His sword—wicked and curved, sharp as a smile—slashes empty air where the boy stood just a moment before. But Pan is already in the air, spinning, a foot, then two, above the tossing deck.
“You missed again!” Pan sticks his tongue out. “Poor old Hook.”
The boy lands, dancing a nimble circle as if the boards were not slick underfoot. He waves his sword, not even trying to strike Hook, his movements all flash and show.
A child. Only a child. An infuriating one, but a mere child nonetheless. How is it that he continues to elude every member of Hook’s crew, besting them all not once, but dozens of times? Or perhaps it is a hundred by now. Or more.
The fact that he doesn’t know unsettles him. Hook swings again to slash away the question of how many times he and Pan have fought. But it continues squatting, a shadow at the corner of his eye, refusing to be vanquished. Much like Pan himself.
There are more gaps in his knowledge than just this one. Parts of his mind are shrouded; there are borders between his own memories beyond which he cannot cross. It is much like the sea bounding this island. He has a ship at his command. It stands to reason that he could simply sail away, as far and as fast as he wishes, and yet always he returns.
Light flashes from Pan’s blade, sudden and terribly bright. It strikes Hook’s eyes, as sharp as a blow. He staggers back, raising his arm to drag it across his face as Pan’s taunting voice sounds again.
“Scaredy pirate! Scaredy Captain Hook.”
Anger seethes, sudden and hot, making him careless. Hook drops his arm and slashes, an ugly sweeping motion. Sloppy, when he knows better, coming nowhere near to striking Pan. Not that it matters. Each blow could be expertly timed to slip beneath his enemy’s guard, and they still wouldn’t land. In all the dozen—hundred?—times they’ve fought, he’s never so much as scratched the boy’s skin.
Hook clenches his jaw. Damn elegance and skill. He pushes forward with abandon, hacking wildly at Pan’s guard. All he wants is to land just one blow, wear Pan down and draw a spurt of bright blood. To see Pan’s eyes widen in fear, hear his mewling cry that Hook isn’t playing fair, that he is always supposed to win.
Hook bares his teeth, not giving Pan a moment to recover as he rains blow after blow. Every strike meets Pan’s sword, or misses him by inches, but Hook gains ground. Pan’s back strikes the rail. Hook’s lips stretch in a grin; at last, finally, he has—
A wave swamps the deck, sweeping Hook’s feet from beneath him. The ship and the sky change places and he crashes to the boards, blinking saltwater from his eyes. Pan’s laughter rings loud and clear as a bell, a sound like a wetted finger dragged across the rim of a glass.
“The old captain’s gone all soggy, wet, and moldy! Look at him. He’s a drowned rat.” Pan’s crowing voice reaches every corner of the ship.
Hook sees himself through the boy’s eyes—drenched, dark curls plastered to his skin, heavy velvet and ruffled silk—absurd and utterly vain—weighing him down. He looks worse than a drowned rat. He looks an utter fool.
“Captain!” A hand reaches to grasp his arm and pull him up.
Hook pushes the man away. He will not become an object of pity on his own ship. What sort of pirate cannot defeat a simple child?
“Pan!” Hook drags himself upright.
The name hangs in the air, answered by a cock’s crow. Then all at once, the boy himself hangs in the air before him. Behind him, the sun blazes so brightly Hook can’t look at him directly; Pan is a hole, an absence, a sharp-edged silhouette pinned upon the day.
Where it raged a moment before, the sea falls to calm, the waves going eerily still so that everything seems to hold its breath and wait on what will happen next. Weariness swamps him, as sure as a wave. He’s soaked to the bone, his muscles aching from the fight, and Pan remains as fresh as a new-cut daisy.
All Hook wants is dry clothing, and smoke filling his lungs. He wants to drink until he can’t remember his own name and sleep for a week. His shoulders slump. The answer to the question he tried to push away crawls from the fog-shrouded corners of his mind to crouch before him, grinning. He has fought Pan thousands of times, countless battles, and he has lost every single one.
The deck rolls. He braces himself as the boy flies a victorious circle, nowhere and everywhere at once.
“You’ll never best me, Hook! Perhaps I’ll cut off your other hand and feed it to the beast too.”
A chill seeps through him, another memory come to join the first. Teeth and scales and terrible jaws. He remembers his death; he remembers drowning.
