Another Pan

by Daniel Nayeri

  Neferat, the girl at the end of a cursed line in whom the spirit lived and worked its evil. Neferat, the beautiful governess Vileroy — and Peter’s much uglier nanny . . . the wicked, hunchbacked, moth-covered nanny, the ancient child thief, the liar.

  Neferat, the dark spirit that had inhabited Marlowe for so long and kept a watch over them all with her broken demon eye.

  Still, Wendy thought as she glanced at the sketches of Neferat as a younger woman, I swear I’ve seen that face before.

  It is 1926. I stand outside Peter’s bedroom. He’s asked for a story, and his father thinks the new nanny could tell it best. He’s hired for his son the most beautiful governess he’s ever seen, a vision of his lost wife — tall and blond. Poor, poor Peter. No mother to tell him stories. A father busy with the responsibilities of adulthood. Even his withered grandfather has nothing to say to him — the old sailor has no interest in children. Peter lives in fear of his grandfather’s wrinkles, his aching rheumatism, his severed hand — replaced with a hook. They are all reminders that Peter, too, will decay. Age will wrinkle and mar him.

  I think I have just the perfect story for little Peter. But first, I hunch my body and grow scars. I age my form by a hundred years . . . show him what I really look like beneath the false beauty. My silk gown becomes a black robe, and I can see that he is frightened. My fingers feel arthritic and knobby. Only my eye remains the same . . . I can never change that. I am an old, hideous crone. Peter is shaking because he knows that this will be the nanny that will put him to sleep, every night, from now on.

  “Come, and I’ll read to you from my favorite book,” I say.

  “No,” he yells, and inches away. “What’s wrong with your back? And you smell funny.”

  “Peter, you have a choice,” I say. “Either you listen to my story or I’ll have to show you my hook. You don’t want that, do you? It’s the book or the hook. Your choice.”

  “What’s that on your jacket?” he says. “Is that a bug?”

  “This is just a little friend. She’ll watch you even when I’m asleep. So you see, Peter? There’s no getting away.”

  From under my robe I pull out an antique hook just like his grandfather’s. This will be the beginning of Peter’s immortal fears, a mummy complex, a freezing of his soul. This will be a story about addictions and anchors and things as unstoppable as growing up.

  The nursery was hot, and Wendy could feel the piles of rubble over their heads. Peter was focused on only one thing: the fact that this was the very room where the bones of the baby king were surely waiting, holding the dust that could reverse time itself. Looking upward from the sketches of Neferat, Wendy could see that the room was square but that the walls seemed to slope inward as they came down — so she was certain now that this nursery was the last room before the tip of the upside-down pyramid.

  With the entrance of the hunched figure, it became even darker, more menacing and strange. It was a prison for the soul, as deep and black as a void. This must be her sanctuary, thought John, the place death lays down her head, the place where she battles the very idea of eternal life. Inside the tip of the pyramid must have been a galaxy of souls, the kingdom of death. The Dark Lady would never keep all five mummies here together, so temptingly close to one another. And so she hid them in rooms surrounding it, to keep her wicked eye on them. All this time, thought John, terrified, although it looked like they had crossed gardens and deserts and rivers, they had only been sneaking around the goddess’s backyard.

  In her hand, the nursemaid Neferat held a weapon that looked like an old, timeworn hook, like an antique from long ago. John’s arm hurt at the sight of it, and he knew it was the same one he had encountered before. Its handle was shaped like an ankh, the Egyptian symbol of life. Its end was curved and sharp, like a sickle, the symbol of death.

  For a moment, everyone stood still. And then, seemingly all at once, they noticed it. In the corner of the room, hidden among several golden sarcophagi, stood a waist-high pillar holding a sarcophagus about as big as a bassinet. Neferat stood motionless. Her chest didn’t rise and fall, as though she didn’t breathe. Wendy and John were petrified by her presence and looked at the sarcophagus instead. Peter, however, was staring straight into the nursemaid’s eyes. For that instant, they were facing off, waiting for the other to make the first move. Peter’s fingers twitched. He had waited decades for this showdown — this chance to pay her back for her years of cruelty. He smirked in the face of death. And maybe it was John’s imagination, but death seemed to be smirking back.

