At first it was just mirrors. She'd catch sight of golden eyes glinting in a wrinkled brown face or a gnarled black hand waving hello when she brushed her hair or washed her face. At home and at school and in public places she saw goblins, dwarves, fireys in the corners of mirrors, and in the middles, and sometimes so close to the surface of her world that they had to be carefully persuaded to keep to their side at inconvenient times. When she laid a hand against the surface, though, they were just mirrors, as solid to her touch as walls.
Then it wasn't just goblins but trees, hanging vines, whole stone walls. Soon they showed up more often than they didn't, and all she saw in mirrors was herself standing in front of tall hedges or tarnished iron gates.
"The Labyrinth misses you," said Sir Didymus one day about a year after her visit, while they were playing a game of Scrabble.
"Misses me?"
"It liked you a lot," harrumphed Hoggle. "It never liked a runner so much, I think."
"If it liked me I never noticed," Sarah said, drawing a tile from the bag. "Seemed it was always doing nothing but getting in my way and trying to kill me."
Hoggle laughed, his raucous, squawking laugh. "You think that was the Labyrinth trying to kill you?" he guffawed. "If it was trying to kill you, you'd be dead. It weren't even trying to stop you. It played with you a bit, is all. It saved you more often than elsewise. The Helping Hands caught you, didn't they?"
"And the forest dropped Ludo through the ground to my bog, and left thee, did it not?" added Sir Didymus.
"And that wall came down and let us through when the cleaners were after us," said Hoggle. "If there was anyone trying to kill you it was Jareth, not the Labyrinth."
Didymus coughed. "Ah, and I think perhaps even that might be a bit of a poor word choice," he put in, unnoticed.
"It misses you," said Hoggle again, "so it's pouting and trying to get your attention."
"Like a spoiled child!" laughed Sarah disbelievingly.
"A very big, magical spoiled child!" Hoggle cackled. "And good luck putting it in time out. It don't answer to anyone but the Goblin King, and often not even him."
"Hmm," was all Sarah said.
The next time she looked in her vanity mirror and saw dusky skies and mossy stones instead of her bright bedroom, she stopped and stood square in front of it with her hands on her hips.
"It's no use," she said to her reflection. "If you want me to visit, you can ask me nicely. But I won't put up with this sulking. You're as bad as I used to be."
One morning three days later, she found that what was usually an unassuming row of identical bushes on the way to school was broken by one twisted, ancient-looking tree, twinkling with an otherworldly silver sparkle. She ducked behind it and found a glittering, twilit path canopied by trees and carpeted with many autumns' worth of leaves.
She figured this was how a labyrinth asked nicely. She didn't go to school that day.
She was steadier these days than she used to be before she lost her brother. She looked at minor inconveniences in her Aboveground life, and she thought of oubliettes and gate guards, and didn't get as worked up over things the way she used to. Her sighs were more quiet and good-humored, her smiles more wry and secretive.
She did a lot of wandering in the Labyrinth—at first just in the hedge maze, but then also in the forests and the outposts and the winding paths just outside the walls. She met the worm again.
"So you got out, did ya?" it said. "Cor! Congratulations, then."
"Thank you," she said.
"Come inside for a cuppa tea?" he offered. "If you aren't here lookin' for any more brothers, eh?"
Sarah surveyed his size—not taller than her pinky—and the little crack in the brick behind him which was his front door.
"Can I take a rain check?" she said.
"Sure, sure," he replied, nodding agreeably. "Whenever you're thirsty, just drop yourself by. We'll save a cup for you."
"I'll be back," promised Sarah.
She took up lessons in fencing and quarterstaff from Didymus, meeting him in her room, in the park, in the Labyrinth when she could get in. He was small but he knew his business, and when he rapped her shins with his little fencing foil it stung.
"Jareth doesn't seem to have noticed that I came back," she said one day during a pause in a lesson while she rubbed her sore ankles. "it's been months since I did. You'd think he'd have had a word with me before now."
"Of course he has noticed, milady," said Didymus, with slightly less gentility than usual. Sarah thought that if knights were allowed to roll their eyes he would have. "His Highness is as attuned to the Labyrinth and its moods and visitors as any denizen."
"Why hasn't he said anything, then?" Sarah said, lunging for the little fox.
"Perhaps he simply thought thou would be best left alone," Sir Didymus said gently, with a deft step out of the way.. "Perhaps if he will not come to thee, thou might go to him."
"No," she said. "I will not go to him."
Toby got older. A lot of the toys that Sarah hadn't boxed away that night ended up in his room one way or another, and she didn't ask for them back.
