Peter Pan in Scarlet

by Geraldine McCaughrean

Wendy looked sternly at Peter, thinking there had already been enough danger for one night.

  ‘But it’s raining!’ said a Twin.

  ‘Then we shall get wet!’ said Peter.

  ‘And muddy!’ cried Curly.

  ‘And mucky!’

  That clinched it. Adventure and the chance to get dirty were calling too loud to ignore.

  The Twins said they would go questing together and share the prize (since Tootles had two hands). Slightly asked if he could win half a kingdom instead of Tootles’s hand. Curly started to say that he couldn’t win Tootles’s hand because he was already married, but broke off, for that was clearly nonsense and he could not imagine what had put such an idea into his head.

  Fireflyer said that he was too hungry to go questing anywhere, and began scouting about for conkers to eat. When the top-hat chimney suddenly came rattling down out of the tree-canopy, he took shelter inside it, out of the rain. The Questers snatched up dead wood to use for swords.

  ‘Off you go now!’ urged Tootles delightedly. ‘I’ll count to twenty!’ and she turned her face to a tree and covered her eyes. The Questers waded away waist-deep through the fallen leaves, towards all points of the compass.

  ‘When I come back,’ said Peter to Wendy, in a low voice, ‘I shall build a stockade and call it Fort Pan. Those others can’t come in, because they broke my house. But you can, if you like.’ He said it as if he did not greatly care one way or the other. ‘You stay here with Tootles while I go questing.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ said Wendy. ‘I want to go questing too! I don’t much want Tootles’s hand, but I’ve never seen a dragon!’

  Princess Tootles, after counting to twelve-ish, picked up the top hat with Fireflyer in it, and struggled out of the wood. She sheltered from the rain in the mouth of a cave, at the head of a beach, and made herself a throne out of seaweed, a crown out of some pretty pieces of metal she found lying about. ‘I dub you Royal Liar Extraordinary!’ she told Fireflyer and he was so flattered that his scorching little body set the seaweed pop-pop-popping.

  Dawn welled up, and Tootles glimpsed the shifting, oily sheen of the Lagoon. In her memory, it had been a shining crescent of turquoise water over shoals of white sand. The Lagoon she saw now was darkly heaving: a horse’s flank slick black and streaked with foam. A mane of washed-up seaweed lay among the pebbles, busy with flies. All along the high-water mark lay strange, white containers, like birdcages or crab-pots. On closer inspection they proved to be the skeleton ribcages of mermaids, with here and there a backbone or a hank of yellow hair. Tootles looked nervously around and ran back to the cave.

  Meanwhile, the Twins found a Forest Dragon, with wooden limbs and a wooden body and a sharp, spiky mane of twigs. Just like a pile of fallen trees, in fact. They killed it with fire.

  At about mid-morning, Slightly spotted a Cloud Dragon. It filled the sky from one horizon to another … until the wind sprang up and it went all to pieces.

  At about midday, Curly reached a beach and found a Water Dragon. Every few seconds, the Dragon surged up the beach towards him, shapeless and smelling of salt, then retreated again. Curly tried to kill it, but his blade went straight through its watery hide and his boots got wet. So he sat down on the beach and threw stones at it instead.

  In the mid-afternoon, John sighted a Rock Dragon: knobbly spine of limestone, a boulder of a head, and a pebbly cascade of tail. John left his wooden sword sticking up out of its neck. A triumph, he told himself.

  Meanwhile, Wendy could not think where to look for a dragon. Surely they do not live in the open, she thought, or people would see them all the time and take photographs. Then she glimpsed one—its shoulder, at least—a great bulging thing the colour of blood, rising up from behind a hill. Her heart tried to jump out of her mouth but got wedged. She wanted to whistle up Peter, but her lips were too dry to blow. Wendy shut her eyes tight. Only as she crawled closer on hands and knees did she remember that she had not made herself a sword. The dragon rattled horribly loud—obviously a saggy, baggy monster with loose, flapping skin … And so big!

  When she finally dared to open her eyes, Wendy burst out laughing. Not a dragon at all—just a huge, wind-blown circus tent! She could read the word painted in fading letters across the canvas roof. Ship’s cables tethered it to the ground. Around the tent were various cages on wheels, some empty, some with zebras or ostriches inside; a gorilla, three tigers, and a cotillo; a puma, an okapi, and a palmerion. None of the cage doors were shut. Ponies with plumes in their browbands grazed the grass round about. From inside the tent came the strains of a piano. Intrigued, Wendy climbed down for a closer look.

