"So it's true then, isn't it?" he heard her say from somewhere inside. "You did grow up. The Lost Boys told me, but I never believed it. I drank poison for you, you silly ass! Don't you remember anything? You used to call me Tink!"

She burst into tears, the sound of her crying echoing through the toy house.

Peter searched the windows. "Are you in there, little bug?" He opened the front door.

"I'm not a bug!" she declared, furious at him. "I'm a faerie!"

He tried to see up the toy staircase, his neck crinking as he laid his cheek to the floor. "I don't believe in faeries."

He heard her gasp. "Every time someone says 'I do not believe in faeries' there is a faerie somewhere who falls down dead!"

Peter's patience with himself and his out-of-body experience, which clearly wasn't anything of the sort, snapped. "I do not believe in faeries!" he screamed at the top of his lungs.

A loud crash sounded from within the dollhouse, and the faerie appeared at the top of the stairs, swooning. She clutched futilely at a wall, then toppled over, tumbling down the stairs to lie in a ragged heap at their foot.

Peter jerked erect, his face ashen. "Oh, God! I think I've killed it!" He fumbled with the hinged flap of the dollhouse side, swinging it open to have a better look.

The faerie's eyes fluttered. "Clap. Clap your hands, Peter. It is only way to save me. Clap, Peter, clap! Louder! Louder!"

Peter was clapping as loud as he could, aware suddenly of a ringing in his ears, like tiny silver bells, thousands of them. "I'm clapping, I'm clapping! What's that noise, that ringing? Are you doing that? Just stop it, okay? Hey, what are you… are you all right?"

She was standing again, ignoring him, pretending that she had forgotten him entirely. She brushed herself off and walked into the kitchen, where a Barbie doll was serving dinner from a stove top to a Ken doll seated at a table. With a frown the faerie switched the Ken doll and the Barbie doll around so that Ken was serving Barbie. She nodded and turned back to Peter.

"All right, now, who am I?"

Peter sighed hopelessly. "You're… ah, who knows?"

She put her hands on her hips and the wings ruffled faster. "You do! I know you do!"

Peter exhaled and shook his head. "All right." His lips went tight. "You're a psychosomatic manifestation of my suppressed sexual anxiety-a composite of all the girls and women in my life with whom I thought I was in love. That's who you are."

The faerie's light flared wildly, and she zipped from the dollhouse as if catapulted, right past Peter's nose. He tumbled back and away from her, rising to his knees as she swung wide about the room and back again. He was just coming to his feet, hands outstretched, when she flashed down to the far end of the rug on which he was standing and gave it a mighty jerk. The rug was yanked from beneath Peter's feet, and he was sent tumbling backward head over heels across the room.

"Guess again!" snapped the faerie.

Peter rolled onto Maggie's discarded parachute, ribbons tangling in his arms and legs, and his head struck the baseboard of the wall with a thud. For a moment he blacked out. When he came awake again, everything was spinning.

"I see stars," he mumbled.

"That's right, Peter!" exclaimed the faerie jubilantly, flitting past his nose. "Second star to the right and straight on till morning! Neverland!"

She raced about, gathering up the makeshift parachute's ends, then lifted him up like the stork who delivers the baby in childhood stories. Straining against his weight, she flew toward the latticed windows and out into the night, the bundle that was Peter struggling weakly beneath, oblivious still of what was happening to him. Wind blew in chill gusts against the sack.

"Any bathrooms around here?" Peter mumbled.

The faerie tinkled like a bell. "Don't worry, we'll be over the ocean in a few minutes. Uhggg-you are so heavy!"

She jerked at the parachute roughly.

"Arghh, my head!" Peter groaned. "My back!''

They gained height, soaring out from the Darling house, up above its gables and over the roofs of the neighboring homes.

"Forget your back, Peter!" the faerie cried. "It's the back of the wind that matters now! We'll catch it, if we hurry!"

As they rose, the tiny stork and the huge baby, the faerie with her bundle of gripes and confusion, a fringed white head poked out of the back door, and eyes gone wide with wonder and the remembrance of better times stared skyward. Tootles, clad in bright pajamas and a smile, watched the faintly struggling Peter disappear from view.

Out across the city of London the faerie flew with Peter, past houses and shops, down streets with rows of lamps whose light reflected like silver on the carpet of new snow. Below, in a shadowy park, a couple stood beneath one of the lamps, kissing. The faerie swung past them, kicking pixie dust loose from her tiny slippers. The couple rose several feet into the air and hung suspended. They did not look up, their arms coming tighter about each other.

"Straight on till morning," whispered the faerie with a smile.

She began to rise, her bundle dragging clear of the light until it had melted into the darkness.

Behind, distant and receding rapidly from view, Big Ben chimed out the midnight hour.

Return to Neverland

They flew until daybreak, out across the night sky, past moon and stars, through the fabric of children's dreams and the memories of childhood. Peter slept for the most part, exhausted from the day's events and the emotional ordeal of losing his children, dazed from the knock on the head he had received when he had been tumbled by the upturned carpet. Sometime during the night the faerie had harnessed him into the makeshift parachute, but Peter remained blissfully unaware of it all.

It was dawn when finally he began to come awake. He was aware of a swaying motion, the rocking of the parachute into which he had been bundled, and then of daylight, soft and silver, penetrating the folds of his cocoon. He did not realize yet where he was. In truth, he thought he was back in his water bed at home, cradled in its temperature-controlled embrace. He smelled the odd but invigorating scent of brine and seaweed wafting on a gentle morning breeze and smacked his lips.

He smiled and drifted back into sleep.

Had he awakened, he might have glimpsed what lay below.

The ocean was all around, vast and depthless blue, its cresting waves glittering like scattered diamonds in the new day's sunlight. There was an island settled in the midst of the azure waters, an odd, craggy atoll which possessed the overall look and feel of a travel-magazine paradise, with jutting peaks that scraped against the passing clouds, patches of jungle nestled down within valleys and defiles, coves into which the ocean rolled against white, sandy beaches and rocky cliffs.

Everywhere one looked, there was something wondrous to behold. Was that some massive, old sequoia on that rocky pinnacle just off the island's coast? Were those waterfalls tumbling down off the rocks at every turn? Was that some sort of town down below?

Was that a pirate ship at anchor?

Peter, alas, missed everything.

Abruptly he felt himself falling-not so rapidly as to be frightened by the sensation, but fast enough to be aware of it. Floating, that's what he was doing, he told himself, turning over in his bed. Odd, his bed seemed to lack definition. And where was Moira?

The descent grew more rapid. And was that someone grunting in a tiny voice? What was this business about being too heavy? Who was too heavy?

The descent ended in a jarring stop that tumbled Peter head over heels once more. He felt himself lurch awkwardly beneath his covers. He squinched his eyes shut as it all happened, grappling for his pillow, which had somehow disappeared.