Wendy Darling isn’t a child anymore. The fact shouldn’t surprise him—children grow up in this world, after all. But in his mind, she is frozen as he last saw her, a young girl trailing after Pan. She doesn’t belong to this world; she belongs to Neverland.
James watches Wendy Darling, the woman, pelt away from him. Not running from him this time, but running toward a child of her own. Should he find it strange that even with strands of gray in her hair and lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes, he knew her instantly and she knew him?
No. If some part of her still belongs to Neverland, so does a part of him.
Stay. Stay here with me.
Against the day’s cold, Samuel’s hands are suddenly on his, flesh and blood and wood and flesh again. Dizziness sweeps him, and James leans his weight onto his cane until it passes. Samuel’s voice, his ghost, has never come to him outside of their flat before. His worlds, all of them, bleed together, disorienting him.
James blinks. The world resolves back into the gray London street, the damp, clumpy snow falling from the sky. Did it ever snow in Neverland? He shakes his head to chase the thought away. A melting trickle of icy water slips beneath his collar, a finger traced down his spine.
He wishes for Samuel’s warmth again, regrets the loss of his ghost. He shouldn’t have banished him. He needs him here, now. The tug of Neverland is stronger than ever. Wendy Darling reappearing here in this world—it must be connected. Did she feel the door open too? Did she feel the beast slip through?
Last night, he might have dismissed the beast and the door as an illusion, but now he’s certain.
And if the door is real, why shouldn’t he return? If he’s meant to stay in London, he needs Samuel to ground him, to give him some rationale for why he shouldn’t run off seeking his ghost, the remains of him in Neverland. Because if the door can open one way, if the beast could step through, then couldn’t James himself cross back as well? And find Samuel waiting on the other side.
The thought freezes the breath in his lungs more effectively than the winter air.
The temptation pulls at him, stronger than the desire for smoke or drink. Samuel had always been his anchor, reeling James back when he drifted too far, when he let smoke carry him to the point of unraveling in a desperate attempt to quell his pain. He’d promised Samuel, again and again, that he’d be careful. And again and again, he’d broken that promise. Here, now, everything still hurts, and he no longer has Samuel, his compass, to find his way home.
“Why should I stay when you’re gone?” He snaps the words aloud into the cold, puffs of breath hanging like ghosts in the air.
A young couple passing close to him startles. The man casts James a wary glance, pulling the woman at his side closer and steering her away.
He ignores them. Mad Hook. Bad Hook. Let them think him a crazy old man. What does he care? His leg aches, not just with the cold. He feels the buried fragments of a blade shattered long ago, lodged beneath his skin. Shrapnel. They shift, magnetized pieces tugging him back to where he promised never to go.
Gripping the head of his cane, he walks deliberately against the ache with no destination in mind. He can’t remember why he even left the flat—he does so rarely these days. Something pulled at him, demanded he be here at this precise moment to meet a ghost from his past made real.
He can no longer see Wendy Darling on the street ahead. But he’s certain now that they’ve found each other once, he’ll see her again. It strikes him—presumably she’s been in London this entire time, right under his nose, but they’d never encountered each other. Not until today. There must be a purpose to it. Did Pan ever give Wendy Darling the secret of his hunting beast? Could she have called it here, or better yet, could she call it off if it attacks again?
A faint memory tugs at him—the pale oval of a face surrounded by coppery curls, mouth startled-wide, peering over the rail of a ship—his ship—as he sank into the beast’s jaws.
She stood at Pan’s side and watched him die. She did nothing to stop it.
James stops suddenly, heedless of the people behind him. The old sensation is there—a sixth sense, reawakened. The swirling snow erasing the street might as well be the surface of the ocean. If he concentrates, he can feel the beast moving, tracking him through London. Tick, tick, tick. Claws clicking over the deck of his ship, claws clicking over the frozen streets.
He glances back and he can almost see it—there, a blunted snout vanishing between two men bundled in their coats, hurrying with their heads down against the wind. The wind. It’s too purposeful the way it moves. The clustering snowflakes suggest scales. Teeth. The bite in the air isn’t just the cold.
