Alias Hook (23 page)

“No—” Stella begins.

“Yes you will! Grown-ups always lie, especially ladies!” he shouts. “Children never tell when they go back. But she’s a grown-up. She’ll give us all away,” he appeals to the company. “If the grown-ups find out about the Neverland, they’ll put a stop to it. They always stop anything fun. Then where will all the children go to get away from them?” Pan glares down again at Stella. “But no silly lady is going to make a man out of
me!
The sentence is death!”

And of course all the other boys take up the happy cry. “Death! Death! Death!”

Stella’s expression betrays a hint of the cold comprehension I felt on the day Pan cut my hand away, the shock of a rational mind against a tide of childish willfulness run riot. The boys dole out death without a scrap of conscience, with no idea of the gravity of it, the horror, the rapture. They neither fear nor respect the death they wield with such delight. Their only adversaries have ever been my pirate crews, lumbering future versions of themselves. Killing is a game to the boys, but Stella has seen how real death is in the Neverland. Until this moment, however, she has never been its target.

She glances again at the tribal elders, but their faces have turned to stone. She won’t look at me, will implicate me no further. But she’s been a friend to me, as no one else on this benighted island ever has.

“You cannot kill a mother, you know,” I protest to Pan. “It’s unheard of in the stories.”

“Why do you care?” He peers at me more intently. “You’re trying to protect her! You hid her from me on your ship!”

“She was my hostage,” I riposte smoothly. “I meant to ransom her. But as she comes from out there, she’s of no use to me.”

“Then why do you defend her?”

“Consider the bad luck it might bring to the Neverland,” I extemporize. “Killing a mother. And besides, who is going to do it?”

This at least is something none of them has thought of. Killing in battle is one thing, but this demands a different sort of mettle.

“We are warriors,” the leader of the elders injects, when Pan turns to him. “We do not execute.”

Various Lost Boys begin to argue for hurling the prisoner off a cliff or abandoning her to the beasts in the wood. None wants to be the unlucky one called upon to use his weapon against her. A tremor of hope stirs at my throat.

“Silence!” Pan shouts, his eyes glittering again, his little teeth beginning to show. “We’ll take her to the Mermaid Lagoon!” he orders. “Let them have her!”

My blood chills. The Mermaid Lagoon, that dark, seductive, troubling place within the steaming jungle. The place the boy fears most in all of the Neverland. As do I.

The boys are cheering, taking to the air like bats, swarming toward us. My phantom hand twitches with the urge to defend her, but I step away for fear they’ll harm Stella trying to strike at me if I resist. The elders are all on their feet, and as the boys close ranks, hovering in the air round Stella, Pan rises up to crow in my face.

“I win again, Hook!” he jeers. Then he swoops back to glare at Stella. “Now, Lady, you’ll see what comes of defying me!”

And they march her off, poking and prodding at her, driving her into the underbrush. I’ve not been wise enough to stop them. I have only to look into the faces of the elders, watching with grim impassivity, to know how completely I’ve failed.

I won her a reprieve, no better. There might yet be a way to intervene, but only if I dare enter the most lurid, monster-infested hellhole in all of the Neverland.

Chapter Nineteen

SUITE: THE MERMAID LAGOON

1

For all my secret forays upon this river, even I have never dared disturb the loreleis at their sinister games. The Mermaid Lagoon has always been as hidden from me as the boys’ secret lair. Why would I seek it out? Everyone knows how they lure mortals into the slimy depths and drown them for sport. My oldest, deepest fear, an eternity of bloated, airless misery in the bowels of the unforgiving sea, grips me like a choking fist.

Yet, I row with all my strength, near dusk as well, when the fair folk are up to the most mischief. It took the better part of the day to regain my boat and pull across the bay for Kidd Creek, but for once the fractious currents were with me. Stella is a grown-up; they can’t fly her to her doom; they must walk her, or resort to some hidden water route, and I must be there when they arrive. My wounded shoulder scarcely complains during this activity, making me all the more anxious and determined on her behalf.

The creek has long since given way to the Mysterious River, a maze of fetid overgrowth and steaming, tangled vegetation, heavy with the sweet perfume of jungle blossoms. Tendrils of organic slime drift across my bows, mossy mounds thrust out at me from the banks as I plow into that lush, damp, and perilous canal.

