by Lisa Jensen
“Release,” she hisses softly.
“Yes,” I whisper.
“Comfort,” she murmurs, her inflection slow and musical. “Rest. Peace.”
“Please,” I groan, closing my eyes. Respite, release, indeed, such pleasure as I have not known in centuries, all could be mine, if only I would surrender. She can do it, I know it, I can feel it. My bully self, my pride, my wit, my rage, all are dissolving, along with my will. I have no will. I have no self. Her glamor oozes over me like aspic, trapping me in helpless thrall. Yes. Please.
The round, precise notes of her voice are a rippling arpeggio of unparalleled beauty. “What will you give me, Captain?”
“My life,” I rasp.
“You do not value your life,” the enchantress replies carelessly.
My eyes startle open, a tremor of fear shivers through me. She watches me avidly, tilting her head from side to side like a curious sparrow.
“My … my soul,” I babble, and receive only another volley of brittle laughter worthy of Proserpina for my reply. “Majesty,” I plead, like the most creeping, cringing, vilest sot, “whatever I have, it’s yours—”
What might I not promise away next, in my humiliation? But the fairy queen is already disengaging me from her spell, the trembling promise of peace, respite, comfort, hope ebbing away, leaving me shipwrecked and stranded on cold, unfriendly shoals.
“Talk, talk, talk,” she flutes in her sing-songy manner. “Foolish man. You have changed nothing.”
With a single massive swoop of her wings, she rises up into the limitlesss vault of the hall above me.
“Majesty, wait!” I’m all but sobbing, falling to my knees on the hard stone floor.
“You value nothing, Captain. You are of no use to me.”
“But—”
“Twice before, the Red Moon has risen, and you have done nothing,” her waterfall voice pipes down to me. “This is your last chance. You will not get another. Seize it soon, or your cause is lost.” And she sweeps herself up out of the light, and all is suddenly darkness and stillness and despair in her wake. The hall, the mirrors, the bountiful flowers, all vanish, and I’m on my knees in the forest, the wet of trampled grass seeping into my stockings. The laughing moon is slinking to westward, the forest is black and still and unpopulated to my eyes so recently bedazzled by the light. A mournful breeze stirs in the trees, bringing with it the acrid scent of crushed nectar and the occasional fleeting sigh or snuffle of an unseen sleeper in the dark, but the revels of Faery are concluded, or else I can no longer see them.
I’d have wagered anything that my deliverance was at hand at last, but nothing is won here without the forfeit of something else. Not until I shiver with more than the night chill at how close I’ve come to losing my grip on all that I am do I begin to recover my senses.
By what unbalanced delusion could I even imagine the imp queen would help me? This is the Neverland. No one will help me here. I’m no more than a game to Queen BellaAeola, as I am to her ally, the boy. Fairy seduction is only another victory to win over me, and I exposed my back to the cat like the most witless gull, begging and sniveling for the favor of her rejection. As if my encounters with Caroline and Proserpina were not cruel enough; by God’s black heart, how could they still wound me so completely after all this time? The fairy queen spoke too of a red moon, a Blood Moon, twice risen. Once when I did for old Bill Jukes, centuries ago. When was the other time? Only in my dreams. And this chance they all taunt me with, surely no more than another means to unbalance and humiliate me. What cause is not lost here? We are all lost. We are all damned.
I’ve not risen from the grass, as immobilized by despair as I was in BellaAeola’s erotic web. In the damp silence, I begin to notice a low, quiet, miserable sound. It’s not the distant sirens this time, nor the moaning of fairies, but something more wretched. A human voice.
Shifting to my feet, I follow it in the dark, picking my way across tangled roots and pine needles to an ancient tree stump, half as high as a man, covered over with moss and bramble. Something shelters there, on the ground between two roots. By the last of the moonlight, I recognize the Parrish woman on her knees in the lee of the stump, her pale face bent over something cradled in her arms. She reacts not at all to my approach, only kneels there, keening mournfully. Too weary to maintain the game of cat-and-mouse, I steady my hook in the old bark and lower myself to crouch beside her, peering at what she holds. What I take at first for a moldering bouquet proves to be an armload of dead, dry grasses, reeds, and rushes. A dark shape lies within them, and I peep closer over her shoulder to see what it is. A brown sparrow, stiff and cold, stares up at me out of its dead, glassy eye.
