“This has got to be the worst idea ever,” I said as Leo and Tigger grabbed each of my arms and propelled me into a chair in front of the common room table. “Why me?” I demanded, my voice quivering just a little. “Can you think of anyone on earth who’d do a worse job?”
“Of course I can, Furball. Lots of people. Anyone of us here would do a worse job. They’ve seen all of us a lot but they’ve only seen you a couple of times. You can do this, don’t worry.” Leo threw back the hood of my bear pelt, grabbed a straight razor, and started shearing my hair in great clumps.
“What’re you… Ow! What’re you doing?”
“We gotta hurry, we don’t got much time,” Stumble said as he rummaged through a chest he’d dragged from somewhere.
“This is going to hurt, but it’s got to be done,” Tig said as he pulled a stiletto from one of the pockets of his pelt. “Hold on a sec,” he told his twin. Before I had a chance to object, wince, or even understand what was getting ready to happen, he thrust the thin blade through my left ear lobe and also managed to nick my neck as well. I bellowed in pain as Tig dropped the knife and put a gold earring through the hole he’d carved in the lobe. “Whatcha think?” he asked his brother.
“It looks like you were drunk when ya did it, so it’s perfect,” Leo said as he started hacking away at my mane again. “You know you got fleas?” he asked me.
“Hold still, Furball,” Stumble said as he pulled a nasty looking mustache from the chest he’d been digging through. He dumped a bunch of evil smelling liquid from a bottle onto the mustache and stuck it on my face, below my nose. “Well?”
“It’ll do, it’s dark.”
“Time?” Leo demanded.
“We gotta be out of here in the next half turn if we’re going to have a prayer of a chance for this foolishness to work,” Surefoot said. “Strip,” he told me as Leo finished cutting the rest of my hair off.
“Are you nuts? Do you really think this is going to work?”
Leo gave me a gentle shove. “Course it is. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t be doing it, would we?”
“That’s the same thing you told me when I almost drowned.”
“That was different, that involved water.”
“Involved water?” I asked, my voice rising just a little. “What the heck do you think this is going to involve?”
“You’ll just be on the water. You won’t be in the water.”
“Hopefully,” Surefoot muttered under his breath. I ignored that.
“Okay,” I said with a resigned shrug. I stood up and shed the bear pelt. Surefoot threw me a bunch of rags and I put them on in record time. The rags fit surprisingly well and I wondered where they’d come from but decided I didn’t want to go there.
“What about his head? You can tell the top of it ain’t been in the sun much.”
“Ta-dah,” Stumble said, handing me a bandana that reeked. “Wrap this around your head, Furball.”
“Nah, let me do it,” Tig said, snatching it from me. “You’ll mess it up.”
“Sword?” Surefoot asked.
“Cutlass, and for goodness sakes, don’t draw it unless you have to. You’d cut your foot off, Cub.” Leo handed me the cutlass and I strapped it on, the weight on my hip feeling strange.
“Shoes?”
“Nope.”
“Sling-shot?”
Tig thought about it and then nodded. “Yeah, it’s the only thing he can use that he won’t manage to kill himself with,” Tig said as he finished wrapping the bandana around my head.
“Did you forget that time he tried to shoot the orc? He couldn’t sit down for a week.”
“Not helping,” I told Surefoot.
“Don’t worry, you’ve gotten better since then.” Four sets of eyes rolled in unison including my own. “Just hide it under your shirt or something.”
“Eye-patch?”
“No way, it’ll itch.”
Tig gave another thoughtful pause and nodded. “Roo’s right. If we put an eye-patch on him, it’ll hide at least one of those puppy-dog eyes of his.”
“Forget it,” Stumble advised, holding up a pink patch covered in sequins. “This is the only one we got.” I didn’t even want to consider where it had come from or why.”
“You’re up for this, right?” Leo asked as he gave me a once over. Of course I wasn’t up to it. I wanted to lose the stew I’d had a few hours earlier and not just cause it had tasted like mud.
