Straight On Till Morning

by Liz Braswell

  (A bit like that stupid little dog her parents had given her—but quieter and far more pleasant.)

  The smell of honey filled the air, sweet and soothing. The cityscape of Paris in miniature was enchanting. Everything was lovely.

  Eventually done gazing at the Eiffel Tower, Wendy looked up. She was a little surprised to see that she was in a sort of nest or cocoon made out of the bodies of hundreds of thysolits. They ignored their unwary passenger as they droned and flew to whatever their eventual nighttime destination was, taking her with them.

  The frustrated jingles of Tinker Bell were soft and fading as the little fairy tried to force her way in from the outside.

  “Ah, excuse me?” Wendy addressed the bees, leaning forward. Those making up her “seat” underneath shifted themselves obligingly to better support her new position. “I don’t mean to be rude, but my friend would like to come, too.…”

  The thysolits in front of her turned themselves slightly so she could see all of their thoraxes—all of their moments—neatly lined up. Paris…the Shesbow twins…St. Petersburg…New York City! The bookseller’s nephew…Thorn…

  The smell of honey grew stronger.

  “Oh, look,” Wendy said. “Look at it all! It’s like a thousand little plays…just for me.…”

  Every once in a while, as if somehow sensing she had finished watching a scene, a thysolit would gracefully exit its place and another would come to fill in with a new image or scene.

  “How thoughtful of them…” Wendy said dreamily. “I can just sit here and watch…don’t have to lift a finger.…

  “OUCH!”

  Finally, having shoved her way through the wall of bees and apparently out of options, Tinker Bell had resorted to the last trick of fairies. She sank her sharp little teeth into Wendy’s arm, forcefully enough to summon bright drops of blood.

  “Tinker Bell, you… !”

  But the pain cleared her head; the smell of blood was stronger than honey. Wendy took a fresh look at the scene around her through slightly more wakeful eyes.

  Thysolits. Everywhere. Completely caging her.

  “I’m surrounded by a bunch of bees with pictures in their bottoms. And they’ve kidnapped me,” she said slowly.

  Tinker Bell decided an extra little nip would drive the point home.

  Wendy didn’t even really react, thoughtlessly scratching at both wounds.

  “Yes, you told me so. I really could have sat here forever, trying to satisfy my curiosity. And they would have kept finding something else to pique my interest, to make me continue.…And I would have been lost. A subtle kind of poison indeed. They promise to show you the world but just sort of hypnotize you instead while life goes on without you. What would they have done with me ultimately, do you think?”

  Tinker Bell shrugged. Something not good?

  “As succinct and correct as always. Shall we?”

  Concentrating on flying the normal way—Ha, normal! As if flying had been a normal thing a week ago!—Wendy tried to part the bees like a curtain. Tinker Bell didn’t bother with such niceties, kicking them in their rear ends and punching them in their eyes. Which actually seemed to be a better tactic, because the thysolits resisted Wendy’s efforts utterly, pushing back with a force she didn’t believe insects should have.

  “Let me out!” she cried, finally also resorting to kicks.

  The wall of bees opened—and then enveloped her leg, covering it with their combined weight. This threw her awkwardly off-balance; she flailed and swayed and swung her arms, trying to regain herself.

  Concentrating and tipping only a little, she managed to draw her little dagger from its necklace sheath.

  “Don’t make me use this!”

  No reaction. She might as well have been talking to a bunch of…well, bees.

  Feeling a little guilty about the violence, Wendy swept her arm out with the knife held diagonally, her thumb on its top, like she was sawing off a strip of old cloth. The blade slipped harmlessly in between the first thysolits, who moved slowly out of its way…and then caught and sank into the bodies of those who couldn’t or wouldn’t escape.

  The result was immediate: a black and amber ichor began to pour out of the torn bee bodies. The smell of honey became overwhelming. And sickening.

  The humming changed; it was no longer drowsy but growling and angry.

  The swarm turned and dove at her face.