Parrish turns her white face up to me, her dark eyes glazed with sorrow. “My baby,” she rasps. “I’ve lost my baby.”
I should flee for my sanity, had I an ounce of strength left, but I can only cling to the stump as she gazes up at me from the depths of her unvarnished wretchedness.
“Madam.” My shaking voice betrays me, and I stop.
“I tried to hold on to him,” she murmurs. “I held him in my arms, they let me hold him.” She lifts up her ghastly burden a little, and I struggle not to recoil. “He lived. He looked at me. He knew me, I’m sure.”
She turns back to the bundle in her arms. “We knew each other, didn’t we?” she croons softly. “You and I. My baby. You were so much stronger than me, so much wiser, such an ancient soul, oh, God—” Her voice catches; she clutches the dead bird closer, and my blood chills. She begins to rock her upper body, back and forth, back and forth, cradling the thing to her breast.
“I was the failure,” she whispers to it. She looks back up at me, a white face so beyond tragedy it seems inanimate. “I couldn’t keep him alive. I lost them both. I failed them both.”
“Madam,” I try again, shaken to gentleness by our fearful encounters, desperate to break through this last grim enchantment. “This is not your child.”
She blinks at me. “I know,” she agrees sadly. “My baby’s dead. I killed him.”
3
Chilled by more than the predawn cold, it takes me a few moments to command my wits to action. At last, I inch my hand toward her bundle, and her gaze slides down to watch.
“Let me.” I can scarcely breathe the words.
Parrish nods slowly, and when my hand is near enough, she sighs and shifts her little burden to me.
“Don’t hurt him,” she whispers.
I lower the creature in its bed of brown grass as carefully as I might into the shelter of the next root, steady the makeshift nest with my hook to see the little corpse does not tip out. She watches in stoic silence.
“Thank you, Captain,” she murmurs at last.
“You know me?” I almost groan with relief; she’s not yet a madwoman, and I am still a creature of flesh and blood and sanity.
Her gaze turns to me, and I see some faint trace of life and purpose returning to her eyes. They have a greenish tint here in the wood, or perhaps it’s the moonlight. She regards me in silence for another moment.
“You are Captain Hook,” she says, at last, “and I am a long way from London.”
“Welcome to the Neverland,” I say dryly.
She shivers a little inside her jacket, darts a wistful glance at the dead bird in its nest. “I thought it might have been him,” she adds softly. “I thought maybe he was the one who called me here.”
“This is scarcely Paradise. The dead do not come here to seek their reward.”
“I saw him just now,” she says to her empty lap.
As I saw Caroline and Proserpina, nearly forfeiting my wits for the fairies’ idle amusement. A part of me longs to fly like wingéd Hermes back to the protection of my ship, my cabin, and my pots of rum, to obliterate the memory of all I’ve seen in the Dell. Yet I crave the presence of another mortal in this desolate place, for if Parrish were truly one of their witchy tribe, why would the fairies discard her so cruelly?
“You saw
phantoms only,” I tell her. “The imps will find out your weakness and use it against you. They will turn your dreams to ash, destroy even the memory of whatever might have once been good in your life—”
I have her full attention now. I stop talking, embarrassed by her scrutiny.
“Come away, Parrish,” I begin again. “We mustn’t stay here. This is an evil place.”
I grasp the tree stump to steady myself, offer my hook arm to help her up, and she takes it. Her grasp is strong, substantial, alive, and I am grateful for it. We are not out of this wood yet.
* * *
Some primordial thing as out of time as myself flaps by overhead on leathery wings with a raucous shriek that startles us both out of our separate reveries. The forest answers with a volley of restless snarling and trumpeting; shrubs rustle, twigs crack, a covey of starlings spooked up out of one roost circle in a fractious black cloud, and alight in another. Night in the wood belongs to the imps, but dawn belongs to the beasts.
