Alias Hook (16 page)

She gazes at me for so long a moment that I nip again into my wine glass to escape her scrutiny. “Mr. Barrie is long dead,” she tells me at last. “Why are you still here, Captain?”

Her question so surprises me, my tongue fails to produce a sound, like the jack on my harpsichord. “Spite,” I mutter at last. “I should have died a thousand times by now, if I could. But Death will not have me. The boy wills it.”

She regards me in silence.

“You alone defy him,” I add, peering back at her.

She draws a breath, shakes her head in apology. “I guess I must have slipped in under his radar,” she says.

“What?”

“Sorry, Captain, I keep forgetting. In the world I left there are ships that fly in the air—”

I gape at her. “By witchcraft?”

“By engineering,” she explains. “They carry passengers.”

“A world where people fly. In ships,” I marvel, trying to regain my
savoir-faire
. Flight, the thing so much sought after in my day, but never more than a dream, like the Philosopher’s Stone of the ancients. “Extraordinary,” I murmur.

“Very useful in warfare,” she says tartly. “Imagine cannon shot out of the sky, but much, much more powerful.” A vague shudder of recognition stirs within me. Ships that fly in the air, raining fiery destruction. I’ve seen them in my dreams. I drain my glass and move back to the table and the decanter.

She joins me. “The world has not aged at all well since you were in it,” she says, thrusting out her own glass. “Hatred and greed run riot. Wars are global. It’s a fucking nightmare. Oh, pardon me, Captain,” she adds hastily.

“I am a pirate, Madam,” I remind her.

“Yes, but I suppose ladies in your day were more genteel in their speech.” Her grin slips out again. “In the stories, you know, when Captain Hook swears, it’s always,” and she affects a
basso profundo
comic opera voice, “’Brimstone and gall! Hammer and tongs!’”

“May harpies rip out my liver did I ever utter such nonsense,” I reply and nod her back to her seat. “They are entirely fabrications of the Scotch boy. In real life I am no stranger to oaths,” I promise her.

“Such as?” Her eyes dance wickedly. “Oh, come, Captain, you’ve seen what a guttersnipe I am. Indulge the historian in me.”

I sit back in my chair. “Well, in my day it was considered quite reckless to refer to God’s hooks or God’s wounds,”

“Gadzooks!” she titters. “’Zounds!”

My mouth twitches. “Aye, it loses a little something with age,” I agree. “To actually name the deity or any part of his anatomy was a terrible blasphemy, and the more intimate, the better.”

“God’s gallstones!” she chirps.

“By God’s putrid bile,” I counter.

“God’s cods and tackles!” she cries.

We’re both chuckling now; I can’t stop myself. “Have they no more cause to curse in your world?” I prompt.

“More than ever, but it’s all so boring!” she exclaims. “‘God damn it’, fucking this or that, ‘Bloody Hell,’ so prosaic! Nobody swears with any imagination any more. It’s not the art form it was in your day.”

I laugh at her backward compliment, down another drink. “Men no longer dare the Almighty to smite them down?”

“Blasphemy doesn’t seem like much of a sin any more,” she says, with another sip. “It’s been upstaged by all the others.”

“If you’re already in Hell, there’s little more to fear from divine retribution,” I observe.

“Absobloodylutely,” she agrees, and clinks her glass to mine.

A shaved silver coin of moon, no longer completely round, has risen over the island; her ghostly light floods down the hatchway as I creep along the passage after escorting Parrish back to her cabin.

I go up the hatch for a breath of air, peer out at the bright confetti of Neverland stars. I have sailed all the world’s oceans and never seen their like, for the fixed pattern of Neverland stars shine in this place alone and no other. Were any of them the stars I once knew—the Dog the Bear, the Southern Cross—I’d have some notion of where the Neverland stands in the world. It’s a lonely feeling, a million stars ablaze in the night and none to ever guide me home.

The candles gutter as I enter my cabin, filling it with jittery shadows, ominous, wraithlike things who give me no peace. They’re not Parrish’s memories I’ve uncorked tonight, but my own.