  Wendy screamed. She tried to knock them away, now using her dagger like a badminton racquet. But they didn’t bounce away lightly like a shuttlecock. Every time she injured one, it stuck on the dagger—like thick honey—and she had to shake it loose before defending herself from another one.

  “Tinker Bell! Are you all right? How are you doing?”

  The jingles that came back to her were angry and loud but otherwise unintelligible.

  The things were now bludgeoning Wendy’s body hard enough to leave bruises.

  “Let’s just push our way through—maybe we can outpace them!”

  Wendy covered her face with her arms, and, pointing her dagger before her, flew upward into the thick of the swarm. Hopefully where they least expected her to go.

  She burst into the clear night air, shedding bees like ugly raindrops.

  Tinker Bell zoomed through the path she had made and appeared by her side, disheveled and a little scratched. But red with anger and ready to go.

  “Come on, this way!” Wendy pointed south, because that was the way the pirate ship had been heading. At least she thought it was south—she was turned around from the bees and there were no points of reference from which to take her bearings. Ursa Major didn’t look quite right and there were no moons at all.

  The two girls spread their arms and took off into the wind…and then Wendy looked behind her.

  The swarm had caught on to their escape plans. Like a strange yellow-and-orange tornado, they crowded together and rushed at the two girls.

  “Back this way!” Wendy cried, pointing. Tinker Bell nodded, understanding immediately.

  They dove under the swarm.

  Momentum—and insect stupidity—continued to carry the bees forward, now the wrong way, away from the two girls.

  But it wasn’t very long before they righted themselves and were in pursuit again.

  “All right. Hide in the clouds?” Wendy suggested. But there were none now. The storm had finished and it was a perfectly clear night, not a wisp in sight.

  I don’t think we can outrun them, Tinker Bell jingled sadly. This is why they’re so dangerous—they’re relentless. Once the colony is on the warpath, they will never let up.

  “Surely there must be some escape…” Wendy said, looking around desperately for a mountain or a cave or some other sort of answer to present itself.

  This isn’t London. You can’t escape Never Land the way you could escape your life in the city.

  “I feel like we should revisit this theme later, and less ironically,” Wendy muttered. “Also: Ouch. All right. I suppose it’s…fisticuffs, then?”

  She tried to ready herself for the clash, putting her arms up the way she imagined a boxer might, but with her dagger out.

  The bees came, their hum and bodies filling the sky to the horizon.

  “They never actually sting,” Wendy reminded herself bravely. They just had numbers and mass.

  That didn’t stop it from being utterly terrifying when they hit.

  They slammed into her all over her body. She could barely get a breath in between their blows, which came like a massive, fuzzy hailstorm. Their droning drowned all her thoughts.

  She tried her badminton strategy again, using the length of her arm and dagger together as one weapon, connecting with as many bees as she could with each blow.

  This was moderately successful, at least for knocking them away—if not actually killing them.

  Still they kept coming.

  One clocked her in the head so badly she saw stars. She fell, spiraling to earth.


  Only Tinker Bell’s quick response and tiny hands on hers guided Wendy back into remembering which way was up.

  A hundred, a thousand bees were waiting for her when she returned to battle.

  Her arm throbbed. Her left eye swelled almost shut. Her stomach ached from the angry purple bruises that now covered it. Without her shadow, Wendy’s reserves were depleted quickly.

  And they just kept coming.

  Every time she thought they had done enough, that she and Tinker Bell had killed enough of the creatures, they would try to fly away—only to be pursued twice as angrily by the remainders. They never gave up.

  Hit, block, hit, drop.

  Hit, block, hit, drop.

  It was clear: there was no escaping, no flying away, no resting, no stopping for a breath, no doing anything else until the last bee was gone.

  Wendy dispatched the thysolits one after another without thought, sending their waning lights and broken bodies down to earth. The whole thing was less like a heroic battle than scullery work: endlessly scrubbing and scrubbing a room of dirt and grime that would, given the chance, kill her.

