Peter Pan in Scarlet

by Geraldine McCaughrean

‘Has anyone seen Puppy?’ asked Curly yet again, and yet again they searched and searched, finding nothing. Yet again they called—‘Puppy! Come, Puppy!’—but the corniches of snow that loomed over their heads creaked and groaned and sagged in swags, as if they might fall at the next vibration.

  ‘He’ll be waiting for us at the bottom, when we get down again,’ said Wendy brightly, so that the littler ones would not cry, but she bit her lip when she remembered the crevasses and rockslides, the wasps and gummy trees. Neverpeak was no place for a tiny little puppy dog.

  The changes that had altered Neverland’s forests and hills had changed Neverpeak too. Once, sweet-water springs had sent glittering tails of spray flickering down tapestries of wild flowers and birds’ nests. Now ice welled up from the core of the mountain, splitting it open and spilling glaciers down it like grimy grey lava. The glaciers bulldozed boulders into teetering towers of rock. Nearing one such glacier, the explorers felt a wall of sudden cold: such a solid wall that they could have drawn pictures on it if they had just had a crayon.

  ‘How shall we ever be warm again?’ asked First Twin through chattering teeth.

  ‘Hot tea and muffins,’ said Second Twin, ‘when we get down.’

  ‘How shall we ever get down?’ said Tootles.

  ‘Slow and steady,’ said Peter with a careless laugh, ‘or very fast indeed, if you slip!’

  Here and there, a sugar coating of white snow covered the dirty grey ice, hiding the huge cracks that threatened to swallow foolhardy travellers. It wound like a highway towards the peak, and Peter started up it without a backward glance, so that the others felt bound to follow. But the cold struck through their shoes and chilled the marrow in their shins, their thighbones, their hips, their spines, their shoulderblades. Ravello roped them all together like proper mountaineers, but Peter would not be tied, refused to be tied.

  ‘Only think of the treasure up top!’ he said, and his breath was dragony with the cold. ‘Only think of my treasure!’ His loudness brought a rustling rush of snow down from the mountainside to wash across their feet and wipe out their footprints.

  Suddenly everyone came to a halt. Out over a yawning ravine the glacier shrank to a thin beam of ice, like a bridge of cheap, crazed glass. It was so slippery that the Darlings got down on hands and knees to crawl across it. It was so thin that they could see right through to Certain Death below.

  ‘Is this a proper quest we are on?’ asked Tootles. ‘A person could get killed!’

  Peter gave a savage grin, scrambled to his feet … and strode out across the narrow ice-bridge, shouting, ‘A quest, Tootles? Yes! To be or not to be. That is the quest!’ The others looked on, open-mouthed. ‘Come on, then, all of you! Courage is the thing. All goes if courage goes!’

  He was within a few paces of the other side when he looked down and, there in the shiny ice, caught sight of something that broke his stride, broke his nerve. Peter gave a cry so terrible that all the harpy birds left the mountain then and there, never to return. For the space of a few heartbeats, pandemonium raged inside him. Then, foolishly, he tried to run. His boot soles skidded, his arms went out, and he pitched on his face … and over the edge of the ice-bridge.

  Ravello gave a cry, threw aside the rope he was holding and went—hop—one—skip—two—jump—three—‘I’m coming, sir!’—to where Peter hung by his fingers from the icicles beneath the ice-bridge. Ravello’s weight smashed a hole in the bridge, and he dropped feet-first through it, saved only from plummeting to his death by arms flung wide and the width of his great woolly shoulders. ‘Grab my legs, boy!’ he told Peter. ‘Grab hold!’

  ‘I saw him!’ came Peter’s voice from beneath the bridge. ‘I saw Hook!’

  Ravello’s body, gripped by the ice, writhed with cold. ‘His memory, perhaps. His likeness printed on the air.’

  ‘No, no!’ The small voice was full of panic and confusion. ‘I saw my reflection in the ice and it was …’ The icicles within Peter’s palm were ready to melt or snap. Soon he would plunge into the ravine below. But the memory of that reflection troubled him almost more. For ice is a true mirror. In it he had seen the long ringlets Ravello had coiled into his hair, seen the sunburn darkening his skin, seen the red coat and thigh boots.

  ‘Take hold of my legs, sir! I shall pull you up.’

