He was very sorry. “I say, Wendy,” he whispered to her, “if you see me forgetting you, just keep on saying ‘I’m Wendy,’ and then I’ll remember. I don’t seem to have the habit of remembering things.”
Of course this was a rather unsatisfactory explanation, and a little unnerving to be told. However, to make amends he showed them how to lie out flat on a strong wind that was going their way, and they could sleep then without falling. Indeed they would have slept longer, but Peter tired quickly of the game of sleeping, and soon he would cry in his loud captain’s voice, “We get off here.”
So with occasional tiffs, but on the whole a good deal of fun (the sailors on that strange, purple-sailed junk could not believe a flock of children circled low overhead laughing, before disappearing into the distance, and reported it confusedly at port), they drew near the Neverland, despite Peter’s haphazard guidance.
“There it is,” said Peter calmly.
“Where, where?”
“Where all the arrows are pointing.”
Indeed it seemed like a million golden arrows were pointing it out to the children, for the fat, friendly sun was setting behind the island, and casting out honey-coloured light to guide them in.
Wendy and John and Michael stood on tiptoe in the air to get their first good look at the island. Despite its shape, quite different to their own, personal Neverlands, they all recognized it at once, and until the Fear fell upon them they hailed it, like a familiar friend to whom they were returning home for the holidays.
“John, look, there’s the lagoon. O, the mermaids will all be there!”
“Wendy, look at the leatherback turtles laying their eggs in the sand!”
“I say, John, I see your flamingo with the broken leg!”
“Look, Michael, there’s your cave!”
“John, what’s that in the brushwood?”
“It’s a wolf with her whelps. Wendy, I do believe that’s your little cub!”
“There’s my boat, John, with her sides stove in!”
“No, it isn’t. Why, we burned your boat.”
“That’s her, at any rate. I say, John, I see the smoke of the Haida settlement!”
“Where? Show me, and I’ll tell you by the amount of smoke rising whether they are out on the war-path or not.”
“There, just across the Mysterious River.”
“I see now. Yes, they are out on the war-path right enough – that’s the smoke of a banked fire, left unattended.”
Peter was a little annoyed with them for knowing so much, but if he wanted to lord it over them his opportunity was at hand, for have we not told you that very shortly that the Fear of darkness would consume them? It came as the last shafts of light were extinguished, leaving the island in a sudden gloom.
In the old days at home the Neverland had always begun to look a little dark and threatening by bedtime. Unexplored patches arose in it and spread, black shadows moved about in them. The old stone circle, homely and covered in moss by day, loomed menacingly. The roar of the beasts was quite different, and above all, children lost the certainty that they would win. It was easy to be brave and daring in daylight, but not when you unable to see what vast, dark threat was sneaking closer through the gloom. Then you were quite glad that the night-lights were on. You even liked Nana to say that this was just the mantelpiece over here, that the Neverland was all make-believe, and to stop being silly.
Of course the Neverland had been make-believe in those days. But they were here, and it was real now. There were no night-lights, it was getting darker every moment, and Nana was far away, left behind with their parents at Number 14.
They had been flying apart in a casual V formation, like a migrating flock, but they huddled close to Peter now. His careless manner had gone at last, his eyes were sparkling, and a tingle went through them every time they touched his body, as though something more electric than mere blood was circulating within him. They were now over the fearsome island, flying so low that sometimes a branch would grab at their feet. Nothing horrid was visible in the air, Tinker Bell’s swift revolutions were proof of that; yet their progress had become slow and laboured, as though they were pushing their way forward through hostile forces. Sometimes the children hung in the air until Peter had beaten on it with his fists and forced it to relent another foot.
“They don’t want us to land,” he explained.
“Who are they?” Wendy whispered, shuddering and clutching hard at little Michael’s hand, that he might not fall behind and be lost in the gloaming.
But he could not or would not say. Tinker Bell was roused to action and sent on in front, a sharp-eyed little sentry, glowing like a sulphur lamp.