“It’s for Red, ain’t it?” Every Lost Boy there nodded. I swallowed, a gulp I’m sure they could have heard all over the Island. “Lost Boys forever,” I said and tried to swagger as I walked towards my trapdoor. I tripped over the cutlass as it found its way between my legs.
“We’re doomed,” someone said in a whisper that carried.
Leo walked over to the common room table. “Here’s Tink’s contribution,” he said grabbing several small sacks of pixie dust and tossing them at me. The stuff I was wearing didn’t have nearly as many pockets as my pelt, but the pockets it did have weren’t full of holes like mine were so I was able to get them all put away.
“Is that enough?” Stumble asked, worriedly. I waited for the punchline about my weight that he’d have normally made, but he was genuinely concerned. I wondered if that was a good thing or a bad thing. It took a lot for Stumble not to be insulting everyone around him. “Remember, we don’t know what kind of shape Red’s going to be in.”
“What was he thinking, anyway?” Roo suddenly erupted. “He knew that they were hunting and he knew they were around here. It’s not like Peter didn’t warn us and there ain’t nothing important enough that he had to go out there for. It was just stupid and now we’re sending Cubby out and it’s not like he’s had a bunch of experience doing stuff like this.” He caught the look on my face. “Not that you can’t handle it, it’s just that the whole thing is stupid. He shouldn’t have gone out.”
“At least he didn’t lead ‘em back to the tree,” Leo said. “That’s how he got caught. He wanted to make sure they were following him away from here.” Roo snorted, but didn’t say anything. I knew the only reason he was so upset was because he was worried about him. Leo turned back to me. “You know what to do, right?”
I did and I didn’t. “How come I can’t just take a rowboat and bring him back in it? How come we all can’t do it like we do on a raid.”
“Because they’ll be expecting that,” Leo explained patiently. “You can get closer on your own than all of us could cause they won’t be expecting just one of us. It’ll be… Naw, it won’t be, but you can do it. We could all go if there was enough pixie dust, but there ain’t and we just gotta do what we can. It’d be different if Peter was here, but…” he shrugged. “They should be holding Red near the bow because they’ll be waiting for sunrise to have him walk the plank. They’ll be expecting us… you to come from the Island so you’re going to have to fly out to sea a bit and then come back from that direction. You gotta do it ‘fore the sun starts to rise or they’ll be able to see you and no matter how much like a pirate you look, it’s not going to fool them if they see you flying.” I glanced at Stumble, almost wishing he’d make some comment that I’d be impossible to miss but he continued being silent and anxious-looking. “Try to land somewhere on deck where there ain’t a lot of the scum around. You shouldn’t have to worry ’bout those aloft since they’ll be looking towards the Island. Once ya get on deck, don’t sneak around, but walk like you own the place, cause you do. Go towards where they’ll have him at the bow. You’ll be able to get pretty close to Red before they figure out they ain’t ever seen you before. Heck, depending on how much they celebrated after they caught him, they may never even notice you ain’t you. Dowse him with pixie dust and make good your escape. Head back out to sea and then make a big loop again since if they have anything nasty ready, it’ll be pointed towards the Island and not seaward.”
“So he’s just going to be sitting on the deck waiting for me to come and rescue him?” I asked, a little skeptical that it would be near as easy as Leo was making it out to be.
“They’ll have his hands and feet tied up, but they probably won’t have him tied to anything. They might have him gagged, but probably not.” He looked down at the floor. “They think they’ll hear us cry for mercy.” He spat on the floor. “Ready?”
I wanted to yell that there was no way a coward like me could ever be ready for something like this. That I was just a kid and how the heck could anyone expect anyone like me to be ready for something like this. The whole thing was insane just thinking about it, much less acting it out. I was going to get myself killed, which didn’t bother me that much as long as it didn’t involve a lot of pain. I was more worried about the fact that I was going to end up failing in trying to rescue Red and I’d cause him to be killed too. I swallowed all those thoughts. “Sure,” I said with a grin that I had to twist sideways before I could force it on my face.
