Chapter Five

THE INFERNAL BOY

Do I expect her to fly? Soar out over the bay on harpy wings? I could not be more astounded if she did. A woman! A fully formed female woman abroad in the Neverland. I’m a raving Bedlamite at last, or something very dire is afoot. Only Indian women who cook the food and heal the sick, who make it possible for the tribes to reproduce themselves, are allowed on this island, and they must keep to their villages, out of the boy’s sight. And ours. No other grown woman has ever been seen in the Neverland. Never, ever.

But she does not reappear. Instead, a crunching of shrubs and a cascade of gravel and pebbles rattling down the trail echo back to us, along with her falling cry, abruptly cut off. We descend with far less speed, but more care, down the bluff through a cloud of choking dust to find the creature sprawled on her stomach in the soft sand at its base, unstirring, head turned to one side. I am near enough to spy an arrangement of plain, metallic pins meant to contain her hair, although most has come loose in her tumble down the slope to spill across her cheek. But otherwise, she appears to be not much damaged; no pool of blood, nor twisted limbs.

You’d scarcely know her for a female, garbed in her plaid jacket, a glimpse of white shirt tail peeking out over loose dark trousers. Her feet are scarcely clad in soft, useless satiny things that expose her toes and heels. And she is surely not Indian; her face and hands are pale, her hair brownish and dusty, not long and silky black, much less done up in pearls and powder, as was the fashion in my day. But I am scarcely reassured.

“Where did she come from?” grumbles Nutter, at my elbow.

I stand back, frowning. “Who saw her first?”

“You did, Cap’n.”

“Did no one notice any commotion back in the wood?” I ask them all. “Any sign of boys?” The flying boys are not invisible; did they dump her in our path, someone must have seen them, but my men only shake their heads.

“She can’t have fallen out of the sky,” I begin again, but of course, she might have done just that: this is the Neverland, where no witchery is impossible.

The question is not how, but why?

I gaze down again at the puzzling figure. This is no Wendy.

They are not always called Wendy, the eager girls who are not yet women, his make-believe mothers. There have been many others: Imogen, Clara, Hortensia. Fatima. Genevieve. Wherever they come from, he speaks to them in their own tongue—the language of youth. But that element has flown from the visible part of her face. Care lines bracket her silent mouth in the harsh daylight. Her body has ripened well beyond girlhood, as I saw up on the bluff, a matron of no less than thirty, if I am any judge.

Has the boy got himself a mother, a real mother, after all these years?

I draw a sudden, anxious breath. “Not dead, is she?” I demand of the men.

Nutter visibly draws back, Jesse totters uncertainly on his lame foot, and my gaze falls on young Flax. Peering about resentfully at the others, the fair-haired youth creeps forward, crouches low over the woman, stumbles awkwardly back.

“Dead pissed, more like,” he says, wrinkling his nose, staggering again to his feet.

Daring to bend nearer again, I too detect a whiff of stale alcohol. She’s begun to snore very softly now, through wet, parted lips. Small wonder she seems so little harmed. The devil protects drunkards and fools.

“Beg pardon, Cap’n,” Burley’s soft, West Country voice tiptoes out to me from where the others have all regrouped, further down the beach. “Best be out on the tide.”

Their unease reinforces my own. Time was, a solitary female might have feared ravishment at the hands of my crew, but those were not these men. Females and their complications are part of what they come back to the Neverland to escape.

But what now? I could leave her here to rot, that would be the sensible thing; this is Pan’s domain, let him deal with her. But the boy is not usually so careless with his mothers. Far more likely she is part of some diabolical new game, a spy the boy hopes to plant aboard my ship, possibly to divide my men from each other. True, she scarcely looks like a temptress, dressed like a hoyden in breeches in a threepenny farce, but what else can it possibly mean? A woman in the Neverland! Nothing happens here without Pan’s knowledge.

Peter doesn’t know everything. Who said that? A voice out of a dream. I frown down again at the insensible creature. If she does not belong to Pan, how the devil has she broken through the sorcery that guards this place to come here? A way to break the enchantment; it’s worth any risk to understand if such a thing is possible.

