Wendy had just finished hanging the last of the washing when a tootle of pan pipes announced Peter's return. She hurried out to meet him, ignoring the other girls' questions about meal preparation. They knew what to do by now. She just hoped Peter hadn't found a new boy, as he often did on his extended trips – they were running out of room. Worse, he might have brought Tiger Lily. Peter would never think of the princess as anything but a redskin – at least, he had better not – but Wendy didn't want her near him. Peter was hers!
She emerged in the small clearing just outside the tree. Peter was there, she saw with a smile, cross-legged beneath a tree playing his pipes. Ray lounged against another tree, playing accompaniment on his own set. Wendy stopped dead, her smile fading. No one but Peter played pan pipes. No one!
They stopped playing, but not to look at her. Peter's face was uncharacteristically solemn as he stared at the tree tops. Then, somewhere in the distance or perhaps right above them, another set of pipes began to play. While Peter's melody had been cheery, and Ray's somehow stately, this one was haunting.
At first it was barely recognisable as a set of pipes, sounding instead as if Neverland itself was singing. The pure music was offset by the songs of birds and the distant sound of the waves, which somehow became part of the soulful tune. Later, Wendy could not have sung back a single bar of the song, could not remember the sound, but only recall the emotions it brought to the surface. You couldn't have sung along, as with a pirate shanty, although the birds did, nor have danced to it as with the music back in England.
When it stopped, its echo still floating through the trees, the forest was silent. Wendy felt almost that if she strained, she could still hear a faint echo of it, but at the same time, the song might never have been. For a moment the forest was still, poised between realities, before the spell was broken as Neverland's inhabitants returned to their lives.
"It didn't work," Peter said heavily. "I was so sure…"
"It did work," Ray interrupted. He was always interrupting Peter, Wendy
thought, vexed. He should know his place by now. "Just not the way we thought.
We were wrong, is all. It's not the end of the world." Peter just looked
at him. What didn't work? Wendy wondered. She was sure there was a vital
clue, something she'd missed, here, but still trapped in the music's spell,
she could not think what it could be. The two boys looked up and saw her,
and the grief on Peter's face, coupled with the deep anger only just veiled
that etched lines in Ray's forehead, made her wonder if she really wanted
her questions answered.