A timepiece inside a predator. Time carried in the belly of the thing that pursues. Barrie describes the ticking as 'very regular,' not like a clock swallowed by accident, but the precise, metered ticking of a mechanism that is functioning exactly as intended. And when the ticking arrives on the ship, every head turns not toward the sound but toward Hook. 'They had no thought of fighting it. It was Fate.'
Every encounter. Every visit. Every generation of Darling daughters. Peter arrives at the glass. He looks in at the warmth. He never uses the door. Not once. In the entire book. Windows are how you watch from outside. Doors are how you enter.
Everything else about Peter is wrong. His eyes are old. His teeth are first teeth. His costume is skeleton leaves. But the shadow is perfectly normal. Thin and flat and grey. As if it belongs to a different boy. An earlier boy. One who was still ordinary. The shadow had not been updated.
'Make-believe was so real to him that during a meal of it you could see him getting rounder.' The children ate when Peter believed they were eating, and were hungry when Peter believed they were full. 'If they broke down in their make-believe he rapped them on the knuckles.' The fiction is mandatory. The nourishment is real. The food is not.
'The only difference being that the clothes are made to fit you, while you have to be made to fit the tree.' Custom-fitted hollow spaces in the ground. Entered by breathing. And if the boy doesn't fit: 'Peter does some things to you, and after that you fit.' The prose carried you past it before you felt the weight.
'The boys on the island vary, of course, in numbers, according as they get killed and so on; and when they seem to be growing up, which is against the rules, Peter thins them out.' Against the rules. Whose rules? Thins them out. How? 'And so on.' The narrator moves past it the way you'd step over something in the road.
'A Never tree tried hard to grow in the centre of the room, but every morning they sawed the trunk through, level with the floor.' A tree that asserts growth every day and is severed every day. Barrie wrote that it 'tried hard.' The tree is trying. Something won't let it stop. And something won't let it finish.
'Peter wants you to shoot the Wendy.' A direct lie. The boys obeyed without hesitation. The same words they used minutes earlier to save themselves: 'Let us do what Peter wishes.' One instruction saved them. The next put an arrow through a girl's chest. Same mechanism. Different target.
'At the sight of his own blood, whose peculiar colour, you remember, was offensive to him, the sword fell from Hook's hand.' The crew has noticed. No one discusses it. The captain's blood runs wrong, and the wrongness is visible, and the seeing is the thing nobody will name.
'To reveal who he really was would even at this date set the country in a blaze.' Not a pirate's name. Something from before the hook, before the ship. A name connected to acts a country does not forget. Barrie wrote this and never returned to it. The blaze is still waiting.
'Even strong men had to turn hastily from looking at him, and more than once on summer evenings he had touched the fount of Hook's tears and made it flow. Of this, as of almost everything else, Smee was quite unconscious.' The gentlest man in the story makes the most dangerous man weep. Without trying. Without knowing.
Peter returns to find Wendy grown. Her daughter is asleep. 'He took a step towards the sleeping child with his dagger upraised.' He does not strike. But the step is taken and the dagger is raised. When confronted with evidence that someone grew up, the first instinct is violence against the evidence.
'Sometimes, though not often, he had dreams, and they were more painful than the dreams of other boys. For hours he could not be separated from these dreams, though he wailed piteously in them. They had to do, I think, with the riddle of his existence.' The narrator says 'I think.' About the riddle, the narrator hedges. As if saying more would crack the walls.
Said on the sinking rock in the lagoon, with water rising around him. A boy who has never grown, never aged, never changed, calling death an adventure. As if he hasn't met it yet. As if it's still ahead of him.
'And thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.' Three words for what keeps the story alive forever. Gay. Innocent. Heartless. The last one is the weight-bearing wall. And Barrie chose that word, of all the words available to him, to be the last one that mattered.
The base of the statue. Fairies climbing the stump. The things that grew from what remained.