Sometimes Peter poised himself in the air, listening intently, one hand cupped to his ear, and again he would stare down with eyes so bright that they seemed to bore through the darkness. Having done these things, he went on again, humming softly to himself. Peter found it all very good fun.
His courage was almost appalling. “Would you like an adventure now,” he asked Wendy casually, “or would you like to have your tea first?”
John said, “Tea first,” quickly, and Michael pressed her hand hard, but the braver Wendy hesitated.
“What kind of adventure?” she asked cautiously.
“There’s a pirate asleep in the trees just beneath us,” Peter told him. “If you like, we’ll go down and kill him.”
“I don’t see him,” John said after a long pause.
“I do. He’s there, just where the branches fork to the right.”
“Suppose,” Wendy said, a little huskily, “he was to wake up.”
Peter spoke indignantly. “You don’t think I would kill him while he was sleeping, do you?! I would wake him first, and then kill him. That’s the way I always do it. It’s not sporting otherwise.”
“I say! Do you kill many?”
“Tons.”
Wendy said “How ripping,” but decided to have tea first. She asked if there were many pirates on the island just now, and Peter said he had never known so many, for when they got lost roaming on the seas of Earth, they would often wash up on the shores of Neverland, and be absorbed into the crew.
“Who is Captain now?”
“Hook,” answered Peter, and his face became very stern as he said that hated word, for they were sworn enemies. Peter was always sworn enemies with pirate captains; it made for the most fun.
“Captain James Hook?”
“Ay.”
Then Michael began to cry, and even John could speak in gulps only, for they knew Hook’s reputation. He had been the most barbarous buccaneer known to humankind, until (it was assumed) his ship went down in a killing storm off the Horn of Africa. It was all very fun to read of his dastardly exploits in school… but now all that knowledge welled up inside them, more real than ever before. Captain James Hook was alive, here, on Neverland.
“He was Blackbeard’s bo’sun,” John whispered huskily. “He is the worst of them all. He is the only man of whom Barbecue was afraid.”
“That’s him,” said Peter.
“What is he like? Is he big?”
“He is not so big as he was.” There was satisfaction in Peter’s voice.
“How do you mean?”
“I cut off a bit of him.”
“You!” Exclaimed Wendy.
“Yes, me,” said Peter sharply.
“I wasn’t meaning to be disrespectful.”
“O, all right.”
“What bit did you cut off, Peter?”
“His right hand.”
“Then he can’t fight anymore?” John asked hopefully.
“O, can’t he just!”
There was a pause, then Wendy asked, “Left-handed?”
“He has an iron hook instead of a right hand, and he claws with it, while he flails a sword in the other.”
“Claws!” the three children gasped as one, recoiling.
“I say,” said Peter.
“Yes?”
“Say, ‘Aye, aye, sir.’”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“There is one thing,” Peter continued to them sternly, “Which every boy who serves under me has to promise, and so must you.”
John paled, but Wendy nodded once, stoically.
“It is this: if we meet Hook in open fight, you must leave him to me.”
“I promise,” John said loyally. Wendy murmured something under her breath that could have been interpreted as a promise, but could have been a wordless sound.
For the moment they were feeling less eerie, because Tink was flying with them, and in her light they could distinguish one other. Unfortunately she could not fly so slowly as they, and so she had to go round and round them in a circle in which they moved as in a halo. Wendy quite liked it, until Peter pointed out a major drawback.
“Tink tells me,” he said, “that the pirates sighted us before the darkness came, and got Long Tom out.”
“The big gun?”
“Yes. And of course they must see her light, and if they guess we are near it they are sure to let fly. At this range they’ll probably get pretty close.”
“Wendy!” wailed Michael.
“Tell her to go away at once, Peter,” the three cried simultaneously, but he refused.
“She thinks we have lost the way,” he replied stiffly, “and she is rather frightened. You don’t think I would send her away all by herself when she is scared!”
