Lost Boy

by Christina Henry

  I showed him nothing. I knew better. Anyway, he’d have a hard go of it, trying to kill me. I’d been on the island much, much longer than he knew.

  Peter looked from me to Nod to Fog to Nip and then heaved a great sigh, as though he hadn’t intended for it to end that way all along. Me against Nip, his right hand against the boy who wanted to take my place.

  “Very well,” he said, in that pretend grown-up voice he used when he wanted to be serious. “Nip against Jamie, thirty sleeps from now. Sam, you’re in charge of marking off the days. When you wake up in the morning put a line on that board with a rock.”

  Sam nodded. He looked eager to be a part of this, but glad that he had a meaningful part to play that wouldn’t involve blood or death.

  The circle of boys broke up, and nobody seemed to know quite what to do with himself. The game was supposed to end with Nip kicking from the end of a rope until he was still.

  Since it hadn’t ended that way, none of the boys wanted to look Nip in the eye. I wondered what would become of Nip until Battle day. He hadn’t made a place for himself among the boys before this, and he seemed unlikely to now. It’s hard to make friends with someone who tried to hang you.

  Del’s body lay in the center of the clearing and Peter pretended it wasn’t there as he walked by.

  “Who wants to swim with the mermaids?” he shouted, just as if nothing of import had happened.

  There was a loud “hurrah” from Billy, and the others joined in the chorus. They appeared relieved that Peter was giving them something to do besides think about recent events.

  I didn’t point out that it was nearly sundown, and that sharks sometimes swam into the lagoon after dark, making the mermaids scatter. I didn’t say that the boys had just returned from a long, pointless trek to Bear Cave and back and needed to sleep and eat so they wouldn’t do foolish things that might get them killed.

  I didn’t say anything at all, though it was clear Peter expected me to do so. He wanted so badly to tell me off for babying them, for spoiling their fun, but I wouldn’t bite his bait.

  I watched them go, Peter in the lead, the rest already forgetting Del.

  Soon the only boys left in the clearing were Charlie and Nip and me. Nip turned and limped inside the tree to lick his wounds, just like a bear—and just as dangerous.

  I picked up Del’s body—he was already cold and stiff—and carried him out to the place where I buried the boys we lost.

  Charlie trailed behind me, a little yellow-feathered duckling, and he patted my shoulder when I put Del in the ground and wept like I would never stop.

  chapter 8

  The boys didn’t return until almost morning. Charlie and I chose to sleep outside in the clearing by the fire. Nip was likely too damaged to be much of a threat, but I wasn’t risking Charlie over that belief. It was only sense to stay away from him when the others were gone.

  The night was fine and cool, the never-birds calling to one another in long singsong cries. Charlie tucked himself right up against me like a roly-poly bug and went to sleep. I lay awake for a while, listening to him and the night breathing all around me, and wondered how Peter could fly.

  • • •

  I thought we would take a boat to the island, but Peter took me to a secret place, so-so-so secret that it didn’t look like anything at first and I thought he was teasing me. We had to go outside the city, a long way, and I was tired when we got there, so tired, but Peter kept smiling and clapping and telling me it would be wonderful, so I kept going even when I wanted to close my eyes and fall down. When we got to the secret place, there was a big tree, and a hole between two thick roots that jutted out of the ground.

  “In there,” he said, and pointed.

  I thought for sure then that he had tricked me. “That’s nothing but a hole in the ground,” I said, and could hear the tears in my voice.

  “No, no, it’s not!” he said, and he was so earnest that I believed him again. “It’s magic, and only we know that it’s here.”

  He came next to me and put his arm around my shoulder and pointed up over the top of the tree. The tree was very big, bigger than some of the houses in the city, and right above it were two stars. One of them was very bright and one of them was smaller.

  “It’s because of that star,” he said. “The second star to the right. That star shines over my island, and shines over this tree, and if you go inside you’ll come out on the island on the other side.”

  He must have seen me doubting, because he said, “I’ll go first, and you follow.”

  That seemed a little better to me. If he went first, that meant that he wouldn’t stand outside the hole and pour dirt on me and laugh, which had seemed a possibility. He dashed into the hole and slithered inside so fast I hardly saw him. I stood there, unsure if I should follow or not as there still seemed the chance of a trick.

  His head popped out of the hole again like a jack-in-the-box, and his green eyes gleamed in the starlight. “Come on, Jamie, follow me. Follow me and you’ll never grow up!”

  I took one step, and then another, and then I was inside and the earth seemed to close all around me.

  • • •

  The whooping and hollering woke me first, and then the wind brought the smell of the sea ahead of them. They tumbled wild-eyed out of the forest, and many of them just collapsed once they were within sight of the tree.

  I sat up and grabbed Fog’s ankle as he danced by, full of mermaid songs. “Where’s Peter?”

  “Went to the Other Place,” Fog said. “Said he had to find new boys to make up for Harry and Del.”

  I let Fog go, and he fell to his knees and then flat on his face, snoring before his nose even touched the dirt.