He needs to get away. He needs to hide.
The frozen breath feels jagged in his lungs, but he moves as quickly as his leg will allow. The point of his cane stabs at the slush, his shoulder knocking aside the bodies around him. Someone shouts after him, but he doesn’t slow, panic driving him forward. A sharp turn and he barrels through the nearest doorway, finding the warmth and light of a pub on the other side.
Samuel’s warning rings in the back of his head again, but James pushes it away. He very much needs a drink right now. And besides, the bitter thought strikes him, hasn’t the damage already been done?
He imagines Samuel’s disappointed expression. Disappointed, but not surprised. They’d both known James’s weaknesses. Samuel had understood, hadn’t he? And at the very least, he’d forgiven James, and so, perhaps, his ghost can forgive him now again.
James knocks snow from the worn leather of his boots. As he moves toward the bar, there’s a hush like the sea, blood ringing like waves in his head. He hasn’t touched the pipe today—or has he? But even without the smoke in his lungs, he feels time coming unmoored. It takes him two tries to climb into a seat at the end of the bar. He is split down the middle. His bones are hollow, salt crystals eroded by the sea.
There was something… Something he was afraid of, wasn’t there? A reason he ran to hide here. But when he tries to hold on to it, it slips away from him.
“Brandy.” The word slurs in his mouth, but the man behind the bar doesn’t seem to notice, or doesn’t seem to care as James puts a crumpled note down between them.
When the glass arrives, James can barely see it. It moves, like a bird darting away from his hand. His fingers miss entirely. On the second attempt, he gets the glass to his mouth, and drinks quickly before the entire thing vanishes. Some of the liquid spills, dribbling down his chin, but the rest burns all the way down.
Hook closes his eyes. No. Not Hook. James. But even in his thoughts, the name is suddenly ill-fitting, like his coat that pulls too tight across his shoulders, the boots that constrict his feet. The room sways around him like the deck of a ship. He leans his head against the wall beside him.
Samuel, I’m sorry.
Then the wall isn’t there, or perhaps he isn’t there, and he’s falling.
THE NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN
AND NEVERLAND – BEFORE
Waves roll over the deck, wind battering the ship and pushing it away from the coast. They’re so close he can almost smell home, but he fears they’ll never make it. He imagines the hull split, spilling its treasures of sugar, molasses, fruit, and wood from the West Indies into the inky deep.
He’d promised Anna their fortune when he left. A dowry for her, if she wanted it, a good life safe from the workhouse. She’d kissed his cheek at the dock and bid him come home safe with worry in her eyes. He’d promised he would. If his bones end with their cargo on the ocean floor, how long until someone brings her word? At least with no body to bury, she’ll be spared the cost of his funeral.
The thought is bitter between his teeth, clenched against the wind. Salt-spray drenches him, the water so impatient to drown him it can’t resist leaping onto the deck.
Another swell strikes them broadsides. The frantic and useless shouts of the crew are lost in the wind, as the ship lifts, caught and carried to the crest, tilted at an angle that sends him sliding and scrabbling for purchase. The ship finds the pinnacle and hangs above the trough between waves that will surely shatter them. Somewhere in the chaos, someone shrieks a prayer, then time halts.
James blinks. Fetched up against the rail he stares straight down into an abyss that is improbably deep. A stray memory, a story Anna told him when they were children about Charybdis, the monstrous whirlpool set to destroy Odysseus’s ship. The thing in the water beneath the ship now is exactly how James pictured that monstrous whirlpool so long ago.
A mouth. Fanged. Ringed in teeth receding into an endless throat of waves. Hunger, given form, and inexorably dragging them down.
He shouts, an incoherent and wordless thing, and the sound echoes back to him in a sudden stillness, as if the storm vanished. He cannot turn his head to see the rest of the ship, the rest of the crew. There is only this—him clinging to the rail and the mouth in the waves.
