Lost in the Never Woods

by Aiden Thomas

Peter laughed, but his eyebrows were still drawn in confusion. “I— What— Wendy, why would I want to kill you?” he asked, taking a step forward.

  “STOP!” Her hand shot out, fingers splayed as if she could hold him back while she was stuck in a decrepit old cot. Wendy was surprised when he did actually stop, looking all the more confused.

  He didn’t look particularly large, but ropes of muscle still wound their way around his lithe build. Wendy’s free hand went to her forehead, trying to steady herself. “Please, just stop.”

  “Stop what?” Peter’s hand went up to touch his cheek again. “I’m not doing anything! Wendy—”

  “Stop—stop calling me Wendy!” Her eyes darted around the room again. The only way out was through the door, and on the other side of it was the woods. Who knew how deep he had taken her or how far she was from home.

  Peter cocked an eyebrow at her. “You … don’t want me calling you your name?” he said slowly.

  “No.” He shouldn’t even know her name to begin with!

  Peter frowned and scratched the back of his neck. “That doesn’t make sense,” he said, his hand dropping to his side in defeat.

  “Did you kidnap Benjamin Lane and Ashley Ford?” Wendy demanded.

  “Kidnap?” He gave her a bewildered look, blue eyes going wide. “What—”

  Frustration growled in the back of her throat. “Who are you? What do you want with me?”

  He leaned closer to her and pointed to himself. “I’m Peter,” he said slowly, as if he were trying to explain something very simple to a small child. She couldn’t tell if he was being serious or making fun of her.

  Either way, Wendy glared. “No. I mean, who are you?”

  Peter scratched the back of his head again. There were pine needles stuck in his messy auburn hair. “You’re acting really weird. Is this some kind of game I’m not getting?”

  A manic laugh shotgunned out of her. “I’m weird?” Wendy demanded. “You kidnapped me and are holding me hostage in a hunting shack in the middle of the woods!”

  “Kidnapped? I didn’t kidnap you, you fainted—”

  “I got knocked out because you—”

  “Fainted,” he corrected. Wendy spluttered—was he serious?—but he continued on. “You fainted, I brought you here so you weren’t just lying out on the grass all night”—he paused in counting on his fingers to slant her a look—“you’re welcome, by the way. And you’re only being held ‘hostage’ by that mess of springs you got yourself caught in,” Peter added, pointing at her leg.

  Wendy teetered on her good foot. She didn’t have a leg to stand on, metaphorically—or literally—speaking. This all sounded semi-rational, but Wendy still didn’t trust him. She squinted at him.

  The fact that he stood there, looking both triumphant and amused, didn’t help her mood.

  It was maddening because she did recognize him, but for reasons that didn’t make any logical sense. It was all things she had imagined about Peter Pan. The small chip in the corner of his front tooth. The confidence in his voice. That damn charming smile. And those eyes that felt like she was looking at stars.

  Wendy forced herself to focus, to think practically. She needed to get somewhere safe because being with him felt dangerous. It was the sort of danger you felt before jumping off a cliff into water: a low rush in the pit of her stomach that made her fingers tingle.

  “Why didn’t you just take me into my house instead of dragging me out here?” Wendy ventured.

  She could see him chew on the inside of his cheek. The muscles in his jaw flexed and relaxed, accentuating the curve of his freckle-peppered cheekbones. “I didn’t want to run into your parents,” he said, scuffing the floor with his bare heel. “I mean, it’d look pretty weird if I just showed up at your house with you unconscious.”

  Wendy tried to judge whether or not he was lying. She still didn’t know how he knew her name.

  “You look pale,” Peter cut in, giving her a worried look. He moved to take a step closer, but seemed to think better of it and stopped.

  Maybe he was some sort of stalker, but that didn’t feel right, either. She was terrified of him, but Peter also looked very wary of her. It was hard to keep up this idea that he was a threat when he kept dipping his chin and peering at her carefully. He squinted slightly.

  Was he trying to study her face, too?

  Wendy licked her lips. She wanted to ask him how he knew her, to get a real answer, but she couldn’t work up the courage.