It’s not yet daybreak as I herd Parrish along an old hunter’s trail, but a rising tide of birdsong greets the promise of dawn. If we lose our turning, I listen for the boom of surf and sniff the air for salt to keep us heading for the bluff above the bay. But she can’t be hurried, shuffling along in her useless slippers, now sodden and filthy, lost in her own thoughts.
“I’m sorry I took your boat,” she offers, after a while. “I didn’t mean to keep it. But I didn’t want anyone fighting over me. I thought I could prevent it if I left your ship.”
“You meant to warn the boy,” I suggest evenly.
“Well, I suppose if I’d found him, I’d have tried to talk him out of it, yes,” she agrees. “But I was trying to find out what called me here.”
“Your child?”
“He’s not here,” she sighs. “I know that now.”
“Then your other loss?” I prod carefully, eyeing her. “You spoke of ‘both.’”
Her gaze drops. “My husband.”
Husbands do not typically venture to the Neverland and then call for their wives. It could never have been one of my own men; they are all unloved and unlamented when they arrive here.
“Why search for them in the wood?”
“I know about the forest, where the fairies live,” she says at once. “I’ve seen it in my dreams.” She shakes her head. “I thought the fairies could help me.”
And the Dell opened readily to her eyes so they could have the pleasure of humiliating her. Dead leaves skitter across our path in the dawning breeze like empty fairy promises.
At last, we come to the edge of the bluff, where the path winds down for the beach. I hope I haven’t idled away another hundred years among the imps, for fairy time obeys no laws but its own. But the dark smudge of my ship is still visible out in the bay. The skiff bobs in the scrubby grass at the foot of the bluff, neither covered over in barnacles nor sunk to the bottom with age.
Parrish is all but hobbling in her useless slippers; I must give her my arm all the way down the trail, clawing brush and bramble aside with my hook. At last we plow into powdery sand at the foot of the cliff. Off to our left, Pirates Beach stretches away southward, under its treeline of palms, ghostly in the moonlight. I glance again out at my ship, and begin to long for the quiet and comfort of my bed.
I look at Parrish, who gazes stoically back at me, trying not to let me see how she’s favoring one foot.
“Let’s rest a moment,” I suggest. “It won’t be light for a while yet.”
She nods gratefully, and I draw her back round a curve in the bluff, protected from the shore breeze. She slumps down in the sand and starts rubbing at one battered foot. I sit beside her, sweep off my hat, set it down on the sand.
“Peter doesn’t even want me here, you know,” she sighs. “I’m old and silly, he told me.”
“He spoke to you?” I peer at her. “When?”
“In the nursery. Back in London.” She reads the confusion in my face and begins again. “My dreams of Neverland gave me no peace. I was so sure I was meant to be here, that someone needed me. I did everything I was supposed to, got a situation as a governess near Kensington Gardens, left the nursery window open every night, just like in the stories, and sat up waiting for him.”
She must be a madwoman after all. “And he came for you.”
“I think so.” Something sardonic lurks in her sideways glance. “He might’ve been a hallucination. He might’ve been make-believe. The fact is I was drunk, Captain. I’d become that worst of clichés, the tippling governess.”
I nod. In truth, we are all as drunk as bishops most of the time here, thanks to our never-ending liquor supplies. Pan prefers his enemies pickled in bravado.
“But he didn’t want me,” Parrish sighs. “He refused to take me with him. Said he’d have no silly ladies about the place, bothering him. He swirled his cloak of fairy glamor about him and stalked off, as it were, if such a thing can be imagined three floors up and in midair. ‘Grownups can’t fly!’ he taunted me, and off he went. I was devastated. I wanted it as passionately as any child, the Neverland, more than anything I’ve ever wanted before.”
“But … why?” I blurt.
“The grown-ups have made an awful bloody mess of the world,” she says tartly. “I couldn’t stand it any more. I wanted out.”