I hear the lurid boiling of the lagoon some distance ahead, but evil vapors are already rising up from the water to protect its hidden entrance. I lose my heading in the mist; one tributary beckons me to starboard, another veers off aport, and I don’t know which to follow. Which will cost me precious time, driving me in circles like the tide in the bay? Which will wreck my boat on unfriendly shoals? Which are merely phantoms? They seem to open and close at will within the shifting vapors, like mocking lorelei mouths. Yet I must choose one. I cannot abandon Stella now; she has no one else.

A splash, a spray of water, startle me in the vaporous humidity. I twist about and see a glint of vivid color, hear another splash just ahead, to starboard, something bursting out of the water, then sinking again. Expecting the tentacle or claws of some slimy thing, I crane round further to see. But it’s only a fish arcing out of the water, scales a shimmering rainbow of gemstone colors, sapphire, amethyst, celadon green, as beautiful as the roses. As it dips back into the water, another as vibrantly colored rises in formation close behind, and dives, and then a third leaps out in the others’ wake.

In a heartbeat, all three break the surface again, just beyond the starboard bows, trailing long, gossamer fins, splash again into the water, rise up some little distance further on, making for a single green lane amid all the shifting entrances that tempt me out of the mist. Rarely have I beheld such exotic looking flying fish, and never in the river; they are creatures of the deep sea.

A sign from out of the sea, that’s what the Indian shaman said. Squelching my unease, I row after the gorgeous fish through the obscuring mists and into the deep green passage. The channel narrows, and I keep close to the river bank. Bending low on the thwart, I work up under a canopy of ferns and the long limbs of ancient trees, stretching out to trail their fertile green foliage in the water. And beyond them, the Mermaid Lagoon spreads open before me, hissing like steam from a kettle, despite the chill in the air. My phantom fingers ball up for warmth, but my hook holds steady through its hole in the oar shaft as I work into the vertiginous tunnel at the mouth of the lagoon, sweating with apprehension in the clammy cold.

Smoky clouds edged in pink stretch and dissolve overhead, revealing a first faint scattering of stars in a lavender sky. The lagoon seems to pulse with its own unearthly glamor, while the water, as black as pitch, laps and eddies round the narrow wedge of Marooner’s Rock, thrusting up in the middle. It takes a moment for my ears to pick out another kind of lapping, paddles dipping almost soundlessly into water; I freeze, hug my skiff to the bank, as a canoe powered by half a dozen braves glides past the mouth of my green tunnel and back out into the river.

I see them now, a cloud of jeering, whistling boys harrying Stella along the fetid marshes at the edge of the lagoon, about a quarter way round from my hiding place at the river mouth. The stark silhouette of Marooner’s Rock stands off to westerly from both of us. They’re all in a hurry now; the boys know what an evil place this is at night. Pan orders them to strip off the blanket, and four boys gingerly grab a corner each and fly it off over Stella’s head. Her hands are still tied behind her, but the hint of her womanly body under her shift troubles the boys, who fall back on instinct. Pan alone goes boldly forward, fluttering up to her face.

“It will be a gruesome death,” he promises eagerly. “You’ll sink under the water, and the mermaids will tear you limb from limb!”

“Why would they do that?” Stella asks mildly.

“Because that’s what mermaids do!” he snaps back. “Everybody knows that!”

Stella gazes out at the water, faintly rippling now with dark activity. A fishtail gleams just below the surface out near the rock, and my flesh crawls. How can I intervene? I haven’t even brought any weapons, but when have my weapons ever been any use against the boys or their allies? My groping fingers close on something damp and gritty under the thwart, and I withdraw the object the lorelei left in our boat; I once compared it to a bagpipe. I raise the reed to my lips and blow. The amphibious pocket expands the slightest bit, holding the air. I blow again.

“Of course,” Pan goes on, rising a little in the air, “I might be merciful. If you begged me.”

Stella gazes up at him. “Beg you? For what?”

“For your life, Lady. I caught you fair and square, and you deserve to be punished for your crime. Still, I could show you mercy. I could let you live. But you’d have to follow my rules.”

“Which are?” I hear the incipient smile in Stella’s voice. Their words carry wonderfully on the water.