  In that second of rigid stillness, as they confronted the governess of the underworld, a hundred thoughts flashed through their minds.

  Please, Peter, don’t do something crazy, thought Wendy.

  If we live to tell him, Dad is going to flip, thought John.

  It’s mine, thought Peter. It’s finally all mine.

  Then, at the same time, Peter and the Dark Lady leaped at the pillar in the corner. . . .

  It had been more than an hour since the kids had entered the labyrinth, and Simon was starting to smell a double cross. He paced in front of the stall door in the girls’ bathroom, the portal, and counted the minutes. Was there a back door out of the labyrinth?

  The door of the girl’s bathroom slammed open. It was that Hispanic RA and two boarding boys — the two worst ones. The girl walked right to the portal with her obviously stolen spear and said to the guy with poet glasses, “Teach him to swim, 22.”

  The cornrowed blond followed the girl through the portal as the broad-shouldered poet smiled a gap-toothed smile and walked toward a shrinking Simon.

  Peter snatched the sarcophagus off the pillar a half a second before the nanny’s hook cut through the air where the coffin had been. Peter dove to the side as another slash of the razor-sharp hook whistled through the air toward him. He rolled across the stone floor, holding the sarcophagus to his chest. The figure pounced toward him, raising the hook high in the air and bringing it down just as Peter rolled up to a kneeling position and brought the sarcophagus above his head as a shield.

  To Wendy, it looked like this withered shell of a woman, almost frail-looking in her tattered robes, tried to stop the swing of her antique hook when she saw the sarcophagus of the fifth mummy in the way. But Peter had been too quick in that last second, and the hook stabbed into the front of the sarcophagus. They both pulled, there was a splintering crack, and the sarcophagus ripped open.

  The mummified bones of the fifth legendary mummy flew end over end in the air. “No!” screamed Peter as he fell back.

  John scrambled into the action, running under the mummy and catching it in his gym bag. He zipped up the bag and tucked it under his arm. Suddenly, the room grew darker. The figure seemed to disappear and then appear again. There was a flicker, like a bulb burning out, and Peter rushed to John.

  In the next instant, they were washed in darkness. And then the very air they were breathing seemed to change. No longer the hot earthen smell of underground, the air around them suddenly felt cool, almost fresh. The light returned, and Wendy gasped at what surrounded them.

  Now they weren’t standing in the sarcophagus room at the tip of the upside-down pyramid — they were standing in the Marlowe nurse’s office, with its sickbed and bottles of medicine and closetlike feeling. The walls were covered with sleeping moths from floor to ceiling, so that Wendy couldn’t tell what color the room was painted.

  “What’s going on?” John whispered.

  When Wendy turned to look at the ancient hunchbacked woman, she was gone. All that remained was a few of the moths that had encircled her a moment ago. The gravelly voice filled the space around them again. It was calling Peter.

  John and Peter moved to Wendy as she turned toward the door, but it was shut. They were trapped inside the insect-infested nurse’s office. In a corner, a few of them began to flutter and come to life. A deadly calm fell over the room, and as the moths woke, the small space of the nurse’s office
filled up with fluttering insects, thousands and thousands of them. Then Wendy noticed another change. “Something’s wrong.” She could barely breathe. It was as if the insects were sucking out all the oxygen, as if the room was not built to support so many living creatures all at once.

  John whimpered. Wendy’s throat went dry as she tried to breathe.

  There was a rustling outside the door of the office. Wendy was sure the dark figure would come rushing into the room and finish them all off, but why were they here? On the other side of the door, she heard a soft echo: “Peter, Peter.” It didn’t sound like the gravelly voice that had called him before. And then Tina came bursting into the room, holding some kind of spear from the exhibit. Wendy had never been so happy to have her barging in. One of the LBs — the blond banker’s kid, who was probably running the entire Marlowe branch of Peter’s organization — came running behind Tina, and Wendy gulped the oxygen that wafted in after them.