Blood roars in Hook’s ears. He whirls in the direction of the piping voice, bringing his blade around. But Pan’s sword is there once again, blocking his and knocking it aside. Hook’s sword clatters to the deck. The point of Pan’s blade touches one of the buttons gleaming on Hook’s velvet coat. With no effort at all, Pan could drive the blade straight through his heart.
“Do it. Do it then.” Hook speaks low, barely moving his lips, a desperate, angry wish.
The blade at least would be swift. Pan narrows his eyes.
“That’s not how it goes. You must do it right, silly old captain.” Despite the gaiety of the words, Pan’s tone is blade-bright itself, and just as sharp.
Up in the rigging and hanging from the rails, dressed in skins and smeared with mud, Pan’s band of wild boys cheers. They are a nest full of raucous birds, roosting on every part of his ship.
“I know, I shall make you walk your own plank!” Pan’s eyes glitter, all malice and glee.
Hook thinks of a geode smashed open, a hollowness studded with jagged crystalline shine. That’s what Pan’s eyes remind him of; they are nothing human.
Soft waves lap the ship. Why isn’t his crew stopping this, coming to his aid? Didn’t someone try to help him just now? Hold out a hand? But he slapped them away. He commands a crew of grown men and Pan only commands a ragged band of boys. It should be easy, they should win, but it isn’t just Hook himself—they are all wooden puppets dancing at the end of Pan’s strings.
Hook clenches his muscles and wills himself to keep still. But Pan’s will is stronger. In this place, Pan’s will is everything. Hook’s arm jerks upward, beyond his control, and he shakes his hook in the air.
“You won’t get away with this, Pan! I’ll best you next time!”
The boy laughs, delighted at the play unfolding according to his whim.
“I am. Not. Your. Toy.” Hook grinds out each word, as painful as spitting up stone, leaving his throat bloody and raw.
If Pan hears the words at all, he ignores them.
“You’re a rotten, spoiled child, smashing your dolls together until you break them.”
“No more talking now. Talking is boring.” Pan’s gaze snaps to him, delight melting to reveal something colder, crueler—an ancient being behind the face of the child.
Pan no longer flits back and forth but hangs still in the air, becalmed as the sea. His eyes give Hook the sensation of looking out over dark waters, sensing rather than seeing what lies beneath them. He feels it then, the dull awareness that has been in the back of his mind all along, the thing he’s been trying to ignore. But he cannot ignore it any longer. It will rise at any moment, all armor-plated scales and hungering jaws.
Hook remembers drowning. And he has been here a hundred thousand times before.
Fear grabs hold of him, despite his determination not to be unmanned on his own ship, made cowardly before his men. Pan shouldn’t have the satisfaction, but his breathing is no longer under control. His pulse gallops, and he’s pulled helplessly behind it.
Pan. Panic. A hand slips beneath his skin, takes hold of his heart, and its grip is iron.
His death is an immutable fact. It exists before him and behind him, a thing that has happened before and will happen again—an endless circle. He and Pan and the creature below the waves are three points of a triangle, irrevocably joined. No matter what he does in this moment, nothing will change.
The shadow of a smile, a cold and terrible one, shapes Pan’s lips. Then they purse, sounding a whistle that rises and falls, piercing and sharp, skipping across the flatness of the water like a stone loosed from a child’s hand.
Hook turns, though he doesn’t want to, his legs marching him across the deck when he would dig in his heels. He glances to the side, his crew coming into focus at last as though they’d ceased to exist until this moment when Pan needed them to witness their captain’s humiliation.
These men—how many times have they fought together? How many times has he died in front of them? His mind churns and Hook finds he cannot even dredge up a single one of their names. They should be brothers in arms, loyal men willing to die for their captain, and yet he’s certain not a one of them knows a single thing about him beyond his shouted orders. Just as he knows nothing about them.
The realization hurts more than it should. The sensation of loss washes through him. There’s something missing, someone he’s forgotten. He scans his crew with a kind of desperation this time. Rough pirates, dressed in dirt and sweat-stained clothes, grime beneath their torn and ragged nails, hands calloused from the rigging. Except for one. Hook’s gaze snags on a man standing apart from the others. The man flinches, as if startled at being seen.
