Emergence

by Various

  Scott Furley had just sat there with his wine glass still in hand, covered in Jolene’s blood. He’d begun to cry.

  She didn’t see what happened to him, but she heard him scream as she ran from the room.

  The house was huge. Just getting to the front door took forever and she made a wrong turn once, then felt dizzy. She tried to navigate a doorway and struck her shoulder on the edge of the frame so hard she spun and fell to the cold tiled floor.

  It seemed to take a monumental effort to push up off the tiles. Her head weighed forty pounds and she could only arch her back and whine pitifully before blacking out.

  He’d put something in her drink he hadn’t put in the others’.

  And they were all dead. The main cast of Capes and the showrunner, killed all at once.

  Like he’d killed the cast and crew of Peter `N Wendy, all those years ago.

  She knew that now.

  He was the reason her father had told the lie. To protect her.

  She’d woken up tied securely to an antique chair.

  Ormond had undressed her while she slept, changed her clothes. What else had he done? She didn’t want to think about that.

  She woke up wearing a light blue chiffon nightgown, much too small for her. It was made for a child.

  It had been hers.

  The costume she’d worn in the pilot of Peter `N Wendy. The chiffon nightgown of Wendy Darling.

  Her hair was done as it had been then, girlishly bound into locks all tied up with a blue silk ribbon.

  Her feet hurt. They were crammed into the same old pair of slippers.

  He had remade her, from Diana Hale ‘the Amazon’ back to Wendy Darling.

  They were in a room she hadn’t seen before, a room with a wall of television screens and a console.

  He was sitting in a high-backed chair with his back to her, watching the screens, which seemed to be security feeds, but not from anywhere at Second Star. They were from an office building. She’d been there before, recognized the lobby. It was Vulpes Plaza.

  “Oh my God…,” she’d sobbed. ““What are you doing, Elton?”

  “Captain,” he’d insisted, not turning around. He was wearing some bulky suit underneath a rich, red velvet, frock coat.

  On the console there was some kind of mannequin’s head, or a helmet. It was silver and gold and leering, with empty eyes and a wicked, symmetrical silver smile bridged by a sharp, golden mustache. It had silver, sculpted ears hung with golden hoops. The helmet had a mass of springy golden mesh coils, like steel wool, running down the back. It looked like a head of long hair. Perched atop the helmet was a rakishly tilted, wide brimmed red pirate’s hat with a gold feather.

  “What?”

  He’d held up his hand. The right hand. Except it was the hook. Clean of blood now.

  “Wendy Darling, I must ask you not to speak anymore. Watch. Listen. We shall see how your young hero does.”

  And that’s what she’d been doing for the past couple hours.

  Watching Jim. Watching Pan.

  Watching him fight his way through the lobby against the girl with water powers, through the Japanese restaurant against that sick bastard Handley from the news.

  Watching him save the kids.

  Watching Jim be a hero.

  The hero she had never been.

  Her heart broke at every wound he took. She sobbed every time he fell. But he just kept getting up. He just kept going.

  Her mind went to their last meeting, when she’d told him how strange it all was, that he was back, when what she really wanted to tell him was the truth about her father’s lie.

  He wasn’t a kid. He wasn’t. He just looked like a boy.

  But no fairytale boy could do the things he did.

  He was a hero.

  How could she ever make up for how she’d made him feel?

  She’d listened to Elton mock him, direct him like a puppet over a headset mic, and she’d smiled every time Pan had come out on top.

  But Elton wasn’t angry. He’d smiled, too.

  A few times, he’d even clapped in boyish delight, like when Jim had decapitated the speedster. He’d laughed out loud at that.

  Sick.

  Then, when the cameras had gone dark in the studio while Snow Bunny and the fire guy had been fighting, he’d gotten up from the chair and taken off the headset.

  He was wearing a full suit of gold and silver armor underneath the coat. It made him taller, and, she suspected, stronger.

  He smiled at her, a wild look in his eye, as he lifted the strange helmet from the console. He moved toward her.

