This continued for several minutes, in which all the girls picked sides and began screaming for a victor within this senseless and directionless fight. Even Gwen found herself rooting for little Spurt, yelling, “Just wiggle away from him, Spurt! He can’t grab you if you get behind him!”
“I’ll strangle you all!” Peter cried, but he couldn’t even swat back Hollyhock and Bramble, who were flitting and pinching him as much as they were pinching the other children.
Eventually, the ruckus died down, with no obvious winner. The only two who continued fighting were Sal and Newt, who seemed to have forgotten that when they joined the ruckus, they were teammates. Rosemary pulled them off each other, kissing both of their foreheads when they each declared that they had both been mortally wounded.
Peter smiled at Gwen. “What do you think, Dollie-Lyn?”
Gwen had already decided how she would respond to all this. The story had been full of incongruities and inconsistencies, so she announced haughtily, “I don’t believe a word of it,” and promptly sat down on a toadstool, affecting the most incredulous air.
“But it happened!” Spurt insisted, even though he’d slept through the whole story and didn’t know what he was advocating for.
“It did, Gwen!” Rosemary assured her.
“How would you know? You weren’t there.”
“I can prove it,” Peter replied, rolling off the bed and pulling out a painted cardboard box from beneath it. “We still have all the booty.” Sure enough, the peeling cardboard was loaded with all the treasure described.
“Where’s the flag?” Gwen asked, still not satisfied.
“The what?”
“The flag,” Gwen repeated. “Everyone knows that when you kill a pirate captain, you take his flag. That could be anyone’s booty. I want to see the skull and stars flag.”
The children looked at Peter. They’d never heard that you had to take the flag before. In fact, Gwen had made that rule up on the spot, in the interest of making things hard for Peter.
He looked disarmed at first, as if Gwen had taken the wind right out of his flagship sails. His expression recovered quickly though, and the smirk flickered back.
“Well, let’s go get that flag then.”
The pirate ship had long since been abandoned, and Bard and Spurt felt it would be better to stay and watch over the underground house. Others were reluctant, but willing, to venture to that possibly haunted ship that had rotted and bobbed in Cannibal’s Cove since Peter defeated its crew. Gwen was more scared of the prospect of running into crocodiles, but Peter assured her there had only ever been one fearsome crocodile in Neverland, and it had gone the way of the pirates.
Jam and Blink were as adventurous as ever, and Rosemary wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity either. Gwen wondered, as they embarked, just what she had gotten herself into, but she had no way or desire to back out of it. Newt and Sal were already singing a made-up sea shanty.
They flew out, Hollyhock and Peter leading the way. High over the trees and into the clouds, they bounced their way back down into the foggy cove, which was still full of midmorning haze. The ship’s mast was broken and toppled over on itself, and the ship’s body was covered in dark, mossy growth. Every inch of metal was coated in heavy, red rust, and when they set foot on the soggy deck, it squeaked as if the wooden boards beneath their feet were moaning.
“First one to find the flag is the winner!” Rosemary declared as she took off into the disarray of discolored sails.
Newt and Sal followed after her, while Jam exclaimed, “No fair, you got a head start!” Blink calmly searched the deck, thinking that the flag might have blown down to the ground after all this neglect. Hollyhock kept to Rosemary’s side, having a tremendous confidence in the little girl’s ability to find the missing flag.
Gwen’s arms swelled with goosebumps, which she rubbed down with her palms. It wasn’t even that cold, but there was a distinct marine chill that haunted Cannibal’s Cove. Her lacy yellow dress—a new one she had found in the traveling trunk of mismatched clothes—did not feel like appropriate garb for this occasion. She pulled her hair back with the ribbon Bard gave her upon her arrival in Neverland. “So this was the last of the pirates?”
“Yep,” Peter answered. “I defeated the very last of them, and not another ship’s sailed in since.” His triumph did not mask the melancholy of his voice. There was a nostalgic look in his eye as he surveyed the decaying ship; it had once been a grand stage for his heroic feats and gallant antics. Now, it was only a memory, and its glory was confined to a story he couldn’t even remember well enough to tell coherently.
