The earth had begun to suckle it's mud and the glossiness was gone from the soil.  Torch aloft, it felt as though the universe had become nothing but a shifting sphere that glinted with flashes of orange colored leaves and branches as they passed by below.  The moon had been consumed by a cloud like a muddy dragon and now shone weakly from it's belly, giving no light or guidance to the group that huddled uncomfortably in the light.  Ever and on, Wendy filled her tiny lungs and shouted out for Michael, or Peter, or sometimes even for Jason (though she knew by now that wasn't really his name).  Toodles, Slightly, and Curly tried to keep an eye out for them, but the ever present glow of the torch destroyed whatever chance they had of adjusting to the darkness.

It was a bad idea, having a light that showed the rest of the world where they were, but didn't let them see.  Had they been brighter they might have doused it and kept on their own, but they were only children, despite their independence, and with frayed nerves they couldn't bear the terrible darkness alone.  No one answered Wendy's calls, but things looked on from outside the ring of torch light, things with black eyes that glistened in the fire like the backs of spoons, and some eyes that seemed to consume it.  Sometimes, as they passed over certain trees, the glowing selves of fairies would poke their heads out of their shelter and glare, causing abstract patterns out of the corner of the eye of bits of light and bells.

"Michael!"  Wendy bellowed.  Her voice came back to her in a mocking echo.

"Wendy, that may not be such a good idea now." Toodles said nervous, shifting towards the torch.  "We're almost at the mountains.  Big ugly things live in the mountains at night."

"There's nothing there in the dark that isn't there in the light." Wendy recited, but she didn't really believe it.  Many terrible things are there in the darkness when you can't see them, and the same was doubly true in Neverland, for there lived all the things that you can't convince yourself aren't there when the night light goes out.

Wendy called again.  This time there came an answer; a shrill bellow in the trees that shook the fibers of the leaves and all the wet organs in the bellies of the listener.  Wendy made a terrible little noise and clung onto Slightly's arm.  She was frightened and worried and jittery, and if she didn't hear a human answer to her calls quite soon she thought she was going to cry.  At this point she even would have been glad to hear 'Jason', because it meant the island wasn't wholly bestial in the night, and the world still existed outside the fire.

Entirely loathsome of what she might hear, Wendy tried once more for Peter.

They thought, at first, they heard nothing; only the distant movement of trees, but after a moment a colorful glow of fairy light shown itself in the distance, and Wendy felt her heart lift.  It was the amiable pink glow that Tinkerbell bore, and as it drifted slowly forward they could see lines of something larger beside it, something upright and stronger and boy shaped.  Peter and Tink!  They were back!  Wendy let out a joyful shout and rushed forward into the darkness to greet them, but as the boys followed the fairy glow turned an ugly shade of gold, and the faint voices were interrupted by an avian shriek and the sounds and shadows of flapping wings.

"Don't rush the Queen!" a not-quite-normal voice shouted over the distance, trying to sound authoritative.  "She'll meet the subjects ONE AT A TIME, if you PLEASE, and keep your manners about you, she's a LADY!"

"Stop flapping, I can't hold on!" snapped a familiar voice.  Was it Nibs?  True as he said, the winged thing that had been held before him slipped, yelped, and went crashing down into the trees below to get caught in the twines of the branches.  The fairy dove in after him.

"Nibs?!  Is that you!?" Wendy called.  He looked up and, they imagined, squinted into the light.

"Wendy?"

"It is you!" she exclaimed happily, and rushed in to hug him, scold him gently for not having come home with the others, and pick a stubborn tree leaf out of his hair.  They quite nearly forgot the thing that he'd dropped except for Toodles had drifted down to investigate.  In a hole punched in the canopy a rather large and muddy bird was sprawled spread on it's back on a tree branch, with it's feet up in the air and a fussing little fairy hovering over his head.  It didn't look hurt but it did look rather disoriented, as it kept muttering that it didn't WANT to wear a cumber bun to the dance because that would look silly without any trousers.  What a cumber bun was or why anyone would want to put one on a bird was a bit above Toodles, but he did manage to make himself useful when the little fairy, failing to bring the bird to it's senses by pulling on it's crest, turned to him and demanded in very colorful language that he stop gawking and help the captain to his feet, or something unpleasant was going to happen to his face.  He obeyed, and when the captain couldn't quite find the wits to stand, he fit very neatly under the boy's arm.

Nibs looked startled when Toodles flew back up to them.  "Oh!  I'd forgotten about you!  Are you allright?" he asked, leaning down into the Captain's face.  The bird blinked and said drunkenly  "You have a cat on your head."  Nibs fingered his fur cap and scowled.