  “Come, Wendy. It’s Hook or Pan this time.”

  #

  Pan glided in silently over the pitch black hills, keeping the coast to his left until he passed Santa Barbaros, then he followed the ribbon of the 154 inland.

  The Second Star Ranch wasn’t hard to find.

  Occupying 3,000 remote acres in a little valley ringed in evergreen trees, he spotted it miles before he arrived. It was lit up like a summer carnival, like a dream city constructed of light, an illumined oasis in a desert of night. The Ferris wheel was turning and flashing gay-colored lights; a small, unmanned steam engine was clacking along its glowing track in tireless circumference of the massive grounds; and the arcade was all aglow in brash defiance of the gravity of Pan’s arrival. Gravel paths lined with cavorting bronze statues wound through the tree-lined property, and a big JumboTron screen on the east end was flashing 52-foot-high cartoon characters to an empty picnic field, making them terrible to behold.

  There was music playing. He could hear it as he descended, echoing through the little valley from what must have been a myriad of hidden speakers.

  It was Peter `N Wendy’s Theme. Looping over and over again.

  He came in low, and perched on the star-capped grand arched iron gate separating Second Star from the rest of the world, with its golden lions and the big crest inscribed with Honi Soit Qui Mal y Pense (“Evil to him who evil thinks”) and Deiu et mon droit.

  God and my right.

  Right hand? Divine right? Did Elton Ormond think his money earned him the right to do whatever the hell he wanted?

  Enraged, Pan wrenched the top off an adjoining lamppost and flung it at the crest. It did nothing but make a lot of noise. Not that anything could be heard over the blaring, sweeping music.

  He sprang from the gate and launched himself low along the gravel path toward the house, dodging through willows and evergreens.

  The golden statues, each with its own light, were all of children. Playing flutes, dancing, picking flowers, girls and boys. All in a line, like the children of the Pied Piper. He thought of how Ormond had portrayed himself over the years, as a philanthropist, a humanist, he remembered all the music videos of Ormond interacting with children, holding them, leading them in dance.

  It sickened him.

  He made for the main house, a large Tudor-style affair.

  Before the front door was a sprawling, intricate garden of multi-colored flowers, arranged so as to portray a Mercury-like figure captured in mid-spring across a starry night sky.

  It was Peter Pan.

  Standing before the garden on a little dais was a tall statue of Peter Pan, fists on his hips, feet apart and confident, a smile on his face.

  Jim’s face.

  It was his own face. The statue had been modeled after some publicity shot of him from the show.

  He flew to the thick oak door and smashed through it with both fists.

  He zipped down the tiled hallway, which was decorated with painted portraits of Elton Ormond in various ludicrous regalia; a decorated generalissimo’s uniform, an ermine robe, an Elizabethan monarch replete with glittering emperor’s crown, and tellingly, a red-coated pirate.

  He passed through a living room cluttered with platinum albums and awards, a crowded first edition, ladder-accessed library out of a Franke
nstein movie, and through a kitchen big enough for a school cafeteria.

  Then he found the dining room and his heart seized up in his chest.

  Three bodies lay strewn about the table. He recognized one as Paul Thurbee, one of the actors from Capes. Beside him was the corpse of a woman, face down in a dinner plate that was brimming over with blood.

  His heart shook as if electrified.

  He went to her and gingerly lifted her head with his fingertips.

  She looked familiar, but under all that red and dripping with what seemed to be some kind of pasta, he couldn’t tell who she was.

  He was sure she wasn’t Cassidy, though. Cassidy had dark hair and this woman was blonde.

  He continued through the house.

  Bedrooms, bathrooms, a video game arcade, a home theater, a bowling alley, a swimming pool, every room cluttered with strange knickknacks that offered an unbidden glimpse into the brain of the owner. Everywhere the trappings of childhood; remembrances of Ormond’s past, or a spider’s bait to catch little flies?

  At last he came to a barred and code-locked door which it took him several tries to batter open.

