Hook & Jill Read online

  Therefore it was Peter’s idea, not Wendy’s, to hunt today. And that afternoon in the hideout he announced, “Take up your bows and knives, boys, the forest is too full of beasts. We must thin them out.”

  Knowing his enthusiasm for the hunt, Wendy had qualms about the suggestion. She remembered the fates of other creatures at Peter’s hands. But there was need for the excursion on several levels and, condescending, Peter yielded to her request that he slay only beasts this outing, “But if trouble arises, or even Indians or pirates, I’ll not stay my hand!” He was never more happy than when hunting.

  “I’ll come along, then, and keep a lookout for trouble.” Wendy vaguely hoped to warn trouble to keep low before Peter could have at it.

  But all the children, excepting Peter, harbored the terror of pirates that Wendy’s stories inspired. Even those boys who’d killed a pirate or two in their time wondered now how they’d done it. The children had been rummaging for weapons, but at the mention of trouble, they hesitated. Beasts were the least of their worries.

  “Shall we hunt waterfowl today?” asked John. All the boys knew Peter slew birds in the marsh only as a pretext for spying on the pirate ship. On more than one occasion, Peter had changed quarry in mid-hunt, aiming for felons over feathers. His band was loyal, but leery. John, having at one time lived among the civilized, had developed a different stripe of courage from the rest. He dared to bluff. “Near Neverbay?”

  “No, we’ll stalk big game in the underbrush. Wendy needs fresh skins.”

  Silence fluttered down like the last leaf.

  “A large family does go through them,” Wendy affirmed.

  The boys looked up, down, and sideways. Constructing a tepee had seemed such a good idea at the time. But because of avenging arrows, Wendy’s precautions forbade the family to fly over the Indian village, and the children had no recent image of a tepee on which to draw. They had, however, discovered that animal skins made a cozy tent when you lashed them together and suspended them from the bedposts.

  It was the campfire beneath the tent, on the bed, that went all wrong. The stench still hung about, which was in fact the real reason for vacating their home today. Vacating was also in fact Wendy’s idea before it was Peter’s. Peter liked the smell of burnt fur. It reminded him of burning and pillaging. It reminded Wendy never again to slack her responsibilities and leave the children alone. For very different reasons, both Peter and Wendy determined the children should examine the Indian village next time the natives moved up to their mountain camp.

  Opting for discretion, those children offered no comment. With the energy of acquitted suspects, Peter’s boys fell to smearing their faces with mud for camouflage— an unnecessary precaution for those who had been smoked with the skins— and up the tree shaft the family went, away through the forest and even farther up into the treetops, with Peter in the lead sending parrots shuddering off, appropriating an eyrie among the leaves from which to spy out their prey.

  Wendy always seized an opportunity to fly, but the children climbed this time and became tangled between quivers, bows and branches, and for several minutes their quarry, which were no doubt anxious to begin the charge, refused to come close to the snapping, dragging, and rustling. It wasn’t the nature of the big game on the Island to tolerate such noise, even from easy targets. The beasts might do better, all things considered, to engage in the Indians’ hunt, now in dependable progress on the other side of the Island. One could count on the natives to observe tradition.

  Once they won freedom from the foliage, the children chattered like the monkey families scampering deep in the forest, whence these primates could be heard screeching and screaming in delight. Thinking themselves above danger, the monkeys audibly defied it, prompting Wendy to wonder if such innocence, whether in boys or in beasts, could long survive this wilderness. The boys, at least, seemed bit by bit to learn caution.

  The family settled in, Wendy and Peter screening themselves in the shade of branches, and the others perching above them or nestling in trees on either side. Tinker Bell appeared, flying down from a parrot nest she’d been trying on, and settled on Peter’s shoulder. Wendy sent her a suspicious look. Peter picked off a few orange feathers and addressed his fairy sternly. “You can stay, Tink, but only if you’re quiet.”

  “Quiet and at a safe distance from me.” Wendy narrowed her eyes, leaving it to her rival to work out the ambiguity.

  “And see that you don’t go near the beasts, Tink. I don’t want any loose fairy dust on them.”

  Wendy turned to him in surprise. “Why, Peter? What harm can it do?”