  She couldn’t turn her attention away long enough for a glance at Tinker Bell. She heard encouraging jingles now and then and knew the fairy was doing the best she could, maybe one thysolit for every dozen or two of her own. Eventually exhaustion wore even the terror whisper-thin.

  She lost her fear of falling and dying.

  The stars wheeled overhead in a way that made little sense. The moon (moons) never rose. Nothing Wendy had ever done in her life, not the most menial, boring household task, had ever lasted this long. Or required such continual strength: acid burned in her muscles as she lifted her arm, hit, dropped her arm, lifted, hit, and dropped.…

  She barely noticed when there were only a dozen thysolits left. She had begun to sink slowly groundward, losing whatever it was that kept her afloat with the fairy dust.

  “I…can’t…fly…Tinker Bell.…”

  The little fairy grabbed her by the hand—while kicking a bee hard in its mandibles. Her touch helped but didn’t stop the fall. So she guided Wendy’s descent into the little boat, where the human girl crumpled into a ball. Tinker Bell defended her there, valiantly trying to drive off the last few bees.

  One final thought occurred to Wendy before she passed out: They don’t talk about this in adventures.

  That being a hero is just work…and boring work…endless work…nothing more…

  But what of the family Wendy left behind? Does time pass in the real world as it does in Never Land? As it does in the Land of the First? How exactly are the two worlds (three worlds) connected? If it’s teatime in Never Land, what hour is it on the east coast of the Americas? What does Wendy’s father mean when he says, “It’s gin-and-tonic time somewhere in this great, bloody world,” and what exactly are cocktails? Does Wendy’s family miss her?

  We shall indulge the reader with the answer to exactly two of these questions, even as we indulge the author in a bit of fourth wall breakage.

  In the empty, somewhat dark house of the Darlings, it was raining outside. John and Michael burst through the door with the endless energy and boundless enthusiasm of two young men, the elder of whom had just aced a botany exam and the younger of whom had toast and treacle for lunch as a special treat from the headmaster. Also there were puddles: Michael was soaking. John was trim and dry from the top of his ridiculous hat down to his spats, for he had a large umbrella given to him at Christmastime that he took with him everywhere and called Bella.

  (“Bella the umbrella, isn’t that just perfect?” And maybe it was, the first twelve times. After that, even Wendy began to grow cross.)

  “Wendy, we’re home!” John called.

  “Where’s the tea? I can’t smell tea,” Michael said a little plaintively.

  “You can’t smell tea being made.”

  “I can smell the steam, it’s all warm and moist and lovely,” Michael snapped. “And I can hear the whistle. And if she or the cook has made buns, I can smell those, too.”

  “Neither hearing a whistle nor smelling buns has anything to do with smelling tea,” John pointed out with the wise air of someone much older—and more often than not a pain in the thorax.

  “I guess we shall have to make it ourselves,” Michael said, completely ignoring his brother’s freely given wisdom, as he often did. He poked cautiously at the stove and looked around for the box of matches. Lack of Wendy and how-to knowledge were only temporary impediments to teatime, not permanent ones.

  “But where could she be?” John asked, now sounding plaintive himself.

  Old Nana finally made it into the kitchen by this point. She had been slumbering in front of the fire in one of the upstairs rooms, happily dreaming of lying in front of a fire. She chuffed, demanding the sort of greeting an elder doyenne of the household deserved.

  “Nana.” Michael hugged her, and the dog didn’t mind his wet and muddy paws—the same as Michael never minded hers back when she, too, was of puddle-jumping age. “Have you seen Wendy?”

  Nana sighed. If the two boys had been a little more observant of her large, expressive brown eyes, they would have realized she was saying something to the extent of, Oh, here we go again. You’re not going to bother even trying to understand what I’m about to say, but I will try to tell you anyway, because that is what good dogs do.

  She walked over to the kitchen door, sat down pointedly, looked out the window, and barked once.

  “She’s gone out,” Michael hazarded.

  Nana sighed a moist pant of relief.

  “Wendy? Gone out at teatime? Most suspicious. That’s not like her at all.”