She was kinder to her stepmother than she used to be. She was, however, even more of a mystery, if anything. She was sweet and good and responsible, now, but whereas she used to drift far away in her mind, now she brought the faraway to her, to spit and crackle behind her eyes like some Fourth of July sparkler. Sometimes Karen Williams wondered whether she had suddenly started doing something right, those years ago, or something wrong. Or if maybe it didn't have anything to do with her. Or anyone.
Sarah was better about spending time with other people now, not being on her own all the time—or she would have been, in theory. She was more pleasant, but she spoke less, and she watched you like she had a secret she knew you'd like. She was harder to connect with, in a difficult-to-define way, and most of her peers didn't bother. She didn't seem to notice.
She went to college, but didn't really study anything specifically. Sarah floated from subject to subject like it didn't particularly matter, like someone killing time by browsing in an interesting shop.
She acted, more than anything, like she was waiting patiently for something inevitable. Her stepmother and father didn't understand it, so they smiled and made small talk when she came home on holidays and pretended not to notice.
"What you have to remember is up and down," Hoggle said as they strolled through his garden outside the walls of the Labyrinth.
"Up and down?" said Sarah, swatting at a fairy.
"Directions change all the time in the Labyrinth," he said. "You know that well as anyone. Paths'n walls shift the second ya turn your back. The only thing that can be counted on is up and down. Up goes toward the center of the Labyrinth. Down goes toward the edge."
Sarah sighed. "No wonder the Helping Hands thought it was strange that I wanted to go down."
Hoggle nodded and broke a stem of grass off to chew on. "If you ever get lost, look for something that gets you up or down, like a ladder or a staircase."
"Oubliettes being an exception."
"Anything that only goes one way is an exception," he grunted. "Getcher self into something you can't get out of."
Sarah grinned funnily at him at that, sly and happy, as though she thought getting into something she couldn't get out of sounded like an excellent idea.
"Like this?" Sarah Williams puffed out her chest and let out a throaty howl. Ludo grunted a no, shaking his shaggy head. He took a step forward and placed huge, gentle hands on her shoulders and chin, pushing them back, tilting it up. He stepped back again and nodded once.
Sarah took a deep breath and bellowed, a bellow that seemed to vibrate the walls of the sunny little courtyard they stood in. A few tiny chips of gravel at their feet stood up on their pointed ends and danced.
Ludo's big, pleasant face smiled happily. "Sawah good!"
Sarah beamed back at him. "Hey, I am good, aren't I! In no time I'll be rolling boulders with you, just you wait." She stood on tiptoe and gave him a peck on the cheek, then swung her backpack onto her shoulder. "I have to go to class, but I'll be by tomorrow to practice, okay?"
Ludo nodded and grunted in answer, and Sarah replied with a howl that rang from her toes. As she turned and hurried from the courtyard, a piece of paving stone turned one slow somersault after her.
A labyrinth guard on his patrols came around the corner just in time to see her go, and he and Ludo stood and watched the rock wobble to a stop.
"You know, at this rate," the guard said, "His Majesty is going to have something to say about it pretty soon."
"Sawah not go to King," Ludo insisted, frowning as though daring the guard to go report on his friend.
"Yeah, yeah, I know," said the guard, kicking the rock. "I'm just saying, he's got to notice."
People Aboveground started looking through Sarah Williams.
She realized she was having to clear her throat two or three times to get helped in a store, and her professors seemed surprised when she came to the front of the room to hand in her assignments, like they hadn't noticed her in class today.
She inspected her hands, peered closely at her face in a mirror to determine whether she had started turning invisible in the night, but there were no changes except her longer hair which she had stopped cutting, and her skin browning with her time in the warming Underground light.
She went home for the weekend, and when she knocked at the door and Karen answered, her stepmother took just a fraction of a moment longer than she should have to connect with Sarah's eyes.
"Oh! Sarah, I wasn't expecting you. You're a godsend though, can you watch Toby? Your father and I have an engagement tonight with his coworkers and we were have a babysitter coming but I have to run some errands before we go and—"
"Cancel the babysitter," said Sarah, smiling. "I'd love to watch him."
"Oh thank you so much, you're an angel." She shut the door behind Sarah and hurried back upstairs to her bedroom. "Toby's playing in his room!" she called down the stairs.
"No I'm not," piped a voice from the sitting room, and seven-year-old Toby ran out clutching a plastic knight and grinning like the sun. "Sarah!"
"Hey, squirt!" she cried, bending down and giving him a hug. "How've you been?"
"I'm good. I got a toy castle for my birthday!" he announced, and held out the toy knight in his fist in illustration.
"The one you had your eye on? Good for you!" She took the offered knight and turned it over consideringly in her hands. "This is cool. Hey, Tobes?"