“You could stay with the Lost Boys. You could cook our meals and mend our clothes. You could tell us stories, just like the other mothers.” Pan flutters in the air before her, buoyed by his own magnanimity, then leans his face a little closer to hers. “But you wouldn’t be allowed to think any more grown-up thoughts!” he declares. “And you must call me ‘Master.’”

Stella bursts out laughing. “Oh, don’t be silly!”

Pan’s feet hit the ground with a thump; it was almost his backside. He has to claw furiously back up into the air again. The Lost Boys are all whimpering in the shadows behind him, all of them grounded just as suddenly and scrambling to follow his lead and rise up again, their alarm as palpable as the mist on the water.

Something splashes out by the rock; with sick dread I see one of the loreleis emerging from the water. Her long, webbed fingers come first, securing handholds in the mossy rock as it angles steeply upward. Then her arms, translucently white, and her head trailing its mane of seaweed hair, iridescent black and green. The flesh of her spine curves down to the glistening scales of her rump as she rises above the surface, pert, naked breasts exposed as she twists on the rock to look toward the shore.

The boys draw back further still, but Stella stands transfixed, as beguiled as any Wendy. They stare at each other, Stella and the mermaid, as panic pounds in my blood. Don’t look, I beg Stella silently, turn away. She will enchant you. She will kill you.

Pan boosts himself to a more authoritative position in the air, cups his hands round his mouth.

“Look what I’ve brought you!” he calls out to the siren. “Tell your queen!”

The mermaid lifts her head, angles it curiously to one side, and I dare to draw a breath. If they engage in some parley, the way Pan always likes, then Stella may yet have a chance to gather her wits and flee. The boys are far up the bank now, and—

Without a word, Stella steps off the bank and drops into the water, which closes over her head. The lorelei lets go her perch and slides tail-first under the surface with the speed of an eel. The boys are as astounded as I, even Pan. He flies out to the still-rippling water and stares down in dismay.

A low vibrato begins to boil up out of the depths of the water, dissonant siren voices rising in a lurid crescendo to speed the boys off to their beds perhaps, or praise their profane gods for this succulent morsel so callously thrown their way. Whatever it means, Pan composes his features into a scowl and turns back to the others.

“Let’s go, men!” he cries, “she’s done for!” And off they fly.

I’m out of my coat, scrambling over the wales, still clutching my inflated pocket, even though every fiber of my flesh and blood and bones recoils at the black water. As horrible as it may be, I know I can’t die.

But Stella can.

The water is cold and deep, the darkness total. My wide-open eyes perceive no light, no movement, only black. I hear nothing, so instantly numb from cold that I don’t even feel the wet, aware only of my blood pounding in my ears, and the speed with which I’m spiraling downward. It’s black all around me, as black as the tomb I’ve always craved. Will this become my tomb? Will blackness swallow me up at last? But Stella is bound and helpless somewhere, alone in the blackness, and I plunge deeper still, thrusting with my hook. I wait as long as I dare before pressing the reed to my mouth for more air, a sip only: I must save some for Stella.

Something glimmers in the dark below, not the gloss of fishtails, but a smear of white. I claw after it against the pressure of black water. The white disappears just as my hook touches hard, solid rock, sharp, crusted with barnacles and ridged by the tides, but I find purchase and crawl downward along its surface, fist over hook. My lungs are some foul, heaving fish I’ve swallowed whole, the urge to spit it out all but irresistible, yet I drag myself down to a ridge of the crusty rock. That’s where it went, the white apparition that must be Stella, and I hurl myself over the edge and downward, kicking clumsily, into absolute black.

My lungs strain, the ache of holding my breath spreads from my chest up my throat into my nose. What would happen if I let go, empty my lungs, my mouth, my nose, suck in black water? It should be easy to let the blackness take me. My blood thunders to escape my flesh and become black water, my brain is giddy with the struggle not to breathe, as I’m propelled through weightless nothing. This must be what it’s like to fly. This must be what it’s like to die.

Purple, green, orange, vermillion explode before my eyes and I touch sheer solid rockface again, feel my way down to the edge of an open archway. I poke my head over the edge, see a deep underwater grotto, all a-shimmer with a pulsing spectrum of light. But she’s not here. Did I follow a phantom to this place? My mouth forms a single mournful word,