“Cubby, there’s something you gotta remember,” Stumble said in the most earnest voice I’d ever heard him use. “You gotta keep your happy thoughts close, and you gotta keep one for Red too. He won’t be able to make his own happy thought, so you’re going to have to do it for him. It’s… yeah.” He grabbed the wooden sword that I usually used and handed it to me. “Here, stuff this down your breeches so it can’t be seen. You may need it.”
I took the sword and carefully placed it down inside my left pants leg and immediately picked up three splinters in my leg. There wasn’t enough room between my ankle and the bottom of the pants leg for it to slip out, but it meant I couldn’t bend my left knee at all. Maybe anyone who saw me hobbling that way would figure I had a peg leg or something. I walked to the spot under my trapdoor, looked around, and jumped. It was idiocy to think I’d be able to make it, especially with my left leg, but I grabbed the edge on my first attempt and pulled myself through. I tumbled outside and hit the ground. It felt weird as though the Island I was used to wandering had been replaced with something else. The stars weren’t warm like I was used to, but gave off the harsh sparkle of broken glass. There were none of the night noises that I was either used to or terrified of. The trees around the clearing were quiet and it seemed like they were listening to something that only they could hear. Even the night air, normally perfumed with what seemed like a hundred scents and odors, had a flat odor too it as if it had hung around too long. “What’s happening?” I asked Roo in a whisper as we fell into a single-file line and started for Pirate’s Cove.
“It knows,” he whispered back, shrugging. “The Island always knows when something like this happens.” As explanations go, that was probably one of the least helpful ones I’d ever heard as well as the most complete one. The trip from Hangman’s Tree to the cove was surreal, even for the Island. Not a breath of air moved and not a sound disturbed the untranquil quiet. This was a quiet that didn’t belong anywhere and the fact that it had come to rest over the Island scared me. There was no downhill or uphill to the path as it wound through the trees that gave the impression of grudgingly giving way to the trail. At one point I had to stop and finally got rid of the stew I’d eaten what seemed like a century ago when things had been normal and the only thing that had worried me was latrine duty the next day. No one said a word.
The trail ended all too quickly at the trees surrounding the cove. We came to a stop and looked out across the water at The Jolly Roger. It didn’t look any different from every other time I’d seen it in the early morning except that there were a couple more lanterns at the bow than normal. There was no moon or clouds and the stars that had turned strange didn’t provide enough light to get rid of the shadows that had gathered all over the place on the beach, the sea, and the hull and deck of the ship. Leo pulled out Pan’s spyglass and examined the ship. “Pan’ll banish you if he finds out you have that,” his twin warned.
Leo closed the spyglass with a snap. “Ain’t no good. All it does is bring the darkness closer. He’s gotta be there, though.” He looked at me. “Ready?” he asked again.
“Quit asking me that,” I snapped. “You think I’m going to suddenly say ‘no’ and run and hide?”
He grinned, his teeth managing to shine in the sickly starlight. “Lost Boys forever,” he whispered to which all of us whispered it back in response. “Head down the beach about a half-mile or so, fly out to sea and then come around and fly to the ship from the water-side and rescue Red. We’ll be right here. If you get in trouble, give a yell and we’ll have your back.”
I didn’t ask how they figured they were going to have my back when they’d have to swim a few hundred yards to the ship if I did yell since I had all the pixie dust and there wasn’t any convenient rowboats around this time. It didn’t matter. I was too awed by someone telling me they had my back. It was an unusual and a weird feeling. I made a conscious effort to quit repeating the phrase to myself. I turned and started to walk away when I felt someone grab my shoulder. I turned to see Stumble staring at me with that unnerving earnest look he’d been wearing all night. “Don’t forget the happy thoughts. Two of them. Even three if you can. He’s going to need it. Promise.” I promised I wouldn’t forget and started off down the beach.
