Emergence (45 page)

At last he came to a barred and code-locked door which it took him several tries to batter open.

Behind it he found the replica of the pirate ship set from
Peter `N Wendy
, just as Tink had told him. The room was dim. There were video cameras on tripods, and a kind of Japanese mattress on the floor beside a bolted rung to which a set of bright prison manacles were affixed. The walls were lined with foam soundproofing.

He felt his stomach turn.

What had Ormond forced Tink and the others to do here?

He thought of all he had inadvertently seen in his career fighting subhuman trash like Ormond, and he shivered. He had seen unwanted things, children in the most horrible moments of their young lives, recorded for the perverse enjoyment of the dregs of humanity, in rooms just like this one. Some of them dingy, some of them palatial, all of them with this melancholy air of the execution chamber.

Toward the side he found a richly carved wardrobe. Inside, it was like an arsenal of perversion. Sex toys and whips hung arranged like medieval weapons. And on hangers were the screen-accurate costumes of all the Lost Boys, Tiger Lily’s buckskin dress, even a Pan and Wendy outfit, apparently never worn, still sealed in plastic garment bags.

Ormond had planned for Cassidy and him to come here.

Jesus. Had Tink staved him off somehow? Had he stood between Barry and Ormond and them, sacrificing his own innocence to keep them in the dark? Why hadn’t he told anyone sooner?

But the bomb at Perennial was the answer to all that, wasn’t it?

Pan backed away from the closet, recoiling from the walls and even hovering off the floor. He didn’t want to touch anything in this room. The walls seemed to throb with vileness, as if the horror they had witnessed has somehow seeped into them and there pulsed like lurking dragons ready to dig their poisoned claws in your brain.

The house was empty.
      

Where was Cassidy?

Where was Ormond?

He flew back outside and landed on the shoulder of his own effigy out front like a homunculus.

He cupped his hands to his mouth. He wanted to scream their names, but his pounding heart, his throbbing head, the fire flooding his limbs, he couldn’t form words.

The crowing was supposed to be Peter Pan’s cry of heedless, boyish joy.

But what burst from Jim’s throat was a primal shriek of rage, a ragged, bestial challenge torn from the cracking throat of a boy with a man’s horrified heart.

It carried above the music, above the gamboling of the cartoons and the jaunty calliope.

He leapt from the statue into the air, to get a bird’s eye view of the grounds.

“WHERE ARE YOU?” he roared.

He jumped down to the turreted roof of the little train station where children boarded to tour the grounds. MARGARET STATION it was named. Ormond had told Cassidy and him on that long-ago visit that it was named for his mother, as was the train itself, and a few other scattered locations. All in honor of his mother.

Nothing, Cassidy had noted then with a whisper, was named after his father.

Ormond’s father had been rumored to be abusive. Was that what had set him on this ugly path?

There was a naked cherub smiling on the station roof. He kicked it off, punted it into a tree somewhere out in the dark.

“WHERE ARE YOU?”

He flew to a fountain near the center of the park, in which more naked children statues splashed with mock innocence. Not so innocent now. He threw them down to the stones, smashed them, raging.

He jumped down to the gravel road that cut down the center of the place, leading from the front door of the house to the amusement park.

“WHERE ARE YOU?” he repeated, pulling down the statues flanking the road in frustration as he went.

He had smashed six of them when he grabbed hold of a tall metal statue of a pirate and found it didn’t budge.

Instead, it whirled, suddenly animate, and grabbed a hold of him with one titan-strong cold hand that closed about his throat and drew him in, inches from a smiling metallic face of silver and gold that reminded him of Darth Vader and one of those odd Guy Fawkes masks protesters always wore.

This was Hook.

The eyes that stared out at him were wide and frantic and blue. Elton Ormond’s eyes.

“Here,” said the deep, distorted voice he had heard over the speakers at Vulpes Plaza, the voice of Hook.

Then he was flung spinning into the trunk of an oak tree, so hard something cracked. Whether it was the bark or his own back he didn’t know. He slid to the ground gasping.

NINETEEN

He rolled over, and saw Hook adjust a wide brimmed scarlet hat atop his gold and silver head.

“Surprised?” said Hook.