  “So…” Peter rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet, his hands stuffed into his pockets. “Do you want me to help you out of there?” he asked. His mouth twitched with a suppressed grin.

  Wendy’s jeans were ruined. The metal springs had pushed them up her leg and the denim was torn. The cuts weren’t deep, but they stung like hell. A thin red line of blood trailed down her ankle and into her shoe. She glanced back up at Peter. She didn’t trust him, not by a long shot. But standing there, barefoot and apprehensive, he didn’t seem like much of a threat. And the sooner she got out of here—and out of the woods—the better.

  “Yes,” she finally agreed, but not without shame.

  Peter took a cautious step forward. “Do you promise not to punch me again?”

  Wendy shot him a seething glare. “No.”

  Peter’s lips broke into a smile. Dimples cut deep into his cheeks. Peter shrugged. “Fair enough.”

  He knelt down next to the cot. Lingering fear made Wendy lean away from him, pressing herself against the wall. The metal tugged at her leg. “You need to stop fighting against it or you won’t be able to get out,” Peter said, looking up at her.

  His nearness was overwhelming. She couldn’t tell if she wanted to shove him away again or reach out and touch him, just to see if he was real.

  Wendy let out a half-irritated, half-pained growl. “Fine,” she said through clenched teeth.

  He was still watching her with those startling blue eyes.

  “Stop looking at me like that,” she told him. He quickly looked down, but she could just see the corner of his smile.

  Carefully, she shifted her weight to her good leg, letting the other drop a bit and relax. Peter worked his fingers between the knots of spirals and gave them a quick tug, and suddenly her leg was free. Wendy’s foot dropped to the wooden floor and she let out a surprised yelp.

  As she toppled forward, she snatched Peter’s hand to brace herself. His palm was rough but very warm. Wendy quickly retreated, causing her to lose balance again. She did an odd dance on one foot until she limped free of the ruined cot.

  Peter stood and there was a wide grin on his face.

  Wendy scowled. “What?”

  “That looked funny,” he said with a shrug.

  “Shut up.”

  He made no effort to hide his amusement. “Does it feel okay?”

  “It feels like I got my leg caught in a bear trap,” she said tersely as she put her foot down and tried resting her weight on it. The cuts stung, but there didn’t seem to be any other damage.

  But at least she could move now, even if she was seconds away from falling through the half-rotted floorboards. “What are you doing here?” she asked him. She heard the harshness in her own voice begin to slip away.

  “Well, I just got you unstuck from the bed springs—”

  “No, I mean what are you doing here?”

  Peter groaned and tipped his head back. “Not this again.”

  Wendy closed her eyes for a moment to rein in her frustration. “I mean,” she started again, “why are you in this old hunting shack?”

  Peter glanced around and shrugged his shoulders. “’Cause I’m staying here?” he said slowly, as if to judge whether or not he was answering her question right.

  It didn’t make sense. Why on earth would someone willingly decide to stay in a place like this? The woods had at least a dozen hunting shacks tucked into the logging roads. There was no sign of anyone other than Peter being here in t
he last several years.

  “Where are your parents?” she asked. There was no way he was of legal age. He was much older than the magical boy, Peter Pan, that Wendy knew from her stories, but he definitely wasn’t eighteen.

  “Haven’t got any.” He said it so simply, and with such lack of importance, that it took a moment for it to register.

  He didn’t have any parents? So he was an orphan? Was he homeless?

  “Are—are there other people in the woods?”

  He shrugged. “Not that I’ve seen.”

  “So what are you doing in the woods?” Wendy swallowed past a lump in her throat. A question was bubbling up that she needed to ask, but she was frightened of the answer. “Did someone … bring you here? Were you kidnapped?”

  But Peter laughed. “What? No! Jeez, what is it with you and kidnapping?”

  And the frustration was back.

  “If that’s not it, then what are you doing here?” Wendy snapped. “Why were you in the middle of the road? Why did you come to my house?”

  “Because…” His eyes dropped to the floor. “I need your help.”