  It was not a proper piano, at all, but a pianola, reading its music off a paper roll. The keys dipped, though no fingers were touching them, and a carved wooden figure on top of the lid conducted the music in jerky movements, squeaking for want of oil. Wendy was so eager to see it close up that she ducked indoors. The air glowed yellow and the noise of the wind was thunderous in the big hollow space. There was a smell of cough drops and damp sheep.

  Oh, and a hint of lion.

  Wendy had reached the centre of the sawdust floor before she saw them. They were ranged around the tent like the numbers round the face of a clock: twelve lions seated on upturned tin baths.

  ‘Ah!’ said a voice behind her. ‘A customer.’ It was a low, soft voice, plush as velvet, with sibilants as swashing as the sea. ‘Welcome to Circus Ravello. I was so hoping you would come.’ The lions rumbled like thunder. ‘Your devoted servant, madam. Do pray stand still, or my cat-kins may mistake you for lunch.’

  Against the brightness of the doorway, the speaker was a patch of darkness in a halo of daylight. His outline was frizzed. Wendy could just make out a prodigious garment of some kind, its sleeves reaching far beyond the fingerends, the hem straggling to the very welts of his shineless boots: a thousand broken strands of wool, coiling and kinking, blurred the bounds between man and shadow. There was no telling where his wild hair ended and the hooded cardigan began. The colour of both had unravelled, too. A sheep tangled in barbed wire would have looked a lot like this tangle of manhood. And yet he moved with feline grace, planting his feet one in front of the other like a tightrope walker crossing a ravine.

  ‘I did so hope you would come,’ he said again. ‘My heart rejoices at it. My creatures and I are honoured by your kindness.’ The voice trickled into her like golden syrup into a steamed pudding. Coils of bushy, shineless hair and the woollen hood encroached over the face, but she could make out a pair of large, hazel eyes watching her as attentively as the lions were doing. ‘Come,’ he said extending a woolly arm towards her. ‘Walk slowly towards me and make no sudden motion. My cat-kins have not eaten today. Above all, do not—you will forgive the indelicacy of a vulgar animal trainer—do not, whatever you do, sweat. Sweat, you see, falls sharp in the nostrils of a hungry cat-kin.’ His voice poured like hot chocolate over vanilla ice cream. Even the lions’ ears swivelled to catch it. Clawed paws shifted on twelve tin baths, with a noise like scouring saucepans.

  Wendy, as she stepped closer to the lion tamer, could see how every hem and seam and raglan of the shapeless cardigan was unravelling. Moth holes peppered the fabric, and every moth hole had also begun to unravel. He was a woolly miasma of trailing ends.

  ‘I am Miss Wendy Darling,’ she said, reaching out to shake hands (though the man’s hands were quite invisible). If she could make friends with their master, the lions might stop thinking of her as lunch.

  The pale brown eyes wrinkled as if her name alone had bestowed the greatest joy. ‘And I am Ravello, owner of this lamentably humble establishment. I feel certain you will do better with your life than I have with mine.’ He reached forward, too, and Wendy found her hand full of the ravelling cuff of his over-long sleeve. ‘Tell me, child, what is it you wish to be when you are grown-up?’

  ‘I—’ But before Wendy could answer, a blood-curdling scream scattered her thoughts and filled her outstretched
palm with sweat. ‘Tootles! That’s Tootles!’ she gasped and darted past the circus master and out of the tent. Her only thought was to rescue Tootles from danger. Behind her she heard twelve tin baths overturn and Ravello’s voice sharp and loud, trying to quell the lions. But she only ran and ran.

  At the head of a beach was a cave and out of the mouth of the cave came Tootles’s voice shrieking, ‘DRAAAAHAAAGON!’

  Bored with waiting for her questing knights to come back, Tootles had begun to explore the cave. The darkness dripped. Lovely shells glistened in pools on the floor, and the walls were furry with cold, green slime. Deeper in, though, there was no colour and no gleam—only the drip-drip of water like the topmost note of a piano played over and over again. A low roof banged her on the head and knocked her crown over one ear. Soon she had to explore with fingertips, because there was no light at all. And that was when her outstretched hand felt the knobbly hide, the snout, the row of ghastly teeth that went on and on and … Tootles gave a gurgling shriek ‘DRAAAAHAAAGON!’—and ran. The low ceiling caught her on the head again and this time it knocked her crown to pieces.

