Hook unplugged his ears. "Listen, lads!" he shouted them down. They turned dutifully, even those who had been working Peter along the dreaded plank. Hook's smile could melt butter. "I have made an agreement in the interests of good sportsmanship and so on and so forth. This pitiful specimen"-he gestured disdainfully at Peter-"this degenerate pretender shall have three days to prepare himself to do battle with me, at which time he shall return here and face judgment by the blade."
"Cap'n says take up the flint and powder, men, and wave the bloody shirt!" yelled Smee. "It's going to be-"
Hook clapped a hand over his mouth. "My show, Smee." He smiled anew. "It's going to be a perfectly wonderful war, gentlemen. A war to the death between Hook and Pan."
"A war to the death!" repeated Smee through the captain's fingers.
"Or if not"-Hook sniffed with a glance toward the prisons on the docks-"Pan's rug rats perish in the most horrible fashion I can devise."
Smee bounded forward. "A toast! To the ultimate battle-Hook against Pan!"
Hook's smile threatened to rival the crocodile's. "Children admitted free, of course."
The pirates drank from flagons of ale and rum pouches, cheering lustily, pounding fists and glasses on the ship's railing. "Hook! Hook! Hook!"
The captain watched Peter inch his way back along the plank toward the safety of the deck, relief etched in his chubby features. He can't help being pitiful, it seems, Hook thought, sighing. He hoped this fat, old Pan would find a way to offer him some small challenge. It wouldn't be good form, after all, to kill him the way he was.
He strode briskly to the end of the plank to confront his enemy a final time. "Go on, whoever or whatever you are." He sneered. "Get out of my sight. Fly, why don't you? Fly your fat carcass off my ship!"
He jumped up and down on the plank furiously, sending Peter catapulting into the air.
"But I can't!" Peter Banning wailed. "I don't know how!"
Tinkerbell flitted swiftly into view. "Come on, Peter," she urged. "You've got to! Think a happy thought!"
Peter landed uncertainly on the plank again, balanced precariously above the waves. "Now?"
"Of course, now! Think of Christmas!"
A pirate hit the end of the plank a final time. Peter lost what remained of his composure and tumbled away. Down he went, Tink yelling after him, and disappeared in a splash.
"You really can't fly?" Tink cried in despair. "Then swim, Peter! You can swim, can't you?"
"Doubtful," murmured Hook, peering down.
Peter's face could be momentarily seen beneath the surface of the water, and then it was gone.
"Terrible luck," Hook sympathized with a smile.
Tinkerbell darted toward the water and away again, rushing this way and that. No sign of Peter. When it was clear that he was gone, she burst into tears and disappeared in a flash of light. Hook yawned, growing bored. The whole bargain-making business had been a waste of time. Three days or three years, it wouldn't have made a snail's ear's worth of difference.
Then abruptly, impossibly, Peter resurfaced, cradled in the arms of three shimmering mermaids, each giving him long, deep mermaid kisses, breathing air into his lungs. One after another, they kissed him, over and over again. Then they raised his head clear of the water and sped toward the entrance to the harbor, fishtails propelling them swiftly away.
Hook watched incredulously for a moment, then rolled his eyes and blew a kiss after them. "Pan, luckiest of devils. See you in Hades!"
But before he could turn away, a fourth mermaid leaped from the waters directly in front of him, a shining, graceful woman-fish, paused nose to nose with the scourge of the seven seas, the only man the infamous Barbecue had ever feared, and spat water right in his eye.
As she dived from sight, Hook wiped the water from his face with his sleeve and glowered after her. Intentionally or not, she had put out his cigars.
The Lost Boys Found
For Peter, waterlogged and exhausted, rescue happened in a dream. He was borne on the crest of the ocean's waves for many leagues, the soft arms of the mermaids wrapped tightly about him, keeping him safe and warm. The fish-women sang to him, their voices sweet and reassuring. The stories they told were of a time and place only dimly remembered and forgotten again as soon as the words were spoken. There was a boy in the stories, a child who refused to grow up, who lived in a place where adventures were the food of life, and no day was complete without at least several. The boy was fearless; he dared anything. He lived in a world of pirates and Indians, of magical happenings, of time suspended and dreams come true. He was a boy who, Peter sensed, he had once known.
Somewhere along the way the remnants of his pirate garb disappeared and with them his immediate memory of why he had ever worn them.
His journey ended at a column of rock that lifted out of the ocean like a massive pillar, and the mermaids placed him in a giant clamshell tied to a rope that ran up through its center. The clamshell closed about Peter, and he felt himself rising, slowly, steadily, rocking gently in his cocoon. When his ascent was complete, the clamshell's lid cranked open, and he was tossed like a coin on which a wish had been made, landing with an oomph on a grassy bank.
His eyes fluttered open. The waters of a small, clear lagoon sparkled behind him. The clamshell was gone. The mermaids were gone. Their memory was all that remained, and he was already starting to wonder if he might not have imagined the whole thing.
Taking a deep breath, he staggered to his feet, water dripping from his hair onto his face, and from his clothing to the ground. He brushed at himself futilely, then lifted his gaze to look around.
His breath caught in his throat. He stood at the top of the rock column of his dream, hundreds of feet above the ocean, so far up that it seemed the clouds in the sky might pass close enough to brash his hand. The atoll stood just off the coast of the island to which he had been carried, surrounded by azure waters, white foam, and the glistening backs of waves. Mountain peaks rose from the island's spine, their tips white with new snow. Twin rainbows arced from a series of waterfalls into the sea. Far below and miles away, hunkered down within its protective cove, was the pirate town of James Hook. Farther still, where the sky and ocean met in a perfect horizontal line, the sun was a flare of gold and purple light. The afternoon was waning. Sunset approached.
Peter glanced skyward and was astonished to find not one, but three moons, one white, one peach, and the last pale rose. They shared the sky comfortably, as if they might actually belong.
And behind Peter, away from the lagoon and at the exact center of the atoll, stood the largest tree he had ever seen in his life-a great, gnarled, old forest denizen somehow removed to this rock, jutting toward the sky, its limbs stretched forth as if in supplication. It might have been a maple or an oak or a mix of each and still it would have to have been something more. It was like no tree that Peter had ever seen.
It was like something imagined in boyhood.
Or in a dream.
Nevertree. The wind whispered the name in his ear.
He took a step toward the tree, past a patch of rose-tipped yellow flowers that leaned over curiously to sniff at him. He jumped away in disbelief. The flowers sneezed. What is this? He took another tentative step, and another, moving away from the flowers. Flowers that sniff? That sneeze?