It took a very long time to get used to the night time sounds of Neverland. Although Wendy hardly noticed them now, they had once scared her terribly, as they now did the other girls. New boys rarely had such problems, or at least, rarely showed them.
Everyone was unusually jumpy tonight, though. The night animals seemed more menacing, the distant sounds of the redskins ominous. The pirates' complete silence was the worst.
In their little hollows, the boys whispered about a demon, a formless terror that haunted the forest. The girls heard them and whimpered. Where was Peter? she wondered. Normally he would make a grand speech, assuring the children their fears were baseless. Through the whispered conversations she could hear older voices murmuring somewhere in the depths of the tree.
She made her way quietly to Peter's room, taking care not to disturb those already asleep. Just outside the curtain she paused, listening to the low voices which were suddenly clear. Though she'd been taught eavesdropping was wrong, she always did it anyway. It was, to her mind, her greatest vice, but sometimes she was glad of it.
Somewhere on the other side of the heavy leather curtain, someone was playing the pan pipes. She would have thought it was Peter, but it sounded like his voice singing softly. The pipes stopped, and a second boy's voice joined the first. They finished the song together.
"I miss the old days," Peter said at length. "I hadn't thought anything had changed until you got back. Now I see how different it is."
"Everything changes, Pete," the second voice said. Unless Wendy was very much mistaken, it was Ray. But it was a different Ray than she was used to hearing. There was no scorn or anger in his voice, just calm and a sort of resigned kindness. It made it pleasant to listen to, more like Peter's.
"They shouldn't. Not in Neverland. Nothing's supposed to change in Neverland."
"But they do change. Roberts was thrown down. You became chief. The
redskins moved camp."
"So? Those were big changes, sudden ones. Not like what's happened to
the Boys. That was slow, and it was bad."
"You know as well as I do what caused the change. No, don't try to
avoid it. The Lost Boys changed because they weren't boys anymore, Pete.
They changed because girls showed up."
"You're wrong," Peter snapped. "They didn't change because a girl came. They changed because a girl…" Because a girl what? Wendy wondered. As far as she knew, she was the first girl to come to Neverland. Tinkerbell, the mermaids, and the redskin women had been here first, of course, but they had never really been part of the Lost Boys, had they? Besides, they were all doing the same things they'd always done. So what did she, Wendy, have to do with this change that Peter found so displeasing?
"Tell yourself what you want. You know I'm right." The pan pipes began again, a slow, mournful tune. Wendy fled without talking to Peter, hating Ray with every fibre of her being.