  “What do you need my help with?” Wendy asked slowly. A chill ran across her skin. The flame of the oil lantern flickered behind the dirty glass.

  Peter frowned. “I need you to help me find my shadow.”

  Wendy stared at him.

  Again, he had said it so simply, as if this weren’t a completely bizarre thing to say to her. She forced a laugh, not knowing how else to respond.

  Seriously? Was he messing with her? “Uh, did you try looking on the floor?”

  Peter tipped his head to the side, an eyebrow cocked like that was a ridiculous question. “You’re kidding, right?”

  Wendy let out a huff and rolled her eyes. “It’s right th—”

  She pointed to the floor where his shadow was. Or rather, where his shadow was supposed to be.

  The ground below him had no shadow. It was just his feet—his very dirty, bare feet—and then the weather-worn planks. It was such a small thing to be so very wrong to the point that it was unsettling. It was like a Photoshop fail, but in person.

  “That’s not—” Wendy glanced up and Peter looked expectant. Her eyes went to the walls around them, searching for some indication, some smudge in the firelight that indicated Peter’s shadow, but there was nothing.

  Wendy examined her own shadow. It flickered and shifted below her, mimicking her movement across the wall.

  Her shadow was there, but where was his?

  “That doesn’t make any sense.” Wendy fixed Peter with a glare. Surely, this was some kind of weird trick. “That’s not possible.”

  “I told you so,” Peter said. He just stood there, looking infuriatingly placid.

  “How did you do that?” she demanded. “You have to have a shadow—everything has a shadow!” Not in the dark, of course, but there was enough firelight in the shack for her to have one, and the cots, and the small pile of firewood in the corner.

  “It must be a trick of the light or something,” Wendy tried to reason with herself. She could probably search shadow magic tricks on YouTube and find an explanation. Wendy stepped closer to him, thinking maybe he was just standing in the perfect spot for all the light to bounce off him and not create a shadow—she wasn’t entirely sure how that worked.

  But when she moved next to him, her shadow followed, and his was still nowhere to be found. “I— What the—” Wendy stammered unintelligibly as she stared at him, bewildered.

  “It got away somehow,” Peter told her. All traces of a smile quickly fell from his face.

  Wendy felt like she was in a very strange dream. One time, she’d had a dream where everything was normal, except there were three suns. This felt exactly like that.

  But she was awake, not dreaming. She could feel the stinging of the scrapes on her leg, and she could see Peter in front of her, clear as day. Not an apparition, not a daydream, not make-believe.

  And yet Peter himself radiated the fantastical. A boy plucked from her dreams and her mother’s stories, and set before her. He was something else altogether. He was stardust and the smell of summer.

  “I get glimpses of it now and then,” Peter continued to explain as if Wendy weren’t about to have an existential crisis. “In corners, under beds.” He glanced at the cot and his shoulders crept up to his ears. “But I haven’t been able to catch it. The longer it’s gone, the worse it gets.” The firelight caught the worry lines on his forehead. He looked so tired. “I figured since you helped me find it before, you would be able to help me find it again.” Peter chewed on his bottom lip, his eyes large and hopeful.

  Wendy pushed back. “What do you mean, ‘before’?” she asked, feeling all the more frustrated. “We’d never met before last night!”

  Peter frowned as he inched a step closer. “Do you really not remember?”

  She felt the urge to shout at him. To tell him no, there was no way she could remember him, because this was all impossible and Peter Pan wasn’t real. But then, he was standing in front of her, as if he’d leapt from the pages and pages of drawings hidden in her truck. A few years older than she’d imagined, but still. He was flesh and bone, and he didn’t have a shadow.

  When she didn’t respond, Peter pressed on. “I used to visit and listen to you tell stories about me, just outside your window.” Wendy’s eyes bulged and Peter was quick to continue. “I know, I know! That sounds weird, but—” He shrugged his shoulders, sheepish and at a loss for words and unable explain himself. “We didn’t officially meet until one night, when I’d come to listen, but you guys were asleep already.” Peter twisted his fingers together. “But before I could take off, somehow my shadow got loose in your room, and I had to chase it around—”

  The slightest spark of a memory flickered in Wendy’s mind.