There’s a skip in Hook’s thoughts, a needle missing its groove. He’s never seen this man before, doesn’t know his name any more than he knows the others. Except the feeling of loss returns, stronger this time—a phantom limb aching even though he can clearly see it isn’t there.
The man meets Hook’s gaze, and there’s something like distress in his eyes. Hook wishes he could stop walking. If he just had a moment longer. If he could just talk to the man. If only he could remember.
He’s almost to the rail now, almost to the plank. He keeps his eyes on the man, trying to hold every detail, memorize him. It feels important. The man is dressed more neatly than the others; he wears no blade. His hair is tied at the nape of his neck, and his hands, Hook startles to notice, appear soft.
They’re uncalloused—a gentleman’s hands, not a pirate’s. It’s enough to jolt him from his fear and replace it with confusion. The man’s name almost rises to his lips, but just as quickly, the name is gone.
Pan jabs the point of his sword into the small of Hook’s back and Hook’s crew falls away once again. The entire world narrows, leaving Hook and Pan alone. The sword point stops just short of piercing the heavy fabric of Hook’s coat. He lifts one foot, then the other, climbing onto the plank and peering down at the water. The waves churn now, slow and sullen; the thing beneath them continues to rise.
“Now jump!” Pan jabs his sword again, as if Hook had a choice.
His knees bend of their own accord and he leaps. He strikes the water hard, his velvet coat blooming around him, petals unfurling and immediately growing heavy, dragging him down.
He remembers drowning.
And he remembers that drowning alone is not enough for Pan.
The beast appears in a rush of silvered bubbles. Jaws close on Hook’s leg, bones shatter-snapped as the creature jerks him rapidly through the waves. It’s almost fast enough to make him lose consciousness, but not quite. Up and down lose meaning. Water rushes up his nose, burning like fire. A flash of scales winds around him. The creature is vast and he cannot see all of it at once. Couldn’t even if his eyes didn’t blur with the salt. A clawed foot here, the dead-black center of a golden eye there, a flattened snout opening deadly wide.
It looks like a crocodile, but a crocodile is only an animal. It acts on instinct. It consumes in order to survive. This beast comes to the Pan’s call. It is malignant, fired with purpose, capable of hate. And it loathes him.
A small, dispassionate part of Hook’s mind tells him crocodiles are primarily freshwater creatures, a useless scrap of knowledge rising from the ether. They prefer rivers and swamps to the ocean. The thought is so out of place, so utterly unhelpful that even as the breath is crushed from his lungs and Hook dies for the hundredth, thousandth, millionth time, he dies laughing.
* * *
“Did it get dead again?” Cold fingers poke him.
“Not it, him. This one’s the captain.”
“Captain. Map-him. Slap-him.” The sing-song nonsense words are followed by trilling laughter uncomfortably like the chuckling of sea birds.
“Captain.” The third voice is dismissive, dripping scorn. “It still drowned, didn’t it? Useless land-thing.”
Hook rolls onto his side to vomit up seawater. It burns just as badly coming up as it did going down. His chest aches, his ribs battered. He can scarcely believe that every single one of them isn’t broken. Or perhaps they are. His throat, scraped raw, tastes of blood.
“Water.” The word rasps from him.
He’s lying on something hard. Soaked clothing clings to him. He’s too heavy to rise.
“Poor captain.” He can’t tell if it’s the first voice again, or the third, or another one altogether. Either way, the words aren’t said kindly, the tone cold, just on the edge of mocking.
He opens his eyes as the rough edge of a seashell pushes against lips. A trickle of water pours into his mouth, and he swallows greedily before remembering the last time the mermaids dragged him from the waves they tried to revive him with salt water. He nearly chokes, but the water is fresh and he swallows again and again until the shell is withdrawn. He struggles to sit.
Dim light comes through the wide mouth of the cave, a silvery-gray that could speak to pre-dawn, pre-twilight, or anywhere in-between. There’s no telling how long he was drowned this time, how long it took him to return.
All around him, in shallow pools and deeper ones, mermaids lounge. There’s a faint luminosity to the water, algae blooming in the dark. One of the mermaids slaps her tail against the water, a lazy motion. The sound echoes and ripples reflect on the ceiling, creating the unsettling illusion that the cavern is the sea floor and he’s still underwater.