  The Lost Boys caught Peter’s meaning and regarded Tinker Bell with anxious eyes. They had never thought of this scenario, and their expressions transformed as it revealed itself to them in horrifying detail. They were too well acquainted with the fairy to believe she wasn’t capable of it, or— to put it charitably— unthinking enough in her blue rages.

  “You know what fairy dust can do. It made you fly.”

  “But how can it hurt the animals?”

  “Not the animals, Wendy. Us. The animals could chase up here after us, if they could fly.”

  She didn’t want to believe it. “But they’d have to think pleasant thoughts, too!”

  “I can’t think of anything more pleasant to a beast than to fly up here and tear into us, can you?”

  Eyes widening, Wendy looked again at Tinker Bell. “Oh.” A monkey shrieked in the thick of the wood somewhere behind her. Tink crossed her arms, sat back on Peter’s shoulder and smirked. Her movement shot off a few of the sparks that a moment ago seemed so innocuous, and something uncomfortable prickled inside Wendy. She kept her voice slow and even. “I think, Peter, it would be safer for the children if Tinker Bell would please go home.”

  Careless once more, Peter shrugged Tinker Bell off. “Go on, Tink, leave us to hunt.”

  Tinker Bell beat her wings and recovered herself. She hovered for a time, glaring her malevolence, first at Peter, but especially at the Wendy. The fronds enclosing the girl stirred in the breeze as she returned the fairy’s stare. Tink darted off to the forest, chiming madly, but Wendy’s prickly feeling did not go with her.

  The boys, at least, were happier at her departure. They began once again to look forward to the adventure ahead. Nibs and Curly, just above Peter, were debating the anatomy of the beasts about to be slain. Curly asked Wendy if they might wish on the wishbone. “You said your mother let you pull one in the old life. I’d wish to see London.”

  Nibs’ wiry frame sat the branches easily, like a sailor in the rigging. “I’d wish for a sword, to fight pirates.” His swarthy face lit with a grin as he threw Tootles a salute. “And boots, of course.” Wendy assured them that the hunt wasn’t likely to produce any wishbones.

  Remembering an island chieftain in one of Wendy’s stories, John and Michael hankered after boar’s tusk bracelets. Peter assured them that wild boars inhabited the far side of the Island, near the Indian camp. “We’re more likely to shoot tigers here than boars.” Wendy was certain the plural of boar was boar, but didn’t bother to correct him.

  Slightly’s branch bounced as he mimed impaling a boar on an Indian spear. “Let’s go there tomorrow. We could make a pact with the Indians to declare peace while we hunt together. Then we could celebrate at their village, feasting and dancing around the fire for three days and nights!”

  Excited by any new idea, the Twins swayed on limp and limper limbs. Their precarious roost didn’t bother them. They had already discussed the limitations of this tree and designed a structure to support a hunting blind. “We’ll have to look bold to impress the Indians. Can we grab a tiger’s tail like Red-Handed Jill?”

  “Who?” asked Peter with airy nonchalance, and Wendy scowled at him before replying.

  “Of course you may, Twins. I’ve brought plenty of bandages and medicine for the wounded.”

  “I’ll cut you a tiger-tail belt, Wendy, since you like the story so
much,” Peter said, proving his perfidy. He knew perfectly well who Jill was. But he looked so brave and casual, Wendy felt her heart swell, and she had to smile.

  All this time the beasts put off their entrance. By now they were probably tapping their claws and chafing as the boys whooped their approval of Peter’s or Wendy’s tiger-tail idea. Wendy’s eyes shone as she thought of it, for once forgetting the creatures’ proximity.

  She would feel so fierce and wild sporting a tiger belt. How gallant Peter was to understand what she wanted and promise it to her, in spite of his own distaste for the story. Whatever his feelings for romance, his pledge was a token of his care for her. And one day soon, he might show it again and ask to hear the adventures Wendy itched to invent for Jill. As if picking up the thread of her thoughts, Tootles carried her hopes further. He ribbed his captain, exclaiming, “Peter, you do respect lady pirates after all!”

  “No, I never will. Pirates of any kind are villains. But I respect Wendy. She’s our mother.”

