Peter Pan in Scarlet

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  As they flew over the Neverwood, an ocean of golden, orange, and scarlet trees tossed and rolled beneath them now, loosing, from time to time, a spray of crisp, autumn leaves. The Redskin totem poles leaned at crazy angles, felled by wind or war, and roped in creepers and ivy. Huge globes of mistletoe rolled about the treetops like Chinese lanterns. It was beautiful … but there was no birdsong.

  The clearings, where once the League of Lost Boys had built camp fires or held councils of war, were gone: healed up and disappeared as surely as a hole in the sea. If there were wolves lurking, they could not be seen. If there were Redskins on the warpath, their warpaths were hidden from sight.

  ‘How shall we ever find the den or the Wendy House?’ said John, voicing everyone’s fears. But they need not have worried, for the little house with its red walls and mossy green roof was the very next thing they saw. The smoke from its chimney coiled between them and they reefed themselves in by it, hand over hand.

  Wendy’s House stood balanced on the branch of a tree—a tree taller by the height of a church spire than any in the forest.

  ‘How amusing,’ said Slightly. ‘We had a tree in our house, before. Now the house is in the tree!’

  ‘How can a tree be inside a house?’ snorted John.

  ‘Oh, but there was! Don’t you remember? Down in the underground den? The Nevertree! Every morning we sawed it off at the floor, and by dinner time it had grown just the right height to use for a table.’

  On the washing-line that stretched between two branches, wispy clouds hung snagged, alongside a wind-ragged apron, a flag, and a single sock.

  ‘That is my apron!’ exclaimed Wendy.

  The flying children rapped at the door; they rattled at the windows and clamoured round the chimney pot. But no one came to let them in. After a night’s flying, they were starting to tire.

  ‘He has shut us out!’ cried Wendy. ‘After all he said! Me, I’ve never closed my bedroom window, winter or summer! Not ever since Neverland!’

  ‘Not even in a fog?’ asked Curly.

  Wendy was forced to admit it: ‘Well, perhaps in a fog. You know how dangerous a London fog can be to the lungs.’

  ‘Like breathing in bed fluff,’ said Slightly. And they agreed that the owner of the house must have closed the windows because clouds were rather like a London fog.

  ‘Fly down the chimney, Fireflyer, and slip the bolt,’ said Tootles, and the fairy swooped into the chimney pot. (Long years before it had been fashioned out of John’s top hat, its crown pushed out, funnelling smoke into the sky.) They waited and waited, but when Tootles used one of her plaits to wipe a peephole in the dirt-caked windows, she could see that Fireflyer had got sidetracked and was swinging from a coat peg, eating the buttons off a jacket. ‘Silly creature,’ she said.

  Wendy realized they must enter by a different route. ‘You Lost Boys built the Wendy House,’ she told them. ‘You have a perfect right to take it apart again.’ So, after knocking politely once more, they wrapped their fingers around the corner posts and wrenched off the end wall.

  They were confronted by a boy, sword drawn, head tilted back and a ferocious scowl on his face. ‘Have at you, Nightmares! You may breach my castle wall, but I shall fill up the gap with your dead bodies!’ It was Peter Pan and it was not. His suit of skeleton leaves was gone, and in its place was a tunic of jay feathers and the blood-red leaves of autumn: Virginia creeper and maple.

  ‘Now now, Peter,’ said Wendy, stepping into the breach. ‘Is that any way to greet your old friends?’

  ‘I have no friends who are old!’ cried the boy with the drawn sword. ‘I am Boy and if things are big, I cut ’em down to size!’

  Seeing that Peter did not recognize her, tears pricked behind Wendy’s eyes, but she too tipped back her head. ‘Don’t be so silly,’ she said briskly. ‘You are Peter and I am Wendy, and we have come …’—she racked her brains trying to remember—‘in case you were in trouble.’

  Peter looked at her, baffled. ‘How “in trouble”? In a cooking pot with cannibals waiting to eat me, you mean?’

  ‘Well, maybe not that exactly …’

  ‘Fallen off a ship in shark-infested waters?’

  ‘Possibly not, but …’

  ‘Being carried through the sky by a giant mother eagle to her eyrie to feed her hungry chicks?’ It was plain Peter rather liked the idea of being in trouble. It was equally plain that none of these things were happening to him. Wendy began to feel rather foolish, which was something she never enjoyed.

