Alias Hook (31 page)

I keep my features composed, imagine myself with the stoic visage of Eagle Heart, as a tide of dread steals upon me. Which is worse: my anger that the boy so skillfully plumbs the depths of my darkest thoughts, or my shame at having such thoughts at all?

Suppose now that Stella regrets coming here, she means to exploit the signs and this curse against me for her own ends. No wonder she was so eager to seduce me, if she believes I am destined to find the way out. She came after me as soon as the merwives told her the journey had begun, I remember now. Suppose that’s all she wants from me, a way out of the Neverland. And I was glad enough to be duped. Hook, the gull. Hook, the fool. But, no, a tiny, sane, stubborn voice argues within me, this is Stella, my Stella. Am I really so gullible? Or is Pan a more formidable opponent than even I ever suspected?

It takes all the aplomb I can muster to shrug him off. “I can’t expect a boy to understand.”

That irritates him, of course. “I’m not just any boy!” he cries. “I’m a warrior, just like you, Hook!”

In heartless cruelty, in self-absorption, in the easy way he can dismiss everything valuable in life, yes, he is much like the Hook I was once. But I am Hook no more, I tell myself.

He leans closer still, his gray eyes shining and eager. “And you are
just
like me!”

The newly sanded deck of the
Rouge
fair crunches underfoot. Below, I find fresh stores of small game from which to choose my supplies. The men still know me, but in the face of my negligence, someone else is taking pains to keep the ship in trim, or at least defensible. Defense, the only possible weapon there is against the boy in this benighted place. On my obligatory tour round the deck, I see the gig, our larger boat, has been scraped free of barnacles.

“Careened her yesterday, Cap’n,” Burley tells me when I seek him out, where he leads a party of men in knotting new lines into the lower fore shrouds.

I turn about as Nutter lumbers up out of the hatch, pinked with exertion. “Oi, Cap’n! What about your boat, then?” He gains the deck, wipes a blue and white striped sleeve across his forehead. “Since you’re here, what say me an’ the lads take her off to the beach and set her to rights? Bit of the ol’ spit an’ polish, eh?”

Rarely have I seen Nutter so eager for work. “Pity it’s so late in the day,” I reply. “Next time—”

“We’ll be done before dark,” he persists. “You can be off again in the morning.”

How long can I keep on like this, pirouetting from Hook to James, divided from myself? The men deserve a more constant captain, but I am too eager to get back to Stella and forget the boy’s poisonous words. “Next time,” I say more firmly.

It’s near dusk when I return to
Le Reve,
freshly provisioned with wine and victuals, and an ugly layer of doubt larding my heart. I scold myself for a fool when Stella welcomes me home with a warm, loving embrace; how unfair of me to give the boy’s cruel words any credence. Yet I can scarcely bear how vibrant and lovely she looks as sunset fills the salon, bustling under the deck beams, stowing our supplies, teasing me with her musical laughter. Her proprietary touch delighted me this morning, but now I can’t help but feel something cunning in it.

“Are you all right?” she murmurs at last, reaching across the salon table where we sit to lay her hand on my arm.

“The boy has come back looking for us,” is all I say.

She sits up, worried. “He knows where we are?”

“Not yet.” Did he know for certain where we shelter here, he’d not have had to lie in wait for me at the mouth of Kidd Creek.

Stella sighs. “But he soon will. We must find the way out.”

If only I could be sure of her. “I suppose,” I mutter.

Her hand slides off my arm. “What is the matter, James?”

“This body of mine is very old,” I improvise, glancing away. “It has supported me for centuries. If I set foot out into the natural world, what’s to prevent the ravages of time from catching up to me all at once? Suppose I crumble to dust upon the spot, like the ancient artifact I am?”

“But you won’t,” she insists.

“We could stay here, Stella,” I urge her. “Stay here with me.”

“Absolutely not!” she cries.

“You would grow weary of me,” I suggest, as petulant as the boy.

She stares at me, and I’m instantly ashamed. Perhaps I’m not ready to leave the Neverland after all. I reach across the table and knot my fingers through hers in apology.

“You would be far more likely to tire of me, as I age into a crone while you remain the same,” she says softly. “I couldn’t bear to watch your feeling for me fade over time.”