Chapter Thirteen

THE NEVERLAND, 1724: HOOK

For a while we found respite in the Neverland, although we did not know to call it by that name. It was our Eden. After the storms and fog, we craved peace above all things, careened the ship without urgency, in part because we’d lost so many men, but also because we were none of us anxious to sail off again. There was wild game in the forest, and fish in the sea. We continued to think the place uninhabited, a paradise provided solely for our pleasure. If there were never any ships on the horizon for us to plunder, neither were there any warships to hunt us down. We grew indolent and stupid.

The redskins found us first. A party of my men encountered a hunting party of theirs in the wood. My men had known Africans in the islands, mulattoes of native blood, and fierce runaway maroons, but they had never known warriors of such swift and ferocious skill. Only two of my men returned that day to tell the gruesome tale. We set about final repairs to the ship in earnest, making her seaworthy again, protected by our Long Tom and the stern-chasers on deck as we worked. But the tide that had brought us to the mouth of Kidd Creek would never carry us far enough out to sea to escape. Always, we found ourselves becalmed in the fog. Always, the current brought us back to the Neverland.

We dropped anchor further out in the bay, a more defensible position than the shallows by the creek. We kept to our ship, and the warriors kept to their villages, but still there were skirmishes. A raiding party I led to cut out a few ripe females for our pleasure was a miserable failure; all but myself were butchered. They lost many braves canoeing out to our ship in the dead of night, repelled by our pikes and pistols. Time and again we tried and failed to chart a course through the fog back into familiar waters, until a party of drunken men murdered the navigator they blamed for failing to get us out of there. But the powerful forces that ruled in that place were far beyond the control of any one puny man.

And never were we more certain of it than the first time we saw them swarming toward us, a cloud of children dressed in leaves and animal skins laughing and shrieking in midair above our ship. The latest tribe of Lost Boys with the Pan in the lead.

I shall never forget my first sight of him, soaring overhead as I stood my ground amidships, my moonstruck men cowering in disbelief. He was not a very little boy, perhaps eleven or twelve years of age, and yet in possession of a full set of tiny baby teeth, which made his expression eerie. That and the keen light in his gray eyes peering out from under his dirty, tawny hair. Green leafy vines wound over his shoulder and round his middle, over a pelt of ragged fur. He went bare-legged above boots of furry skins, with a short sword at his side and a knife stuck in his boot. In one hand he grasped the musical Pan pipes which gave him his name. He hovered in the air above me, a light like a firefly buzzing about his shoulders, and whooped with delight.

“Pirates!” he cried, and all the other little boys in skins began to cheer. A dozen perhaps, of all races, gabbling in all tongues, and all as befouled by filth and grime as the blackest Moor among them. “And what is your business in the Neverland?” he demanded of me.

I gazed up at him coolly, not to be undone by a mere flying boy. A whelp was a whelp to me. “My only business is to leave this place,” I replied. I closed my hand round the hilt of my sword but did not draw it. “You will oblige me by showing me the way.”

Derisive laughter greeted this remark as he peered at me with unvarnished disdain. “Oh,
will
I? And who might
you
be to order me about, dark and sinister man?”

I made my eyes glinting slits of menace. “I might be the devil.”

“Or you might be a codfish!” he cawed, not the least daunted, and all the boys took up the chant. “Codfish! Codfish!”

I had seen too much of Hell to mind the taunting of little boys, but this one had witchy powers I intended to possess. While they were all still bouncing about, I slid my sword out and upward in one swift movement, catching not flesh but a length of vine girdling the boy’s middle. His weight pressed against my sword and I dragged him down through the air so his startled face was opposite mine.

“They call me Hook,” I seethed at him. “And you are my prisoner. Boy.”

Even as I spoke, I saw excitement kindling in his gray eyes. He bared his little teeth and strained upward as the air between us began to pulse with uncanny glittering, like a hail of diamonds in a shaft of brilliant sunlight. The firefly light was dancing about us too. The boy began to rise, and my blade rose with him, and even as I gripped with all my strength, my sword was sucked up out of my grasp like a loose spar in a hurricane. With a shout of triumph, he grasped the hilt, slithered the blade out from under the vine he wore, and hurled my fine French cutlass to the deck with disdain.