  ‘I can’t fly. Why can’t I, Ravello? Why can’t I fly?’

  The circus-master started to slip, reached to anchor himself—with the gristly crunch of a blade—and kept his grip. Peter Pan transferred his weight from the icicles to Ravello’s legs. ‘Cling tight, sir, or you may pull off my boots and still fall!’

  Not that Pan weighed more than a pillow full of feathers. But it still cost Ravello a titanic effort to pull his body and legs and boots and Peter up through the hole and into the circle of his arms, safe at last.

  ‘Why can’t I fly, Ravello? Why?’

  ‘All in good time, sir,’ purred Ravello soothingly.

  Peter’s fingers sank deep in the woolly hide as he tried to push his valet away. ‘Don’t touch me! I mustn’t be touched! Go back and get that sea chest, valet!’ But his hands got caught.

  Ravello carefully, carefully extricated each of Pan’s icy fingers from the woollen tangles and chafed them warm. His voice was a coaxing whisper. ‘And just what is this treasure we so assiduously seek, sir?’

  Pan looked towards the peak. A few more hours of climbing lay ahead, but already Peter knew what the treasure chest stowed there would contain. Who had put the knowledge into his head he could not tell, and yet there it was, along with memories of a place he had never been and a delight he could not contain. ‘I don’t know what you call them, but they are so shiny and fine and I have wanted them for so LONG!’

  Ravello gave a blissful sigh. With four fathoms of rope and with infinite care, he coaxed the other Explorers across the ice-bridge, then the sea chest too, on its bouncy pram wheels. Just as those wheels reached the place where Peter had fallen through and been pulled to safety, there was a loud Crack! and the whole ice-bridge crumbled and dropped into the ravine. The falling sea chest all but took Ravello with it, but with a guttural, choking roar he withstood the shock and kept hold of the rope, and saved both chest and himself from falling to destruction.

  The Darlings all ran to help him, and together they hauled up the dead weight of a sea chest swinging and twirling on its rope like a hanged man. They found Ravello laughing to himself—on and on—a wry, self-mocking laugh, a noise like water welling into the bottom of a boat.

  In Neverland, a treasure chest contains the treasure-seeker’s dearest wish, the thing he or she wants more than anything else in the world. Those who had wished for gold doubloons and pieces of nine and ten, those who had thought of tiaras, necklaces, and pocket watches; those who had hoped for storybooks and Fabergé eggs no longer wanted any of those things. All they wanted now was a warm fire and a hot meal, a feather eiderdown and some steaming Bovril. True, Curly did desperately wish he had not lost the puppy, but quickly unthought the wish; a puppy shut up in a treasure chest was not at all a happy thought.

  But it made no difference what they wished. They all knew that Peter would wish better than any of them, and that he would decide what they found when they finally lifted the lid of Hook’s treasure chest.

  They sang to carry them the last little way, and the rainbow banner fluttered bravely over their heads.

  ‘To the top, we’re going right to the top;

  From the capital letter to the last full stop;

  From the very first sip to the final drop:

  That’s where we’re going: right to the top!

  All the way we’re going; we’re going all the way,

  From the first crack of dawn to the close of the day.

  No matter what the scaredy-cats and don’t-believers say

  That’s where we’re going: we’re going all the way!

  We’ve come through wind and fire and through cold sea spray;

 
; We fought off dragons and we kept the bears at bay;

  They wouldn’t dare to stay and stand and fight us anyway!

  Cos they know where we’re going: we’re going all the way.’

  ‘But we didn’t fight off dragons and bears—not really,’ said First Twin.

  ‘But we could have!’ said Second.

  ‘All the way we’re going; we’re going all the way:

  Right from Sunday morning up to Saturday,

  Eating flying fish on the road to Mandalay!

  All the way we’re going; we’re going all the way!

  And if you don’t believe us, we’re going anyway!

  We’re going all the way, we are! We’re going all the way!’

  And before they knew it, there they were, with nowhere further up to go. The sides of the mountain fell away from them like the skirts of a king’s robe, and their heads were crowned with cloud.