That complication has not occurred to me. “But,” I begin to bluster, “I would never—”

She waves away my protest. “For another thing, he will never, ever let me stay to make you happy. He’ll find a way to thwart us.”

Of course, I know this is true.

“Anyway, he has made the journey back and forth innumerable times. Has he ever crumbled to dust by exposure to the other world?”

“He is never there long enough,” I suggest.

“Exactly so,” Stella agrees. “Were he to stay too long, he might fall prey to the natural cycles of life. He’d lose his baby teeth, grow hair on his privates, all the things he most fears.” She leans closer to me. “The normal aging process would begin. Why should it work any differently for you?”

Her arguments are utterly sound. Her enthusiasm buoys me up a little, for I begin to believe anything is possible with Stella. The warm flush on her cheeks in the gilded light rouses me to amorous expectation. The only sour note is the voice of the boy yammering away in a deep recess of my heart: if she really cared for me alone, mightn’t she at least have offered to stay in the Neverland with me? Even if she didn’t mean it, even if only to humor me, might she not have said it?

Chapter Twenty-six

SUITE: FAREWELL HOPE

1

“This is madness!” Stella insists.

“This is war. It’s madness to believe otherwise.”

The oaken panel is heavy in the inner curve of my hook as I stand midway up the companion ladder, lining up the teeth of the hinge. It was the stoutest board I could find on the
Rouge,
thick enough to resist the boys’ blades. It took some sawing to fit it to the hatchway; all of
Le Reve
reeks of sawdust still. Its innovation is it will swing up into place from underneath the hatchway. The boys can pry open the coamings on deck, but this can be sealed from below.

“We will always be at war here,” I tell her.

“Then don’t play—” she begins.

“This is not a game! He knows we’re alive. He will find us again. We must be ready.”

There is no escape. The heavens have not cracked open to disgorge another friendly sign. Even my old dream of release has abandoned me; the comforting stranger in a garden, escape on the phantom ship, I’ve not had it in weeks. Our seclusion and safety on board
Le Reve
are but illusions, I know that now, tricks to make his next victory even sweeter. That is the way of things here, to play out the line a little, let me delude myself that I have earned some infinitesimal measure of peace, respite, happiness, before all is wrenched from me yet again.

But Stella’s expression is tragic as she stands below in the salon, amid the litter of boards and tools and hardware, gazes with loathing at the extra sword and shields I’ve also brought back from the
Rouge
.

“Don’t do this to
Le Reve,
James,” she begs me. “This is our only refuge. She was never made to go to war.”

I do not like to see her face like that, cannot bear to be the cause. But I did not begin this war, and I’m damned do I not defend what is mine. My men know this much, even if I have forgotten.

“This is the world where Pan always wins, you said it yourself,” I remind her, and drive in the pin that joins the teeth, securing the panel to its new hinge in the deck above. It hangs there forlornly alongside the hatchway, blocking out the sun. “I can’t let him hurt you, Parrish.” I am all but pleading, as well. “I must prevail, this one time!”

“And then what?’ she demands. “Will you become the new tyrant of the Neverland? Rule over your enemies, bend them to your will, until you become the new despot they’re all plotting to destroy? Don’t you see that it never, ever ends?”

“How can I stop him? What else can I do?”

She sighs. I sneak a glance at her, see her turn away into the gloom. I know what she wants to say. I do not want to hear it.

“They can’t all be as perverse as their queen,” she murmurs at last.

“They all do her bidding.”

“But they must know the laws of magic that govern this place,” she urges me. “Someone will know what we must do. Or maybe we can find one to show us your witch again.”

“The fairies have never been friendly to me, Stella—”

“What about the one who came to your ship that day? She told you it was your last chance.”

“A taunt, nothing more,” I reason. “I know now the terrible Hook can expect no mercy here.”

Another brush with the imp queen could only erode what’s left of my sanity and rob me of the only thing of value I possess—Stella’s love. If, indeed, it’s still mine.

Apocalypse wakes me in the morning; I come to my senses thrashing in Stella’s arms, blood thundering in my ears, brain exploding with images of fire, tempest ruin.

