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Peter nodded.

“I will stand before the opening into the zone of shadow,” said Holmes, “and play. When it lunges at me, I will leap out of the way, and you must drive it through with your weapon.”

The child nodded again, trying not to look impressed — I couldn’t remember whether Peter could play the flute himself or not. Holmes and Peter walked toward the belvedere together, and I noticed that all the fairies had disappeared. The air of the summer night grew cold, and strange, directionless movements seemed to stir the darkness, with a smell of sulfur and mould. Far, far off, as if at the end of an endless corridor, I could hear shrieking, as of the bleeding fragments of a thousand souls.

I did not know whether at that moment I qualified as a soul or a dream. All I knew was that this was real, this was happening in Kensington Gardens, even as I lay deep in sleep at John’s side not many streets away. If it caught my soul, I would never wake up.

I had thought Holmes would play one of those strange airs that he learned in Tibet, or the weird gypsy music that he sometimes coaxed from his violin. But he played the air from Vivaldi’s Concerto in D Major for Lute, and the Gallipoot drew closer — I could smell it, hear the trapped souls screaming, feel its nearness in the bone-hurting cold. When it broke from the trees I tried to cry out in my sleep, tried to scream so that John would wake me, but I couldn’t. It was well I didn’t, for I realized a moment later that if I screamed it would become aware of me, come for me…

It rolled, oozed, surged toward the belvedere, and the exquisite melancholy song of the flute didn’t waver, though the screaming of the trapped and devoured souls rose like the wail of storm-wind. Through its darkness the marble pillars glimmered, then vanished, and I felt in my bones the wrenching of the fabric of the world as it struck.

A shriek like a thunderclap pierced my skull like lightning, and in the blackness that swallowed the moonlight, I saw the flash of Peter’s knife—

Then Holmes was stepping down the shallow platform of the belvedere, the world normal again and as it should be, tucking his bone flute into his pocket with one hand.

In the other hand, he held Peter’s knife.

“Give that back!” Peter came leaping out of the belvedere, grabbed for Holmes’ arm.

Holmes sidestepped him like a dancer. “When the Darling children return to their home, you shall have your knife back.”

“Who are the Darling children?”

Peter doesn’t always remember things.

“Wendy, and John, and Michael,” said Holmes. “The children who went away with you to the Islands last night.” I don’t know how he learned this — perhaps he’d only guessed it, until he actually encountered Peter — but then, as I said, Holmes studied extensively the writings concerned with other realities than those of the material earth. Someone, at some time, must have written about the Neverlands — or the Islands, as they were apparently also called, and they had other names as well. Certainly Meg was not the only child who had inexplicably disappeared, without any traceable sign of human agency, in Kensington Gardens or elsewhere.

Peter said, “They’re my friends. Wendy is to be my mother, and take care of me, and look after my Lost Boys in a secret house below the ground.”

Holmes nodded gravely. “You are renowned for looking after your friends,” he said, as one recalling a legend — or a set of instructions, as to what one must say to a dragon or a fairy — “in the face of any and all danger to yourself.”

Peter smote his chest proudly. “I am.” Peter never could resist renown.

“Then promise me this,” said Holmes. “When the Darling children return home — as return they will, one day — promise me that you will see to it, that they will do so on the day after they departed. That way,” he added, “you will have your knife back in only two days.”

The fairies were gone, and the moon sinking, as Holmes walked back toward the paths of the more populated parts of the Gardens. In the shadows of the willow circle he stopped,