For a moment the circle of light was broken, and something gave Peter a loving little pinch.
“Then tell her,” Wendy begged, in an agony of fear, “to put out her light.”
“She can’t put it out. That is about the only thing fairies can’t do. It just goes out of itself when she falls asleep, same as the stars.”
“Then tell her to go to sleep at once,” John almost ordered.
“She can’t sleep except when she’s sleepy. It’s something else fairies can’t do.” Neither can people, for that matter; but this did not mollify John.
“Seems to me,” growled John, “these are the only two things worth doing.”
Here he got a pinch, but not a loving one.
“If only one of us had a pocket,” Peter said, “we could carry her in it.” However, they had set off in such a hurry that there was not a pocket between the four of them, and Tinker Bell refused absolutely to be stuffed into Wendy’s satchel.
He had a happy idea. John’s hat!
Tink agreed to travel by hat if it was carried in the hand. John carried it, though she had really intended for it to be carried by Peter. Presently Wendy took the hat, because John said it struck against his knee as he flew, a turn of events which was to lead to mischief.
In the black top hat Tink’s light was mostly hidden, and they flew on in silence. It was the stillest silence they had ever known, broken once by a distant lapping, which Peter explained was wild beasts drinking at the ford, and again by a rasping sound that might have been the branches of trees rubbing together, but which he claimed was the Haida sharpening their knives. Peter might have been teasing them a little.
Presently, even these noises ceased. To Michael the loneliness was dreadful. “If only something would make a sound!” he cried.
As if in answer to his request, the air was rent by the most tremendous crash he had ever heard. The pirates had fired Long Tom at them.
The roar of it echoed through the mountains, and the echoes seemed to cry savagely, “Where are they, where are they, where are they?”
Thus sharply did the terrified three learn the difference between an island of make-believe and the same island come true.
Down on the deck of the JOLLY ROGER, Professor Basil Rathbone started up, crying out, “For the love of Plato, what are you shooting at?”
“Take him away below,” Hook enunciated in a low growl, “and lock him in my cabin.”
Smee leapt to obey, hustling the castaway down the steps, banging him against every wall and post as they went. The force of the explosion was still ringing in the air like a struck bell.
When at last the heavens were steady again, John and Michael found themselves alone in the darkness, their ears clamouring with the percussion of that horrible blast. John was treading the air mechanically, and Michael without knowing how to float was floating, his legs curled up beneath him as though to shrink himself as a target.
“Are you shot?” John whispered tremulously.
“I haven’t tried yet,” Michael whispered back, too scared to move in case something fell off.
No one had been hit by the cannonball. Peter, however, had been carried by the wind of the shot far out to sea, while Wendy was blown upwards and whirled away with no companion but that of Tinker Bell.
It would have been well for Wendy if at that moment she had dropped the hat, to fly solo through the darkness.
It is unknown whether the idea came suddenly to Tink, or whether she had planned it on the way, but she at once popped out of the hat with a fizzle of her wings, and began to lure Wendy to her destruction.
Tink was not all bad; or, rather, she was all bad just now, but to be fair, sometimes she was all good, or more often, all mischievous. Fairies have to be one thing or the other, because being so small they only have space inside them to experience one emotion at a time. They are able to change their nature, but it must be a complete change. At present Tinker Bell was full of a violent and jealous dislike of Wendy. What she said in her lovely tinkle Wendy could not of course understand. Most of it was horrible abuse, but it sounded kind, and she fluttered back and forth in front of Wendy, pantomiming: “Follow me, and all will be well.”
What else could Wendy do? She shouted her loudest to Peter and John and Michael, and got only mocking echoes in reply, and from below the grunting cough of a lion. She did not yet know that Tink hated her with the fierce hatred of one defending her territory against all interlopers. And so, bewildered, ears ringing and now wavering unsteadily in her flight, she followed Tink to her doom.
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