canes a hundred years old and yellowed with age.
A dead wind blew so dry it burned Wendy’s nostrils. Sand got in her eyes and it wasn’t even normal sand, the pretty round and faceted jewels of a good English beach. It was more like dust, tiny slippery flakes that soon found their way into every crease and crevice of her clothes and person.
As for the rest of the land, from her squinted eyes Wendy saw…farther than she ever had. Her brain hurt trying to make some sort of sense of the images it received. At home even outside the city there were always houses blocking the view, and trees, and hills; every couple of miles something like a hedge cut off one’s view of the rest of the world. Here she could see for what appeared to be fifty miles in every direction, maybe a hundred, with no real end but for the ability of her eyes.
She felt dizzy, utterly exposed under such a huge, bright, dead sky and endless flat desert, with its weird chess-like rock figures, its unmeasurable walls of red rock and distant plateaus. There was nothing else; she herself was nothing.
She didn’t even have her shadow.
Wendy collapsed to her knees, overcome by it all.
Careful! Tinker Bell exhorted, buzzing up off her shoulder for a moment before remembering not to fly. You’re going to get all sticky and mucky.
“Mucky?” Wendy asked huskily. “Are you joking? Tinker Bell, are you feeling all right? Is the heat getting to you?”
Heat? It’s cold and nasty and wet with all the mud bubbling up everywhere!
“Mud?” Wendy looked around. “All I see is desert, miles and miles of empty desert. What do you see?”
The fairy shifted uncomfortably on her shoulder. I just told you. Mud. A whole world of it. A giant flat. Dead. World. Mud bubbling up. Nothing.
“I wonder which one of us is right,” Wendy murmured. “Do you think it’s some sort of trap, some way of disguising themselves? Of keeping us from finding them and Peter? An illusion…like fairy glamour?”
They are the most powerful beings in Never Land. They are Never Land, Tinker Bell jingled darkly. No need for illusion.
“How does this place usually appear? Have you seen it before?”
Those who return never say. And no.
“Well.” Wendy bit her lip. Even words spoken aloud here sounded thin and dead and useless. “If it’s real at all, at least what I can see, from where I stand, there is no sign of Peter anywhere. Or anything living. You?”
Nothing. Mud.
“Hmm. Hold on then. We’ll walk a bit, and see if we see anything or anyone. Let’s just take a good look at where we started so we can remember.…”
She forced herself back up on her feet and looked behind them. To her relief, the air—or reality—seemed to ripple; shreds of white and gray blew aside and the desert petered out. Glimpses of the dark green jungle peeped from beyond.
“Well, good,” she said, turning back the way they were headed. “We can always return. We shall mark our place with those three rocks there, and—oh!”
Not twenty feet from them, where there was nothing but scrub before, stood a giant monolith. A red-and-orange jagged-edged hoodoo reaching high into the sky. Its top was worn into three strange and slightly bulbous shapes. With just a little imagination Wendy could make out heads and maybe faces—blank, primordial ones.
“Tinker Bell,” she whispered. “What do you see?”
Mud welling up. Bubbling up into three ugly mud statues. Sweating and bleeding and oozing mud.
Wendy was only a little relieved that she and her friend were both seeing different versions of what appeared to be the same thing. The stone effigy in front of her was terrifying in every way: in its size, silence, and sudden appearance.
Why are you here?
Nothing spoke. Nothing that looked like a head or a face moved. No sound emerged, and yet the words reverberated across the dead landscape, echoing and unmistakable. There could be no doubt where it came from.
“If you please…” Wendy dropped into a small curtsy. “We’re here in search of our friend, Peter Pan. Have you seen him?”
Silence.
Terrible, dreadful silence. It, too, echoed, blanketing the desert with a deadly finality.
Wendy waited and waited.
The dry wind blew past her ear. She felt Tinker Bell grow tense, tiny fingernails digging into her skin. Not urging her to do anything. Just nervous.
“I’m sorry,” she began again after a while. “Peter Pan. Have you seen him? He’s about my size, and wears green.…”
Peter Pan was here.