Peter Pan in Scarlet Read Online Free PDF

could play the clarinet. Or that Nibs was missing.
    Or Michael, for that matter.
    ‘Is there no one else?’ asked Wendy. ‘No new Lost Boys? Or Girls?’
    ‘I sent them away when they broke the Rules,’ said Peter at once. ‘Or killed them.’ It was unlikely, but it made him sound marvellously ferocious. If any Lost Boys had found their way to the top of the Nevertree, they were not around now. For years, Peter Pan had been an only child— the only child—the One-and-Only Child in the Neverwood, with no one to keep him company but his shadow and the birds and the stars.
    ‘Where’s Tinker Bell?’ asked Curly, looking in all the drawers. Peter only shrugged and said she had run off.
    One visitor did catch his eye. He saw the puppy’s head sticking out of Curly’s pocket and said, ‘You washed Nana and shrank her!’ The last time he had seen the Darling children with a dog, it had been Nana, a gigantic Newfoundland dog who served for a nursemaid. The puppy wisely refrained from saying it was the great-great-great-grandpuppy of the wonderful Nana. It simply sat in the outstretched palms of the Wonderful Boy and licked off so much fairy dust, and thought such happy thoughts, that it floated up to the ceiling.
    ‘Where’s Tinker Bell?’ asked the Twins, but Peter only shrugged and said he had turned her into a hornet because of her temper. Nobody believed that, either.
    Peter held out the hilt of his sword. ‘First you must all swear not to do any growing up.’ And they all gave their solemn word. Then Peter declared them members of The League of Pan, adding, ‘Tomorrow we shall go and do something dangerous and terrifically brave!’
    Tootles folded her hands under her chin and her eyes shone. ‘Oh yes, Peter! Do let’s! Let’s all go on a quest! We can call it Tootles’s Quest, and everyone can go and find my heart’s desire, and fight a deadly foe and one of you can win my hand!’
    Peter stared at her. The plan had its merits, but it wasn’t his. A tightness stiffened his little mouth. In the next second, his lips pursed and he gave the shrill whistle of a train about to leave—‘All aboard!’
    And at once the Wendy House was a carriage of the Trans-Sigobian Express, hurtling across desert and veldt with a cargo of bears and musical boxes and a patent mangle for the tsarina. It wobbled across rickety bridges over bottomless ravines. It plunged through mountain tunnels as dark as pitch. It was attacked by brigands and bounders, and once even by Baabaa-Rossa the sheepish Privateer. It out-raced Mongols and mughals riding mammoths. It drew up at a station staffed by ghosts in purple uniforms, who tried to eat the luggage. They drank Bovril from a samovar, and when John put a fishing rod out of the window, he reeled in a salmon as big as a horse. In an emergency (and there were lots), they leaned out of the window and pulled on the washing line to stop the train. It was Pretend, of course, but so exciting!
    Make-believe worked its magic, Neverland cast its spell. The grown-ups who had set out from London full of good intentions, clean forgot why they had come: they were children again, and having far too much fun to worry about nightmares or misgivings or autumn in the Neverwood. They slept that night in the luggage racks of the Trans-Sigobian Express, and the netting left criss-cross marks on their cheeks.
    But John accidentally left the brake off at bedtime and when, hours later, the train rammed the buffers in Vladivostinopleburg, the Nevertree gave a shudder that loosened all the soil around its roots.
    A dinner plate fell off a shelf in Grimswater. A baby cried in Fotheringdene.
    The shock woke Wendy, and she lay for a while watching Fireflyer nibbling the laces out of his own little shoes. She thought again of Peter’s fairy friend, Tinker Bell. How long do fairies live? As long as tortoises or as briefly as butterflies? Do they lose their wings in autumn and grow them again in spring? Or do