  “How —?” Wendy choked on the words.

  “We were right behind you when the underworld disappeared,” said Tina. “Ended up just outside this door.” She looked past Wendy and John. “Peter!” she screamed, and ran to his side. He seemed to be having some sort of episode. He was writhing on the ground, his hands around his neck . . . except his hands weren’t actually touching his neck. It was as if there was another set of hands, invisible fingers, wrapped around his throat, and Peter was desperately trying to pull them off. Hearing his name seemed to revive Peter for a second, and in a last, desperate attempt at survival, he took his thumb and thrust it into the air, at a point just above his own head — a point where a cluster of moths coalesced.

  Suddenly she was there. The nanny Neferat appeared, complete with her flock of moths whipping around her shoulders . . . but wait . . . was that the death goddess?

  “What the —?” said John as he and Wendy saw her at once. Not the ancient nanny but the new school nurse, complete with her blue sweater. She was coughing into a bloody napkin as she struggled against Peter, whose finger was piercing her in the one blue and branded eye.

  She shrieked in pain and flung Peter at the wall, crushing a colony of moths in the process. Peter crumpled to the ground, gasping for air.

  The look on the school nurse’s face was pure malice. She may have been sick, but she had the desperation of a cornered animal — so much more dangerous than calculation or hate — capable of doing anything to survive.

  Wendy remembered now where she had seen that strange eye before, the day she ran into the nurse in the hall. The thought that the Dark Lady had been among them all along, posing as a nurse, manipulating everything . . . Wendy felt nauseous. The nurse had been the one who made her doubt Peter, poisoning her mind with ideas about him and Tina. She was probably the one who put the Egyptian eyes above his hallway door. She was just trying to distract them away from the underworld. Though Wendy had so easily forgotten the nurse’s face after every encounter, she could see now that it was very much like the sketches of a younger Neferat on the walls of the cave, before she became the hunched, crippled old nanny in the later pictures — the one that Peter knew so well. Long before she became the goddess of death depicted in the last sketch in the cave wall, she was this homely girl, not old, not young, just a face come to life from Professor Darling’s stories. So plain. No wonder she was so jealous, so eager to leave her mark on the world.

  “Do you have it?” Tina whispered. She didn’t seem to care about the identity of the Dark Lady. Had she even ever met her, or the homely new nurse?

  “Yeah, right here,” said John, holding up the gym bag.

  “So we outrun her,” said Tina.

  “How?” said John with disbelief. “She won’t let us out with the mummy.” They all glanced at the broken door, which was now being quickly sealed shut by the nurse’s millions of tiny minions.

  “She might not let us out at all,” said Cornrow.

  “All right, think,” said Wendy. “There has to be something we know about her.” Wendy frantically snapped her fingers, trying to remember all at once everything her father had ever taught her about Egyptology. She tried to muster a few seconds of calm, just long enough to gather her thoughts and figure a way out of this.

  In the meantime, Tina rushed over to Peter. Wendy wanted to be the one to run to him, but she knew she wouldn’t be of use there. And even though she and Tina had their petty competition, they had to put it aside for now.

  The nurse was making her way toward Peter again. She seemed to have one singular purpose. “Hey,” shouted Tina, rushing away from Peter and pushing the sickbed between him and the nurse. “Hey!” Tina repeated as she drove the table into the nurse’s torso, but the nurse’s attention wasn’t diverted. She just crept past the bed and toward Peter. “Look at me!” shouted Tina.

  “Don’t bother, Tina. You’ve never used the bonedust,” said Peter as he inched away. “Besides, she’s always had it in for me . . . I can’t believe I didn’t realize the nurse . . .”

  “You didn’t really look.” Nurse Neve spoke for the first time, her voice strained. “You never look hard enough. You’re lazy, Peter.”

  Peter scoffed.

  “Or maybe it’s not you,” said Nurse Neve. “No one looks at the plain ones.”