It takes a moment to convince himself that oxygen does indeed flow into his lungs. The mermaids watch him, silent, waiting to see what he’ll do. They remind him of gulls, placid and stupid, but vicious when there’s food at stake.
He’s heard the legends of beautiful creatures luring men to their deaths. But whatever loveliness these mermaids have is more akin to the sleek beauty of sharks, or eels. Their faces are human, but subtly wrong. Strange shadows carve their cheeks and jaws, leaving their features a little too sharp, chins a little too pointed. Their flat eyes gleam in the dark.
He tries to forget the way they watch him as he takes stock. His legs are whole, his arms where they should be. Despite the tender ache of his flesh, he doesn’t seem more than bruised. The only part he’s missing is the only lasting wound the beast has ever dealt him—his hand, replaced by a hook. When he shifts, his bones feel splintered inside his skin, but that’s only an illusion—his mind telling him what should be, rather than what is.
The mermaid in the pool nearest him draws closer, curious, and rests her arms on a lip of rock. When he looks at her, she flicks her tail, showering him with water.
“Sad Hook, Mad Hook, Bad Hook. Pretty Peter beat you again.” She laughs and the others take it up, the sound echoing through the cavern.
Even this close, he isn’t always sure which one of the mermaids is speaking at any given time. As much as they remind him of sea-birds, they also remind him of bees—a hivemind, indistinguishable to his eye. He’s never been able to tell the mermaids apart, to know whether he’s met a particular shoal before. They’re changeable, fluid like the element they swim in. Their faces don’t stay in his mind. Like those of the boys Pan leads. Like those of his crew.
“Bad, bad Hook. He doesn’t know how to beat Pretty Peter, does he?” The voice bounces from the walls, further disorienting him.
The tone is fluting, musical, but also eerie. The mermaids dragged him from the water, but if their mood changes and they grow bored, the lot of them could easily tear him apart.
“It doesn’t know anything at all.” Another voice, or the same, scoffs. “Stupid pirate. It doesn’t know the stories. It doesn’t know Pretty Peter’s secret.”
A flash of teeth and eyes that remind him for a moment of Pan’s. Otherworldly. Unreal.
“What secret?” Hook fixes his attention on the mermaid in front of him, the closest, the one he can see most clearly. The others are mere shadows in their pools and on the stone that resembles hardened melted wax. But she isn’t the one to answer him, or at least he never sees her lips move.
“Ooh. Buried long ago. Would you listen if we told, scold, bold? No. Mermaids are lowly creatures. Like birds squawking, yes?”
He keeps his gaze fixed on the mermaid in front of him in case she is the one talking. She tilts her head to the side, her gaze canny, unnerving. Can they read each other’s minds? Can they read his as well?
“Tell me your story. I’ll listen.” Something prickles at the back of his skull—a memory from the shrouded corner of his brain? Has he asked for this story before? More laugher flutters around the cave.
“A secret!” a voice pipes up and others crowd to follow it, spilling one over the other, blurring together.
The mermaids forget their intention to play keep-away with their knowledge, eager to prove what they know and he does not.
“A treasure.”
“A knife.”
“A door.”
The words overlap, and he struggles to pick them apart. The tickling sensation of almost-memory returns. Once again there’s something he’s forgotten. Something he wanted to forget; he feels the shape of it; it feels like hope sliding through his hands, too much to bear.
“A way out.”
The words are like fire in his veins. He lunges for the mermaid nearest him, wanting to grab her, shake her, make her speak sense. A flick of her tail carries her beyond his reach, his hand and his hook catching nothing.
“A knife.”
“To cut between worlds.”
“Old magic.”
“Oldest. Coldest. Boldest.”
“Mad magic. Bad magic.”
“Bad Hook, Sad Hook.”
“Mad, madder, maddest.”
“Only the maddest can use the knife. Only the baddest.”
The words tumble and bounce, striking him like bruising stones. His blood thumps in rhythm with them. Maybe the mermaids are only taunting him. Can their chattering be believed? He might as well listen to the shrieking of the seabirds. Yet hope flutters, a terrible and dangerous thing when he tried to cut itself out of him long ago. When he tried to dull it with drink and smoke. He has heard this tale before, and he made himself forget. Because he was afraid.
“More door much gore,” one of the mermaids sings.
