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The medicine I was taking then was bitter and strong. Though it gave me the sleep I needed, it also sent dreams, more vivid than I had known in adult life. In dreams that night I walked in Kensington Gardens, leaving the paths that John and I followed on our summer afternoon strolls and seeking the tree-hidden stillness along the far end of the Lake, where the fireflies’ reflection played above water like black onyx. This was where the fairies lived, Meg had whispered to me when we were children. This was where Meg herself had disappeared one evening when Mrs. Clegg had brought the lot of us down to London for I forget what occasion — it wasn’t a treat for us, that was all I knew — and had not reappeared for almost two days. Mrs. Clegg had hushed it up, of course, and pretended that it hadn’t been more than a few hours. But though we were quite small — five or six — I remembered it clearly.

It had been two days.

And Meg had told me, that she had been in the Neverlands, with Peter Pan, for what seemed to her then to have been many weeks. She was never quite the same after that. Happier, as if she carried in her heart the assurance that things would all come right in the end.

I knew, too, from conversations with Martha Hudson, that Mr. Holmes’ logic and studies extended far beyond what people like John — bless his kindly, literal heart! — regard as the Real World.

Thus I wasn’t at all surprised to see Mr. Holmes in Kensington Gardens, walking quietly in the cool blackness barred with moonlight, not only listening but touching the tree-bark, the grass-blades, the dew upon the leaves as he passed. I couldn’t imagine how he knew about Kensington — Mrs. Clegg had certainly never reported that long-ago disappearance of her charge to the police — but he moved like a man who knew the place well, and knew what he sought. When a fairy darted in a sparkling skim of pale-blue light across the lake-surface he only stopped, as it swooped up before him, hung in the darkness a yard in front of him for the space of a second or two, then whipped away.

Whether Mr. Holmes carried something in his pockets that signaled the fairies of his benign intent — and I think he must have — I did not know. But they flickered from the woods, followed him thicker and thicker, as he walked unerringly toward the belvedere that only exists in the park sometimes, usually after the sun goes down: the rest of the time you cannot find it, no matter how systematic your search. But Holmes went straight towards it, coming out of the circle of willows to see it standing in its little meadow, with the fairies hovering around it like dragonflies above standing water in the darkness.

And as he came into the open, about thirty feet from the ghostly circle of marble pillars, he met Peter Pan.

Or, rather, Peter seized Holmes by the sleeve and dragged him back into the willows: “Hist! Beware!” His dagger wrought of meteor-iron, its handle carved of dragon’s bone, caught the moonlight in his other hand.

Holmes dropped at once to one knee at the child’s side, so that their eyes were nearly level; followed his gaze toward the open meadow, the belvedere. “What is it?”

“It’s the Gallipoot,” whispered the child. “The Thing Cold and Empty. It haunts the zone of shadow between your world and the Neverlands. It waits for the veil to open, so that it can slip through and hunt.”

“What does it hunt?” asked Holmes.

“Souls on this side,” Peter replied. “Dreams on the other. It slices them up and swallows them, and all the little pieces of them wave shrieking about it like bloody flags in agony, forever.” His eyes burned somberly. It was hard to tell from where I stood, half-hidden among the willows, whether Peter was pretending or not, because he did pretend … only the things that he pretended often came to pass. “I’ve sought to drive it back through the belvedere into the zone of shadow, but it’s eluded me, and I dare not call upon my henchmen, for it would make short work of them.”

Holmes took a flute from his pocket — an ivory one he’d acquired in Tibet — and said,