Sister Emily's Lightship: And Other Stories

At first the Lost Boys were stunned at the sight of the girls and their signs. Then they, too, got caught up in the song and began to pound their hands on the table in rhythm.

  Tink flew around and around Wendy’s head, flickering on and off and on angrily, looking for all the world like an electric hair-cutting machine. Peter glared at them all until he suddenly seemed to come to some conclusion. Then he leaped onto the dining room table, threw back his head, and crowed loudly.

  At that everyone went dead silent. Even Tink.

  Peter let the silence prolong itself until it was almost painful. At last he turned and addressed Darla and, through her, all the girls. “What is it you want?” he asked. “What is it you truly want? Because you’d better be careful what you ask for. In Neverland wishes are granted in very strange ways.”

  “It’s not,” Darla said carefully, “what I want. It’s what they want.

  In a tight voice, Wendy cried out. “They never wanted for anything until she came, Peter. They never needed or asked…”

  “What we want…”JoAnne interrupted, “is to be equals.”

  Peter wheeled about on the table and stared down at Joanne and she, poor thing, turned gray under his gaze. “No one is asking you,” he said pointedly.

  “We want to be equals!” Lizzy shouted. “To the boys. To Peter!”

  The dam burst again, and the girls began shouting and singing and crying and laughing all together. “Equal…equal…equal…”

  Even the boys took it up.

  Tink flickered frantically, then took off up one of the bolt-holes, emerging almost immediately down another, her piercing alarm signal so loud that everyone stopped chanting, except for Lizzy, whose little voice only trailed off after a bit.

  “So,” said Peter, “you want equal share in the fighting? Then here’s your chance.”

  Tink’s light was sputtering with excitement and she whistled nonstop.

  “Tink says Hook’s entire crew is out there, waiting. And, boy! are they angry. You want to fight them? Then go ahead.” He crossed his arms over his chest and turned his face away from the girls. “I won’t stop you.”

  No longer gray but now pink with excitement, JoAnne grabbed up a knife from the nearest Lost Boy. “I’m not afraid!” she said. She headed up one of the bolt-holes.

  Weaponless, Barbara, Pansy, and Betsy followed right after.

  “But that’s not what I meant them to do,” Darla said. “I mean, weren’t we supposed to work out some sort of compromise?”

  Peter turned back slowly and looked at Darla, his face stern and unforgiving. “I’m Peter Pan. I don’t have to compromise in Neverland.” Wendy reached up to help him off the tabletop.

  The other girls had already scattered up the holes, and only Lizzy was left. And Darla.

  “Are you coming to the fight?” Lizzy asked Darla, holding out her hand.

  Darla gulped and nodded. They walked to the bolt-hole hand-in-hand. Darla wasn’t sure what to expect, but they began rising up as if in some sort of air elevator. Behind them one of the boys was whining to Peter, “But what are we going to do without them?”

  The last thing Darla heard Peter say was, “Don’t worry. There are always more Wendys where they came from.”

  The air outside was crisp and autumny and smelled of apples. There was a full moon, orange and huge. Harvest moon, Darla thought, which was odd since it had been spring in her bedroom.

  Ahead she saw the other girls. And the pirates. Or at least she saw their silhouettes. It obviously hadn’t been much of a fight. The smallest of the girls—Martha, Nina, and Heidi—were already captured and riding atop their captors’ shoulders. The others, with the exception of Joanne, were being carried off fireman-style. JoAnne still had her knife and she was standing off one of the largest of the men; she got in one good swipe before being disarmed, and lifted up.

  Darla was just digesting this when Lizzy was pulled from her.

  “Up you go, little darlin’,” came a deep voice.

  Lizzy screamed. “Wendy! Wendy!”

  Darla had no time to answer her before she, too, was gathered up in enormous arms and carted off.

  In less time than it takes to tell of it, they were through the woods and over a shingle, dumped into boats, and rowed out to the pirate ship. There they were hauled up by ropes and—except for Betsy, who struggled so hard she landed in the water and had to be fished out, wrung out, and then hauled up again—it was a silent and well-practiced operation.