  From the top of Neverpeak you can see beyond Belief: over every obstacle, over the heads of the oldest, tallest anyone; as far back as you choose to remember, and as far as wherever you mean to go next. You can see where you went wrong and what a long way you’ve come. You can look down on your enemies and overcome your fears. The whole world looks up to a child on the summit of Neverpeak! Now the Explorers stood on the snowy crest and surveyed the whole island, pointing out landmarks to one another. They could see the distant Neverwood, charred and still smoking. They could see the distant yellow Lagoon and the narrow strait leading out into the wild ocean. The course they had sailed aboard the Jolly Peter was still written in the ocean: a white foamy furrow looping out and round and ending in a shatter of wreckage out at Lodestone Rock. They could see Grief Reef and the stripy rockscape that hid the Maze of Witches.

  ‘Oh look, Peter! Look!’ cried Wendy. ‘There are the trees where you found us berries for breakfast!’

  But Peter had no eyes for the view. He was scouring the mountaintop for the Treasure, kicking up clouds of snow, groaning with weariness and cold and frustration. The treasure map flapped itself to tatters in his hands. ‘Where is it? Where is it?’ he muttered over and over again.

  Since Neverland’s slow slide from summer into winter, snow had settled on Neverpeak where none had lain before. Deep drifts of softness had rounded its rocky summit into a white dome hiding the Treasure promised on the map.

  ‘May I help you look, sir?’ called Ravello, always slower than the children and only now nearing the top.

  ‘NO! You can’t come up here!’ Peter shouted back. ‘This is MY place! You can’t come up here!’

  ‘No,’ said the circus-master, as if this was the simple truth. ‘No, I know,’ and he contented himself with studying the landscape laid out below, intently looking, looking, looking and cocking his head to listen, too.

  Pan dug in the snow with his swordfish sword until its sawtooth edge was worn smooth.

  ‘Cold,’ said Ravello, which was no more than the truth.

  Peter dug with a piece of slate, shovelling up snow until he was white-haired from his own digging.

  ‘Warmer,’ said Ravello … which was absurd.

  Peter dug with his bare hands, because they were already too cold to feel the pain of it.

  ‘Hotter,’ said Ravello from his perch lower down.

  And then a hollow sound, a smooth hardness that did not skin his knuckles, a streak of red beneath the snow. The Treasure was found!

  There was a big padlock, but Wendy came with her sword, and, with their four hands on the hilt—oh, how cold Peter’s were!—they forced open the hasp. Then Peter Pan stepped up on to the curved lid and raised his two fists in the air, tossed back his head of dark and glossy curls, and crowed.

  ‘Avaaaaast!!’

  It was a noise part-lark, part-hawk. It was a shout of triumph and an avenging war cry. It was part choirboy, part delinquent. Whatever it was, it was not a cock-a-doodle, and it ended in a spluttering cough.

  ‘Hot!’ whispered Ravello, and closed his eyes in an ecstasy of joy.

  The lid rose, and with it the wind, so that a column of twisted snow eddied all around. Even those who had thought they were too tired and cold to care what the chest contained found themselves wishing and wishing that it might contain their heart’s desire.

  ‘WHAT?!’ Peter uttered a cry of dismay and plunged in his hands, hurling aside twigs and dry grass and peat. First Twin had wished for warmth, so here was the fuel to build a fire.

  Peter put his hands to his head in despair, and his hands were covered in a glitter that was not snow. Wendy had wished for fairy dust, to help them fly home again, so here was fairy dust.

  There were dry tea-leaves and bread dough, cold spaghetti and sago pudding all loose in among everything else, because the Twins had wished when they were hungry.

  There were the regular treasure-chest things—gold doubloons and bags of diamonds, because John Darling had not been able to imagine a treasure chest containing anything different. And Tootles’s tiara was there after all, and a few yards of Indian silk.

  Puppy, puppy, puppy! thought Curly, but it was too late to wish the lost dog into Hook’s treasure chest. Curly blamed himself that somewhere, out on the bleak glaciers and murrains, a tiny wee puppy was wandering about lost because he had not wished soon enough.

  Even Puppy (wherever he was now) must have been better at wishing than Curly, because there was a juicy marrow-bone stuck in the hinge. Just no Puppy to eat it.

  But though they had been expecting wonders of some sort, no one could understand why TINKER BELL was there!