  Peter had gone to the Other Place without me—again. The last time he’d brought back Nip, a choice he’d known I would never approve. It was clear now that the reason for that was to find a boy with just the right qualities, one who wouldn’t be troubled about slashing a five-year-old’s throat.

  I soothed Charlie down again—the ruckus of the boys’ return had him sitting up and rubbing his eyes—and soon he was asleep like the others. The air filled with the sleeping breath of boys, their dreams dusted by the glow of the moon.

  I stayed awake the rest of the night, watching that cold eye, and wondered what sort of boys Peter would return with this time.

  • • •

  There were three of them, not just two to replace Harry and Del. The extra one was, I perceived, to replace whichever of us (Nip or me) was lost in Battle, and Peter was trying to get ahead and save himself a trip later.

  The first was called Crow, and he was in the Nod and Fog mold—small and energetic and liked to roughhouse. Soon enough he was always a part of their games and fights, and it was just as if they’d been born three instead of two. We found ourselves saying “the triplets” instead of “the twins” before we knew it.

  The second boy was Slightly, and we called him that because he was thin and slow to talk and generally more thoughtful than the other boys Peter picked. We could have used a boy like Slightly in the long run, but it wasn’t likely that he would have lasted long with those qualities. At least, that was what I told myself later, when I was burying him.

  And the third boy was Sal. Sal wore a brown cap over a head of short black curls and had blue eyes that were always laughing at me. They told me in a thousand ways to stop being so serious and to have more fun; that was what the island was for.

  Yet Sal was also kind and good to all the boys, especially Charlie, and that made me like him, for no one else thought much of Charlie. The others wouldn’t hurt him, but he couldn’t keep up with them and so they didn’t think of him. Sal did think of him, and waited for him, and walked next to him while the little boy shyly showed him the best places to dig for worms.

  Soon enough Sal was a favorite of everybody�
�s, for he had a way about him of making everyone feel like they belonged. Sal could make you feel happy just by smiling—those tiny white teeth flashing always made me warm in my belly. Some of the happiest days I had on the island were those days before that awful Battle day, when Sal and Charlie and I would break away from the others and go off roaming on our own.

  Peter watched all this and pretended it was fine, that he wasn’t bothered in the least that this new boy had taken me away from him even more than Charlie had. He even pretended not to mind about Charlie so much.

  He pretended, but I caught him watching.

  He watched Sal and Charlie like that sneaking, peeking crocodile in his story, the one who waited for his time to come.

  Peter brought Sal to the island, and Sal changed everything for all of us forever, though I couldn’t know that would happen.

  I was only a boy then.

  PART II

  BATTLE

  chapter 9

  I knew that business with the pirate camp burning would cause more trouble than Peter thought it would. He’d burned their camp and fed their Captain to a Many-Eyed and thought that nothing would change between us and them. We’d come a-raiding and they would try to kill us, but it would all be in good fun.

  Though none of the group that followed Peter that day had survived to tell the tale, it was a certainty that the remaining pirates knew who was at fault. I thought that meant they’d know who to come looking for when it was time for revenge, and said so.

  “No,” Peter scoffed. “They’ll leave. They’ll go off sailing somewhere else. Why would they stay? Their camp and all the supplies in it are gone. I didn’t burn their ship, and I could have. I left it there so they could go away and find a new Captain. Then they’ll tell him that he can find the secret to staying young forever on this island and he’ll sail back here and then we’ll all have a grand time fighting each other again.”

  He laughed, and clapped my shoulder. “Did you know that they think it’s some kind of spring? I don’t know where they could have gotten such a notion, but I heard some of them talking about it when I was setting the tents on fire. They think they’ll dump out their rum bottles and fill them with ‘the water of youth.’ Pirates are so stupid.”

  I didn’t really think the pirates were all that stupid, and anyway, who was to say it wasn’t the water that kept us all young? I’d lived there for years and didn’t know for certain why I was still a boy. I didn’t think Peter knew for sure himself.

  That wasn’t a secret I was interested in, anyway. I wanted to know how Peter flew. I’d not mentioned it to anyone else, not even mentioned to Peter that I’d seen him. I tried following him a few times, if I saw him sneaking off on his own, but he always disappeared before I caught him. I was reluctant to spend much time chasing him, as I was still nervous about leaving Charlie alone for too long. Nip did his best to glare death at Charlie and me whenever we drifted into his view.

  Sal was the best, most reliable boy to leave Charlie with if I was away, but much as I wanted to discover Peter’s secret, keeping Charlie safe was more important. And I didn’t want Sal to fall under Nip’s fury either.

  Since the day the boys had tried to hang him, the others mostly avoided Nip. He spent almost all his time in the tree, watching his purple bruises turn yellow. He tried to reset the bone of his cheek himself, pushing the broken pieces more or less in place and tying a long strip of cloth from his sleeve around his jaw.

  The necessity of not being able to move his teeth too far to chew meant he couldn’t eat much besides soft fruit. That meant he was constantly hungry and roared at any boy who walked too near him.

  I knew how to make a broth out of deer bones and some certain green leaves that would keep any boy strong. I’d used it plenty of times when the others had a fever and it saw them through. It would have helped Nip heal faster, but that wasn’t any secret I’d be sharing with him. If he got weak, or even if he starved to death before Battle, it would save me the trouble of killing him later.