He wore a long, red, frock coat with gold buttons, and beneath that, some kind of powered suit baroquely adorned, like the plate mail suit of a Duke he had once seen in a museum. Despite the steampunk-y appearance of rivets and filigree curlicues, Pan could tell this was a modern device, like what Karasu had been wearing. It had probably come from the same maker, some anonymous armorer willing to build anything an eccentric billionaire agreed to pay for.

Pan coughed blood onto the back of his own hand.

“You sent that bomb to Perennial,” he managed.

“Yes. Because of you.”

“Because Nico Tinkham told me what Barry had been doing and you figured it would get back to you. But how’d you find out?”

“Peter Hollis. He found the message you left on Cassidy’s phone.”

Peter…Cassidy’s father.

“You killed him, too. The car wreck. It wasn’t an accident.”

“I didn’t want to. He was my Mister Smee for so long. He always took care of me. Long before I met Barry. But Cassidy was turning him against me. I didn’t think he would stay quiet. Everything changed after that. I didn’t want it to. I didn’t want any of that to happen. Slightly was my friend.”

Slightly
. It took Pan a moment to figure out he was talking about Tink.

“I loved you. I loved all of you. You were everything to me. Barry didn’t come up with that show, you know. With
Peter `N Wendy
. I did. I just let Barry take the credit because I didn’t want anything connected to me. I couldn’t be involved. There were other friends. Over the years. Peter and Barry helped me with them, when their parents found out, when the police started to get involved. Peter and Barry kept them away as long as I made them money. It’s always been that way for me. Nothing’s wrong, so long as I can make money. So long as people love me. But what about who I love? JM Barrie wrote that
stars are beautiful, but they must not take an active part in anything, they must just look on forever. It is a punishment put on them for something they did so long ago that no star now knows what it was
.”

Pan got up to one knee.

“Where’s Cassidy?”

“You don’t know how happy I was to find out you were alive. And then, when you hadn’t changed…it was like all my prayers had been answered. I love you so much, James. I made you into Pan, better than I’d ever hoped to. We can be together now.”

Pan shook his head. He couldn’t listen to this anymore.

He flew at Hook and drove his fist into his face. He didn’t care about the metal. Hook’s head rocked back and one of the spindly mustachios snapped off.

Hook swung at him clumsily with one powered fist, missed, and grunted as Pan delivered a hard kick to his stomach.

There was a roaring sound and a blast of heat, and suddenly Hook had a hold of him and was carrying him into the air above the trees, trying to hold him still, jets of blue flame spitting from the heels of his golden pirate boots.

“Stop it. Stop it. Stop it!” he was saying as Pan thrashed and kicked and punched.

Finally, Hook gripped the nape of his neck and flung him away.

“Stop it!”

Pan regained himself, and they floated in the air, circling each other.

“Why do we have to fight?” Hook said. “Don’t you remember? That time I brought you and Cassidy here? Remember how we talked about your father? And Peter Pan? You came into my heart that day, James. All I wanted to do was hold you, make you feel better about your dad.”

“Shut up!” Pan yelled. “You sick fuck!”

“I
am
sick! I
am
! Does that mean I can’t be loved? You loved Peter Pan. Do you know about the writer? About JM Barrie? He based the character off of these Llewellyn-Davies boys that he used to play with in the park. He helped take care of them when their father died, and then, when their mother died too…oh, it was so sad, James. She was going to give the boys to the nanny’s sister, Jenny. But he wrote his own name into her will. Jimmy. James Barrie. They were so small and helpless without their parents. He took them into his home. He was sick like me, I think. But he took care of them. Kissed them. Held them. Loved them.”

“Where’s Cassidy?” he yelled again, taking out his knife.

“Sometimes love is so sad, James,” Hook whined. “
If you have it, you don't need to have anything else, and if you don't have it, it doesn't matter much what else you have
. Barrie wrote that, too.”

Pan shot towards him again, brandishing his knife, stabbing at the point where the chin of the grinning mask met the glittering collar, but Hook’s right hand came up, and it was a silver hook that caught his knife, and they struggled.

Hook angled the jets in his boots and they flew towards the amusement park, wrestling in midair back and forth, until they smashed into the hub of the slowly-turning Ferris wheel.

