Forever Neverland(10)

“They’ll help you, Wendy. They’ll help stop your dreams. You’ll sleep again. You’ll be able to concentrate on your studies and forget the past. . . .” Mary’s lovely face wore a desperate expression. “Take them, Wendy. Help yourself forget, dear. You’ve earned the right to let go.” She whispered to her daughter, stretching her arm and holding the bottle aloft before Wendy’s impassive face.

Wendy found herself moving without even knowing how she had done so. Mechanically, like a windup doll, she took the bottle of pills from her mother’s hand and unscrewed the top.

“That’s it, sweetheart. I have water here.”

Wendy tipped the prescription bottle until a single white cylinder appeared in her hand. She stared down at the capsule. It sat still, waiting and insipid, in her palm and, at that moment, Wendy could almost imagine that it stared back at her.

Mary Darling took a tall glass of clear, cool water from atop the side table and held it out toward her daughter. Wendy glanced up. She kept the single pill that she had dispensed and handed the bottle back to her mother as she, in turn, took the glass of water.

Then, without a single hopeful thought left in her tired mind, Wendy popped the white pill into her mouth and swallowed it down.

*****

At the window, a tiny pixie straightened, her green eyes wide with shock. “Bad,” she whispered, unaware that she’d even spoken aloud. “Bad. Very bad.” She took to the skies, streaking pixie dust behind her. “Bad, bad, bad, bad . . . .” Tinkerbell dashed back toward her secret place in the woods just as lightning fast as a fast fairy could fly.

*****

In Neverland, Hook dreamed. Except, because no one in Neverland had ever dreamed before, he didn’t know it for what it was. As far as Hook was concerned, he had suddenly become a piece of paper. Two-dimensional and covered with scrolling, cursive-written words.

He was facing a young girl, who was also constructed of two-dimensional, written-on paper. “Come away with me, Wendy,” he found himself saying. “Sail the high seas.” He motioned to the blue ocean around them with a flourish of his paper hand. “There is no place on this world that a wave, and a ship to ride it, cannot take you.” He smiled a charming smile.

The paper girl across from him smiled a gentle smile in return and curtsied. And then she straightened suddenly, and her lovely smile was gone.

Hook found his paper self moving forward. “No,” he muttered. But in the next instant, he was frozen in space and time and could only watch as the paper Wendy began to smolder, to smoke and curl in at the edges.

As the paper girl suddenly went up in flame, Captain James Hook lay in his bed in his dark, quiet ship, on the dark and quiet sea of Neverland and whispered the first word spoken in Neverland in one thousand, eight hundred, and twenty-five years. . . .

“Wendy.”



Chapter Four

Tinkerbell soared in through the open shutters and then took her human form. Peter was curled at the edge of his bed, nearly falling off, his fist clenching and unclenching in his sleep. He had kicked off all of his covers and Tink could see that he still wore all of his clothes. Which meant that he’d fallen asleep drunk. Again.

She pursed her lips and put her hands on her hips, sauntering to the bed with dark purpose. “Oh, Pe-ter,” she called quietly, her tone low and dangerous in the manner that only a fairy’s tone can be.

Peter twitched in his sleep, his brow furrowing and then smoothing again. He did not wake. Tinkerbell leaned over and, with the thumb and forefinger of one hand, she covered Peter’s nostrils, cutting off his air supply. It took a moment for this to have real effect, but when it did, Peter’s mouth opened in a hoarse gasp for breath and he jolted awake, coughing and moaning.

“Wakey, wakey, Peter Pan,” Tink said, her tone still low and unpleasant. “We’ve got trouble. And you need to be half-way conscious to deal with it.”

Peter Pan was not fond of the human world. While it was true that, since his arrival, five years ago, he had done many things and even, inadvertently had fun doing them – he had also been bombarded by the bad news that humans seemed to thrive on. He was not used to these things, having spent so much time in Neverland.

War, murder, disease. . . . It had all very quickly become too grown up for the boy who would never grow up, and since he could not return to Neverland, Peter Pan had hurriedly and desperately taken to the things in the human world that could make a person forget that he was in the human world, all together.

His favorite was wine. Sweet and chilled through fairy magic.

Unfortunately, it had become his favorite nearly every day of late, and so now, Peter Pan gazed up at Tinkerbell through what was most likely a haze of hang-over pain and very blurred vision. His green eyes were bloodshot and the stubble of hair that Tink had noticed on his chin and cheeks ever more regularly these days was back again.