“Easy, easy,” Stella croons, her arms sliding round me in the cold chill of dawn. I roll away from her, gasping, and she curls up behind me. “What were you dreaming?”

“The end of the world.” I can’t even name what I dreamed, sinister foreboding beyond all imagining. I sit up on the edge of the bed, reach for my trousers, too agitated now for sleep. With a sigh, Stella too throws off the bedclothes.

“We must get away from here, Maestro,” she murmurs.

Another miserably bright blue boy day is dawning, a quarter of an hour later as I finish buckling on my harness. Stella brings me a shirt.

“We’ve got to ask the fairies—” she begins.

“No!” I snap, still raw from my dream.

“But, James—”

“Maybe it doesn’t matter what happens to me, once you complete your journey.” I cannot stop my bilious words as I haul on my shirt. “Think of the adventure! You can put it in a book.”

“What?” Stella gapes.

“Why else subject me to the fairies a second time? Or perhaps Pan is right, and you’ve no intention of—”

“Pan? You spoke to him? About me?”

“Perhaps it makes no difference to you if I dissolve in a pillar of salt or wither away in the sun, once you’re free of this place,” I press on guiltily, daring her to prove me wrong. I am beyond all prudence, so desperately do I need her reassurance. “All you want of me is passage out of this hellhole!”

“You know that’s not true!” Stella cries, outraged. “Since when does his word count for more than mine? You’re as bad as the damn boys!”

Wounded, I snap back, “Trade me to the fairies for your freedom if that’s all the more I mean to you. Or perhaps you’ll simply let me slip away when you’re done with me, like your child—”

Her expression checks the volley of my terrible words; even I am shocked to hear them. They are like a thousand laughing demons exploding out of the air, digging a chasm between us that can never be bridged, never ever. It’s another frozen moment before I realize what I take for the pounding of my heart is the distant report of real cannon fire echoing in from the bay.

Just because Pan has not found us out doesn’t mean he’s not up to mischief elsewhere.

“Damn and blast, that’s the
Rouge,
” I bluster, grateful for the interruption, turning quickly away, as if rapid movement might reverse the flow of time, erase these last few, fatal seconds. But Stella’s face tells me otherwise, beyond pain, beyond any rage that even I have ever known, blistering as the sun.

“That’s right, run away,” she says tersely. “Go back to your ship, your men, your precious boys, back to your stupid war; that’s all you care about. You’re just like all of them! Stay here forever, if that’s what you want. God forbid you should ever grow up and be a man!”

The wan apology that had struggled to my lips curdles on the instant. Without another word, I grab my black coat, launch myself up on deck, and clamber over the side for the boat, awash in fury and shame.

2

But the
Rouge
lies to anchor placidly enough as I round the last bend of the creek and pull out across the bay. The intermittent booming of shot has punctuated my journey, and I’m near enough now to smell acrid smoke and see a smudge of gray adrift above the
Rouge.
Yet I see no war canoes, no flying boys, hear no echoes of jeering laughter, only a hollow percussion of footfalls, a distant staccato of barked orders conducted over the water. It’s some sort of drill, but with real shot, a foolhardy waste of supplies and energy. And upon whose orders?

I tie up astern and climb the chains, but all activity is on the foredeck where Nutter is bawling orders to a ragged line of men making clumsy efforts to obey, hauling up powder-filled breeches wrapped in flannel from below.

“Aw, c’mon
ladies,”
he yelps, as the others scramble about their work. “You look like a bunch of faggots. Let’s go!”

“Who gave the order to fire that gun?” I ask Filcher, when I’ve herded up the men to attend me on deck.

Filcher glances sideways at Nutter.

“The boys respect the gun,” Nutter chimes in. “They keep their distance.”

I don’t say the boys keep away because I am not on board for them to humiliate. “Until you waste all your powder firing at nothing. Drill all you like, men, but save your live ammunition for the boys.” Still, I praise their martial enthusiasm and set them to stowing the rest of the shot back in its magazine below. Someone in the Neverland, at least, has the wit to keep their enemies at bay.

“More grape for Long Tom,” I bellow into the hatchway at the men clattering down to the hold.