"If you're done fraternizing, boy," the fairy began, tugging her sleeved huffily "would you make the introduction so we can get on with it!  I have more to do in my life that chase around after little boys and deputies!"

"These are the people I was taking you to see!" Nibs answered.  He did not like the way the queen spoke to him.  "Ma'am, this is Mother Wendy, Slightly, Curly, and Toodles.  Wendy, Slightly, Curly,  Toodles;  this is Queen Mab, and the bird is Captain Partlet of the Flying Brigade."

The Queen waved off Wendy's 'how-do-you-do'.  "Yes, yes, lovely.  Fine.  Nibs, you said you were taking us to someone who could help us rescue the deputies!  This sorry group doesn't look like they could move a brick, much less the door!"

"Deputies?" Curly asked.  Nibs nodded.  He explained about the twins and the strange door at the foot of Crooked Mountain, where the briar patch had been.  Most of it was verbatim from the queen herself.

Poor Wendy looked about ready to pull her pretty hair out. This was usually the point in the adventure that she would appeal to Peter, who would of course know exactly what to do.  At worst they might be out and about till the dawn and she'd have to put them all to bed, and make them stay there until noon, but they would all be safely home.  It was a rare moment she found herself in the middle of an adventure (if she really dared call this an adventure, for it wasn't fun in the least) without anyone to turn to, and no hope of such a person arriving.

"Well we can't all go and try to help the twins!  Somebody has to keep looking for Jason and Michael! And we STILL haven't found Peter!"  Curly exclaimed, the mess of it all starting to make his head hurt.

Nibs looked confused.  "Who's Jason?"

"The boy who kidnapped Michael." Wendy replied mournfully, wringing her hands. "While all of you were out a boy came down Peter's tree and claimed to be lost, and I thought he was telling the truth!  But he dropped Michael, and I told him to get out and he got angry and took him!"

"What do you mean, took him?" Nibs asked. "He just walked away?"

Curly scowled "No.  Something he did made Wendy fall asleep.  I tried to fight him but he did the same thing to me, and when we woke up Michael was gone."

It didn't look like that explanation had clarified things much for Nibs.  He frowned, and the Queen (who had repositioned herself onto Toodle's arm) brightened.

"I've heard that story before!  It used to be one of my favorites, I made the storyteller tell it every night when I was little." she said, seeming entirely oblivious to the situation.  "Where did YOU hear it?"

"It isn't a story!" Curly protested angrily "It happened!  And we have to go find Michael before anything happens to him!"

"Maybe you just think it happened." she said, waving her hand dismissivly.  "You both said you fell asleep, right?  Maybe you've heard the story before and just dreamed the whole thing."

Wendy put up her hands before a shouting match could ensue. "Wait.  Your highness, tell us the story."

Curly blinked. "What?"

"This is just slightly ridiculous." Slightly said "We have to go help the Twins!"

"Hush!" she snapped, though she hadn't meant to.  "Please tell us the story."

Queen Mab looked pleased as a peacock to be the center of attention again, and she moved up to Toodle's shoulder to be in better view.

"Well, I'm sure you must have heard it.  Maybe you just don't remember it.  It always starts on some dark night when you can't see, and it's usually raining, or snowing, or something like that, and a whole family is stuck inside their house until it clears.  Just when the rains at it's worst a little human boy comes stumbling up to their home and falls down outside it, and for some reason the family always goes out to make sure he's okay.  They always take him to a cave or a canopy or something where he'll dry off, and he pretends to be the sweetest creature in the world, until BAM!" She hit her palm with her fist. "Both the parents are out cold, and when they wake up, their children are gone."

Captain Partlet cocked his head and looked at her with one eye. "When my friends told me that story when I was a kid, THEY always said that the boy sent their beaks back to the parents by post a week later.  Didn't your version have that?"

"No.  Fairies don't have beaks." she said flatly.

"Oh."

It was quiet a moment.  Wendy looked ill.

"What happens to the children?" she asked quietly.  The Queen shrugged.

"I don't know.  It's been a long time.  But it's just a silly old story.  It's not like it could REALLY happen."

"But it did really happen!  Michael's gone!" Wendy wailed.  Her eyes were starting to tear up and she didn't like it in the least.

Mab paused. "But you can't be serious.  It's just a story!"

Somewhere below in the trees there came the flapping of wings as a flock of birds startled from sleep.  A dozen black darts came shooting up through the firelight with feather tips scraping the sides of faces and ribs, all screeching in a complex mesh of noise that no human ear could decipher.  The Captain's eyes went wide.