  With the sensation that her insides were empty, Wendy looked out at the forest, staring blankly. The belt would be nice, anyway.

  As ever, Curly was a gentleman. Considering his old belt and the ragged shirt Wendy had mended many times, he asked, “How do boys in London dress to fight pirates? I want to look proper if I go there some day.”

  Peter tossed his head, dismissive. “London is no place for boys. Since I ran away from home, I only go there when I need something I can’t find here.” He flashed his smile at Wendy and immediately she felt the presence of her heart again. It always gave her trouble when he looked at her that way.

  “Peter?” John asked, “You needed a mother when you came to our window. Have you ever gone back to your house to see your other mother?”

  Peter’s expression waxed grave, as it always did when he considered grown-ups. “Yes. Once. I’ll never go back there any more.” The boys pricked up their ears. They sensed a story coming.

  Touched again, Wendy asked gently, “Why, Peter? Did she try to make you stay and become a man?”

  “No.” Peter’s eyes spilled bitterness.

  “What then?”

  The boys were fascinated now. They hung on Peter’s words as steadfastly as they hung in the trees. He rarely hesitated to boast of his adventures. This one must have been dramatic.

  “It was a long time ago. I’d been away just long enough to want to go back. Not to stay, really, but for an adventure. And when I found the house, I remembered my mother used to sing to me. I wanted to hear her sing.”

  Michael interrupted, “Did she tell you stories, too, Peter?”

  “She told me lots of things I didn’t think were true. Were the untrue things stories, Wendy?”

  Wendy didn’t know how she knew. “Not exactly, Peter. Mothers sometimes tell us what they want us to believe. To keep us happy.”

  “She must not have wanted to keep me at all, once I’d gone.”

  “What happened?”

  “When I went back to my window, it was locked.”

  Michael and John inhaled. The Lost Boys rolled their eyes at each other, and Wendy’s heart bled.

  “And it was fitted with iron bars.”

  “No!”

  Peter resisted going on, but seeing the scandalized looks on their faces, he made a show of tapping his courage. Persevering, he tossed them another morsel. “But that’s not the worst.”

  Curly sniffed, pulling a bedraggled kerchief from his neck. “What could be worse?”

  “My mother had forgotten me!”

  A mother herself, Wendy gasped in disbelief. “How could you think that?”

  Peter lifted his chin, fixing her with his green gaze. “Because I saw her. I saw her in my room.”

  Wendy’s spine stiffened. “Then she hadn’t forgotten. She was waiting for you.”

  In a gesture worthy of the best London theatre, Peter shook his head. “No. She was sitting by my bed. Singing.”

  “But that proves—”

  “To a new baby boy!”

  The silence of the family’s shock rebounded through the wood. The children dangled, speechless. It was the ultimate insult to run away from home and be replaced. One imagined, at the very least, that one was missed, and every boy in those trees hoped his absence had ruined the lives he left behind. If they hadn’t wanted to be noticed, they would have stayed at home. The band of boys subsided into stillness while they indulged in the horror of Peter’s tale, but having soaked up the effect of his story, Peter forgot it.

  All quiet.

  At last the forest fauna came to life. Roaring reached the children’s ears, halfhearted at first, petulant… then, as the dinner hour advanced, swelling to the full fury of hunger. The leaves surrounding the children quaked as bows nocked arrows. Danger imminent, all ears were alert, all eyes expectant, hardly blinking. Tiny mudslides dribbled from the camouflage on their cheeks to plop on the ground below. Then, the soft sound of panting, almost a purring.

  What was coming? Something more than a story. Something wild.

  Peter’s face was set, intense. He hung over his branch, muscles as taut as his bowstring, his arrow poised.

  Wendy hoped the something was nothing. At the same time she hoped it was something fierce and feral. Something not even Peter could tame. She hoped it was Red-Handed Jill, brandishing her whip. She hoped it wasn’t Red-Handed Jill because Peter might kill her. She shivered and then she stopped hoping because something had arrived.