"Yeah?"
"You can see me, right?"
Toby looked up from pressing a button on the knight's back to make him brandish his plastic sword, and looked her straight in the eyes.
"Yeah," he said seriously. "Why, did you get superpowers?"
Down the stars clattered Karen, shrugging a cardigan on. "Toby! Toby, you're not in the kitchen, are you? Those brownies are for…" And she didn't quite look at Sarah, and then she did, and Sarah noticed it even if Karen didn't—that split second of surprise and confusion as though she didn't recognize the girl talking to her son.
"Oh! I forgot you were here, Sarah."
Sarah said nothing, but she smiled.
"Settle down," Hoggle grumped, clanging the blades of his hedge clippers against hers as they clipped a topiary rabbit. "You're trimming a hedge, not slaying a dragon!"
Sarah laughed. "Sorry. I just have a lot of energy today. There's an idea, though, a dragon! Why don't we have a dragon hedge?"
Hoggle snorted. "You feel like tempting the Labyrinth like that? We'd have plenty on our hands if just this fella decided to run rampant one day," he pointed out, jerking his head at the topiary. "If you feel up to taming a hedge dragon by yourself, be my guest."
Sarah just smirked and raised her eyebrows, keeping her eyes modestly on her trimming.
"Yeah, all right," Hoggle conceded grudgingly after a few moments. "Maybe you could. Hardly know anymore. Hear you're best rock buddies with Ludo now."
"More than that. I've been hanging out with the fireys, and the other day I finally managed to take off a finger and put it back on. They say I'm the chilliest human they've ever met," she said proudly.
"Stretching the definition a bit," Hoggle sniffed.
"Of what? Chilly?"
"Don't get cheeky," he said, wagging a finger at her. Sarah reached up and snipped a sprig above his head.
"I don't know. I feel pretty human." She felt less connected to the Aboveground than she used to be, more at peace among the stones and trees of the Labyrinth, but she figured that was probably not much different than most people. Just growing up. Leaving home. "I don't think I'm less than human. Maybe a little more."
"The Labyrinth loves humans," Hoggle agreed. "I don't think it'd have welcomed you in the same way if you weren't."
"Jareth isn't human. Is he? Or was he?" she asked, frowning.
"Nah, he's all fae. But the Labyrinth ain't his," replied Hoggle, shaking his head. "Not exactly. He uses it, but he don't rule over it. Just the goblin city. The Labyrinth doesn't have a ruler, or anyone to take care of it and watch over it 'cept a handful of goblins and dwarves and things." He clipped a twig on the rabbit hedge's foot and cleared his throat awkwardly. "You should, uh… You should go talk to him sooner or later, you know."
"Did he tell you to say that?"
"Come on, Sarah, you can't avoid it forever," he pleaded.
"I will not go to him," she said firmly, and set to work on the rabbit's tail.
The day Sarah would have graduated from college, she went to the ceremony but just sat in the back and watched. Her professors had stopped recognizing her long ago, and her name had dropped inexplicably off their rosters. She had stopped getting mail, too, even bills, though the power stayed on in her apartment. The ceremony was nice and made her happy. She was proud, but in a different way, she felt, than the men and women crossing the stage.
After it was over, she went outside and passed between the first two glittering trees she saw. She didn't have to hunt long to find the worm.
"'Allo!" he greeted from his outcrop of brick. Sarah bent over with her hands on her knees to smile at him.
"'Allo to you too," she said. "Is it too late to take you up on that cup of tea?" The little worm beamed.
"Never too late! The missus will be so pleased to meetcha at last. Come on in!" He crawled in through the inch-high crack in the wall behind him.
And Sarah, with a deep breath and a roll of her shoulders, stepped forward and followed him inside.
One day, after some last preparations, she called Toby.
"Do you want to go out for ice cream?" she said.
"If you wait until four, you can tell Mom and Dad you're the babysitter they called for," he says. "I'm not sure they'll let me go with you otherwise."
"Smart idea," she said. "Four it is. Hey, you know that wooded park near our house, the one with the little bridge? Do you think you can get home from there by yourself?"
"I'm not a baby, Sarah," he said reproachfully. "I'm ten."
"Sorry," she smiled. "Don't know what I was thinking. See you soon."
When she arrived, her father answered the door. "The babysitter, right?" he said before she could say anything.
She had expected it to hurt some, but instead she just felt fond. "Yeah," she said, "that's me."
"Karen!" her father called up the stairs as he buttoned his cuffs. "Babysitter's here! We'll be home around seven," he said turning back to Sarah. Then he hurried past her and toward the car. "Come on, Karen, we're going to be late!"