I order the men to make a sling from the loose tarp in the boat with which we covered Dodge. Nutter at one end, Burley at the other, they stretch it on the sand beside the slumbering woman, then back away, as if she might explode in their faces like a Spanish grenado. Let them fret. I will know why she is here. If she proves to be a pawn in some dreadful new game, I must find out what it is before Pan can claim another victory in blood.

The men are not happy to have her in the boat, concealed in the tarp in the bottom. They shrink to the ends of their thwarts as they pull out into the bay for the current to carry us back to the Rouge. I raise my spyglass and scan again for war canoes from the north, where the high plains of Indian Territory abut the boy’s wood.

The Indians are not like me. They have long since made peace with the boy. The Pickaninnys, he calls them, a foolish name that sounds suitably aboriginal to his untested ear. What they call themselves in the oblique syllables of their own ancient tongue, I cannot say. Their battles with the boy are play; when he does not want them, they are free to tend their families, their corn, their buffalo and their ceremonies. To live, age and die. The Neverland is their refuge, not their prison, especially now that so many of the Wendys’ stories tell of the destruction and enslavement of the Indian races. To preserve it, they go on the bloody warpath at the boy’s pleasure against their common enemy: me.

But no dark canoes pepper the bay today. I twist round to sweep my glass northward one last time, before my view goes black, like a curtain rung down on a play.

“Hook!” bleats a shrill voice I know only too well. “What do you think you’re doing out here?”

He’s come upon us with the stealth of a fairy, flown up from behind my oarsmen while I was too distracted to sense the chill of his presence. Pan, our nemesis, the demon king of the Neverland, author of all our misery.

How little he’s changed over time: a rag-mop of tawny hair, bright, feral gray eyes, still hovering on the youthful side of eleven or so. Vines of ivy cinch his middle over the napless pelt of some no longer recognizable animal. More vines twine from hip to shoulder for a bandolier where he stows his badges of office—his pipes, an ancient bear claw, a once proud raptor feather tattered with age and filth. His short sword is thrust through his belt, the knob of a knife handle protrudes from the top of one fur-skin boot as he circles in the air above the men, facing me. He appears to be entirely alone.

“Well, Hook,” he cries again, “what game is this?”

Tension thrums among the men, staring up at this impossible vision, a boy riding the air currents overhead with the ease of an albatross. None have ever seen him so close-up before. Beneath the Pan, behind his sight line, I see Jesse’s fingers inch off his oar, stretch toward his pistol. Something thrills in my blood, but prudence snuffs it out: no, not here, a misfire now will cost all their lives. I hastily signal him to halt in the act of raising my hand to tilt back my hat.

“No game,” I tell Pan. “We are burying one of our shipmates,”

“I don’t believe it.” He frowns down at the suspicious canvas at our feet, buzzes closer to me. He takes special delight in punishing deceit. “We haven’t even had a fight!”

“It was none of your doing,” I begin, and instantly regret it as his keen expression clouds over. It’s utter folly to suggest anything could happen in the Neverland beyond his command.

“I think you’re trying to escape again!” he counters.

“Come, my bully, you know me better than that,” I cozen him patiently. “Do you think me a fool?”

“I think you’re a liar and a cheat,” he sneers at me, with that maddening half-smile that is so often a prelude to death. “I think you’re a man!”

Should he take it into his head to draw his sword, my men will be at a fearful disadvantage; there’s buggering little room to maneuver in a boat, and we are vulnerable on the water. None of them can swim, I venture; for myself, I dread eternal life underwater above all things, forever at the mercy of monsters like the loreleis and the crocodile, eyes bulging, skin spongey, lungs forever bursting for want of air. I shake off the thought.

“You’re up to something, Hook,” Pan accuses, peering at me with combative intensity. “I can feel it!”

“We are a funeral party, nothing more,” I say calmly, banishing all thoughts of the cargo we carry. I’ve learned to think nothing, care for nothing, in his presence. But if he planted that woman in our path, why come all the way out here, alone, instead of bringing a formal war party of boys to the ship? That’s the way it’s always been.

