Alias Hook

by Lisa Jensen

  “The world war you spoke of.”

  She nods. “One man, full of hate, he was the start of it all.” She sets my hook on the shelf beneath the window, straps dripping over the board. “He had to be stopped. The good war, they called it.”

  “Wars of aggression will always meet with passionate defense,” I reason.

  She glances at me. “If leaders were made to fight their own battles, wars would cease.”

  “Bugger witchcraft, my dear, they would hang you for sedition,” say I. “My men do not guess where they are, or why, when they come here. But no sooner do they spy a fighting ship in the bay, hear the first tattoo of war drums, than something primal stirs inside them. They surrender completely to this place, this war, crave battle above all things.”

  “If men gave birth, they would understand how precious every life is,” she says softly. “And how fleeting.”

  She has slid back among the bedclothes, taken up a pillow which she cradles to herself absently, her expression suddenly bereft. I pretend to fiddle with my harness, coil it away.

  “I did kill him,” comes her soft, desolate voice. “My son.”

  I would speak, but her face silences me.

  “Damaged, they said. Unresponsive. Unfinished.” She gazes at her pillow. “It happened so fast. They had to get everything ready, tubes, wires, machines. They let me hold him. He looked at me. He knew me, I’m sure of it.” Her eyes are dry, her expression unbearable. “He was so beautiful, my tiny, damaged boy. He never even cried. All those months I carried him under my heart.” She draws a quavering breath. “I must have known in that moment he was leaving me. How could I not see it?”

  “You couldn’t know that.”

  “As surely as if we still shared the same heartbeat.” Her voice is empty. “It happened so fast. I should have screamed for the nurse sooner, made more of a fuss. They might have saved him.”

  “Or there might have been nothing at all they could do,” I tell her. “You might have only prolonged his misery. You can’t know, Stella; you can’t say for sure what might have been.”

  Her stark gaze meets mine. “I let him go.”

  “You were merciful,” I say carefully. “He died in the arms of someone who loved him. A good death. Better than most of us will ever know.”

  She gazes down at her twisted pillow. “I couldn’t keep either of them,” she whispers. “I couldn’t love them enough.”

  I reach for her, but she shrugs away, hugging the pillow closer to her ribs. So I blow out the light, curl up nearby. It’s a long, long time before she lets me hold her.

  * * *

  We search the skies, day and night, for any unusual activity, but see nothing out of the ordinary: sun, blue sky, the occasional wispy cloud, a full complement of Neverland stars, and a nearly quarter moon, cracking on for her next full phase. But neither do the boys trouble us. Stella is more restive than ever, but I’ve hit upon a plan to test my theory: if the Neverland has forgotten us, surely it will begin with my men. Perhaps they are already addressing another man as captain in my stead.

  I am in the skiff, rounding the last bend in Kidd Creek, near the fertile place where we keep our garden, before I feel the first internal pang of dread.

  “Hook!” caws the Pan triumphantly, vaulting up out of the foliage. “I knew it!”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  A PARLEY WITH PAN

  He emerges from a giant overhang of leafy ferns, sails out over my boat, malicious fairy glitter humming at his shoulder. He has obviously not forgotten me.

  “Pan,” I nod, and still my oars.

  “I call for a parley!” he cries.

  What choice have I? He descends into the stern and perches on the after thwart, facing me, but out of my reach. His imp sparks warningly between us, throwing off powdery bursts of light in iridescent shades of green and rust. At this range, I glimpse a flash of her golden hair.

  “I know the rules,” I sigh, and spread wide my hand and hook, still gripping the oars. The fairy springs for the hilt of my sword, magicks it out of its scabbard in another volley of scintilescent light, drops it on the empty thwart between us. I don’t bother to ask for his blade; it wouldn’t be fair for him to draw against me unarmed.

  “They tried to trick me, you know. Your men,” he sallies, sitting himself cross-legged in the stern, patting out his motley of leaves. “They said you were dead.”

  “Perhaps they thought I was.”

  “But I knew it was a trick!” he crows, thumping his scrawny chest. “I knew you were alive. I can always tell.” He leans closer to me, his gray eyes bright. “And so is she!”

  I dare not betray any flicker of feeling at all, now that Stella is alone and unprotected. “Well, what of it?” I reply easily, pulling my oars inboard.