"Up!  Go up!  Now!"  he shouted, kicking in a panic.  Mab bolted immediately and the others followed, just in time that when something large and nasty propelled itself from the trees towards them it's teeth snapped shut just inches below Slightly's feet.  It crashed back down into the canopy with a snarl and they could hear it's claws on the tree bark as it climbed for a second go.

When the beastie reached the top of the tree, it look about in confusion and disappointment.  It's dinner had flown away.
 

With the luck the Twins had managed thus far, by all right when they slammed that door behind them they should have found themselves to be trapped in a closet.  But it seemed that just this once tonight the Lady Luck had been a bit lax in her duties, and they found themselves instead in a warm, bright, and utterly confusing chamber.  The ceiling of the room was perhaps only a foot or so above their heads and was stained with uneven flows of chemical smoke that broke off and drifted like cinders when they moved below.  The air was dry and rather harsh against their eyes.  It was undoubtedly due to the low perched chemical fires that lit the room, set at random spaces along the rounded corner between floor and wall, puffing thin and sickly smoke into the air.

In the very center of the room, perched upon (oddly) five legs made from twisted scrap metal, was a cage of pulled and delicate glass.  It was as wide as the span of their arms and only a foot deep, and made with close set and pointed rods of glass that distorted the vision and allowed little understanding of what was within.  There obviously was something, though.  Many somethings, in many different compartments, which shifted unhappily when the Twins drew near.  They suspected, at this depth, that they would be moles, or perhaps mice. The smaller twin put his nose up against the bars and squinted while the older looked about hopelessly for an exit.

Finally he turned back to his brother.  "There's no door."  he said pointlessly, and giggled, though it wasn't a sound to be associated with joy.  He leaned his palms against the cage and stared at the glass rods intently.  No matter how hard he focused on the shifting bodies in the box the hard breathing of the beast outside the door could be heard, accented by a rattle in it's lungs that wasn't from sickness.  They had to find a plan.  They needed something to distract the monster while they ran.  But where could they run?  This looked to be the only room in the set too small for it to squeeze into, and what chance did they have trying to fight it on it's own ground?  And if they DID somehow get away, what good would it do them?  The door to the outside world was sealed.  They weren't even sure if the captain and the queen had had the wits to go for help!  Or, even worse, would they CARE enough to?

Something in the cage let out a shrill whine and the twins jumped back, startled.  The whine echoed out in a dozen different tiny voices and little bits of something began to shove themselves through the bars, wiggling like caterpillar legs and threatening to get stuck between the close knit filaments.  They were fingers.  Tiny, tiny fingers, no bigger than a fairy's.  They WERE fairies!  When they pressed their little bodies to the glass the distortion lessened and the vague broken outlines of tiny people made themselves, separated into compartments two deep and high and several wide.  Their shrill squeals were answered by a sudden silence on the other side of the guarded door.

The twins froze, almost hoping that the monster had given up.  The space of three heartbeats passed without a sound from it when in the absence the door suddenly shuddered and groaned as a great weight struck it from the outside.  At once there was a terrible scrabbling of many claws and great puffing breath and rush of air as it snorted at the foot of the door, and at the edges between panel and wall the tips of thin bone scraped randomly in a horrible din that grated the nerves of the ear.  The smaller twin yelped and pulled back from the doorway, striking his back against the wall of the glass cage and sending it toppling unhappily to the ground.  The taffy pulled rods shattered in an explosion of prismatic glass and pricking shards and, before the last bits had even fallen to the stone, up shot nearly thirty tangled wrecks of shrieking, giggling fairy flesh that had long since lost their glow.  They swarmed in a knot over the shattered prison and howled at each other, ripping their hair.

To the mad, high chittering of a language they couldn't understand, the twins threw their arms over their heads to shield themselves, and soon found this was possibly the worst posture they could have taken.  The moment they raised the defense against the cutting wings the knot dispersed in a spray of giggling darts, pulling, scratching, biting, twisting, clawing, and determined to blind the pair with their nails alone.  They swatted at them in a panic but the little creatures seemed numb to pain, and flew back again with redoubled effort, drawing blood from the lobes of the ears.  The black twin followed instinct and bolted for the door.

If the fairies had not been quicker than them, they would have fallen right into the burning teeth of the creature and our story would take an undoubtable turn for the worst.  Instead the monster opened it's horn rimmed jaw, it's scarred yellow eyes gleaming, and was met with a faceful of shrieking mad fairies.  It stumbled backwards in surprise and the twins ran like mice beneath it's belly.