Karen dashed down the stairs and past Sarah two moments later. "We have plenty of time!" she was insisting, but was putting her earrings on as she went out the door.
Toby came and stood next to Sarah in the doorway to watch as they drove away.
"A while ago they started asking if Sarah was a girl from my class when I mentioned you, or you called," he said. "I thought about trying to remind them, but… I dunno. Should I have?"
"It wouldn't have made much difference," she said, still staring out at the place where the car had disappeared around the turn. Toby stood looking up at her.
"Does it make you sad?" he asked. She looked down at him and smiled reassuringly.
"You'll leave home too someday," she said. "It's not really sad when you know where you're going. This is just… more so."
Toby allowed a few more respectful beats before reminding, "Ice cream?" and Sarah laughed.
"Yeah, sure. Let's go."
They got into Sarah's old blue Volkswagen and talked about Toby's school and friends on the drive to the ice cream place. Once they had sat down on the shop's curb they lapsed into comfortable silence to focus on their ice creams.
"You look different," said Toby after a while.
Sarah looked down at herself. Her hair was past her waist now, tapering to a ragged point, and she could never quite get all the leaves and burrs of Labyrinth greenery out of it anymore. Her clothes were the same flowing things she'd always liked to wear, but she hadn't bothered with anything new in a long time. The colors had muted from wear, and the edges were tattered and faintly stained, trailing ends at all her hems, her voluminous sleeves and her jean cuffs and the long sage-green skirt over her jeans. She laughed.
"Yeah, I guess I look a little wild. I'm surprised Dad and Karen left you with me."
"Not that," said Toby, licking dripped ice cream off his knuckles. He waved his unoccupied hand indicatively in front of his face. "You look different here."
"How so?"
He shrugged. "I dunno." He regarded her seriously. "You remind me of somebody."
At that her eyebrows went up. "Of who?"
He shrugged again. "Can't remember. You just remind me."
"Well, if you ever think of it," she said with a hard-to-read expression, returning to her ice cream, "you tell me."
They drove into the parking lot of the park.
"This is your stop. I gotta go, okay?"
"Are you leaving home?" Sarah smiled and nodded. Toby regarded her, frowning just a little in thought. "Can I come visit you sometime?" he said at last. Sarah laughed.
"Yeah, sometime." She leaned over and gave him a tight hug and a noogie. "Be good for Dad and Karen, okay?"
Toby nodded and got out of the car. He stood and watched as Sarah put her Volkswagen into drive and pulled off of the parking lot and onto the grass. She drove slowly over the little stone bridge, past the playground, and into a copse of trees to the East of the park. She looked in her rearview mirror just once before the trees hid the park from view, and spotted Toby still standing in the parking lot, watching her and waving. It made her smile.
She put her gaze back forward and drove, slowly to be careful about hitting any trees. Her tires thumped over their roots and the campus parking pass she'd never thrown away jiggled on the mirror.
She drove for a long time. The copse in the park was not very expansive, nor were the trees in it very large, but the trees she drove past now had trunks she wouldn't have been able to stretch her arms around, and though she couldn't see far in any direction for the thickness of the trees, it was definitely a forest now.
The light in the forest was unchanging, and her car did not seem to be running out of gas, so on she drove.
When her car's tires finally caught on a root, she turned it off, got out, and walked, the keys still left in the ignition. It was very quiet in the forest now that she had shut off her car. The trees were thicker than ever.
The light still never changed; Sarah felt that she might have been walking for days and not noticed. The longer she walked, the more she felt calm, and steady, and ancient, like the trees. The forest became so thick she had to thread a path between the trunks.
When she saw the crack of light ahead at last, she did not sigh with relief or speed her pace. She just smiled, like someone spotting a friend and letting them know they were recognized.
Tall brown riding boots kick up little puffs of sandy dust as the Goblin King makes his way to the outer edges of the Labyrinth. It is much better behaved than used to be, when it had no direction to accept but the energies from the fringes of his kingdom; the pathways lay themselves out in front of him with little circumlocution, and no tricks or dead ends or interruptions.
It does not feel, however, like an obeisance before a king—it feels, he muses, like being escorted to a throne room.
With one final turn the pathway opens and there is the high outer wall of the Labyrinth, a woman atop it with one slippered foot on the wall and one hanging down. Her hair is a long, dark pennant blowing tangled in the erratic Underground wind, her long tatty skirts in streamers over fraying denims. Her skin glitters subtly like the sandstone she is perched on, and her smile is knowing and regal, and her eyes are darker and wilder and more full of secrets and power than any Abovegrounder's could be.
"Good evening," says the King of the Goblin City.
"Good evening," says the Mistress of the Labyrinth. "I think we are long overdue for a conversation."