“Why did the pirates stop coming?” Death hung on the air and troubled Gwen, but it was not a human sort of death. It was the death of dreams and ideas, of fantasies and spirits.
“What would have brought them here,” Peter asked, a bitter spite sneaking into his tone, “once they found out there was more money to be made on Wall Street than in gold doubloons? Why be crooked pirates scheming for treasure they wouldn’t know how to spend when they could be honest businessmen with two cars in their garage and a summer home upstate?”
A nervous laugh left Gwen’s lips. Peter was talking about reality, and it surprised her to see how uncomfortable that made her.
“Why spend your whole life on the high seas looking for treasure,” Peter asked, talking to the clouds as he scaled a rope up what remained of the half-crumbled mast, “when you could have a promised paycheck in exchange for all the life you’d live between nine-and-five.”
He stared at Gwen. Her heart still rested with that reality, and he seemed determined to make her feel guilty for it, wanting her to burn with dread as she considered what the alternative to Neverland really was.
“But that’s not nearly as exciting,” Gwen said.
“No, it’s not, but it’s life, and people live it.”
Rosemary’s piercing cry cut through the fog. “I found it! I found it!” She came running out of the mist, the faded black flag fluttering as she held it over her head.
“No fair!” Jam insisted.
Blink continued searching the ship, unfazed by the discovery of the flag. The dark little girl hunted through the fog, knowing there had to be even more interesting things left to rot among the waterlogged boards of this old ship.
“We should play out the story!” Jam announced.
Rosemary didn’t miss a beat. “Can I be Peter?”
“No, you’re a girl. Peter has to be Peter. You can be the captain, but I’ll be Blink and you’ll tie me up—”
“But Blink’s here!” Rosemary argued. “Blink has to be Blink.”
“Blink can be Bramble though.”
“We want to be pirates!” Newt exclaimed.
“I don’t want to get tied up.” Rosemary pouted.
“Somebody has to though, and Blink’s the tiniest, so she should be a fairy.”
“Why can’t Hollyhock be Bramble? She is a fairy!”
“Hollyhock’s not playing, so it has to be Blink.”
“I don’t want to be a fairy,” Blink said. “I just want to be me.”
They trailed off into discussion, batting ideas back and forth, only to shoot them down and squabble more about the technical details of their reenactment. Jam was full of instructions that no one ever seemed to want to follow. Eventually, it devolved into a simple game of tag.
The young children ran loops around the slick deck, sometimes slipping and falling, but never seriously hurting themselves even when they did hit the deck. Peter quickly joined the game, and Gwen happily took part in it as well.
She wanted to run and race over the old ship, and not worry about the implications of letting it and all it stood for rot within Cannibal’s Cove. It was easier to focus on avoiding Blink’s tiny hand and quick, racing feet than to remember the two-car garage and nine-to-five job her father had. She wondered if her father worked with old pirates, gathering magical treasures to transmute them into eco
nomic solutions for their country.
Gwen heard something rustling, like chains in the galley below. While Jam wailed and Peter laughed, no one else seemed to notice. Something shifted in the bowels of the boat, and Gwen’s attention was drawn to the door down into the hull of the ship. Were pirate ghosts a thing in Neverland? She glanced back at Peter, reassuring herself that he was there. What was the worst that could come of exploring the ship with Peter there to protect and defend?
She went to the hull’s entrance and found that its rotting door easily swung open. As she peered into the darkness, she could hardly make out the shape of the warped steps leading down. She saw a small, red light blinking in the otherwise total darkness, and she was instantly confused. It looked like a tiny LED light, like some electronic device low on batteries or an alarm clock flashing as it sounded. Neither of these things had any business in Neverland.
It shifted closer to her, and the stairs’ floorboards moaned under great pressure. Gwen didn’t dare venture into the darkness, but she leaned in closer to see…
A scaly snout emerged out of the darkness, its unpolished, jagged teeth as sharp as its eyes. The crocodile lunged.