  If I worried about Peter—which I didn’t, because Peter could take care of himself—I’d have worried about the way Nip watched him too. The bigger boy resented Peter for denying their plot. More than once I caught him squeezing his fingers together while he stared at Peter, like he was daydreaming a strangling.

  It didn’t trouble me as much as it ought to, for Nip couldn’t catch Peter on his best day, and Nip was far from his best day. But still he watched, and planned, and waited.

  • • •

  On the day we saw the pirates, Peter took us south through the dunes and to the beach near Skull Rock. This beach was a very long stretch of sand—perhaps a mile or two—with jumbled rocks at the east end. On the other side of the rocks was a wet marshy place where the swamp emptied into the sea.

  At the west end was a jutting promontory of forest that curled around the mermaid lagoon. The lagoon wasn’t visible from the beach—it was on the other side of the trees, which were thick and took the best part of an hour to cross if you went from the beach to the lagoon.

  Skull Rock was a flat grey rock that looked like a skull facing up out of the water—the top end of the rock curved just like a human head, and it even had two large round depressions set roughly equidistant from each other that seemed to be blank eyes staring up in the sky above the sea.

  The rock wasn’t that far from shore, but you had to swim through some very deep water to get there, and the waves could be rough. It was shallow from the beach for about twenty or so steps and then suddenly the bottom dropped away, which took a lot of the boys by surprise the first time. The rock was a good place for catching fish, though, and Peter had declared he was sick of deer and rabbit meat.

  Nip didn’t come with us, naturally—just stayed in the tree and brooded. It was eleven days since the almost-hanging, and he was probably well enough for the trek through the dunes, but nobody was inclined to persuade him to come along.

  He’d taken to going off in the forest for short stretches, always returning with something to eat that he didn’t share with the rest of us—a rabbit or a bird or a squirrel. His jaw had healed enough for him to eat meat again, but eating it hadn’t improved his disposition.

  Several of the boys were not very good swimmers, which wasn’t any trouble when splashing in the shallow mermaid lagoon but quite a bit dangerous in the water near Skull Rock. The mermaids would sometimes help boys who struggled in the lagoon, giving them piggyback rides around. Of course, sometimes they also thought it was fun to watch the boys almost drown. You never could tell with mermaids.

  Sal cheerfully rolled up his trousers—he wore baggy brown wool trousers from the Other Place, and couldn’t be persuaded to cut them into something shorter and better suited to the climate of the island—and waded in as far as his ankles.

  “I can’t swim at all,” he said, and turned his cap around so the brim was on the back of his head. “How about you, Charlie?”

  Charlie shook his head.

  “That’s all right. The water’s nice and cool here, and look, there are crabs,” Sal said, beckoning to the smaller boy.

  He looked at me, then at Sal, who’d crouched in the water to peer at the crabs hidden in spiky pink shells all along the shore.

  “Go on with Sal. I’m going out to the rock,” I said, taking off my coat and deerskin trousers. I carefully laid my knife belt on top of these things and dove into the water.

  The sea was warm, but the first splash of it was chilly after the heat of the island. I flipped over in the water when I was halfway to the rock and just floated on my back, letting the waves push me this way and that before turning back on my stomach to swim the rest of the way.

  Nod and Fog and Crow and Peter had stripped down to their skin and swum out to the rock as soon as they reached the beach, yelling about who could get there fastest.

  We stashed a collection of fi
shing gear in one of the skull’s eyes, covered by a tarp weighted down with heavy rocks. There were nets and lines and hooks—all stolen from the pirates, of course, including the tarp. You could take almost anything from them without them noticing, really.

  In the early days Peter and I used to steal things from them but not fight them, sneaking about their camp in the dead of night. They’d wake in the morning and wonder if the island was haunted, and we would watch them from the cliffs above their camp and laugh silently into our hands.

  This was before they knew that we lived on the island, when the pirates first came there because it was a good place to hide from other pirates, and also from those who would hang them for their crimes.

  When I climbed onto the rock, the triplets already had the net out. Peter flopped on his back with the sun on his face and let the others go to the trouble of catching the fish he wanted.

  He squinted at me as I shook the water out of my hair. “Where’s your little tail?” he asked. “Did he get eaten by a shark? What a shame that would be.”

  I pointed toward the shore. “He’s on the beach, crab-hunting with Sal.”

  “Oh, at least that’s useful,” Peter said. “I like crabs. And perhaps he’ll lose a finger if one snaps at him.”

  Kit and Ed were swimming out our way, and a few other boys had gathered around Sal and Charlie. The rest scampered over the beach, collecting coconuts that had fallen from the long-leafed beach trees. They had a fairly sizable pile, though I knew from experience that they wouldn’t last long. There was nothing sweeter on a hot day than the milk out of a coconut.

  “Can’t he swim?” Peter asked, in a would-be casual voice. “All my boys must be able to swim.”

  This was patently untrue and he knew that I knew it. Plenty of our boys over the years were unable to swim, and it never bothered him before.