  The girls stood in a huddle on the well-lit deck and awaited their fate. Darla was glad no one said anything. She felt awful. She hadn’t meant them to come to this. Peter had been right. Wishes in Neverland were dangerous.

  “Here come the captains,” said one of the pirates. It was the first thing anyone had said since the capture.

  He must mean captain, singular, thought Darla. But when she heard footsteps nearing them and dared to look up, there were, indeed, two figures coming forward. One was an old man about her grandfather’s age, his white hair in two braids, a three-cornered hat on his head. She looked for the infamous hook but he had two regular hands, though the right one was clutching a pen.

  The other captain was…a woman.

  “Welcome to Hook’s ship,” the woman said. “I’m Mrs. Hook. Also known as Mother Jane. Also known as Pirate Lil. Also called The Pirate Queen. We’ve been hoping we could get you away from Peter for a very long time.” She shook hands with each of the girls and gave Lizzy a hug.

  “I need to get to the doctor, ma’am,” said one of the pirates. “That little girl…” he pointed to JoAnne “…gave me quite a slice.”

  JoAnne blanched and shrank back into herself.

  But Captain Hook only laughed. It was a hearty laugh, full of good humor. “Good for her. You’re getting careless in your old age, Smee,” he said. “Stitches will remind you to stay alert. Peter would have got your throat, and even here on the boat that could take a long while to heal.”

  “Now,” said Mrs. Hook, “it’s time for a good meal. Pizza, I think. With plenty of veggies on top. Peppers, mushrooms, carrots, onions. But no anchovies. I have never understood why anyone wants a hairy fish on top of pizza.”

  “What’s pizza?” asked Lizzy.

  “Ah…something you will love, my dear,” answered Mrs. Hook. “Things never do change in Peter’s Neverland, but up here on Hook’s ship we move with the times.”

  “Who will do the dishes after?” asked Betsy cautiously.

  The crew rustled behind them.

  “I’m on dishes this week,” said one, a burly, ugly man with a black eyepatch.

  “And I,” said another. She was as big as the ugly man, but attractive in a rough sort of way.

  “There’s a duty roster on the wall by the galley,” explained Mrs. Hook. “That’s ship talk for the kitchen. You’ll get used to it. We all take turns. A pirate ship is a very democratic place.”

  “What’s demo-rat-ic?” asked Lizzy.

  They all laughed. “You will have a long time to learn,” said Mrs. Hook. “Time moves more swiftly here than in the stuffy confines of a Neverland tree. But not so swiftly as out in the world. Now let’s have that pizza, a hot bath, and a bedtime story, and then tomorrow we’ll try and answer your questions.”

  The girls cheered, JoAnne loudest of them all.

  “I am hungry,” Lizzy added, as if that were all the answer Mrs. Hook needed.

  “But I’m not,” Darla said. “And I don’t want to stay here. Not in Neverland or on Hook’s ship. I want to go home.”

  Captain Hook came over and put his good hand under her chin. Gently he lifted her face into the light. “Father beat you?” he asked.

  “Never,” Darla said.

  “Mother desert you?” he asked.

  “Fat chance,” said Darla.

  “Starving? Miserable? Alone?”

  “No. And no. And no.”

  Hook turned to his wife and shrugged. She shrugged back, then asked, ??
?Ever think that the world was unfair, child?”

  “Who hasn’t?” asked Darla, and Mrs. Hook smiled.

  “Thinking it and meaning it are two very different things,” Mrs. Hook said at last. “I expect you must have been awfully convincing to have landed at Peter’s door. Never mind. Have pizza with us, and then you can go. I want to hear the latest from outside, anyway. You never know what we might find useful. Pizza was the last really useful thing we learned from one of the girls we snagged before Peter found her. And that—I can tell you—has been a major success.”

  “Can’t I go home with Darla?” Lizzy asked.

  Mrs. Hook knelt down till she and Lizzy were face-to-face. “I am afraid that would make for an awful lot of awkward questions,” she said.

  Lizzy’s blue eyes filled up with tears.

  “My mom is a lawyer,” Darla put in quickly. “Awkward questions are her specialty.”

