Author's Note: Hello! Thanks for reading Sunset Underground. I've loved The Labyrinth since I was about seven, and I'm going to have so much fun writing a sequel to it. Please review if you have time, and feel free to give constructive criticism. Additionally, if you notice any grammatical errors or typos, don't feel bad about pointing them out. I'd really like to know about any mistakes so that I can correct them. Thanks!

Chapter One

2B or 4B? Sarah's fingers twitched over the pencils as she tried to make up her mind. She wanted to get the face right this time, she'd erased and redrawn it so many times the paper was almost worn through. Sarah reached for her tea while she considered, and found that it had grown cold. Thunder rumbled outside of her window. There had been dry lightning all day, but the storm had yet to begin. "Just rain already," she muttered, finally selecting 2B. She needed a light touch to get the face of the princess right. If she had to erase it one more time, Sarah was definitely going to throw a temper tantrum, and she liked to think that she had outgrown those.

Sarah had been in advertising for eight long years, and had dreamed of switching careers and becoming an artist for seven and a half of them. It was only a few weeks ago that she had finally stopped dreaming and started putting together a portfolio. She wanted to create traditional fairytale art, the kind that she had loved as a teenager, but for some reason she didn't feel as inspired as she'd expected. She had hoped that after years of wasting her creative energy on advertising slogans, she would be bursting with art just waiting to be drawn. But something wasn't right. Instead of feeling like her inspiration had built up over the past eight years, she felt as though it had dried up.

"Give it time," she advised herself, reminding herself a little of her stepmother, Karen, "it'll come back." With a deep breath, she put pencil to paper, picturing the face that she wanted to draw, a sad, beautiful face with the eyes closed and the lips parted. And then her cell phone rang and she jumped, scratching a dark, wide mark halfway across the paper. "Damn it!" Sarah dropped the pencil, breaking the point off, and banged her fist on the desk with frustration. She'd drawn a big, ugly line right over the princess's pillow and the canopy of her bed, the ruffled canopy that had taken several hours to draw just right. Biting back a curse, she picked up the eraser and tried to figure out how she could get rid of the line without destroying the rest of the drawing, then put it down and sighed. "I don't even care anymore. If I stare at this sheet of paper any longer, I'm going to go crazy." She realized that the phone was still ringing and stood up to answer it, wondering who was calling her so late in the evening. "Hello?"

"Sarah? Do you have a minute?" It was Toby. The moment he spoke, Sarah knew that something was seriously wrong. Toby was using the tone of voice that he reserved for times when he'd gotten himself into trouble and was hoping that she could get him out.

"What happened?" She asked immediately, and then waited, knowing that the longer it took him to tell her, the worse it was.

There was a moment of complete silence, save for a strange sniffling sound from Toby's end. "Toby? Is that someone crying?" Sarah tried not to sound as alarmed as she felt.

"Well? Are you going to tell her?" Came a girl's teary voice from the other end. "Anyway, I still don't understand why we're calling her and not the police. Toby? Oh, for crying out loud, give me the phone!" There was a brush of static, and then, "Sarah!" The girl's voice was so loud that Sarah jerked the phone away from her ear.

She had already identified the emotional girl as Pat, Toby's girlfriend of four months. Putting two and two together, Sarah arrived at what she felt was a logical conclusion. "Oh my God, you're pregnant!" No sooner were the words out of her mouth then she remembered that Pat had mentioned the police, "...Or you've killed somebody. Patty, what is going on?"

There was a noise rather like a tearful snort from the other end, and she heard Pat ask Toby, "are you sure she's the one we should be calling?" Toby's response was muffled and Sarah couldn't make it out, but it seemed to satisfy Patty. "Sarah? Abby's m-m-missing." Pat's voice broke on the name and she began sobbing into the telephone.

"Who's Abby?" Sarah asked hesitantly as Patty cried. Toby had never mentioned anyone named Abby before.

"S-she's m-m-my sister! I was s-supposed to be watching her! I'm the only one she has!"

The dots began to connect for Sarah. "Abby is your sister, and you were supposed to be watching her? But Toby came over and you got distracted and she ran off?" That would explain why Toby had sounded so guilty.

"N-no! Abby's just a baby, she couldn't run off anywhere! She was in her crib! She just vanished."

That struck a chord with Sarah, and she began to feel vaguely uneasy. Pushing away memories of the time she had lost her own baby sibling, Sarah put her tea in the microwave to reheat it. "Patty, calm down, she's just more mobile than you realized. She managed to get out of her crib somehow, and she's probably not far away. Babies don't just vanish." Ha ha. Sarah allowed herself a wry smile.

"But Abby did," Pat insisted. "Toby had just finished saying that he wished she was gone, and then suddenly she was!"

Wait, what? Sarah screeched to a mental halt and tried not to jump to conclusions, while part of her was already panicking. "What? What did he say?"

"We didn't expect her to d-disappear!"

"Patty, stop crying. Now tell me exactly, what did Toby say, word for word?"

"I don't see why-" but even through her tears Patty seemed to sense the urgency in Sarah's tone. "Toby, what did you say? Your sister wants to know. It was something weird about gremlins," she added to Sarah.

"Gremlins?" This was just getting worse and worse.

"Goblins," Toby corrected faintly on the other end.

"Oh, gremlin, goblin, same difference." Patty paused, listening to Toby. "He says he doesn't even know why he said it. The words just popped into his head like he'd heard them before."

Sarah tried unsuccessfully to repress a pang of guilt. "What words?" She asked, biting her lip, and she could hear Toby clearly as he recited a very familiar phrase.

Patty started to repeat it, "Toby said: 'I wish-'"

"No! Don't say it!" Sarah tried not to think about how crazy she probably sounded. "Listen, what's your address? I'm coming over right now." She began rummaging around on her desk for her keys.

"Toby, she says she's coming over right now, she – what is that? Toby, what is that? Is that an owl?"

Sarah's heart nearly stopped beating. "Patty..." she found her keys and gripped them so tightly that her hand ached.

"I've never seen an owl do that before. Do you suppose it has rabies? Do owls get rabies? Oh my God... what if it carried away the baby?" Patty was probably closer to the truth than she realized, Sarah thought grimly as she grabbed her coat and flung her apartment door open, not bothering to lock it behind her. Her cellphone was pressed tightly to her ear with one hand as she ran for the elevator. "Do not go near the owl. Do you hear me? Do not go near the owl! I'm coming over right now!"

"Toby, what is it doing? Oh my God!" Sarah knew the exact moment that Jareth transformed because she could hear Toby yell something and Patty start screaming.

"Patty, stay with me. What's happening? Is someone there? Put Toby on the phone."

"You have to call the police Sarah," Patty was saying hysterically, "there's a man here. No! Toby, stay away from him! What are you doing here? Get out of here!"

"Put Toby on the phone!" Sarah insisted, "put him on the phone now!" She was in the elevator, alone, fortunately, and her panicked voice bounced off of the narrow walls. "Toby, do not talk to that man! Do you hear me Toby? Do not talk to him! I'm coming over right now, just stay away from him! Whatever you do, don't-" There was total silence on the other end. With quickly mounting horror, Sarah realized that she was talking to herself. The line had gone dead.

Author's Note: Thanks for reading! Please leave a review. Take care!