The girl is gone. Her uncle too. And Samuel as well.
Unless they were never here to begin with, and he hallucinated them all. Perhaps he only dreamed leaving Neverland, and now he’s awake, back where he began. Samuel’s skull looks up at him, baleful, reproaching. James’s limbs are heavy, but his head is light, disconnected, his tongue and throat sticky with flower sap.
He can’t sit in this clearing forever, going over in his mind what he doesn’t have. The boys—the men?—the feral creatures left in Pan’s wake might return at any moment. How long will their memory of fearing him keep him safe?
James pushes himself up. He’s unsteady, his body suddenly remembering its aches. He is not the pirate captain any longer; he is not the man he became in London, the veneer pulled over his past. He is nothing, in-between. But at least he still has his cane. And Samuel. He tucks the skull into the crook of his arm. Should he search for the girl? She’s probably better off without him.
Either his eyes have adjusted to the gloom, or the sap has sharpened his senses. One path leading from the clearing seems brighter than the rest. The tip of his cane sinks into the leaf-litter, nearly unbalancing him, but he carries on. It’s as though he’s wading through blood-warm water, each of his legs attached by long, pulled strands of tarry opium. His progress is slow, but at least he’s moving again.
He has it in his mind that he should return to the cave where he first found the blade. If the old bitch-siren is still alive—as undying as he once was—he’ll demand answers. If not, perhaps he’ll drown himself in her pool. Or perhaps he could call Pan’s beast to him, whatever remains of it have been crammed inside Michael Darling’s skin, and allow it to devour him whole. The thought makes him chuckle, a sound without mirth.
It’s too quiet, too still. Neverland should ring with voices—bird-voices, boy-voices, Pan’s, which was always both, even those stupid chattering monkeys. All James hears now are muffled booms of distant thunder. Like cannon fire, he thinks. Two vast ships sailing across the red sky, locked in eternal battle.
The tree line ends, and the beach begins. White sand, soft and powdery, though it looks almost pink under the glow from the sky. This is the far side of the island from where they landed, if his geography is right, but in this place, it’s impossible to tell. There’s an oily motion to the tide, a slickness, like ink crawling up the shore and retreating again—an unsettling motion.
Carefully, James removes his boots, sets them aside before stepping barefoot onto the sand. He glances at the sky, and immediately regrets it. There’s a sound like shattering glass, like bells ringing, and an animal roaring in pain. It’s like nothing he can name, and the sky tears wide, a mouth, a maw. Stars glitter like broken teeth, and smoke pours forth, and for a moment, the roiling shape of it is the beast that devoured him a thousand times.
James falls to the sand, covering his head with his arms. Jaws open. He feels it rather than sees it, the beast twisting in midair to fall upon him, engulfing him. He can’t scream. Darkness, like a physical thing, and he breathes it into his lungs. Consuming him from the inside out. He’s choking. Drowning. Scales wrap him, a powerful tail crushing, rolling and rolling in the depths. His ribs creak, on the point of shattering. His chest won’t expand, he cannot get enough air.
Then all at once, the beast is gone.
James blinks. He is alone on the shore, cowering like a child. No, not quite alone. Someone watches him from a few paces away.
He picks himself up slowly, a new kind of dread pooling in him. Samuel, but not as James saw him in the clearing with the flowers. Samuel as he was just before the end—gray, ragged, worn, and fading. A wave of shame fills him. James scrambles to retrieve Samuel’s skull, brushes the sand from it, and stands as straight as he can. The sadness in Samuel’s gaze tells him he is a pitiable thing. Worn as he is, Samuel is still young. He never wanted Samuel to see him grown this old, not unless they were growing old together.
James’s breath catches, and he cannot get it to restart. The whole world seems to hang still and waiting as Samuel approaches. He leaves no footsteps on the sand. He isn’t really here, and yet James feels seen, flayed, stripped bare. He doesn’t even realize he’s trembling until Samuel reaches out a hand, and James finds himself taking it automatically. The hand he reaches out in turn shakes, but it is his hand, flesh and blood, not wood—a phantom hand to touch his phantom lover.
“Come along, I’ll show you the way.” Samuel’s voice is a sigh.
He turns as if to lead James toward the far end of the shore, the curve of rock, and the memory of a line traced in the sand where water once ran from a cave mouth and into the sea. James finds himself leaning back, digging his bare heels into the ground until Samuel looks back at him with a questioning expression in his sorrowful eyes.
“Last time we were here.” James swallows, begins again. “Last time we were here, you tried to stop me.”
“I could never talk you out of anything. When your mind was set, there was never any changing it.” A faint smile, but touched with sadness. Samuel shakes his head slightly.
Promise. Samuel’s hand slipping from his, hot and hollow and frail. Be kind.
James licks his lips, dry suddenly as the shore underfoot. He wants to protest that Samuel’s words aren’t fair. He stopped killing for him, stopped thieving. He stopped being a pirate. Changed everything. Became a kept man. Became less.
But no. He never did anything of those things. He never changed, though he pretended to.
And there it is. The thought, stark in his mind, matched to the pain in Samuel’s eyes. James hears it, understands it without Samuel ever saying it aloud: Is that truly what you think? That changing would have made you less, rather than us together becoming more?
James’s mouth opens. Closes again. He wants to deny it, but the words lodge in his throat. His damned, stupid pride. The words he never allowed himself to say. And still he cannot say them aloud.
Samuel tugs gently at his fingers, and this time, James allows himself to be led. He is too stunned to do otherwise.