  The pizza was great, with a crust that was thin and delicious. And when Darla awoke to the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall and the sound of the maple branch scritch-scratching against the clapboard siding, the taste of the pizza was still in her mouth. She felt a lump at her feet, raised up, and saw Lizzy fast asleep under the covers at the foot of the bed.

  “I sure hope Mom is as good as I think she is,” Darla whispered. Because there was no going back on this one—fair, unfair, or anywhere in between.

  Belle Bloody Merciless Dame

  AN ELF, THEY SAY, has no real emotions, cannot love, cannot cry. Do not believe them, that relative of the infinite Anon. Get an elf at the right time, on a Solstice for example, and you will get all the emotions you want.

  Only you may not like what you get. Sam Herriot, for example, ran into one of the elves of the Western Ridings on a Sunday in June. He’d forgotten—if he’d ever actually known—it was the Summer Solstice. He’d had a skinful at the local pub, mostly Tennants, that Bud wannabe, thin and pale amber, and was making his unsteady way home through the dark alley of Kirk Wynd.

  And there was this girl, tall, skinny, actually quite a bit anorexic, Sam thought, leaning against the gray stone wall. Her long ankle-length skirt was rucked up in front and she was scratching her thin thigh lazily with bright red nails, making runnels in her skin that looked like veins, or like track marks. He thought she was some bloody local junkie, you see, out trolling for a john to make enough money for another round of the whatever.

  And Sam, being drunk but not that drunk, thought he’d accommodate her, even though he preferred his women plump, two handsful he liked to say, hefting his hands palms upward. He had several unopened safes in his pocket, and enough extra pounds in his wallet because he hadn’t had to pay for any of the drinks that night. His Mam didn’t expect him home early since it had been his bachelor party. And with Jill gone home to spend the last week before their marriage with her own folks, there was no one to wait up for him. So he thought, “What the hell!” and continued down the alley toward the girl.

  She didn’t look up. But he was pretty sure she knew he was there; it was the way she got quiet all of a sudden, stopped scratching her leg. A kind of still anticipation.

  So he went over to her and said, “Miss?” being polite just in case, and only then did she look up and her eyes were not normal eyes. More like a cat’s eyes, with yellow pupils that sat up and down rather than side to side. Only, being drunk, he thought that they were just a junkie’s eyes.

  She smiled at him, and it was a sudden sweet and ravenous smile, if you can imagine those two things together. He took it for lust, which it was, of a sort. Even had he been sober, he wouldn’t have known the difference.

  She held out her hand, and he took it, drawing her toward him and she said, “Not here,” with a peculiar kind of lilt to her voice. And he asked, “Where?”

  Then without quite realizing the how of it, he suddenly found himself sitting on a hillside with her, though the nearest one he knew of was way out of town, about a quarter of a mile, near the Boarside Steadings.

  He thought, I’m really drunk, not remembering walking all this way. But that didn’t stop him from kissing her, putting his tongue up against her teeth until she opened her mouth and sucked him in so quickly, so deeply he nearly passed out. So he drew back for a breath, tasting her saliva like some herbal tea, and watched as she shrugged out of the top of her blouse, some filmy little number, no buttons or anything.

  She was naked underneath.

  “God!” he said, and he really meant it as a sudden prayer because she was painfully thin. He could actually count her ribs. And she had this odd third nipple, right on the breastbone between the other two. He’d heard that some girls did, but he’d never actually seen anything like it before.

  He wondered, suddenly, about Jill and their wedding in a couple of days, and it sobered him a bit, making his own eyes go a bit dead for a moment.

  That’s when the girl stood up on those long skinny legs and walked over to him, pressing him backward, whispering in some strange, liquid language. Suddenly it all made sense to him. She was a foreigner, not British at all.

  “Aren’t you cold, lass?” he asked, thinking that maybe he should just cover her up, here on the hillside, and never mind the other stuff at all. Because Jill would kill him if she knew, the girl so skinny and foreign and odd.

