Alias Hook

by Lisa Jensen

The mocking sun shines more boldly now as I gaze at the pile of ash and dust that was such magnificent beauty only moments before. When I no longer feel the malevolent chill of his presence in my bones, I plod back down the sand to where Parrish still shelters behind the weeds.

  “You wanted a word with the boy, I believe?”

  She wrenches her gaze away from the cliff and stares up at me. “What’s the matter with him?”

  “He has banned roses from the Neverland,” I tell her. “These disobeyed him. That is how he deals with defiance.”

  She clambers slowly to her feet. “This is not how I imagined it.”

  “You supposed the land of eternal childhood would be a happy, carefree place, full of gamboling elves and unicorns,” I suggest dryly. “A bed of roses.”

  We both glance again at the pile of ash, smoking in the pitiless sun. It’s a ghastly thing to see, such wanton destruction. He didn’t smash them in a petulant temper; he reduced them to ash with the force of his hatred.

  At last, Parrish shifts her gaze back to me, her expression bleak. “Now what am I supposed to do? Off to see the wizard?”

  The fairies and the boys are proven inhospitable. The woman is running short of options, and I believe at last she realizes it.

  “There are dark, dire forces at work here you know nothing about,” I tell her plainly. “Whatever brought you here is more powerful even than Pan. I seek only to understand what it is. The lives of my men may depend on it. Your life may depend on it.”

  She frowns at me. “I won’t be part of your stupid war,” she says.

  “Perhaps you are here to end it,” I improvise.

  The effect of these words is immediate. I see her eyes widen hopefully at this possibility. “Come back to my ship,” I urge her, pressing my advantage. “We want the same thing, you and I: to understand your purpose here. Dine with me tonight, and I may be able to help you.”

  She is watching me very carefully. “And what do you want in return?”

  “I would appreciate your honesty.”

  She sends a last, baleful glance at the smoking ruin where the roses had been, peers again at me. “I hope I can expect the same from you, Captain.” And she turns and climbs into the boat.

  It may be true that she’s told me all she believes she knows. But memory is a coquette that wants coaxing, and I must plumb the depth of hers soon, before the Neverland can erode it entirely, as happens so often with my men. The most interesting things slip out unbidden when people are divorced from their wits. Shameful secrets. Hidden desires. Buried memories. And Parrish is fond of drink.

  Chapter Twelve

  HAMMER AND TONGS

  Still, it’s not without a great deal of deliberation that I permit her into my cabin, my sanctum sanctorum. All the relics of my long, weary life are here to be discovered, possibly mocked by her, yet I determine to hazard all. I clear the little cherrywood table, set silken pillows on the chairs, unearth a gilded candelabra from a forgotten corner of my wardrobe. I have more plunder than even I remember stowed away in the shadows. I lost my taste for fine things during my long years in that French island prison, but I regained it with a vengeance when they came at the expense of other, more fortunate men.

  I’m once again in ceremonial scarlet and gold lace, my beard trimmed to shadow. The inverted bells of two polished crystal goblets sparkle in the candlelight. Parrish arrives in her own vagabond shirt and trousers, agog at my finery.

  “I’m sorry, Captain,” she murmurs. “I didn’t realize this was a formal occasion.”

  “Not at all,” I assure her. “I have so few guests, I’m afraid I no longer know what fashion is.”

  She darts another of her speculative glances at me, as I withdraw a chair for her. I see she has taken some trouble with her toilette; her hair is pinned back from her face in a few strategic places, while the rest falls loose and wavy to just above her shoulders. As I seat myself opposite her, one corner of her mouth quirks slightly upward. “You look very dashing,” she flatters me.

  “Ah!” I say, in relief, as Brassy scuttles in with a decanter of port, and just as quickly out again, his eyes averted to the deck.

  “Your men don’t like having me about,” she observes as I fill her glass.

  “I am captain here,” I shrug, filling my own.

  We salute each other, sip.

  “Ooh, this is excellent!” The wine coaxes a genuine smile out of her, then she leans forward. “But can’t they overrule you? Your men?”

  “Mutiny?” I scowl. “You take liberties, Madam…”

  “No! Democracy. I’ve read that pirate captains only command at the pleasure of their men. They can vote you out, or challenge you to trial by combat.”

  I bark a derisive laugh. “Nobody wants my command, I promise you.” I knock back another bracing gulp. “Democracy, Blackbeard. Where do you get such notions?”

  “I studied history at university,” she sniffs, but already her attention is wandering as she gazes wide-eyed all round my cabin. Thinking to disarm her further, I give her leave to satisfy her curiosity. Was she ever a Wendy, she might have been aboard this ship once, in this very cabin. Something might stir her memory, although it must have been longer than this woman has been alive since I realized how pointless it is to take hostages. She rises and begins to rove about, drinking everything in with her eyes, slides a finger along the sleek wood of one of my carved bedposts, takes note of their pineapple-shaped finials, a device recalled from the Indies. Coming to my old sea chest, she studies its arched lid branded in frilly script with the legend “Jas. Hook Esq.” A relic from my peacock days. Her fingertip follows the elaborate course of the “J” up and down and around, and up again. She glances back at me.

  “Jacobus,” I tell her loftily.

  Her mouth tilts up again. “Oh, I see,” she smiles. “James.”

  How odd and empty that name sounds, as distant from me as my severed hand, so long gone.