  The echoes of her scream died away. Plink plink said the tone-deaf darkness. Then a grip fastened on one shoulder, and her knees crumpled with fright as she was spun round.

  ‘Tell me where and I’ll slay it dead!’ said a voice close to her ear. It was Peter, a blazing driftwood torch in his hand. One by one, the rest of Pan’s League appeared at his back. ‘Where?’ said Peter again. Tootles pointed wordlessly, and the League streamed past him while she stayed rooted to the spot, fingers absently stroking her top lip. Last to arrive, Wendy gave her a caring pat and galloped on by to catch up with the boys.

  And there it was—an eye socket, a gaping jaw, a snaggle of teeth as long as a man’s arm. ‘Stand back, men!’ cried Pan and lunged with his sword and rapped it over the skull, then sprang backwards expecting it to scuttle out of its lair, jaws snapping. In the jumping firelight from their torches, the monster appeared to shudder and writhe … but when John threw a rock at it, the rock only knocked out a rattle of teeth.

  Then Fireflyer darted in through one eye socket and out of the other, illuminating the grisly skull. ‘Nothing in here!’ he complained, peering up at the skull like a tourist at a cathedral roof. The dragon was dead.

  Peter put a hand through its nostril and together they dragged it out into the daylight. It was monstrous big. When all the Lost Boys lay down end to end, they were not as long as the dead dragon from snout to tail. They rolled it on its back and found that the stomach hide was gone altogether, leaving only a ladder of ribs and a glimpse of backbone. There was a smell of rotting fish, mermaid, and, oddly enough, gunpowder.

  ‘I win!’ said Peter. ‘I quested the dragon!’

  ‘Superb!’ exclaimed Tootles.

  ‘ ’Tain’t a dragon,’ said Fireflyer, still sitting on the snout. Peter launched a kick at him, but he ducked. ‘Well, it ain’t! Dragons’ve got fireproof tonsils. Everyone knows that! This here’s a nalligator.’

  ‘ ’Tis NOT a nalligator!’ insisted Tootles, who was delighted that Peter had won her hand. ‘Take no notice. That fairy is always lying.’

  ‘Nalligator or not,’ said Curly, holding his nose, ‘it’s awfully dead.’

  ‘Not a nalligator,’ muttered Tootles under her breath.

  ‘Now now, boys,’ said Wendy soberly. ‘Don’t quarrel. All that matters is that …’

  ‘Not a nalligator,’ said Tootles sulkily, several times over.

  Wendy noticed something shiny dangling from Tootles’s hair and pulled it free. It was a metal spring. Tootles explained how she had found the makings of a crown inside the cave.

  Wendy nodded sagely. ‘This one time,’ she said, ‘Fireflyer is telling the truth. It is not a nalligator …’

  ‘Told you!’ crowed Peter. ‘It’s a dragon!’

  ‘I never tell the truth!’ protested Fireflyer (which was not true, of course).

  ‘Nor a dragon!’ said Wendy, holding up the spring. ‘It is a crocodile. In fact, it is THE Crocodile, with capital letters! The one who ate our direst foe. Here, dear Boys, in Tootles’s crown, you see all that remains of the alarm clock it carried in its stomach as it hunted Neverland, looking for a bite more of Captain James Hook!’

  The very mention of Hook sent a thrilling shiver down their spines. Curly felt the curls in his curly hair tighten. For though they had witnessed the end with their own eyes—had seen the pirate captain leap to his death in the jaws of a gigantic crocodile, Captain Jas. Hook still had the power to haunt their dreams. They gazed down at the carcass in awe, and the jaws grinned smugly back at them.

  ‘So has anybody won my hand?’ moaned Princess Tootles, determined that someone must have.

  ‘I found a stone dragon!’ said John. ‘They’re the worst!’

  ‘I found a cloud dragon,’ said Slightly.

  ‘A water dragon, me,’ said Curly, unlacing his wet shoes.

  ‘Ours was made of wood,’ said the Twins, ‘and we killed it with fire!’

  ‘I found twelve lions,’ said Wendy mildly, ‘though I don’t suppose that counts.’

  Peter simply kicked the Crocodile. A hinge in the cheek broke, and the top jaw slowly lifted. It even seemed as if smoke coiled out, but it was only mist rolling off the Lagoon. The weather was certainly strange: it is rare to be dazzled by lightning and tickled by mist in the same night.