  ‘Have you been saying your prayers?’ she demanded (a question every bit as scary as a sword waved in your face).

  ‘Well, I haven’t been saying anyone else’s!’ retorted Peter.

  Then, for the first time, he looked at them properly. His sword-tip wavered and a great smile lit up his face. ‘Ah. You’ve come back, then, have you? I thought I was dreaming you. I have dreamt you a lot, lately.’ He added accusingly, ‘You were much too big.’

  The Twins hastily put back the wall, proving that they were not too big still to fit inside the Wendy House. ‘How lucky you are, Peter! It must be first rate to live in the treetops! Did the fairies carry the house up here for you?’

  ‘Not a bit of it,’ said Peter. ‘They wouldn’t, the idle little brutes. They told people they had, but I did it all by myself!’ (In actual fact, to set the records straight, it was the Nevertree that did it. Peter had not troubled to cut the Nevertree level with the floor each morning. So it had simply grown and grown—clear up through the underground den and into the sunlight. One of its branches had scooped up the nearby Wendy House, lifting it higher than any other tree in the wood.) ‘Why did you say you had come?’

  ‘To do the Spring Cleaning, of course!’ said Wendy, which was much simpler than explaining.

  Carelessly Peter flung his sword into a corner. ‘You can clean out the nightmares if you like,’ he said.

  Wendy was not exactly sure what Peter’s nightmares looked like, so she swept down the black cobwebs from the corners of the ceiling. ‘There! They are all gone now,’ she said, and added breezily: ‘We have been having nightmares, too. About Neverland. We thought something might be wrong.’

  But either Peter did not know or he did not care about the dreams leaking out of Neverland: Neverland had dreams a-plenty to spare.

  ‘Things outside look very … different,’ said Wendy carefully.

  But of course Peter loved Neverland in scarlet and gold just as much as in summer greens, so he saw nothing wrong in that. Wendy did not press him. Perhaps she had been mistaken, and nothing was wrong.

  ‘Are you quite well, Chief?’ said Tootles tenderly, feeling Peter’s pulse and the temperature of his forehead. ‘If you are not, we can play doctors and nurses!’

  ‘I am dying!’ exclaimed Peter, throwing an arm across his face.

  Wendy gave a cry of distress: ‘Oh, I knew it! I knew something was wrong! I do hope you are not!’

  ‘I am dying of boredom!’ groaned Peter. Then he changed his mind and sprang to his feet. ‘But now I have imagined you here, we can have the best adventures in the world!’ And he uttered a triumphant crow that was thrilling and chilling and ear-splitting, all three:

  And then he forgot they had ever been away. He did not notice that Tootles had become a girl or that Slightly could play the clarinet. Or that Nibs was missing.

  Or Michael, for that matter.

  ‘Is there no one else?’ asked Wendy. ‘No new Lost Boys? Or Girls?’

  ‘I sent them away when they broke the Rules,’ said Peter at once. ‘Or killed them.’ It was unlikely, but it made him sound marvellously ferocious. If any Lost Boys had found their way to the top of the Nevertree, they were not around now. For years, Peter Pan had been an only child—the only child—the One-and-Only Child in the Neverwood, with no one to keep him company but his shadow and the birds and the stars.

  ‘Where’s Tinker Bell?’ asked Curly, looking in all the drawers. Peter only sh
rugged and said she had run off.

  One visitor did catch his eye. He saw the puppy’s head sticking out of Curly’s pocket and said, ‘You washed Nana and shrank her!’ The last time he had seen the Darling children with a dog, it had been Nana, a gigantic Newfoundland dog who served for a nursemaid. The puppy wisely refrained from saying it was the great-great-great-grandpuppy of the wonderful Nana. It simply sat in the outstretched palms of the Wonderful Boy and licked off so much fairy dust, and thought such happy thoughts, that it floated up to the ceiling.

  ‘Where’s Tinker Bell?’ asked the Twins, but Peter only shrugged and said he had turned her into a hornet because of her temper. Nobody believed that, either.

  Peter held out the hilt of his sword. ‘First you must all swear not to do any growing up.’ And they all gave their solemn word. Then Peter declared them members of The League of Pan, adding, ‘Tomorrow we shall go and do something dangerous and terrifically brave!’

