Peter Pan in Scarlet by McCaughrean Geraldine

Author:McCaughrean, Geraldine [McCaughrean, Geraldine]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press Children's Books
Published: 2010-10-25T22:00:00+00:00

At the foot of Neverpeak Mountain lay scarlet bogs and swamps, as innocent-looking as parlour carpets, but as deadly deep as graves. The Company had to watch their every step, for straying off the path might sink them in quicksand and leave nothing to show for Pan’s Quest but a bubble of marsh gas. Between the swamps grew mangroves and mandrakes, corkscrew-dogwood and dog-tooth corkwood oozing amber gum. There was no food to be had, except for the berries they had picked earlier and brought with them. Ravello counted these out on to the Explorers’ plates at mealtime, keeping none back for himself.

The only trouble was, the berries brought on dreams, and the only trouble with dreams is that there is no choosing which ones you get. They arrive like the weather, blown in from north or south, past or future, dark places or light. Dreams float seven-eighths beneath the water.

Tootles dreamed she was a man wearing worsted trousers, a red robe, and a big moustache—which was very confusing.

Wendy dreamed of a little girl called Jane asleep in a moonlit bedroom. The girl dreamed Wendy and Wendy dreamed the girl, and when their sleeping eyes met, the child sat bolt upright and cried, ‘Mummy!’ It churned up the blood in Wendy’s heart like the lees in a bottle of port wine.

The Twins dreamed each other’s dreams, which was fine.

John dreamed of his brother Michael and woke up crying.

Curly dreamed of Slightly, who was calling to him, telling him to beware, but the dream unravelled before he could find out why.

But Peter! Peter had a marvellous dream of somewhere he had never been, somewhere aswarm with boys all older than himself, all strangers, playing games he had never played, crowding into buildings he had never seen. He was rowing a skiff over sunlit water, and his legs were not long enough to reach the footboards. He was dressed in white, pitching a ball at three wooden sticks in the ground, and he knew that something vital depended on it. He had to sing a song he did not know, in a language he did not understand.

And he was so HAPPY and so AFRAID and so HOPEFUL, because just around the river’s bend, just at the top of the grand stairs, just beyond Agar or Jordan or Luxmoore’s Garden or Fellows’ Eyot—what were these places and how did he know their names?—he would find the treasure, the whole wonderful …

They were woken by the sound of Slightly’s clarinet. It was playing the same tune he had played to the witches, back at the Maze:

‘Better loved ye canna be.

Will ye no come back again?’

And they shouted for him to go away, but he just went on playing.

They had pitched camp at night, unaware how close they had come to the mountain itself. Now, in the dawn light, it rose above them, higher than high, its head in the clouds and its feet fourteen storeys underground. Neverpeak stretched up and away: granite cliffs and marble precipices, pumice ledges and slaty slopes of scree.

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