Hook slammed Pan’s head once against the axis, and he blacked out momentarily, hanging limp in his arms. Hook carried him to the top of the wheel and laid him down on the roof of one of the baskets.

“The Davies boys…one died in the War. Another jumped in the river, died holding his boyfriend to him. And the next oldest one, he threw himself under a train. They burned all of Barrie’s letters to them. Isn’t that sad, James? Isn’t it?
Life is a book we write, and when we are finished, the manuscript is burned
.””

Pan grabbed Hook’s leg and yanked it out from underneath him.

Hook fell from the roof of the basket and tumbled down the center of the Ferris wheel, bouncing off the spokes, eliciting sparks and groans of metal the whole way down, until he landed heavily on the platform base.

Pan got to his feet and looked down to see Hook lying in a tangle amid the twisted metal.

The damaged wheel began to teeter, dislodged from its base. He jumped off and landed on the roof of a popcorn stand.

The big Ferris wheel wavered and fell crashing into the turning Merry-Go-Round, scattering the prancing white plaster horses, each transfixed by a golden unicorn pole like butterflies in some ogre’s collection. The calliope music dwindled, deepened, and died.

Pan looked around.

“Cassidy!” he called. “Cassidy!”

There was a wrenching of steel, and Hook stood up in the rubble of the Ferris wheel, pushing spars of metal aside. His hat was gone, his coat torn.

He brought up his left hand and flicked it down like someone opening an umbrella. A long, curved sword blade emerged from some hidden housing.

He kicked aside the metal, advancing, brandishing the hook, and now the sword.

“Proud and insolent youth! Prepare to meet thy doom!”

It was from the book, of course.

Pan obliged.

They closed in the center of the arcade, beneath the ropes of starry midway lights and through the kicked-up clouds of sawdust, feinting and dodging and striking. The armor was as hard and resilient as Karasu’s had been, but now Pan was fighting out of wrath. He came in like a stinging hornet, dealing hard blows and then ducking back only to plant his feet against some vertical surface, a Zoltar booth, a high striker, or a cotton candy stand, and propel himself back into the fight, colliding with Hook hard enough to stagger him, even to dent that glittering armor and send the gold and silver flaking from him.

Hook was all sharp edges now, and the silver hook or the cutlass scored more than a few times, drawing blood when it was not deflected by Pan’s knife.

They took turns trying to gain the advantage of the night sky, but one would grab the other’s ankle and yank them back down into the fray. There was no respite. No quarter. Blood began, at last, to leak from under Hook’s mask.

Hook swept the sharp sword down to cut him in half down the middle, and Pan whirled aside, spinning like a top, leapt up, and came down on the blade hard enough to snap it. Hook staggered off balance.

Pan scrambled up his back, locked his legs around his neck. He gripped Hook’s head, insinuated the point of his knife into the right eyehole of the mask. Hook howled and launched into the air, spinning like a rocket, clawing to get Pan off his back, scraping with his hook, dragging its point along Pan’s arm.

Though Pan cried out, he hung onto Hook until his arm couldn’t respond anymore, then he slipped around, clung to the front of his armored opponent, and worked the knife round the edge of the eyehole. The grinning face wept blood.

He withdrew, still holding on with his knees to Hook’s chest, then thrust the red knife up under the chin of the mask. He had been seeking to finally end the madman, but instead hit some unseen catch. The mask flipped open, revealing Ormond’s battered, bloodied face. The same spring action that had opened the mask, at the same time, flung the knife out of Pan’s hand. It went flashing off into the dark.

Ormond whimpered, his one blue eye rolling.

Pan drove his fist into Ormond’s face. His knuckles were broken from beating on steel, but he struck again and again with increasing force, mashing the singer’s custom nose flat, rearranging the once-contoured features, knocking teeth down the back of Ormond’s throat, dislodging his jaw, ignoring the pain , unaware even if it was the bones of his own hand he heard splintering or Ormond’s skull.

Soon his drooping hand was indistinguishable from Ormond’s face. Both were blood and sagging pulp. Only Ormond’s eye showed.

“Bad form,” the man somehow mumbled through bubbling blood.