  Behind it he found the replica of the pirate ship set from Peter `N Wendy, just as Tink had told him. The room was dim. There were video cameras on tripods, and a kind of Japanese mattress on the floor beside a bolted rung to which a set of bright prison manacles were affixed. The walls were lined with foam soundproofing.

  He felt his stomach turn.

  What had Ormond forced Tink and the others to do here?

  He thought of all he had inadvertently seen in his career fighting subhuman trash like Ormond, and he shivered. He had seen unwanted things, children in the most horrible moments of their young lives, recorded for the perverse enjoyment of the dregs of humanity, in rooms just like this one. Some of them dingy, some of them palatial, all of them with this melancholy air of the execution chamber.

  Toward the side he found a richly carved wardrobe. Inside, it was like an arsenal of perversion. Sex toys and whips hung arranged like medieval weapons. And on hangers were the screen-accurate costumes of all the Lost Boys, Tiger Lily’s buckskin dress, even a Pan and Wendy outfit, apparently never worn, still sealed in plastic garment bags.

  Ormond had planned for Cassidy and him to come here.

  Jesus. Had Tink staved him off somehow? Had he stood between Barry and Ormond and them, sacrificing his own innocence to keep them in the dark? Why hadn’t he told anyone sooner?

  But the bomb at Perennial was the answer to all that, wasn’t it?

  Pan backed away from the closet, recoiling from the walls and even hovering off the floor. He didn’t want to touch anything in this room. The walls seemed to throb with vileness, as if the horror they had witnessed has somehow seeped into them and there pulsed like lurking dragons ready to dig their poisoned claws in your brain.

  The house was empty.

  Where was Cassidy?

  Where was Ormond?

  He flew back outside and landed on the shoulder of his own effigy out front like a homunculus.

  He cupped his hands to his mouth. He wanted to scream their names, but his pounding heart, his throbbing head, the fire flooding his limbs, he couldn’t form words.

  The crowing was supposed to be Peter Pan’s cry of heedless, boyish joy.

  But what burst from Jim’s throat was a primal shriek of rage, a ragged, bestial challenge torn from the cracking throat of a boy with a man’s horrified heart.

  It carried above the music, above the gamboling of the cartoons and the jaunty calliope.

  He leapt from the statue into the air, to get a bird’s eye view of the grounds.

  “WHERE ARE YOU?” he roared.

  He jumped down to the turreted roof of the little train station where children boarded to tour the grounds. MARGARET STATION it was named. Ormond had told Cassidy and him on that long-ago visit that it was named for his mother, as was the train itself, and a few other scattered locations. All in honor of his mother.

  Nothing, Cassidy had noted then with a whisper, was named after his father.

  Ormond’s father had been rumored to be abusive. Was that what had set him on this ugly path?

  There was a naked cherub smiling on the station roof. He kicked it off, punted it into a tree somewhere out in the dark.

  “WHERE ARE YOU?”

  He flew to a fountain near the center of the park, in which more naked children statues splashed with mock innocence. Not so innocent now. He threw them down to the stones, smashed them, raging.

  He jumped down to the gravel road that cut down the center of the place, leading from the front door of the house to the amusement park.

  “WHERE ARE YOU?” he repeated, pulling down the statues flanking the road in frustration as he went.

  He had smashed six of them when he grabbed hold of a tall metal statue of a pirate and found it didn’t budge.

  Instead, it whirled, suddenly animate, and grabbed a hold of him with one titan-strong cold hand that closed about his throat and drew him in, inches from a smiling metallic face of silver and gold that reminded him of Darth Vader and one of those odd Guy Fawkes masks protesters always wore.

  This was Hook.

  The eyes that stared out at him were wide and frantic and blue. Elton Ormond’s eyes.

  “Here,” said the deep, distorted voice he had heard over the speakers at Vulpes Plaza, the voice of Hook.

  Then he was flung spinning into the trunk of an oak tree, so hard something cracked. Whether it was the bark or his own back he didn’t know. He slid to the ground gasping.

  NINETEEN

  He rolled over, and saw Hook adjust a wide brimmed scarlet hat atop his gold and silver head.