  In a corner of the lid, cocooned in gossamer, emerging like a butterfly from its chrysalis, a lovely, lissom fairy no bigger than a child’s hand, stirred into wakefulness, complaining sleepily that someone had left open a window. ‘How can a person sleep in such a draught?’ She blinked once, then once again. ‘Peter? Is that you, Peter Pan?’

  The Darlings were enchanted. They took it in turns to hold the fairy in the palm of a hand. ‘We thought you must be dead at your age!’ said Tootles (which Wendy felt was not quite tactful).

  ‘So I was,’ said Tinker Bell, ‘or hibernating. It’s hard to tell.’ Then she complained that their hands were all far too cold to sit on, and that Peter was ignoring her. ‘Fairies die if you ignore them, you know!’

  ‘Peter, look!’ cried Wendy. ‘It’s Tinker Bell! Did you wish for her to be here? Is she your treasure?’ It gave her the oddest feeling to think it. But after all, it was very noble of Peter to prize a friend above gold, silver, or honey sandwiches.

  But Peter continued to rummage in the treasure chest, casting aside a storybook, crushing a painted egg.

  Tinker Bell looked again. ‘Oh,’ she said sleepily. ‘I thought it was Peter Pan, but it is not he. It is the Other one.’ And she went back to sleep.

  And there at last, filling fully half the chest, lay the Real Treasure—the one for which they had risked everything, the one which had brought them here to the Point of No Return. Peter lifted them out with gentle hands: a cup, a trophy, a cane, a statuette, a top hat, a plaque shaped like a knight’s shield, a cap circled with rings of red and white, an oar painted blue-green at the paddle, which he clutched lovingly to his chest.

  Wendy picked up a trophy, its base engraved with fifty names and the words, SPENCER CUP FOR RIFLE 1894. ‘It is very pretty, Peter, but why?’ Peter did not answer, but snatched up another and looked at it, a chalice plated in shiny silver.

  Curly was dragging together the kindling into a bonfire. With every moment, the views to north, south, east, and west were melting away, licked up by tongues of flying snow. A blizzard was closing in. John called Ravello to bring a match, to light the fire.

  But Peter went on gazing at the cup in his hands, shivers shaking him from head to foot. His look of rapture turned to one of horror as he saw, looking back at him, his own reflection. It was the same one he had seen in the ice-bridge. Reaching sideways, he took hold of Wendy’s hand. ‘I am not myself,’ he
said in a whisper. ‘Wendy … I … am … not … me.’

  The figure of Peter Pan’s valet just then emerged on to the peak of the mountain. With the weather worsening, it seemed an odd time to push back his hood. His features were hidden now only by the flurrying snow.

  ‘Ah! Over here, Ravello!’ called John. ‘A match, if you please!’

  Ravello did not seem to hear, though he had heard Peter well enough. ‘Not yourself, did you say? Oh true! How true! You have not been yourself for the past ten leagues.’ Again that laugh, like a rising tide swamping a beach. ‘Not yourself, no. For you have become Hook. Captain Hook. Captain Jas. Hook, scourge of Neverland!’

  The name alone sank into their chests like a steel hook. Ravello walked over to the treasure chest, gently picked up one of the cups, held it to his cheek and kissed it, long and tender. He also took the opportunity to give Peter a push with the sole of his boot.

  ‘Here is the proof,’ he said hugging the trophy. ‘Behold the Treasure—the selfsame Treasure Captain Hook left here all those years ago! Are these boys’ toys? No. Do they smack of the Cock-a-doodle? No! Only Hook, with his iron will—his flinty soul—his steely determination—could find the same Treasure he left here all those years ago! See, then, how I groomed you for the role, boy! See how I readied you for this moment! See how I coached you into wishing the right wishes, and finding the right Treasure! But oh, you made it so easy for me! So ridiculously easy! What a service you did me, Pan, of your own free will! What a loving-kindness you did me the day you put on my second-best jacket!’

  ‘HOOK!’

  The circus-master flinched and gave a shudder from nose to tail, as a dog will whose ears get wet. ‘Once, but no longer,’ he said. ‘I am the man who once was Hook. Look there, if you would see Hook!’ And he pointed at Peter Pan with the iron hook he wore in place of a right hand. ‘See where he wears the red jacket! See where his hair falls in coils to his shoulders! You of all people should know: if you put on another’s clothes, you become that man!’