  I watch her fingertips trail along the lavish scrollwork of the stern window frame, above the curly pegs from which my hats depend, caress the carved wooden cabinet mounted above my writing table. I am mesmerized by the way her fingers glide over everything, as if the act of touching feeds her more information than her eyes can take in on their own. My phantom fingers stretch longingly, but my hook does not stir.

  “You have a skilled carpenter aboard, Captain,” she tells me.

  “It’s been an age since any of my men had the skill of a rhubarb,” I reply. “I find that whittling helps to pass the time.”

  She glances back at me. “This is your work? It’s very fine.”

  She has no idea how long I’ve had to perfect my craft, how little there has ever been to distract me. Indeed, a rhubarb might have produced such work had it had such an infinity of time. “You mean, in spite of this,” I suggest, tilting up my hook to save her the bother of pretending not to look at it.

  She gazes briefly at us both, my hook and myself. “Quantity of hands must not matter so much as the skill with which they’re used,” she says with an easy shrug.

  “There are few pieces of scrap wood so worn out and damaged they can’t be put to some use,” I mumble, and I swallow another deep draft so she might not see how her praise discomposes me. “Even by so poor a craftsman as the terrible Hook.”

  “Oh, that’s just an alias,” she replies, with a brazen smile. “This is the work of a maestro.”

  She comes at last, as I knew she must, to my harpsichord, so long silent, its polished mahogany shining bravely in the candlelight. Unlike the Rouge, I can’t bear to let it fall into disrepair, but tune and polish it as attentively as any fatuous lover.

  “Do you play, Captain?”

  “I did once.”

  “Surely there are one-handed compositions?” she persists.

  “Perhaps you would care to play me one,” I ooze.

  Her laugh is light, not mocking. “Not me, Captain, I haven’t the gift. Females no longer learn
music and needlepoint and drawing in the nursery any more, you know. It’s an altogether different world.”

  “What do you do, then, in your world?” I prompt her. “Besides misinterpret history?”

  Impudence fades from her expression, and she gazes down at the keyboard. Her fingertip depresses one key so gently the note does not strike.

  “I used to write books,” she murmurs. “Romances.”

  “Like masques in Shakespeare? Magic, fantastical journeys, exotic scenery, whimsical Fate?”

  Her eyes crinkle up. “Your education is showing, Captain.”

  “The education of the playhouse,” I shrug. Not at all the sort of schooling one was meant to boast of in my day. “I am not unacquainted with Shakespeare, as well as the modern scribblers. Congreve, Farquhar, and the like.” I find I am boasting after all.

  This amuses her, for some reason, then she shakes her head. “My books were trifles in which a man and a woman defeat obstacles through love. I gave them up when I realized what lies they were,” she adds wistfully. “I lost the heart for it.”

  I pick up the glass she left on the table and carry it to her. “Heartlessness is a quality we all share in the Neverland,” I point out. “Is that what brought you here?”

  “For that I might’ve stayed where I was, thank you very much,” she scoffs, and downs another sip. “I dreamed this would be a happy place. Childhood reborn.”

  Dreams or memories? “You dreamed often of this place as a girl, I suppose?”

  She looks surprised. “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

  “Perhaps to escape some childish sadness,” I try again, raising my own glass. It’s my impression that the children who dream their way here in fact, as opposed to those who only visit during their dreams, are at odds with the other world somehow, dreaming their way here out of desperation.

  “Not me, Captain. I had the most boringly happy childhood,” she grins. “My parents were still alive. We had our house in Devon, and summers I spent with my aunt and uncle in Scilly; I had beaches for my playground, and the whole of the ocean to dream on!”

  So that’s how she knows her way around a boat.

  “It wasn’t until after the war, a year or so ago, that the Neverland started really haunting me,” she goes on thoughtfully. “When I found the book.”

  “Book?” I nearly choke on my wine. Is she an enchantress after all, mistress of some volume of arcane lore?

  “Peter and Wendy,” she replies. “My aunt gave it to me when I was very small. It was autographed. Lovely, ornate old thing, dark green binding, Peter and the mermaids on the cover, I believe, done in gilt.” I marvel over her recollection of such details, not at all like my men. “I only just found that book again, it was put away for years. And inside, beside his name, I found that he’d written one word. ‘Believe.’ And that’s when the Neverland started coming alive in my dreams.”

  “Do you say the Scotch boy sent you here?”

  Now it is her turn to stare at me.

  “The one who went home and wrote down the stories of Pan for the first time,” I explain.

  Her eyes widen. “You knew him? He was here?”

  “Oh, aye, Inky or Blinky, or some such as they called him, nearsighted little fellow, always scribbling things down,” I mutter, and take another satisfying draft. “Previous to him, they were just stories whispered by children to each other. I should scarcely recollect him now, but for the way the stories have altered since he laid siege to ’em.” Parrish is still staring, enrapt, so I go on. “He got it all wrong, of course, wrote about Pan as if he were a product of his own era, newly run off to the Neverland, although this place is eternal and Pan has been here so much longer than that. Always trumpeting about that he would never grow up, the Scotch boy, that he would never forget.”

  “And he never did,” Parrish murmurs.

  “A pixilated distortion of the facts, at best, and happy enough he was to invent the rest,” I correct her. “I suppose he’s still spewing the same bilge back in your world.”

  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 sail
ed 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 farther 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.