“I’m called Pan!” he crowed, as all the other little boys cheered. “And no man is a match for me!” He swooped down toward me. “Next time, Hook, you better fight fair!”

He blew a shrill bleat on his pipes, peeled off higher into the air and led the flying boys away past the shrouds and off over the creek in a cloud of chattering laughter.

My men thought they were bewitched or dreaming. But it’s children all over creation who dream the Neverland into existence because they crave it so much. Such was the powerful force we could not name, the unconscious, uncensored desire of children.

Much has been made of my obsession with the Pan, how I ignored the wise council of my shipmates to leave that place in search of more hospitable waters and fatter prizes elsewhere. How sheer childish obstinacy kept me in the Neverland, determined to have my revenge on the clever boy who’d got the better of me. But there was never any hope of escape from the Neverland. I was under a curse, and what few of my men who’d not had wit enough to die or desert me beforehand were bound to share it with me. We made every attempt we could, yet however far we sailed, neither the pattern of the stars nor the shape of the coastline ever altered. Every current, every breeze, brought us back to the Neverland, where the braves and the beasts and the boys were always waiting.

It was foolishness, grown men fighting little boys. My men never took it seriously until one of their fellows had his bowels stove in by a blade wielded with boyish delight. After that, they took better care defending themselves, but it was never an even match; the boys were fleet and ferocious as mosquitoes in the air, doling out death on a whim. Between battles, my men were glad enough to give themselves over to drink, for the Pan called on the enchantment of that place to see our rum casks ever replenished. Drink made them even more likely to get themselves killed in battle or do some fatal injury to themselves. Or risk my wrath, which grew hotter with every tedious new day.

I would have given the boy anything, done anything he asked to purchase our escape. But our presence was all he wanted, a party of bloodthirsty pirates to make his fantasy complete. Along with my eternal humiliation, which he came to crave above all things. My crew diminished, along with our memories of the world we’d left behind, our wits as befouled by rum and torpor as the stinking hull of the
Jolie Rouge,
rotting so long at anchor in the bay.

Silver strands glinted in my dark hair and beard when I looked in my glass. The aches and pains from a lifetime at sea, so long ignored in violent action, began to make themselves felt. I was as twitchy from inactivity as I’d been in the French prison, or during my time chained in the filthy
barracoons
of Cape Coast. So I hit upon a proposition I believed Pan could never resist: I would invite him to join my company of brigands. I hadn’t any notion of holding to the bargain for long. But once taken into my crew, I was certain he would long to sail off in search of real ships to plunder, and that would take us out of the Neverland at last.

He came aboard alone, without the usual company of boys in his wake. He had a lot of cheek to come unarmed, although we both knew he could fly away at any moment.

“Well, Hook,” he hailed me saucily, “have you more favors to beg of me?”

“Indeed no, I’ve one to grant you,” I sallied back.

He cackled like a little crow. “What do you have that I’d want?”

I told him, gratified to see the greed for adventure in his eyes. But he shuttered his greed and peered at me with suspicion.

“Why?” he demanded. “Why me?”

“You have proven yourself a worthy adversary, Pan,” I responded silkily. I had treated with the likes of Edward Low and Black Bart Roberts in my day; I knew how to coo and flatter. “You would be an ornament to our enterprise. Surely you’ve heard the stories of pirate captains granting their most valiant opponents a place in their crew?”

“Only when the pirates win the battle,” he piped up. “You have to beat me first!”

“No need for another battle if we are on the same side,” I reasoned. “Besides, I have had plenty of opportunity to judge your … skill and cleverness.” I fair choked on the words.

That mollified him for the moment, long enough for me to produce a rolled up parchment from my coat pocket. I had labored all day to limn the word “Articles” across the top, with all due flourishes, and to write out some nonsense about ship’s rules and the reckoning of plunder against the most gruesome injuries I could imagine, the sort of stuff that would appeal to a boy. In truth, I’d rarely bothered with such niceties; my men were bound to me by fear and greed and malice for as long as there was profit in it. But such things were much in fashion in other crews, and the stories always made a fuss over the fabled pirate articles. So I spread out the parchment on a barrelhead for his perusal. I’d had my men scrawl their names or their marks in a column with an empty space at the bottom. All very official looking.