  Tootles folded her hands under her chin and her eyes shone. ‘Oh yes, Peter! Do let’s! Let’s all go on a quest! We can call it Tootles’s Quest, and everyone can go and find my heart’s desire, and fight a deadly foe and one of you can win my hand!’

  Peter stared at her. The plan had its merits, but it wasn’t his. A tightness stiffened his little mouth. In the next second, his lips pursed and he gave the shrill whistle of a train about to leave—‘All aboard!’

  And at once the Wendy House was a carriage of the Trans-Sigobian Express, hurtling across desert and veldt with a cargo of bears and musical boxes and a patent mangle for the tsarina. It wobbled across rickety bridges over bottomless ravines. It plunged through mountain tunnels as dark as pitch. It was attacked by brigands and bounders, and once even by Baabaa-Rossa the sheepish Privateer. It out-raced Mongols and mughals riding mammoths. It drew up at a station staffed by ghosts in purple uniforms, who tried to eat the luggage. They drank Bovril from a samovar, and when John put a fishing rod out of the window, he reeled in a salmon as big as a horse. In an emergency (and there were lots), they leaned out of the window and pulled on the washing line to stop the train. It was Pretend, of course, but so exciting!

  Make-believe worked its magic, Neverland cast its spell. The grown-ups who had set out from London full of good intentions, clean forgot why they had come: they were children again, and having far too much fun to worry about nightmares or misgivings or autumn in the Neverwood. They slept that night in the luggage racks of the Trans-Sigobian Express, and the netting left criss-cross marks on their cheeks.

  But John accidentally left the brake off at bedtime and when, hours later, the train rammed the buffers in Vladivostinopleburg, the Nevertree gave a shudder that loosened all the soil around its roots.

  A dinner plate fell off a shelf in Grimswater. A baby cried in Fotheringdene.

  The shock woke Wendy, and she lay for a while watching Fireflyer nibbling the laces out of his own little shoes. She thought again of Peter’s fairy friend, Tinker Bell. How long do fairies live? As long as tortoises or as briefly as butterflies? Do they lose their wings in autumn and grow them again in spring? Or do they crumble like wasp’s nests in winter? Surely not. Surely there was no winter in Neverland? In a whisper, she put the question to Fireflyer: ‘How long do fairies live?’

  And Fireflyer shouted, without a moment’s thought or flicker of doubt, ‘We live for ever, of course!’ It woke everyone up.

  ‘Oh, you are such a whopping liar!’ groaned Slightly drowsily, and Fireflyer grinned and bowed very low indeed.

  Overnight, the clouds on the washing line had flapped themselves ragged and blown away. In their place hung black thunderclouds a-crackle with lightning. Beneath the Wendy House, the forest tossed and churned, and leaves spun past the windows.

  Fearlessly, Peter skipped out along the branches to pick twigs for kindling, built a wonderful fire in the grate and lit it using nothing but the spark of Imagination. Then Wendy told them all such sensational sea stories that the Twins were seasick, and their imaginary midday milk tasted of rum. Outside, whole rookeries blew out of the treetops, but high in the storm-tossed Nevertree, the Twins declared they were ‘ready to sail through waves as high as a house!’ Curly said he would sail through waves as high as a hill. John said he would sail through waves as high as a mountain. Then everyone looked at Peter. He raised a fist over his head. ‘I’d sail through waves as high as the MOOOOON!’ he said. ‘Then down to the bottom of the sea!’

  At that, there was a noise like a ship’s mast breaking, and the whole Wendy House lurched sideways. The League slid down the floor and piled up in a heap, along with the makings of the fire and Puppy, too. They clung to one another and tried to think happy thoughts so as to defy gravity. But it was hard as, one by one, they realized: the whole Nevertree was listing, toppling, swooning …FALLING.

  As it fell, the tree fumbled its grip on the Wendy House, which spun out into empty air, floor over roof over window. Branches impaled its walls; boughs caught it, then instantly broke and let it fall further, a spinning box full of falling figures plunging towards the forest floor. John had the presence of mind to pull the communication cord …

  But it did not stop them crashing to the ground.

