Slumber of stone
Chapter one.
My grandmother was Wendy Darling. Yes, the Wendy Darling, the one who had all those miraculous adventures with Peter Pan. She was also my guardian after my father, a wealthy merchant, died. My mother had been a whore and had died a year after I was born. Now Wendy-bird, as she loved being called by me and the other children on that street in London, wasn't really my grandmother in the biological sense, but she had been the only person that my father would have trusted with a lame dog. He told me once when I was four that all of his family was made up of snakes and jackals.
During the night, if I had a nightmare Wendy would rush up to my room no matter what hour of the night it was and tell me one of her stories and hold me until I fell asleep. There was always love in that house from the day I turned nine and she took me in to the day I turned thirteen and she passed away.
She told me that if I was still a child when she passed on with her last words she would tell me a secret that only a child could know or understand. She had also told me that the attic was off limits so when I was old enough to put two and two together I figured that the attic had something to do with the secret. I had no interest in finding out by breaking a rule and by no means did I want her to die, she had been the only person who had cared about me other than my father and, perhaps, my mother. She had been the only person who understood my weird quirks and how I was more mature in thought than my peers and had a larger vocabulary than any of them.
I had rarely ever seen her upset, but when she was I knew exactly what to do. When she was sitting down I would climb into her lap or, and this only came about when I was older and couldn't sit in her lap any more, sit on the floor cross legged at her feet and ask her to tell me a story. She would say, "What sort of a story?" as if she knew what I was about to say. My reply was always the same every time, "A Peter Pan story.". With that she would begin and as the story progressed I watched as the years melted away from her face giving her the light of youth once again. There were occasions, though, when she would say, "Why don't you tell me a story?" and so I would begin to make up a Peter Pan story of my own. I always insisted that her stories were better, thought.
When I was twelve-and-a-half we found out about the cancer. The doctors said that she would be lucky if she lived till my next birthday, which was July third. They offered to put her in an institution so that she would have a better chance of living her full life span. She refused. That day when we went home she sat me down and told me the full account of her adventures and how she had a large fortune in the bank and that I was the soul heir to that sum of money.
We lived out those months before my birthday as thought it was stolen time that we had to make good use of. We traveled the globe visiting every country I had ever heard of and a few I that hadn't. Then, on the eve of my birthday, we returned home and she asked me a question I should have been expecting, but wasn't. "Are you a child still?" she asked. I thought for a moment how I was more mature than my peers, but then I realized that it was the kind of mature that made you want to cling to childhood as much as possible. Then I looked into the anxious face of the woman who raised me. "Yes." I said and a light came into her eyes that made her look twenty years younger.
"I am dieing." she said, after sitting down on one of the old chairs in the living room, as thought I didn't already know, "I can feel it in my bones, the tiredness of old age. When I ascend those stairs to my room, I shall never walk back down. You, my dear child, will inherit all of my belongings. Including those of which I have kept in the attic. Now, to business. There is a prophesy that a child who goes to Neverland without having ever met Peter Pan before and came there of their own free will, shall save Neverland from the Slumber of Stone, whatever that may be. Tinkerbell told me this for some reason which is unbeknownst to me, but she said that the child would be given gifts from three out of the four worlds and would remain there forever." "What worlds?" I interjected forgetting that it was rude to interrupt. "The worlds are really just the different societies of Neverland. There are the pixies, the mermaids, the Indians, and the pirates." "What about the lost boys?" I asked. "They are a part of all societies so they aren't their own group. And, of course, the pirates wouldn't give you anything but a canon ball to the gut."
And, with that, she rose from her chair and said "I bid you goodnight. Take care of your self. After I am in my room, go to the attic and prepare for your journey while I prepare for mine." "Thank you, for every thing." I said. "Not at all, Susan. Goodbye." after saying that, she hugged me for the last time and, even though it sounds ungrateful, during that moment I couldn't find a single reason to be sad because, after all, isn't death just a new beginning. "Goodbye, maybe I'll see you I the next life if I get there." and with that we parted ways, her going up the stairs to her room and myself going to the other set of stairs on the other side of the house which lead to the attic trap door.