It must be a hallucination, an illusion created by the foam. But then how to explain the stars shining in the depths of the mouth, as if a sky existed below the bottom of the world? How to explain the sense of something pulling him downward, not just gravity, but a sense of want? It makes no sense. It—
Crack. The terrible sound of the rail giving way, or a lightning strike splitting the ship in two, or both. Time rushes forward all at once, and James spins, no longer holding on to anything at all. Breath leaves his lungs as the water slams into him. His head rings, and stars burst behind his eyes.
He should be shattered. He should be drowning, but somehow the world is blue and green and black all around him. Salt that might be the ocean or his own blood fills his mouth. Waves close above his head, but somehow, the stars remain, screaming past, as he drowns-and-does-not-drown. He tumbles through the air. He is falling, and it is a very, very long way down.
He wakes to pain with the vague knowledge he shouldn’t be waking at all. He is dead, surely. Drowned, or mercifully broken by the waves before his air had a chance to run out. He shouldn’t feel anything, yet there is a persistent sensation, like a stick, sharp at one end, repeatedly driven into his side.
“Lay off!” Or those are the words he means to say.
What comes out is a more garbled sound, turning to a wracking cough.
He rolls onto his side just in time not to choke, spitting seawater and bile onto the sand. Grit meets his palms as he braces himself to keep from falling face first into his own sick. He is hollowed out, feverish, and a trembling shakes him from head to toe.
“Have you been kilt, then? Was it the Injuns or the mermaids?” The voice is high and piping, a child’s voice, the words nonsensical.
He doesn’t have the strength to stand, flopping instead onto his back like a landed fish. The light is very bright. He closes his eyes, trying to drift away from everything, but the jabbing resumes.
“You’re not doing it right. You’re a pirate. That means we fight. Yaah!” On the last word, the sharpened point of the stick drives into his side again, hard enough to draw blood.
James’s eyes fly open on a strangled shout and he sits up. At the motion, his stomach heaves again, but there’s nothing to bring up. Grit behind his eyes, his head thudding and spinning, and the relentless sunlight knifing at him. Not dead, but it’s all enough to make him wish he were.
“Leave me alone.” The words come out slurred, his tongue swollen with thirst.
He squints, trying to focus, trying to make sense of his surroundings. The storm, the shipwreck. They were a week out from home. Could he have washed ashore? But the sky over London was never this blue, and there’s nowhere that he knows of in all of England with sand so soft and white.
“You’re awfully boring.” Scorn marks the boy’s voice.
The collection of shadows and angles crouched before him resolves into a child. The boy rocks on his heels, feet bare, his knees sticking up sharply to either side of him, arms dangling loose between his legs. Dirt streaks his skin, deliberately patterned on his cheeks to accentuate their sharpness. His hair, spiked wildly, burns like a copper pot over a flame.
The boy’s chest is bare as well. He’s scarcely clothed at all except for whatever wraps his waist. James can’t quite make it out. It shifts—now leaves, now the hide of an animal. Briefly, it seems the boy’s legs are an animal’s, the joints turned the wrong way, feet replaced by cloven hooves.
Perhaps he is dead after all. This is Hell, and the boy is a demon sent to torment him. Anna told him stories from the Bible as well as Greek mythology. He’d never taken either for truth, but now he wonders. The child might be a satyr, a faun, a minion of the Devil. The wild tufts of his hair do almost look like curling horns.
A glance past the boy reveals no sign of parents, no sign of any other living beings at all.
“You’re not a very good pirate.” The boy sounds impatient and irritated now.
Anger begins to override the thirst, the hunger, the pain. Who is this child, left on his own to torment a half-drowned man? Why are there no adults to watch over him? No one to fetch help?
“I’m not a pirate.” The words are clearer this time. “I’m—”
And he stops. There is a void where there should be…something. Information about himself. The name of the ship he came from, the shipping company, the name of his captain. But all he finds is ragged absence, like a plucked tooth. He can tongue the edges, but there is nothing to be gleaned.
“Course you’re a pirate. You’re not an Injun and you’re not a mermaid. What else would you be?” There’s such certainty to the boy’s voice that for a moment, James almost believes him.