Unless he doesn’t know.

“But since you’ve come all this way, let’s have a game,” I add quickly, my fingers sliding into my coat pocket in search of one of the many objects I keep about my person to barter with the little magpie. I must turn this moment to my advantage before he can set his own rules. My fingers close round something smooth and hard, which I withdraw. Too late, I recognize the stiletto recently liberated from Dodge. It’s folly to arm the boy with another weapon to use against us, but there’s no time to find anything else. I stand carefully in the stern, leg braced against Burley’s solid bulk, and Pan rises too, giving the men some breathing room.

“This blade says you can’t give me true answers to three questions,” I challenge Pan, holding the closed knife aloft. He’s arrested in midair, watches with birdlike curiosity as I press the metal button to snap out the blade. Slowly, he bares his baby teeth and nods. “How many men in this boat?” I begin, hooking the knife closed again.

“Not enough to beat me!” the boy gloats.

True enough. Pan can’t count past three, but neither does he lie. “Where are your boys?”

“I sent them to the Indians to learn how to scalp.”

No shrieking has been heard on the water that would signal my men are their victims, back aboard the Rouge. Surely Pan would not be here, missing all the fun, if they were. In any case, his wild pack of boys will not attack without their leader. But I must gather my wits; an extra question out of turn will forfeit the game. I revolve the prize in my fingers. I’ll not to let it go without something of value in return, if I can play one audacious trump without tipping my own hand.

“For what reason would you ever bring a grown-up woman into the Neverland?”

“That’s a stupid question!” snorts Pan.

“And that is no answer,” I shrug, and begin to lower the weapon.

“I never would! Never, ever!” he shouts indignantly. “No grown-ups allowed in the Neverland, especially no lady! I would never let one come here, and nobody else better, either,” he adds with a furious glare. “That’s the truth!” And he swoops down to snatch the weapon out of my grasp. “I win again, Hoo—”

But Nutter springs up, all yowling impulse and no strategy at all, his giant fingers closing round one of Pan’s mangy boots, and for an instant Pan flails sideways in the air.

“No fair!” the boy shouts. Like all tyrants, he believes he himself always acts with the utmost fairness. Then up he goes in a detonation of fiery sparks, a reek of brimstone, and a shrill cacophony of fairy language, leaving Nutter grasping empty air, and the boat near scuttled beneath us.

“Hey!” Pan cries in irritation from high above us. “Kes!”

Of course his imp is nearby. I throw mysef over Nutter to shield him from the inevitable retaliation, glancing up just as a dazzling flash scorches my eyes. Amid the frenzy of shouting men and harsh fairy noise, hands I cannot see pry me off Nutter and grapple me back to my seat in the reeling boat.

“Nothing happens in the Neverland unless I say so!” Pan’s voice shouts from his magical updraft. “Don’t you forget it, Hook!”

Then nothing but grumbling men and water lapping against our boat. Whatever the fairy threw in my eyes burns there still, although I presume it will not last; fairy spells, like all their humors, are fleeting. But she’d already bustled the boy out of harm’s way, was it necessary to half-blind me into the bargain? The wooden thwart rocks beneath me as the men fight to steady the boat, grunt at their creaking oars. Their acrid man-sweat mingles with the pungency of brine and salt and fish off the water. But the menace I felt in my bones when the boy was about has subsided.

“Gone, Cap’n.” It’s Flax’s voice, directly across from me, clotted with incredulity. It’s always a shock, the first time they actually see an aviating boy.

“Sorry, Cap’n, I couldn’t get a clear shot,” Jesse apologizes.

“Almost had the little wanker,” grumbles Nutter.

At least they still have breath to voice their defiance. No more lives were lost today, and all I had to forfeit was my sight. I might almost count it a victory. To say nothing of the information I gleaned from the boy. No grown-up women allowed? He could not have been more vehement on that point.

If Pan didn’t bring her here, who did?