Straight On Till Morning (Disney Twisted Tales) - Liz Braswell Page 0,1
every freckle, every pore. He blew out through his careless lips, and his breath lifted up the ends of his long, shaggy bangs. She hovered above his pug nose. After debating and biting her own lip, she gave him the tiniest quick fairy kiss on it.
Then she steeled herself and zoomed into the sky like a bee bent on finding its way home after a day of foraging nectar.
But she was not going home.
She was going to look for Peter’s shadow in the scariest place of all.
She was going to London.
Yes, it’s a scene re-created so often it has become almost a caricature of a trope, but let’s go through the process once again anyway because it’s necessary, even to this story.
Low clouds do not blanket the sky, for that implies coziness and comfort. No, these clouds mask the sky, weigh on the sky, choke the sky. They are strengthened by smoke from below, the trickling-upward effluence of a hundred thousand chimneys that decorate the landscape like unhealthily angular flowers. The slate-and-clay-shingled, higgledy-piggledy rooftops seem to extend forever in an industrial upside-down version of the fairy-tale hills and dales in a children’s book with bright pictures and bad perspective. Everything—everything—is in shades of gray and black. A great gray river slinks through the city like a tired but friendly snake, hobbled by bridges far less impressive than their names imply.
(Don’t believe me? Look up London Bridge and gaze at its pictures. An utter disappointment.)
Of course there’s Big Ben, the giant clock with equally giant gunmetal and copper hands that an astounding number of fictional characters have wound up standing on at one time or another. Its bells, along with all the church bells of the city, toll the hour menacingly with the obvious mournful implication of time passing, death coming, soup’s getting cold.
On the cobbled streets below the towers and rooftops, weather has some impact and energy; the almost-rain and morning mist combine to make a wet, stinging atmosphere that has men swirling into greatcoats, nannies bundling up their charges, and mums shouting, “Come out of the garden, you’ll catch your death in the fog!” Also many, many umbrellas. So many black umbrellas with the usual spindly frames—like insects or skeletons or whatever—that watching them pass is almost torturously jejune.
There.
London.
End of one century, beginning of another.
Got it?
Good.
Halfway between where the umbrellas ended and where the sky should have started, maybe twenty and a half feet below the tallest chimney, was one particular casement window. Gazing out of it was a young woman in an unfashionable pale blue dress. Her hair was a popular shade of brown and her eyes an exquisitely normal blue for that time and place.
At first she looked up at the sky, but it was impossible to make out any shapes in the clouds because of their utter completion, filling the heavens from one end to the other in the same unbroken shade. So she looked down. But the dismal garden below soaked up the wet like a moldy sponge; there were no puddles, no reflections. The tree was sodden.
Nothing in this stolidly real vista was alterable by even the strongest imagination: there was no foothold for pirates, fairies, golden carriages, knights, or even a hint of swashbuckling. Someone from the street had thrown a brown banana skin over the fence, and there it lay, out of place in the English yard, attesting to the banality of global commerce and how it didn’t bring with it sultans or magic horses—only bananas.
Wendy sighed and turned from the window. Afternoons were the hardest.
In the mornings she still saw her tutor, and there were chores and writing exercises. After elevenses was a good improving book recommended by the bookseller, the one with the handsome nephew.
By then Mrs. Darling had usually either gone to pay visits or was busily engaged in correspondence with her delicate blue pen at her elegant secretary. The gloom never seemed to affect her even if she did stay home all day; she was always gracefully and slowly attending to some task or other: her face; her toilette; her sewing; the little expense book she kept for the house; the pantry; their unpredictable cook, Mary. Wendy used to watch her mother engage in these endless circuits with delight, but that feeling was now tempered with confusion: how could someone remain so serene and glowing while working through the same indoor errands, rainy day in and day out?
Wendy still enjoyed it when Mrs. Darling included her in some