Yes. Of course he’s a pirate. What else would he be?
He squints at the child. There’s a canniness to his expression, a brightness to his eyes. The way his mouth lifts makes his face look even sharper. It’s sly, and despite the bright sun drawing sweat from James’s skin beneath his clothes, the boy casts no shadow at all.
“In fact…” The boy leans forward, and there’s the suggestion of hunger in his expression; it’s unnatural, like the moon rising in the dark wells surrounded by irises that are suddenly no color James can name. “I think you must be their captain.”
The way he says it, punctuated by a sharp-toothed grin, sounds like a judge pronouncing a sentence on a doomed man. The boy hasn’t moved, but he seems closer, the space folded between them. There’s a green scent to the child, an animal scent—James can think of no better way to describe it. Musk and wild and earth, as if the child sprouted from a seed the way a tree would grow.
James glances to the side, wondering if his legs would hold him if he tried to stand, wondering if he could run. A border of trees stands in dark contrast to the brightness of the shore. When he twists around to look behind him, there, just beyond the point of land where the island—and he is certain somehow that it is an island—curves away from view, is a ship. Black-sailed, its belly massive, guns bristling from its ports, its rails and masthead elaborately carved.
He’s never seen the like, and yet… And yet, he knows the ship. He knows how its deck will roll beneath his feet, the precise snap of its sails, the way each board and rope will sing in a storm. He belongs to the ship, and it belongs to him.
He looks back to the boy, pulse jagged now. Something has changed. Something is very wrong. The boy’s smile is a sickle-cut in his face, the smell of him even stronger now.
James pushes his heels into the sand, trying to back away, trying to stand. But there isn’t enough strength in him, and there’s something compelling about the child as well. The boy sways in his crouch, a hypnotic motion, and James can no longer look away.
“Yes,” the boy says, and the single word twists, a musical tone going on and on like a flute, rising and falling.
It dulls the edge of his fear, dulls everything.
“You’re the pirate captain, and that’s your ship.”
“What—” He swallows, his throat making a dry clicking sound, then tries again. “What about the crew?”
Because how could the ship be there, anchored off the point of the shore if no one sailed it there? The ship must have a crew. And one of them could save him. He can almost see them. Feel them moving around him on the deck, jumping to his command. He has been there before. Or will be there? Has always been?
There’s a shifting sensation, like the sand running out beneath him, pulling him down. Only nothing moves. It’s something far more subtle and fundamental shifting. Time. Place. Truth.
His heart beats, a painful drum, but he can’t express his fear in any meaningful way. He can only stare at the boy with his bright eyes and terrible smile.
“Oh, there were pirates before, but I didn’t like them. Your pirates will be much better.” Airy, confident, tone shifting even as the boy shifts, as everything shifts, a new truth wrapping itself around him.
The ship changes. James changes. Bones twist beneath his skin, snapping and taking on new forms. His shoulders broaden, his feet lengthen. Even his hair feels thicker, heavier on his scalp, and a new beard roughs his cheeks where a moment before he’s certain he was clean-shaven.
In his mind, there’s a scrambling, a desperation to hold on to something, but there’s nothing to hold. Where was he before now? How did he come to be here? What is his name?
“You’ll need a sword. All pirates must have swords. And…”
The boy pauses, putting his head to one side, tapping at his lips as he ponders. Then his smile widens, and he claps his hands, bouncing in his crouch as though he’s about to leap into the sky and fly.
“And a hook! You must have a hook for a hand. That will be your name, Captain Hook, and we shall fight all the time and you will be beastly and terrible, but I will always win.”
“A hook?” He looks at his hands, considering the long fingers, the palms.
His hands are not a thing he’s ever thought much about before. No more than he thinks of his eyelashes, his knees. They are all simply a part of him. But what does the boy mean that he will have a hook for a hand?
“How will—?”
The boy waves his own hand, dismissing the words. Dismissing them so utterly that they curl and dry in his throat, and he finds himself unable to speak again, as though his lips are sewn shut.