Its low reptilian roar was lost in the sound of Gwen’s scream. She flung herself backward and away from the humongous beast. Falling down in her attempt to get away as fast as possible, she scrambled to her feet as it pushed its way through the doorway and onto the deck. It amazed her that the massive creature had even fit in the stairwell.
“Get up, Gwenny!” Peter cried. She saw that the other lost children were already high in the air, out of the crocodile’s reach. Scurrying to her feet, she tried to fly up and join them. The children were all gleefully calling to her, horribly excited and screamingly alive, with only a playful sense of danger.
Her feet stayed firmly on the ground. Even when she jumped up, Gwen felt herself pulled back down by tenfold the force of gravity. She couldn’t fly when her heart was racing with fear, when she knew too well that crocodiles could kill you and death was the end-all of life and joy. No one else was afraid. It was only because she comprehended the consequences that Gwen could not find the focus to fly.
She ran across the deck to the steps outside the captain’s quarters. The crocodile was slower than her, but it was pursuing with passion. Gwen was too panicked to do anything but stay a few steps ahead of the scaly monster.
“Fly!” Peter yelled.
“I can’t!” Gwen cried. She felt tears coming to her eyes. She was inept and scared; she felt younger and smaller than anyone there, a baby among children. She was going to die in the jaws of the crocodile because she couldn’t muster the whimsy to fly.
Hollyhock zipped down and began doing laps around Gwen’s head until they were both dizzy. Bramble did jumping jacks in her hair. Even with all this fairy dust, she still couldn’t leave the ground.
Peter sank down, away from the mast and down to the side of the boat. “Jump, Gwen-Dollie, just jump over the edge and fly over here!” Gwen ran to the edge of the boat and got up on the ship’s railing. She almost could have leapt into his arms, he was so close. The crocodile was after her though, and when it came snapping at her heels, Gwen locked eyes with Peter and leapt with all the confidence she could muster.
Covered in fairy-dust, she was weightless in the air for a cruel, short moment before she plunged down into the saltwater below. Her startled, screaming gasp drew in a horrible mouthful of dank seawater, and as she flailed alone below the surface, she heard the deafening crash of a gigantic reptile joining her in the chilly water.
Gwen thrashed through the water so frantically that she didn’t know whether she was sinking deeper or floating up. She felt her arm jerked up in someone’s firm hold, and as she finally managed to break the surface, Peter swept her up into his arms and carried her high into the air. She wrapped her arms around his neck and held herself as close to him as she could. Saltwater dripped from her hair, her dress, and her eyes.
“Can you fly now?” Peter’s voice was little more than a whisper.
Gwen shook her head against his chest, sad and ashamed.
Peter flew her back up to the ship, setting her on the deck’s railing where she would be safe from the crocodile now that it was floating below in the water. Gwen looked down at the creature with fearful hatred. The other, carefree children were throwing pebbles at it. Jam was even so bold as to pull the crocodile’s tail and fly away, screaming euphorically before it could catch her between its teeth.
“Is that the same one?” Gwen asked.
“If these are my eyes, then, aye, that’s the ticking crocodile,” Peter muttered.
“I thought you said it was gone?”
“Oh, we chased it away. We sent it after those awful suit-and-tie pirates. It must have come back home once it’d eaten its fill of their nasty bones and briefcases.” Peter landed and peered over the ship’s edge, his chin in his hand.
“It didn’t make a sound!” Gwen felt cheated—she would have been prepared for the crocodile if only it still ticked. “No ticking, just blinking… What’s that thing on its neck?”
Peter’s eyes narrowed as he looked to Gwen. “What blinking thing?”
“Some sort of device on the back of its head. It’s got a little red light that blinks.”
His face remained stony, even as he became pensive. Gwen didn’t want to interrupt him. He startled her when he leapt off the boat and flew down near the crocodile.