As they wretched their weight against another door the twins dared a glance back to see the twisting thing they were running from.  It stood on four thick legs ridged with bone and horn, with a bisected chest and frail waist like a hunting dog's.  Along it's spine, in a series of impossible joints, three sets of claws jutted upwards and down as though they begged to be wings, and the three fingered claws snatched violently at the swarm of fairies, almost acting counter to the snapping mouth and twisting head.  It's heavy tail ended in a tuft of bone that looked as sharp as if it had never been used.  The twins heaved against the inset door and fell on their backsides when it's groaned open.  A panicked check showed the room free of monsters.  It contained, through no small imagination, the remains of a bedroom.  There was a decayed mattress in a ruined frame shielded by yards and yards of red curtain, most of it already pulled down and cannibalized into other objects, and an enormous mess of what was formerly straw and fabric that had to have been a cushion bed large enough for the beast behind them   The twins scuttled inside, slammed the door behind them, and jointly hauled across the heavy chain that connected a thick but inevitably ineffective bolt between the edge of the large door and the wall.

There wasn't any way such a bolt would hold should the monster decide to ram it, and the twins knew it.  However, their plan, which had formed simultaneously in their heads as they scanned the room for dangers, didn't need it to. They looked at each other to be sure the idea was shared, and for the first time in nearly an hour, they grinned.  With lovely coordination the pair flew upwards to the distant ceiling and began to pull the curtain fabric down from it's lofty rings.
 

"Slightly, Curly, you come with me to help get the twins out.  Toodles, you stay with Wendy and keep looking for this Jason fellow." Nibs delegated authoritatively, falling into the role of leader a bit too easily.  They waited now some thirty feet above the tree tops, in a stillness interrupted only by the frantic preening of Captain Partlet in an attempt to make his wings air worthy.  Every few seconds he spat out a mouthful of sticky mud and went back to sucking it off his feathers.  It wasn't pleasant to watch.

"Now wait!" Wendy cried "We can't go yet!  There's something bigger going on here and I think the Queen can tell us what it is!"

Blank stares turned to Mab, who returned equally "What are you talking about?  This place isn't even in my jurisdiction, I don't know what's going on any more than you do!"

"Yes you do!  You knew the story!"  the girl insisted.  "You have to be able to tell us something!  Think about it." she began to count off on her fingers. "Firstly, this morning, Peter disappears without a trace and we still haven't seen a hair of him.  Secondly, a door appeared at the foot of the mountain."  She looked at Nibs pointedly "You know Peter wouldn't be able to stay away from it once he saw it.  Thirdly, a boy comes down Peter's tree and kidnaps Michael.  You know there wasn't really any legitimate way he could have come to Neverland.  He isn't from the pirates and Peter certainly didn't bring him, though he seemed to know a very important fact only Peter himself would know."  Wendy wiggled her fingers at the boys "That makes three.  You know that after three times it's no longer just coincidence, don't you?  These things all have something to do with each other, and probably mainly to do with either the door or the boy.  And the Queen knew about the boy."

"I did not know about the boy!" she huffed indignantly "I only said it reminded me of a story I heard when I was younger, nothing else."

"But many stories are based in fact." Toodles said, catching on. "This one might be based in fact too."

"Which means we're dealing with the fact behind the story.  Exactly."  Wendy said, feeling a little bit pleased with herself.

Slightly frowned "But the whole thing is just slightly ridiculous!  Any story the Queen heard when she was a child would have to be hundreds of years old--"

"Hey!"

"--and there just isn't any way that they could be the same boy!"

Curly wrinkled his brow.  "But we're in Neverland."

And that seemed to settle it.

The temporary leader drifted lower to Mab's level, and she crossed her arms.  "What else can you tell us about that story?"  he asked.  The queen puffed at him.

"I have more important things to remember than all of the insipid little details of a story I heard when I was a child.  That's the job of a storyteller.  Not a queen."

"Then tell us where we can find a storyteller."

The queen glowered at him.  She felt that she was being treated quite unroyally, and wanted the Captain to interject on her behalf, but the poor fellow had a beakful of sulfur mud and couldn't even mutter a how-do-you-do.  She looked at him pleadingly but his attention was taken by a particularly nasty spot of gunk beneath his secondaries, and he didn't see her.  The Queen finally pouted and stomped her foot against Toodle's shoulder.  "If you MUST, my sister would have a storyteller at her palace.  But I tell you it's not a true story.  It's just a drabble meant to scare little fairies away from humans."

Wendy nodded "We'll have to take the chance."

As they looked about to get their bearings for Small Monday Island, Nibs drifted in next to her and took her arm.  "I hope you know what you're doing."

"So do I."