  But the girl put her hands on his shoulders and pushed him back till he lay on the cold grass staring up at her. It was past midnight and the sky still pearly, this being Scotland where summer days spin across the twenty-four hours with hardly any dark at all. He could see faint stars around her head, and they looked as if they were moving. Then he realized it wasn’t stars at all, but something white and fluttering behind her. Moths, he thought. Or gulls. Only much too big for either.

  She lay down on top of him and kissed him again, hard and soft, sighing and weeping. Her hot tears filled his own eyes till he could not see at all. But all the while the wings—not moths, not gulls—wrapped around him. He did not feel the cold.

  He woke hours later on the hillside and thought they must have had sex, or had something at any rate, though he couldn’t remember any of it, for his trousers were soaked through, back and front. He felt frantically in his pocket. The safes were still there, untouched. His wallet, too. His mouth felt bruised, his head ached from all the beer, and he could feel the heat of a hickey rising on the left side of his neck.

  But the girl was gone.

  He stood slowly and looked around. Far off was the sea looking, in the morning light, silvery and strange. He was miles from town, not Boarside Steadings at all, and there was no sign of the thin girl, though how she could have disappeared, or when, he did not know. But leaving him here, alone, on the bloody hillside, drained and tired, feeling older than time itself must have given her some bloody big laugh. Well, he hoped she got sick, hoped she got the clap, hoped she got herself pregnant, little tart. And all he had to show for it was a great white feather, as if from some bloody stupid fairy wing.

  And brushing himself off, he started down the cold hillside toward—he hoped—home.

  Words of Power

  LATE BLOSSOMING FLOWER, the only child of her mother’s old age, stared sulkily into the fire. A homely child, with a nose that threatened to turn into a beak and a mouth that seldom smiled, she was nonetheless cherished by her mother and the clan. Her loneness, the striking rise of her nose, the five strands of white hair that stroked through her shiny black hair, were all seen as the early signs of great power, the power her mother had given up when she had chosen to bear a child.

  “I would never have made such a choice,” Late Blossoming Flower told her mother. “I would never give up my power.”

  Her mother, who had the same fierce nose, the white streak of hair, and the bitter smile but was a striking beauty, replied gently, “You do not have that power yet. And if I had not given up mine, you would not be here now to make such a statement and to chide me for my choice.” She shook her head. ??
?Nor would you now be scolded for forgetting to do those things which are yours by duty.”

  Late Blossoming Flower bit back the reply that was no reply but merely angry words. She rose from the fireside and went out of the cliff house to feed the milk beast. As she climbed down the withy ladder to the valley below, she rehearsed that conversation with her mother as she had done so often before. Always her mother remained calm, her voice never rising into anger. It infuriated Flower, and she nursed that sore like all the others, counting them up as carefully as if she were toting them on a notch stick. The tally by now was long indeed.

  But soon, she reminded herself, soon she would herself be a woman of power, though she was late coming to it. All the signs but one were on her. Under the chamois shirt her breasts had finally begun to bud. There was hair curling in the secret places of her body. Her waist and hips were changing to create a place for the Herb Belt to sit comfortably, instead of chafing her as it did now. And when at last the moon called to her and her first blood flowed, cleansing her body of man’s sin, she would be allowed to go on her search for her own word of power and be free of her hated, ordinary chores. Boys could not go on such a search, for they were never able to rid themselves of the dirty blood-sin. But she took no great comfort in that, for not all girls who sought found. Still, Late Blossoming Flower knew she was the daughter of a woman of power, a woman so blessed that even though she had had a child and lost the use of the Shaping Hands, she still retained the Word That Changes. Late Blossoming Flower never doubted that when she went on her journey she would find what it was she sought.

  The unfed milk beast lowed longingly as her feet touched the ground. She bent and gathered up bits of earth, cupped the fragments in her hand, said the few phrases of the Ke-waha, the prayer to the land, then stood.

  “I’m not that late,” she said sharply to the agitated beast, and went to the wooden manger for maize.

  It was the first day after the rising of the second moon, and the florets of the night-blooming panomom tree were open wide. The sickly sweet smell of the tiny clustered blossoms filled the valley, and all the women of the valley dreamed dreams.