  “Maybe she has gone out to buy us special treats and got caught in the rain,” Michael said hopefully.

  “It’s London, Michael. No one ever ‘gets caught in the rain.’ It rains all the bloody time here.” John started off saying it amusingly, like his father would, but trailed off into something somewhere between wistful and bitter. For the slightest moment, a world had flashed in front of his eyes, a memory of bright sun and blue sea that wasn’t a real memory at all, but a memory of imagination. There was a palm tree and the smell of coconuts.

  Without being able to read his brother’s mind and yet somehow sensing the mood behind it, Michael took the sort of cerebral right turn that babes sometimes manage when their too-learned betters cannot.

  “We should get treats for Wendy sometime,” he ventured, not coming to quite the right conclusion (but not the wrong one, either).

  “Yes, we should,” John said uncertainly. The two sat down at the un-set table, and the older boy’s mind went the way the younger one’s couldn’t, wondering, perhaps, if it was too late for something like treats to rectify a situation they had been stupidly unaware of—despite how traces of it were pressed into every dark corner of the house, making itself widely known, and permanent, and sad.

  When Mr. Darling returned home for a light supper before going to his study to get even more work done and Mrs. Darling finished her book club/charity drive/sherry session with the Tevvervilles and Miss Pontescue, the two entered to a half-lit house and an uninspired supper. Wendy rarely cooked unless it was a special occasion, but every occasion had her mark upon it. An extra garnish, a pretty bouquet, a little menu she had written out.

  But this night the table was set minimally, napkins thrown down on chairs. The lamps weren’t trimmed. The leftover roast, plopped in the middle of the table for anyone to steal or any mouse to nibble, was mostly cold. John and Michael sat glumly in their seats, politely waiting for their parents, not even bothering to sneak an early morsel. John had a book he wasn’t reading.

  “Boys.” Mrs. Darling kissed them each on the head. “Where is Wendy?”

  “No idea, Mother,” Michael said. “She hasn’t been here for hours.”

  “Oh.” Mrs. Darling looked at Mr. Darling.

  “Oh.” Mr. Darling looked flummoxed. Wendy was never not where sh
e was supposed to be when she was supposed to be there. “Has there…has there been a break-in?”

  “Has someone stolen Wendy?” John asked, with a sneer and the touch of irony that often bloomed in an overbright boy with two mediocre parents. “Is that what you’re asking?”

  Mr. Darling frowned. His eldest son had reined in his tone at the last minute, couching it in what sounded like genuine surprise. Darling fruffled for a moment, feeling like he was being made fun of somehow, but couldn’t quite put his finger on it. He wanted to be angry.

  But Wendy…

  Mrs. Darling, ever practical, was looking around the foyer. “Her umbrella is here, though her jacket is gone. She couldn’t have gone out, or at least not far.”

  “I go outside without an umbrella all the time,” Michael said.

  “If there was fun to be had, you would go out without your own shadow,” John said waspishly, rolling his eyes.

  The two boys looked at each other, realizing the same thing at the same time.

  “The shadow,” Michael whispered.

  “It’s not real,” John reminded him, also whispering.

  “We should check.”

  “We’ll go look upstairs one more time, Mother,” John said loudly as the two boys hurried away from the table. “I…pray she doesn’t have a fever and lie collapsed, insensate, somewhere.”

  “That’s a bit much,” Michael muttered, realizing with a wisdom beyond his years that he would be saying very similar things to his older brother for the rest of their lives. Nevertheless, united in this mission they raced upstairs together into the old nursery, which was now John and Michael’s room. It had been repainted, of course, and had a new chair and extra wardrobe, and a neat line drawn down the middle in chalk past which Michael’s lead soldiers were not allowed to march.

  The old bureau was still there and still had some of Wendy’s old things in it: once-favorite toys, bits and bobs, sewing notions. The top drawer was stuck, as always happened in damp weather; John had to wrestle with it up and down until it finally flew open, sending him backward to land on his bum.