This, at least, makes a kind of sense to me. I watch covertly as she shakes out her dark hair, turns back to her blistered foot. She never went to the boys tonight, nor was she welcomed with anything like affection by the savage fairies. Can it be she is not Pan’s creature at all, but the victim of some powerful sorcery? If this woman killed her child, might she have been sent to this vile place for punishment, as I was? I sign her death warrant do I leave her here alone, for there is nothing Pan so despises as a grown woman, the destiny of all the Wendys he can never forgive for growing up and leaving him. I’ve seen it hundreds of times. He sends the Wendys off with a great show of indifference, but he cannot purge them completely from his memory; that miracle is reserved only for those enemies he kills in battle. The pain of so many losses accrues over time, as I know too well, and Pan is more than capable of making this woman pay for them all.
Of course, it is no concern of mine what the little whelp chooses to do in his kingdom of witchery. But who knows better than I what it is to be friendless and alone in this place? And in one instant of resolve, however foolhardy, I set my course, for good or ill.
Pale dawn is already creeping up over the island, chasing off the moon. “Daylight is coming,” I tell Parrish. “Perhaps you ought to come back to my ship.”
She looks at me warily. “As your hostage?”
“As my guest.”
She draws a breath, gazes down the beach, gives her head another little shake. “I don’t want to cause any trouble. Surely there must be some … cave, or something, that—”
“Madam, I have lived here for two hundred years,” I tell her plainly. “There is no other safe place.”
She’s still looking at me uncertainly as I stand up and slap the sand from my breeches. “If what you say is true, you cannot imagine the danger you are in,” I warn her. “Let me help you.” I offer her my hand.
At last she nods, and takes it. “Thank you, Captain,” she says as I help her to her feet.
I turn back to sweep up my black hat and notice some tiny red thing poking out of the sandy dirt beneath it. Some species of sand crab, I think at first, or cocooning insect, but for the speed with which it’s thrusting itself up out of the ground, the length of a finger already, now two.
No, it’s not a sentient creature at all, but tiny red leaves at the tip of a sturdy green stalk. Up it comes, winding out of the sand as I stand frozen in the act of shaking off my hat. Green leaves, fully formed, begin unfurling from the stalk, while the small, shiny red leaves at the tip belly into a fecund round bud. Other buds on other stalks are sprouting out of the earth as well, all within the little crater in the sand and scrub wher
e we were just sitting, green stalks stretching up toward the dawn, splitting into branches spiked with thorns, shaking out their leaves, buds popping open like ripe figs.
Roses, by God’s blood! A little thicket of them growing into being before my dazzled eyes: knee-high, now waist high, aburst with heavy blooms—blood crimson, violet, sunset pink, yellow blossoms as vivid as the sun.
I turn to see Parrish frozen in astonishment behind me, all agog, staring at this impossible spectacle.
“How did you do that?” she demands of me.
For once, no glib retort rises to my lips.
“Well, don’t look at me!” she exclaims. “I couldn’t grow moss in a swamp!”
It’s some witchery, of course, some fairy spell. Clamping on my hat, I reach out to the nearest bush to touch one of the scarlet blooms. The petals are velvety soft against my skin; its heady fragrance lingers on my fingertips. They are as real as they are beautiful. And sinister, for Pan despises roses, as well as climbing bougainvillea and all species of citrus, any devious plant whose fragrant fruit or lovely blossoms conceal thorns to prick him. Briars and bramble he adores; his wood is carpeted in sharp, bristling things to be beaten back and mastered, but he’s outraged by the perfidy of beautiful things that tempt him only to wound him, and he will not have them on his island. He favors the jasmine that runs riot in the wood, honey-sweet, uncomplicated. All through this island, where anything grows at his command, Pan has banished roses. Why do these disobey him now?
This is some new species of sorcery unknown even to me. After all the time I spent with Proserpina, queen of witches, I thought I had seen them all.
Chapter Ten
SAINT-DÓMINGUE, 1724: PROSERPINA
They called her Proserpina. Tall and straight, she was, with mahogany skin, and lustrous eyes as deep and rich as Spanish chocolate. My crew and I shared a taste for vengeance as well as profit, and I ran them hard aboard the Jolie Rouge. But we’d run afoul of a frigate off Saint-Dómingue; laden with plunder, we’d barely limped away with our lives. One of my men was native to the place and knew of a hidden bay where we could shelter and careen the ship. I’d taken a wound in the thigh that would not heal, dripping pus and bringing on bouts of fever, so they took me to Proserpina.