Door—with the word repeated, he latches onto it. A knife. A door. A blade for cutting between worlds? Could Pan have hidden a secret way to leave Neverland somewhere on the island? Or is the secret older than the boy? Just because the mermaids called it his doesn’t mean Pan knows about it at all.
The hope in him flares bright and at the same time leaves him queasy. What is there beyond the world? He’s sailed to the horizon before. And always the sea spins him back around and he finds himself once more on Pan’s island. There’s no other place, has never been. Only this one. Only the endless battle, death after death, drowning after drowning.
The mermaid in the pool closest to him drifts in a lazy circle.
“Where is this knife? How do I find it?” He hears and hates the eagerness in his voice, the raw need.
“Knife, knife, knife.” She makes the word into a song. “Life wife strife. The drowned captain doesn’t know!”
She flips onto her back, her expression dreamy, mouth fixed in a vapid smile. She’s growing bored. They all are. If he doesn’t get the story now they’re likely to forget, if they ever knew.
He imagines a fishhook sunk into the mermaid’s cheek, tearing her smile wide. A filleting knife plunged into her gut, opening her from tail to sternum.
If he lets himself get sloppy, lets his anger show, he has no chance against them. He must be the blade forged in the fire, and not the fire itself—honed and useful. He waits for his moment, letting the mermaid pass by him several times without moving, letting her grow complacent.
The next time she strays close, he lashes out with his flesh and blood hand, catching her and hauling her from her pool. Her eyes widen, mouth opening and closing like a landed fish in truth.
“Tell me.” He pulls her close; her breath smells of seaweed and oysters slurped raw, rank and cold.
Gasps, splashes, a piping of voices without words. The other mermaids flee, leaving their sister alone. Cowards. He keeps his focus on the one in his grip. A full-grown mermaid could tear him apart, but this one is too stunned. Or too young and stupid to know a powerful motion of her tail could drag him into the water and pulverize him. A snap of her jaws could tear out his throat.
Her eyes shine, the light in them threatening to spill over as tears, but she doesn’t fight back. Her passivity makes him loathe her all the more.
“The knife. Tell me.”
“Away, away! Far across the island.” The words emerge high, ending on a squeak. She tries to twist out of his grip, but he doesn’t let go.
Pan made him a villain, the most fearsome pirate that ever was. Not powerful enough to best Pan himself, of course, but terrible enough to destroy everything and anything else.
“A hole. A pool crying out into the sea.” Her words tumble, fast and panicked.
“What does that mean? Talk sense.” He shakes her hard enough that her teeth click together.
“Hurting.” She protests, pulling weakly against him. “Tears running out into the sea.”
She wipes at her own cheeks, wet and salt-tracked. He can’t tell if she’s expecting mercy or trying to explain. A hole? Running tears? Does she mean a stream? A cave with a stream running out into the sea?
Even though she’s babbling nonsense, he’s certain she isn’t lying. He is Neverland’s monster and her fear of him is complete. Hate curdles from his anger, sour and thick. The mermaid disgusts him—a creature as powerful as she shouldn’t cower before him. She could tear his throat out with a single snap of her jaws and yet she whimpers and shivers in his grip.
And she has nothing useful left to tell him anymore.
Hunger rises in him, called by her fear. All his forgetting, all his dying, all his loss—it’s a void roaring to be filled. The gleaming point of his hook reflects in the wideness of the mermaid’s eyes. He’s barely aware of raising it before he brings it slashing down, burying the point in the mermaid’s eye.
Hook opens his hand. The mermaid sinks, one dead eye fixed on him, the other a hole trailing a ribbon of blood. He watches until she vanishes from sight, then rocks back onto his heels. A cavern with a stream running out to the sea on the other side of the island. Has he seen such a thing before? Did he go looking and fail to find it, or did he give up without even trying?
A magic blade sounds like something out of a children’s tale, impossible and ridiculous. But this is a world made by a child, or something that looks like a child at least, so why shouldn’t there be such a blade? Why shouldn’t a knife be a door, and why shouldn’t he use it to step through?
The mermaid is no longer visible, the water still. He wonders if, like him, she will return and remember dying. He hopes she will. Why should he suffer alone?
He wipes the blood from his hook onto his coat and stands. He won’t allow himself to forget this time. He won’t turn back. And if the knife turns out to be only a useless, chattered tale, he will return here and slaughter every last mermaid, one by one.