  He sits back, frowning. He wants me to defy him, wants a new game to begin. “She’s an outlaw!” he challenges me.

  “There’s nothing she can do to hurt you,” I say reasonably. “You are master here.”

  “She is condemned to death!” he insists.

  I don’t remind him that his sentence was carried out to the letter with results that were beyond his control. I decide instead to turn the conversation in another direction. “Do you never tire of being captain?” I ask him.

  The question surprises him, but he furrows his brow in elaborate rumination. “Well, it’s hard work sometimes,” he concedes loftily. “They take a lot of looking after. But when they get to be too much trouble, I kill ’em!”

  “Your own Lost Boys?” This shocks even me. “How?”

  His gray eyes glisten. “I send ’em back! Make ’em go back and grow up.”

  Blood pounds like a blacksmith in my head. “Then why not send her back too?” I hear myself say calmly; send her back, my bully, and show old Hooky how it’s done. The fluttering of the fairy grows more agitated, as if she can hear the din in my head.

  “She’s grown up already,” Pan declares. “She has to die here.”

  I will my hammering heart to silence. “You might pardon her, you know,” I say evenly. “It would be very grand of you.”

  “She doesn’t belong here!” He folds his arms in defiance. “Everything’s changing, can’t you feel it?” He leans toward me again. “You have changed!”

  I gaze at him impassively. The water of Kidd Creek babbles happily around the boat, sunlight glows a hundred shades of green in the rustling trees, shrubs, ferns, and reeds. How can I argue, with the memory of Stella still so sweet inside me? Pan scowls, studying me.

  “Of course, my mother was prettier and cleverer and so much more fun!” he proclaims with the absolute confidence of ignorant youth; I know he has no more notion of who his mother was than an egg in a henhouse.

  “She’s not my mother,” I say simply.

  He peers at me, his eyes suddenly rounding in pity and horrified delight. “You like her!” he squawks. “Hook likes a lady!”

  Let the boy jeer. Let him be the one left out of the game for once. And as soon as he sees my indifference, the glee leeches out of his expression.

  “She can’t have you, you know,” he says more darkly. “You belong to me.”

  A riot of fairy light pulses between us. My mind closes instinctively to the shrill grapeshot of the imp’s language, yet from her tone and movements, I might almost think she’s upbraiding him.

  “Stop it, you silly thing!” Pan cries in real irritation. “We’re talking! If you can’t behave, you go home!” He dismisses the creature with a wave of his hand, yet she sparks in the air beside him, gabbling in protest. “I mean it! Go on!” the boy shouts. Then her glittery trail speeds away.

  Pan peers at me again. “That lady can’t win against me.”

  “She is stronger than both of us,” I reply.

  “You, maybe,” he protests. “You are old and weak and stupid.”

  “True,” I agree mildly. “I’m no use to you any more.”

  He scowls again. My mildness enf
lames him more than my wrath ever did. How did I never notice before? Watching him, I try another tack. “I propose a new game,” I suggest. “Pretend battles between your men and mine, like you wage with the tribes. It will be just as much fun,” I promise, thinking of the ferocity with which my men throw themselves into football.

  But he screws up his face in disgust. “That’s stupid!” he cries. “How can I win if it’s all pretend? I want to win!”

  By God’s blood, that part of Stella’s theory must be true. Beating me is all that matters to him, all that ever will. Look at the predator’s glint in his gray eyes, peering at me. There is no appeasing him, no cajoling him. There is no compromise, not for me. He’s like the most savage hunting dog; he smells me by my fear. Soon, very soon, he will make me pay for my foolish dreaming in the coin I can least afford.

  His expression intensifies. “She’ll make a fool of you, Hook,” he needles.

  Where does he get such talk? From one of the more forward Wendys? I gaze out at the water without responding, but he has the instincts of a shark when it comes to drawing blood.

  “My best hunting knife says she will leave you all alone,” he presses on. “What will you wager?”

  Only my heart, although I do not say it. His little animal face flushes with cunning, even as I resist his game. “She doesn’t really care for you, you know,” he says airily. “There are probably a hundred men out there, a thousand, that she’d like better. It’s only because she’s stuck here with you.”

  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.