“You’re determined to do this thing.” Samuel’s voice drifts back to him, blown on a lonely wind, even though the air is eerily still. “I won’t let you go alone.”
What is it that he’s even trying to do? James is no longer sure. Set something wrong right? But how? He plunged in the first time not knowing what he was doing, wielding a blade, a magic he didn’t understand. He was like an animal in a trap, gnawing off its own leg to be free, not caring for the consequences. It had cost him his crew. It cost the lives of innocent people in London who simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Perhaps the way to end this all is to end himself. Hasn’t that been the problem all along? Killdeer and Harrigan stalking him, killing to get to him. If he simply removes himself from the equation, they won’t have a purpose, and they won’t have the satisfaction of winning.
James stops. They’re at the mouth of the cave. A faint glow hangs around Samuel, a luminescence matched to that of the pool he remembers from so long ago. Samuel looks back at him again, something almost reassuring in his smile, but touched with regret as well. James tightens his grip on the skull, ducks, though it is unnecessary, and follows Samuel inside.
The stone underfoot is uneven. He almost slips, but Samuel is there to steady him. The only light comes from Samuel’s skin. The pool wasn’t that deep into the cave. James remembers that. So whatever light it emitted then is gone. Even as the thought occurs to him, his next step nearly takes him over the edge, and he reels back, losing his balance and landing hard on his tailbone.
Samuel drifts beside him. When the shock of pain subsides, James can just make out the pool, faintly illuminated by Samuel’s glow. Or rather, he can make out the place where the stone of the cave floor stops, and something else begins. He has a faint sense of it as liquid. But at the same time, it is simply a lack of light, a negative space, a hole in the fabric of here that is something else. Or perhaps nothing at all.
He crawls forward, squinting, but it doesn’t help. The light fails, resisted by the black. He has a sense that he’s leaning over water, but he can’t see it clearly. A chill emanates. Not quite a breeze. Cool damp. He has the sudden image of a rotten arm reaching up to seize him by the throat and drag him down. He sees a rage-filled face, sharp angles of cheekbones and razor teeth tucked behind thin lips. The mermaid, the oracle, whatever she was. The black of the pool is the black of her eyes and he imagines her still sleeping there, dead and not, and he rocks back onto his haunches, wrapping his arms around his bent knees as he crouches at the edge of where he feels the pool to be.
“What do I do?” He isn’t really asking Samuel, but he looks up anyway.
He feels very small. He wants Samuel to give him advice, remove the weight of decision from his shoulders, but Samuel merely shakes his head.
“I can’t tell you that.”
James wants to shout at him, ask what good he is then when Samuel’s expression breaks, shifting from disappointment to sympathy. As his expression shifts, so does he, moving to James’s side, crouching beside him, and placing a hand on his shoulder.
It doesn’t sink through James’s skin, and for a moment, he can allow himself to believe that Samuel is really here. He can allow himself to feel warmth from the touch, everything in him leaning toward it and drawing comfort and strength and reassurance from it.
“I’m only here to make sure that whatever you do, you don’t have to do it alone.” The smile Samuel offers this time touches his eyes, it cracks James open so his pulse stutters and his breath snags.
“I think I know.” He doesn’t really, but he didn’t know what he was doing last time either.
It’s about belief. A leap of faith. He isn’t sure what he believes in when it comes to the larger question of his life, but in this moment, he believes the blade—or whatever remains of it—waits for him in the black pool, and he will have to reach in to get it. Because if Samuel can be dead and still here by his side, if his ship can be broken on the shore when he sailed it through the sky to freedom, if he can be James and Hook both, then this is also true. The blade is broken, its fragments buried in his leg, but it is in the pool waiting for him too. That’s the logic of Neverland.
The dead mermaid oracle also waits beneath the surface, as does the nightmare beast from his worst dreams, beady black eyes just below the level of the water, glaring hate. All of these things are true, but he’s not going to let it stop him.
Using his other hand, James curls the articulated fingers of his wooden hand into a shape like a hook to catch the hilt of the blade. Then without giving himself any more time to doubt, James throws himself forward all in one motion and plunges his arm into the black.
It’s like having the limb severed at his shoulder. The arm sheared clear off, too quick and clean to feel the pain. Then the pain comes a moment later. A burning cold, the sense of reaching through and back to his own past, when he did this the first time. The sense of being here and another part of him being somewhere else.
His arm is no longer his to command. He can’t move the muscles; the whole thing might as well be carved of wood, not just the hand. He has to trust. He has to trust that somehow his fingers caught something before he wrenches himself back and falls gasping onto the cave floor.
He can’t lift his arm. He can’t do anything for a moment but breathe against the burning cold. His eyes water. He struggles to lift his head, turn it toward the dead weight of his arm. He can barely see in the dark, but far away from him is his hand and there is the blade.
Paler than the black blade had been all those years ago. Gray, and he still can’t tell if it’s metal or stone. Pitted. There are pieces missing, and his thigh aches, like calling to like.
“Did I…?” The words are a wheeze, not enough breath to complete the question.
Samuel crouches beside him, brushes a hand across James’s brow. He feels the touch, whether it’s truly there or not. James is about to speak when something terrible happens to Samuel’s face. It crumples, like smoke collapsing inward to fill a sudden displacement of air. Something dark and terrible swings through the place where Samuel leaned over him a moment ago, and James barely has time to register what’s happening.
Michael Darling stands over him with a stone in his hand, and he brings it crashing down on James’s skull.