  ‘You all did very well,’ said Wendy, seeing trouble brewing. ‘Would you like to hear about my lions now? And the Circus?’

  ‘Well, we can’t share,’ said Curly. ‘You can’t share a princess. How would you split her up?’

  Peter fingered his dagger, at which Tootles looked distinctly uneasy.

  ‘There are lots of different days in the week,’ said Wendy brightly. ‘Perhaps Tootles could lend you a hand on Wednesday, Slightly, and you a hand on Thursday …’

  ‘I’d rather have half a kingdom anyway,’ said Slightly.

  ‘Well, you can’t,’ said John, ‘because I quested best and killed a stone dragon and they’re the worst!’ The Boys began to bump and barge each other. Even the Twins started a fight over which of them had set light to the Forest Dragon.

  ‘Let’s have a story,’ said Wendy quickly.

  Peter leapt on to a big rock. ‘No! Let’s have a WAR!’

  This marvellous idea of his set Fireflyer whooping and wheeling in fits of delight. ‘A war, yes! I never saw a war!’ The fairy clung to Peter’s unkempt hair, like fire to a fuse.

  The Twins stopped fighting. John brushed sand off his sailor suit.

  ‘No,’ said Wendy. ‘Don’t let’s.’

  ‘No,’ said Curly. ‘Let’s not.’

  ‘No,’ said John. ‘Not a War.’

  Perhaps it was the clammy touch of the mist. Perhaps it was the ghost of a memory. Perhaps, in far off Fotheringdene someone leaned against the war memorial on the village green …

  ‘Done War,’ said one Twin.

  ‘Me too,’ said the other.

  ‘Michael wouldn’t like it,’ said Slightly.

  Peter stamped his foot in outrage. ‘And just who is Michael?’

  John gave a gasp. Wendy turned away. Could Peter really have forgotten their brother? Their wonderful brother Michael? For a long time no one spoke. There was only the noise of Fireflyer fizzing and fretting around their heads.

  ‘Michael Darling went away to the Big War,’ said Slightly. ‘He was … Lost.’

  Peter stared at them, these mutineers, with their white faces, wet hair, sad eyes. Then he somersaulted carelessly off the rock. ‘Ah! One of the Lost Boys! Do you expect me to remember them all? There were so many!’

  No one tried to explain. They knew that Peter Pan (and foolish young fairies like Fireflyer) were much better off not knowing about the War. Besides, something else had put it quite out of their heads.

  Five large black bears, jaws agape and slavering, were leaping towards them over the ro
cks.

  ‘Hup, cub-bages!’ said a deep, imperious voice.

  The bears lurched up on to their haunches, roaring, rolling their black heads on their thick no-necks, drooling saliva and dancing in waltz-time: one-two-three; one-two-three.

  Peter Pan spread wide his arms: he would shield his League from harm or die in the attempt! Behind the bears, out of the wreathing mist, came a sixth shape, almost as tall, almost as shaggy. There was a crack like gunfire.

  ‘Wet your whistles, cub-bages!’ said the Great Ravello, coiling up his long, rawhide whip. The bears dropped down, long claws sinking like grappling irons into the soft sand, and lumbered down to the water’s edge to drink. ‘Gentlemen … ladies. I hope my little pets did not scare you.’

  ‘Fear is a stranger to me!’ declared Peter, hands on hips.

  ‘Two strangers met in one day, then, Peter Pan,’ said the circus-master. ‘Fear and Myself.’

  Peter was startled. ‘You know my name?’

  Ravello came closer, his woolly garment dragging, erasing his own light footprints. His voice was softer even than the sand. ‘Naturally I know you, Peter Pan. Who has not heard of the Marvellous Boy? The Boy from Treetops? The Fearless Avenger! The Wonder of Neverwood! The flame of your fame lights my every dull day. You are the stuff of legend!’

  The League of Pan gave a rousing cheer, except for Wendy, who thought so many compliments might go to Peter’s head. Sure enough, Pan gave a shrill crow of pleasure:

  The bears in the surf jerked upright and rocked from foot to foot, rattling their claws like dinner knives.

  ‘Ah, I must caution against loud noises,’ urged the circus-master, in tones so sweet that the bears, sniffing the air, scented honey. ‘My cub-bages are nervous of loud noises. They might run amok.’

  Curly, watching the bears with a mixture of terror and fascination, asked if they really ought to be drinking from the Lagoon. ‘I read somewhere: doesn’t drinking seawater make you go mad?’