  Thanks to the storm, a million leaves had fallen to the forest floor ahead of the Wendy House. The splash sounded like water, but water would have been harder. They sank and sank, then sprang up again from the spongy mattress of twigs, leaves, and old bird’s nests. It was impossible to see what damage had been done, for down here among the undergrowth there was barely any light. Only the glimmer of Fireflyer, darting angrily about, lightened the ton of dark weighing down on them. The League of Pan picked themselves up and wondered what to do. Wendy called everyone to her and checked them over for injuries. There were only a few scratches and bruises and torn clothes.

  She thought, when she stumbled over Peter, that he was worse hurt: there was a trickle of blood coming from his nose. Quickly she pulled out the handkerchief from her sleeve and tried to staunch the flow, but he jerked his head away and glowered. ‘Don’t touch me! I mustn’t be touched!’ That was when she realized: he was sulking hugely. ‘Now see what you’ve done, all of you. I said you were too big! Now look. You have smashed my house! I wish you had never come!’

  ‘It was the storm, Peter!’ said Wendy; though she had not been hurt by the fall, her heart hurt now.

  ‘I was better on my own,’ grunted the Only Child.

  The Nevertree lay along the ground, its roots bleeding gouts of earth. The storm mumbled on. On several of the tree trunks, posters advertised:

  But the corners were curling and the paper was peeling as the paste failed in the rain. Somewhere the puppy was barking, though the where of it seemed to be somewhere else. Their whistles and shouts fetched only hoots, growls, and hisses from the undergrowth: wild things were prowling the Neverwood, with eyes that could see better than theirs in the dark.

  ‘I can hear Puppy!’ said a Twin. ‘Somewhere underneath us!’

  ‘I do believe it has found our dear old den!’ said the other.

  ‘MY den!’ barked Peter. ‘I just don’t use it any more.’

  By following the unhappy sound of the puppy, they found their way to the circle of toadstools that marked Peter Pan’s underground den, and clambered about trying to remember how to get in. Years before, each had entered by sliding down their own particular hollow tree. Tootles found her tree, but found, too, that she did not fit it; she had become a slightly different shape since the faraway days of Before. The others twisted and turned her—‘Oh, mind my frock!’—this way and that—‘Ow, mind my plaits!’—trying to post her down the chute. ‘Ouch, mind my moustache!’

  ‘Tootles, you haven’t got a moustache!’

  Down below, the puppy’s barking grew frantic. Something had taken up home in the underground chamber: a badger? a python? a giant truffle? Whatever it was, Puppy had a very low opinion of it. In fact, as Tootles struggled to get down, the puppy w
as trying to get up, so that neither could manage. The Something began to stir and move about.

  ‘So that’s why you don’t live down there any more!’ said Slightly, edging backwards, shivering in his evening shirt and bare legs.

  ‘Don’t care to!’ Peter retorted. ‘Could kill it if I wanted, but I liked living up in the treetops … until you all came along and broke my house!’

  Peter’s sulk cast a guilty gloom over everyone. They shuffled their feet and picked at the circus posters on the trees, tried to warm their palms round Fireflyer, and glanced towards Wendy for help.

  ‘Soon, can we go to the circus?’ said John.

  ‘Ooo, can we, Peter? Can we?’ begged the Twins. ‘We’d be out of the rain!’

  ‘And there might be clowns!’

  ‘I hate clowns,’ said Peter. ‘You can’t see what they’re thinking.’

  Around them, the trees could be heard clenching their roots in the ground, cracking their knuckles. It was impossible to tell what the trees were thinking, either.

  ‘As soon as it’s light,’ said Wendy, ‘we shall build a new home!’ and everyone felt instantly brighter … except for the One-and-Only-Child. Perhaps Adventure was calling him, or perhaps he had grown too used to making all the decisions.

  ‘No we shan’t!’ he said, tossing Wendy’s bloodstained handkerchief aside. ‘Why stay at home? We shall all go on a Quest!’ He said it as if no one in the whole history of the world had ever spoken the words before or had such a wonderful idea.

  ‘Oh, a Quest, yes!’ said Tootles, entranced. ‘What a cracking idea!’

  ‘I can’t help it. I’m just so marvellously clever,’ Peter explained. ‘Anyway, the Quester who brings Princess Tootles the heart of a dragon wins her hand, and a Happy Never After!’

  ‘Dragon?’ said Tootles, startled, and scratched her top lip.