  Peter’s arrow hissed and sang. Darts from the boys’ bows whistled after it but bounced to a stop, unnecessary. Peter threw back his head and let out a mighty crow, his victory shaped into sound. It seemed to Wendy that his voice was his arrow, and it pierced her heart. Her hand flew to her breast and she cried out. “Oh! Oh, no!” The something died instantly. With only one shot, the hunter prevailed, in the space of a heartbeat.

  Jubilant, the children loosed themselves from the trees and dropped in bursts to the forest floor. Wendy sought to descend also, but found she couldn’t fly. Without focusing, she climbed down, fingers seeking purchase branch by branch, until her feet touched the ground and led her to the death scene. Rubbing together, her palms tried to rid themselves of grit.

  “It’s a lion! A lion!” The boys danced around it. Wendy pushed through them and looked down. Her heart bled again at the sight— the powerful king of the forest, with a golden mane flowing freely to the earth. Its mouth gaped open, exposing its tongue and its deep teeth. In its silence, it spoke to Wendy.

  She choked on her words. “It looks so proud, even though it’s dead.” She looked to Peter.

  His countenance glowed with triumph while the boys shouted and cavorted around him. The image of pride, Peter flung his arm toward his kill. “Look, Wendy, I’ve made the forest safer for you.”

  She stared at the animal again. She didn’t feel safer. Somehow the death of this splendid thing seemed only to bring danger closer. “It never really threatened us.…” But some other kind of beast crouched in Wendy’s memory, a shadow looming over her from the light of Peter’s hearth fire. It danced in a macabre rite, clutching an arrow for a trophy, and celebrating the death of a man. She put out her arms to hush the children and knelt down next to that ghastly shadow’s most recent prey.

  Peter tugged on its fur. “He’ll make a nice blanket, now I’ve tamed him.”

  Wendy’s face tensed in consternation. She had to stroke its mane, to caress its coat. It was warm and silky, contradicting the claws that fringed its footpads. Unable to comprehend its fate, she shook her head. “But it’s huge, fully grown.”

  “The grown-up ones are the most dangerous, Wendy. The only law they understand is the law of the jungle.”

  “The forest animals can’t obey rules, Peter!”

  “Of course not. They’re wild.” He shrugged. “They have to be slain.”

  She dragged her gaze from Peter to the carcass and its equal horror. When she could speak again, she wondered, �
�How did you bring down such a magnificent creature so easily?”

  Peter stooped over his victim, placed a foot on its shoulder, and yanked the arrow free. Wendy shuddered at the drag of it. Dark liquid began flowing from the wound.

  “I know where to aim! The heart is the weakest part, even in the meanest of creatures.”

  Wendy buried her fingers in the fur of the animal, gloriously unlawful— and dead at Peter’s feet. Its blood marked his hands, and, although it couldn’t be seen, its blood stained her hands, as well. She didn’t look at them, and she didn’t know how she knew… she wasn’t innocent.

  Watching the wind ripple through the mane, Wendy realized Peter’s words were true. The heart was the weakest part. Because she still felt his arrow, driven into her own. She recognized the truth. She admitted it. And in her afflicted heart, she still believed.

  Chapter 8

  Harvest at the Fairy Glade

  Tinker Bell was no innocent. She was versed in forest lore. She knew the warning signs. She should have heeded them.

  But her small heart was breaking, and she fled from it. Tink streaked through the forest, away from her beloved Peter and oblivious to where she was going. The Wendy creature was taking Tink’s place in Peter’s world, and the world was gall to her. This Island was her universe, and there was no place on it that didn’t remind her of him. She could settle nowhere.

  Her thoughts ran rampant, as confused as her flight, and her aura burned angrily. Peter had brought the Wendy here on a whim, just a whim. He hadn’t cared about the girl, he wanted to hear stories. He’d heard lots of stories now. Why was she still here? And the Wendy thought she was a queen, she ruled at the hideout, Peter commanded all the band to obey her. Adventures weren’t risky and fun anymore, their mother ordered them to be careful! And every time the Wendy was careful about something, she got bigger. About this notion, Tink wasn’t confused at all.

  The Wendy wanted to grow up. She was growing up. Peter was one of the things the Wendy was careful about. With the clarity of air, Tink could see that the big girl wanted Peter to grow up, too!