  “Surprised?” said Hook.

  He wore a long, red, frock coat with gold buttons, and beneath that, some kind of powered suit baroquely adorned, like the plate mail suit of a Duke he had once seen in a museum. Despite the steampunk-y appearance of rivets and filigree curlicues, Pan could tell this was a modern device, like what Karasu had been wearing. It had probably come from the same maker, some anonymous armorer willing to build anything an eccentric billionaire agreed to pay for.

  Pan coughed blood onto the back of his own hand.

  “You sent that bomb to Perennial,” he managed.

  “Yes. Because of you.”

  “Because Nico Tinkham told me what Barry had been doing and you figured it would get back to you. But how’d you find out?”

  “Peter Hollis. He found the message you left on Cassidy’s phone.”

  Peter…Cassidy’s father.

  “You killed him, too. The car wreck. It wasn’t an accident.”

  “I didn’t want to. He was my Mister Smee for so long. He always took care of me. Long before I met Barry. But Cassidy was turning him against me. I didn’t think he would stay quiet. Everything changed after that. I didn’t want it to. I didn’t want any of that to happen. Slightly was my friend.”

  Slightly. It took Pan a moment to figure out he was talking about Tink.

  “I loved you. I loved all of you. You were everything to me. Barry didn’t come up with that show, you know. With Peter `N Wendy. I did. I just let Barry take the credit because I didn’t want anything connected to me. I couldn’t be involved. There were other friends. Over the years. Peter and Barry helped me with them, when their parents found out, when the police started to get involved. Peter and Barry kept them away as long as I made them money. It’s always been that way for me. Nothing’s wrong, so long as I can make money. So long as people love me. But what about who I love? JM Barrie wrote that stars are beautiful, but they must not take an active part in anything, they must just look on forever. It is a punishment put on them for something they did so long ago that no star now knows what it was.”

  Pan got up to one knee.

  “Where’s Cassidy?”

  “You don’t know how happy I was to
find out you were alive. And then, when you hadn’t changed…it was like all my prayers had been answered. I love you so much, James. I made you into Pan, better than I’d ever hoped to. We can be together now.”

  Pan shook his head. He couldn’t listen to this anymore.

  He flew at Hook and drove his fist into his face. He didn’t care about the metal. Hook’s head rocked back and one of the spindly mustachios snapped off.

  Hook swung at him clumsily with one powered fist, missed, and grunted as Pan delivered a hard kick to his stomach.

  There was a roaring sound and a blast of heat, and suddenly Hook had a hold of him and was carrying him into the air above the trees, trying to hold him still, jets of blue flame spitting from the heels of his golden pirate boots.

  “Stop it. Stop it. Stop it!” he was saying as Pan thrashed and kicked and punched.

  Finally, Hook gripped the nape of his neck and flung him away.

  “Stop it!”

  Pan regained himself, and they floated in the air, circling each other.

  “Why do we have to fight?” Hook said. “Don’t you remember? That time I brought you and Cassidy here? Remember how we talked about your father? And Peter Pan? You came into my heart that day, James. All I wanted to do was hold you, make you feel better about your dad.”

  “Shut up!” Pan yelled. “You sick fuck!”

  “I am sick! I am! Does that mean I can’t be loved? You loved Peter Pan. Do you know about the writer? About JM Barrie? He based the character off of these Llewellyn-Davies boys that he used to play with in the park. He helped take care of them when their father died, and then, when their mother died too…oh, it was so sad, James. She was going to give the boys to the nanny’s sister, Jenny. But he wrote his own name into her will. Jimmy. James Barrie. They were so small and helpless without their parents. He took them into his home. He was sick like me, I think. But he took care of them. Kissed them. Held them. Loved them.”

  “Where’s Cassidy?” he yelled again, taking out his knife.

  “Sometimes love is so sad, James,” Hook whined. “If you have it, you don't need to have anything else, and if you don't have it, it doesn't matter much what else you have. Barrie wrote that, too.”