  Wendy gripped John’s gym bag, frantic for an idea. “Come on, come on,” she pushed herself. What’ll distract her?

  “What about the mummy?” John whispered to Wendy.

  “The bones,” muttered Wendy. “OK, so what about the bones? They’re filled with life. She hates that, because she’s the god of death — wait, that’s it! The bones! She hid them because she’s afraid of them!” Just as Wendy made her breakthrough, the nurse suddenly stopped. Slowly, she turned toward Wendy, John, and Cornrow. Her branded eye glinted. Something had finally caught her attention away from Peter.

  “Run, Wendy!” shouted Peter, pointing at the wall of flies and moths that were blocking the door, as if he wanted her to take her chances trying to break through. But Wendy was too busy struggling with the zipper of the gym bag.

  “No,” said Wendy, “it’s the bones. She’ll be weak to the bones.” In the pressure of the moment, Wendy couldn’t open the bag. The sickly nurse, the plain-faced ageless woman, came nearer and nearer, coughing as she struggled forward. Wendy closed her eyes and winced, but the strike she expected never came. The goddess of death passed her by, and suddenly, Wendy knew —

  “John!” she screamed. She knew that the Dark Lady had only one purpose: death. And those who cheated her by using the bonedust were all she cared to reckon with. She knew why Layla’s windstorm — back when Simon had stolen the fourth mummy — had held back only John and Peter but didn’t bother her or Simon. John had been the only other person to use the bonedust, to repair his arm, maybe even to escape death, and now that death was coming for him.

  “John! Run!” screamed Wendy. But John was staring into the bewitching eye, mesmerized. He never saw the shimmer of the hook, hidden beneath a blue cardigan, slicing through the air. He realized what was happening too late, when death’s cold stride had brought her across the room and gouged her hook into John’s stomach. Silence. The nurse’s branded eye twinkled with the light of John’s life. With an detached shrug, the old demon governess let the boy’s body slide off her hook, her gruesome medical instrument, and onto the floor of the office, on a discarded pile of gauze.

  John looked up, blinking at his sister, then Peter and Tina. A dry heave seized in his throat. As he hung on death’s edge, he said, “Front pocket . . . my bag . . .”

  Wendy was struck mute. She could only stare at the horrifying sight and wish that it weren’t true. Shell-shocked, she stood quivering. She would rather have had any thought shouting in her mind. Absolutely anything. Any thought would have been happy compared to this one. Her brother, John, was dead.

  In the moments directly after John died, Peter and Tina were — maybe for the first time ever — unable to come up with something
to do. For Tina, it was the reality of all that blood pooling under John and the regret that she had been so mean to the little nerd.

  For Peter, it might have been the unexciting manner in which the school nurse walked up and put the hook into the kid’s gut. There was no sense of climactic flare. No real nod to heroic convention. It was so utilitarian, so unfun. Frankly, it was a really boring way to play a swordfight, and he resented letting such a mousy-looking wench have it. But he knew better than to say any of this in front of Wendy. Poor girl, he thought. She really was the best one of all the girls he had known.

  But Wendy, who was most ravaged by the sight, who was most wracked with tears, who was the only older sister John ever had and the only one who could have protected him — Wendy never stopped trying.

  As soon as Nurse Neve walked past her toward John, Wendy had struggled with the gym bag’s zipper. As the hook had punched the hole in John’s belly, Wendy had yanked at the bag’s seams and stuck her nails into it with grief. And as the feeble-looking nurse stood above the body and placed her black loafers on either side of a heap of soaked gauze, content to have avenged herself on a user of the bonedust, Wendy finally ripped open the bag and grabbed the mummy of the baby king.

  Wendy threw herself toward the nurse, with an agility that could only be attributed to her rage. She held the skeleton above her shoulder, like a cannonball. Peter realized her plan and screamed, “NO!” He scrambled to intercept her, but he was a few steps behind. It took a split second for Wendy to bound toward the deathly nurse, for the nurse to see her and turn, and for Wendy to smash the mummy into her face.