“Pirates have hooks for hands and patches over their eyes and wood for their legs and gold for their teeth. Everyone knows that.” The boy runs on, his words blurring in his excitement. “And you’ll live at the front of the ship and have the finest room and there will be seven crow’s nests and a hundred cannons.”
Wait, he wants to tell the boy. That isn’t right. That isn’t how ships work.
But the boy would ignore him even if he could speak. The child jumps up so for a moment it seems as though he does hang in the air, impossibly. His feet hover just above the ground, certainly not touching it. James wants to tell him that isn’t how boys work either, but his lips remain fixed closed.
The sand beneath the boy is pristine, unmarred by darkness, despite the sun shining directly on him. If he missed the shadow somehow before, he is certain now. His own shadow pools around him; the trees cast shadows and everything else is exactly as it should be, save for the boy.
The boy’s feet touch the sand again, and he bends forward at the waist.
“Are you ready?” he asks.
For what, he thinks, but he cannot speak. The boy nods, as if his silence were consent, and he leans back, stretching so far it seems his spine must snap, throwing his head back.
The sound that emerges is nothing he can describe. Nothing that should come from a human mouth, much less the mouth of a child. It rises and falls, trilling like a bird, tolling like a lonely bell, sounding and sounding like wind through a hollow reed. It is an awful noise, in the truest sense of the word. It sounds like an ancient language, spoken by angels and demons before the beginning of the world. He cannot understand it, but at the same time, he knows what it’s for—something is being summoned.
He feels the answer rising from the deep, coalescing from the dark, as if all the shadow the boy lacks exists outside of him, scattered about the island, bits of it drawing together to take form. Water sloughs off the back of the creature crawling from the waves. It is mere inches from him, but even so he cannot make sense of it. It is as ancient as the sound that called it, a monster from the beginning of time. A crocodile, but more than that. Jaws vast, plated with thick, overlapping scales, eyes burning with all the malice in the world.
The dizzying notion strikes him that the beast and the boy are the same. An invisible tether stretches between them, a monster, but one on a leash and controlled by the boy’s hand. There’s a third length to the rope as well, with a barbed tip buried in his own flesh, as though the boy has joined all of them so even if he tried to run the beast would still find him, no matter where he might go.
The creature springs forward in an impossibly fast motion, its lashing tail propelling it across the sand, its mouth dropping open. He throws out a hand as if to ward it off and too late he remembers the boy’s words. The creature’s jaws snap. A neat thing, severing bone. His hand, which he never thought of until now, is simply gone. Unmade, as if it never existed, a smooth and bloodless stump in its place.
The boy leaps into the air again, letting out a triumphant cock’s crow, like a rooster calling up the dawn. As the boy touches down again, the world settles into place around them both. A new truth, a new reality.
He is Hook, pirate captain. He is in Neverland. It has always been his home. And the boy, Pan, will be his enemy until the end of time.
LONDON – 1939
James’s mouth tastes hot, sticky, and dry. There’s a hand on his shoulder, shaking him.
“Up you go. You can’t sleep here, old duffer.”
He can’t have passed out, not after only one drink…but no. He was somewhere else. Someone else. He was in Neverland, with Pan. He feels it still, that other place like a hook buried in his skin, trying to bring him home.
Hook.
And the beast, the beast was here, searching for him. His pulse speeds, but he can’t feel the monster. But does that mean he’s safe, or simply that they’re closed off to each other? He can’t find it, and perhaps it can’t find him either.
His head pounds. He lifts a hand to it instinctively before he remembers, flinching away before the point catches him. But his fingers are only wood, gleaming with silver. The hand Samuel carved for him. The hand he’s worn for years. Only looking at it, it seems strange. It doesn’t seem to belong to him. He isn’t…
James tries to stand. The floor pitches under him, and the barkeep catches him with a grunt. The man pushes him away again, his expression one of disgust, and the flashing impulse to violence rises. He should clap the man in irons, run him through with his sword.