  “You woke me up,” she heard herself say before she could stop herself. It felt more like a dream than a memory, but Wendy could perfectly picture it—waking up in her bed to a strange sound and finding Peter Pan, the young boy, probably about eleven years old, just like her, wrestling on the floor with something dark but translucent.

  Peter looked just as surprised, but his face, instead of echoing the dread that Wendy felt, lit up with excitement. “Yes! I caught it, but I couldn’t get it to stick back on—”

  “So I sewed it…” she murmured to herself. Like with most dreams, she couldn’t remember the details, just faded, splotchy images.

  The large smile splitting Peter’s face did little to make her feel better. “That’s right! You helped me get it back on!” A relieved laugh shook his shoulders. “John and Michael slept right through it somehow—”

  A sharp pang struck Wendy. She sucked in a breath.

  Peter didn’t notice and continued on. “But they’re always heavy sleepers.”

  He knew Wendy. He remembered things she couldn’t—things she’d thought were just dreams, because they were impossible, weren’t they? But so was not having a shadow. And he did know her brothers. What else did he know? What else did he remember that Wendy didn’t?

  Wendy felt like she’d been dropped into freezing-cold water. Her skin tingled and she was dangerously lightheaded.

  “Wendy?” Peter’s voice called her back and she forced herself to focus on it, to ground herself back in reality. At some point, he’d moved closer. Peter watched her warily, his eyebrows pulled together and hands held out like he was readying himself to catch her. “Are you okay? You don’t look so good…”

  Wendy dragged her hand across her sweaty forehead. The shack suddenly felt uncomfortably hot, suffocating. This was too much to process at once. “Please take me home now.”

  “But—”

  “Please?” She hated how pathetic she sounded and how her eyes were starting to prickle. She needed to get out of the woods. She needed to go home. “We can sort all this out—this shadow stuff or whatever—but I really need to go home first.” Wendy knew she wasn�
�t being very truthful, but right now she’d have said anything to get out of that shack.

  Peter paused and for a second she feared he would object. She could see him thinking and watched as the muscle in his jaw worked anxiously. But then he nodded. “Yeah, okay.” He crossed the room and opened the warped wooden door.

  Outside, Wendy saw a small clearing in the light that spilled from the shack. Beyond that, everything was swallowed up by the darkness of the woods.

  Wendy’s body stiffened in the doorway.

  “Are you all right?” Peter asked.

  She could feel him just behind her shoulder.

  Wendy wrung her sweaty hands together and nodded. “Y-yes, I’m fine. Just a little afraid of the … dark.” It was only half a lie. She was afraid of the woods, but especially afraid of them at night.

  Peter laughed. It came so easily to him.

  “That’s a strange thing to be scared of.” He grabbed the lantern from a hook on the wall and pressed it into her hand. “There,” he said, chin tilted proudly. “Problem solved.”

  Wendy gripped the metal handle. “Right.”

  Peter hopped through the doorway and leisurely strolled toward the woods.

  Begrudgingly, Wendy followed.

  “Since when are you afraid of the dark, anyway?” Peter asked, glancing back at her over his shoulder.

  Wendy almost stopped, wanting to pull back from the familiar way he kept talking to her. He stared at her, so open and unabashed. Meanwhile, her own cheeks felt hot under his gaze.

  Wendy’s hands shook so fiercely that the metal handle of the lantern clattered. Peter frowned at it. She gripped it tighter in an attempt to stop the shaking. The strain made the dry, cracked skin of her knuckles sting.

  Peter continued leading the way through the woods. His bare feet easily traversed rocks and tree roots. “I mean, lions, quicksand, nasty-tasting medicine: Those are all valid things to be afraid of,” he said, leaping onto a fallen tree, his arms out at his sides as he walked along it. He seemed perfectly at home. “But the dark?” he asked. Peter jumped down and fell back into step next to Wendy. “Really?” There was a teasing note in his voice as he ducked to avoid a low-hanging branch.