Peter and the crocodile had a long history that was both unpleasant and playful. They danced around each other, snapping, diving, darting, and dipping around as Peter tried to get a better look at the light. He flew back up like a firework, exploding into a dramatic pose as he landed on the ship’s deck. “It isn’t good,” he announced.
“What is it?”
“It’s a tracker. They must have caught him and planted it on him before turning him loose again. They knew he’d eventually come home.”
Gwen looked back down. The crocodile seemed harmless from afar, more like a bit of driftwood than a danger. “What does that mean?”
“It means we have to get that device off him and destroy it.”
“Get it off him?” Gwen laughed in disbelief. “How do you plan to do that without losing a limb? It’s huge! We couldn’t fight it even if we all teamed up.”
Peter nodded and sighed. He was in a state of dread that Gwen had not seen from him before. “We’ll need help.” His unblinking eyes watched the crocodile. He seemed caught in a problem that was much more twisted and more subtle than that posed by the carnivorous creature below. “We’ll need the mermaids.”
Peter put two fingers in his mouth and whistled in a strange fairy-like pitch to get the attention of his entourage. The lost children came to an abrupt halt and held themselves in the air as Peter called out his orders.
“The grown-ups that are trying to find Neverland have some sort of foul device on the back of our beloved crocodile’s neck! We need to get it and destroy it, lest it transmit our location to those wretched adults!”
While the crocodile’s attack had struck the children as a terribly funny, exciting thing, this news seemed to perturb them into focus. There was no more laughter, although Jam did ask, “What does ‘transmit’ mean?” Her question went unanswered, because Peter was already giving everyone their marching orders.
Blink, being the fastest flier—aside from Peter, of course—was sent to fetch the mermaids from their lagoon. It was high noon, so they would most certainly be sunbathing on the rocks. Bold Jam was in charge of keeping the crocodile on the surface and near the ship. Happy to play the damsel in distress, Jam willingly flitted just out of the crocodile’s reach as bait. Hollyhock and Bramble were put on a stealth mission since they were light enough to land on the crocodile and observe its device unnoticed. Rosemary, Newt, and Sal flew off to the shore to find heavy rocks and other things they could drop on the crocodile’s head if needed.
While everyone else accepte
d the situation without question, Gwen was all tripped up on the logic of it. “How could a transmitter work here? I kind of thought… well, technology didn’t work in Neverland.” After all, her cell phone had lost reception the moment she’d arrived.
Peter was busy unwinding rope from the mast. “Technology is their magic, Neverland is ours. It’s all magic. It all works.” He looked back at her with slight irritation. “Well, don’t just stand there and be a girl; help me get this rope down.”
She immediately assisted him, embarrassed that he had to ask her to make herself helpful. Peter left her side and began scouring the deck for something, opening all sorts of rotted chests and barrels. “What will it mean if the transmitter gives them the location though? People can’t come to Neverland unless it’s for the right reasons… right?”
“Knowing how the crocodile got back here might give them an idea for how they can invade. But they don’t have to be here to do damage.” Peter’s voice was bitter as he called back. “If they know where we are, they can attack from afar. They’ve done it before.”
“When? How?” Gwen was confused, but as she finished unwinding the rope and loaded her arms full of it, she approached Peter.
“About eight years ago. Remember the tree stump? They fried it—and a lot more—in an electrical storm attack.”
He kicked open a wooden crate, finally finding the net he was looking for. A thin smile crossed his lips, and it was a welcome sight to Gwen. Together, they untangled the net. As the lost children returned with their various rocks and heavy branches, they, too, helped untangle the net. Bramble and Hollyhock gave a report back to Peter on the nature of the device, and just about the time Jam was getting cranky and tired of being bait, Blink arrived with the mermaids.
When he saw the beautiful faces of the mermaids bobbing in the water, Peter ordered his lost children, “Wait here on the deck.”
“I’m tired!” whined Jam, still taunting the crocodile on the other side of the boat.
The Neverland Wars Page 12