But he doesn’t have a sword. And the man looking at him with pity and distaste doesn’t see a captain, or even a war veteran, which might account for the wooden hand. He sees only an old drunk.
“I’m fine.” James’s tongue is thick, making his words into a lie. He sways, but keeps his feet beneath him with the help of his cane.
“Just go.”
James does, staggering out into the snow. His head still rings, the world still unsteady, the here and now refusing to stay solid. He scans the street, but there’s no sign of anything scaled with terrible jaws trying to take shape. Cold London air slaps his cheeks and slips chapped and icy hands beneath his coat. He tugs the front of it shut, clutching it tight. He just makes it to the alleyway beside the pub before he doubles over, bringing up a thin stream of bile onto the crusted snow. James braces himself against the wall, breathing deep despite the smell, only somewhat blunted by the cold.
The brick resolves, the dirty snow underfoot gaining solidity. The world ceases swinging back and forth and trying to drop out beneath him. James pushes himself upright.
It was an alley very much like this one where he and Samuel first arrived in London, still clinging to each other after the terrible storm. The memory digs at him, sharp as a blade. Time has become unstuck, moments from his life—his lives—catching him unawares, tumbling all on top of each other. Anna bidding him farewell with tears in her eyes. The ship, his ship, carrying him over Neverland’s waves. The storm, bringing him here.
He has lived too many lives, all of them filled with loss, weighing him down.
James wipes his mouth. He’s about to push himself away from the wall when something catches his eye farther back in the alleyway. It’s half-hidden in the shadow of a stack of crates piled against the wall. It might be anything—a sack of refuse, an old soldier sleeping off the drink with nowhere else to go.
Ice grips his spine, and it has nothing to do with the weather.
Leaning on his cane, James approaches. The still form was a man once, but now he is so emptied of anything like life that it might never have been alive at all. James doesn’t bother to check for a pulse. Erased, like a hand sheered from an arm with razor teeth as though it never existed at all.
Faint markings, like soot left on the chimney wall after a fire, stain the brick behind the body. It’s as though something has leeched out of the man. A shadow, imprinted where he leaned back for a moment, pressing away from the thing he feared before he fell.
Scales and jaws. A living nightmare.
Your dreams are a dangerous thing. Samuel’s words again, breathed against his ear, but Samuel is not here, and James resists the urge to turn toward them. He was in Neverland, his dreams shining like a beacon, calling the beast. But Pan was the only one who could ever call the beast, the only one who could control it. Does that mean Pan is here as well? The thought chills James to his core, nearly undoes him.
He remembers drowning.
No. If Pan were here, he would feel it. That he is certain of, even if the tie between himself and the beast is severed. All those years, every time they fought, it was always only one long battle. The moments in-between were barely a respite. He could always feel Pan, like a splinter beneath his skin.
If he can’t feel Pan, and his connection to the beast is gone, could that possibly mean that after all these long, terrible years Pan is finally gone too? A spark like hope flares in him, and at the same time, a sick feeling of disappointment. He should have been the one to do the deed, to drive his blade through the child’s heart. And if Pan is dead, or gone, then what of Neverland? Because the island was always part of the child too, shaped by his whim. James cracked open the door, but what sort of place now lies on the other side? If the scaled beast is any indication, it is a broken one.
He looks down at the dead man again, slumped against the wall. The beast may have the scent of Neverland, but it isn’t enough. It drew close to James once again, and missed. Without Pan, the creature is alone, maybe even afraid, snapping wildly and hoping to get lucky. Hoping to catch him.
James’s breath steams the air. If he’d woken and left the pub a moment sooner. If the barkeep had tossed him into the cold, the beast might have found its mark.
James steps back, gripping the head of his cane against the stiffness and ache in his leg and forces himself to straighten his spine. How long will his luck hold? He is still here, the last survivor of Pan, except perhaps one—Wendy Darling.
He takes a breath, steadying himself. The thread connecting him to her—he can still feel that at least. Whether or not she has anything to do with the beast, she might prove useful. Old enemies once. Now, perhaps, it is time, for them to be allies at least, if not friends.