Tuesday

He had many faces—the Bogeyman, the Goblin King, a nameless lurking darkness—but he was the specter of The Book, the creature that gave it form, and his name was Jareth. None had come close enough over the long centuries to learn his name, save for one: a young girl with a head full of fantasy.

He sighed, watching Sarah from behind a veil that her mortal eyes could never pierce. It had taken him several years to find his way back into her hands, and what he now saw bothered him. She was taller, older. Her long chocolate hair had been cut to an inch below her shoulders and layered to frame her lovely face; her emerald eyes now saw the world through a haze of education, rather than the jewel-bright fantasy that she had once seen. It frustrated him, but Jareth finally admitted that, in the time it took him to return to her, his little girl had turned into a young woman.

His kind instinctively chose a single victim and fed off their fear and belief. Once they had gained enough strength, they worked through their victims to bring chaos into the world, to nourish the inhuman need for disorder. Always, the victim was a child; they were easier to scare and control, because they believed stronger than anyone else. Sometimes the creatures would stay with the same victim long past childhood, but that was because it was easy to control what the human believed in once you were already inside them. Jareth had chosen his own prey very carefully; Sarah Williams had been a blindingly bright star, shining through the murky world of disbelief. He had wanted her and her strength more than anything, but she had beaten him in that silly reproduction of The Labyrinth; he shouldn't have had to concede the fight, but her belief in The Right Words had been so strong that she had forced him back into his book. It had enraged him—the girl was his!—and when he was enraged, the world shook.

Jareth was the very worst of his kind. He was restless and volatile, childish and mischievous, cunning and ruthless; he was prideful and easily goaded into seeking revenge. He was the preeminent Bogeyman, the name that even other creatures of shadow refused to whisper for fear of summoning him.

He had been restricted to the book, but he had never stopped imagining the day when he'd get back to Sarah. It had never crossed his mind that she had already been too close to the brink of womanhood, that when he saw her again she would no longer be the melodramatic girl he remembered. It had only been a handful of years, but they had wrought so much change in her that he could barely find hint of the adversary that he so wanted to face.

The years could not change her belief, though; it had been dimmed, to be sure, but she still burned brighter than most humans ever did. She looked different, she acted different, but Sarah Williams was still a child at heart.

That wasn't exactly what Jareth had been hoping for, after all a child of mind and body was easier to control than one simply of the heart, but he had always relished a challenge. Time had denied him the second chance he had envisioned; he would have to work differently to ensnare the mind of a woman, but he refused to leave Sarah alone. It was, after all, simply within his nature to haunt.

Jareth smiled darkly, watching from the shadows as early morning light crept into the room, bathing Sarah in its weak glow. "You had better enjoy the light while you can, brave Sarah," he whispered to her sleeping ear, "because your world is about to get very dark, indeed."

Sarah woke up screaming but, as she struggled to catch her breath, the details of her nightmare faded from mind until she was left only with the memory of hawkish blue eyes. Her heart slowed its fast rhythm, but skipped a beat when her eyes settled on the red book that rested so innocently upon her desk.

The Bogey Book had followed her home. It wasn't logical, she couldn't explain it, but Sarah knew that she hadn't picked the book back up after her panicked re-shelving. Something about the book wasn't natural, wasn't right, and she had felt that with every fiber of her being. Standing in the dusty recesses of the library, it had felt as though something dark and restless had tried to crawl beneath her skin. Just thinking about it now, hours later, made her skin crawl.

Sarah wrapped one of the thick blankets around herself and slowly got out of bed, drawn to the book like a helpless moth to flame. It drew her eye, time and again, though she had tried her hardest to ignore it; the thing was just too damn creepy to devote any sort of attention to. And yet she couldn't turn away. Now, in the early morning hours when the world was still silent, it felt as though nothing existed beyond her four walls; as though it was just her and the book. She reached out and opened it, her fingers longing for the feel of leather and old paper, while the rest of her wanted nothing more than to simply get away.

To Sarah blazed across the inside cover; the script was heavy, black, arrogant, accusing. There was no possible way that she was the Sarah it had been dedicated to—she was at least a hundred or so years too young—and yet… a small voice in the back of her mind was certain that she was, despite the illogic of it. There was a warning in those two simple words and it made her want to dive through the pages of Le Livre De Bogey, but she had a feeling that her world might turn upside-down if she dared.

With a jerky movement she shut the book, finally giving in to the urge to flee her own room.

"Oh god," Sarah whispered in shocked horror, "what are you?"

Her day had not gone well at all. In the twenty minutes it had taken her to get ready for school that morning she had felt the oppressive presence of the book in her room growing, felt it in the hollow of her back as though the book had eyes to stare at her with. Then, at school, she had found the leather-bound demon waiting for her in her locker, its gold lettering flickering sullenly. Accusingly. She had slammed her locker shut, her heart beating painfully fast, and had run to the safety of homeroom. When she had come back to her locker, several classes later and filled with immense dread, the book had been gone.

She had been willing to concede that perhaps she had made the event up, that her unease with the book and her unsettled state of mind from her forgotten nightmare had made her mind play tricks on her. But Sarah could not, would not, lie to herself. The moment she had walked back into her bedroom after coming home from school, she had seen that The Bogey Book had not been on her desk, where she had left it, but was laying open by her pillow. Inviting her to read.

"I know I didn't check you out," Sarah said to the book, "and yet here you are. I know I didn't take you to school, bring you back, or even move you from my desk, yet here you are!" She threw her backpack to the floor and angrily peeled off her jacket. "You're not just a book, are you?" she asked, edging closer to her bed. "Real books don't haunt people."

The book didn't answer, but she felt the cool brush of that questing darkness once more, felt the silent urging to read.

"Dare I cast my fate upon devil's mercy?" she murmured quietly, hesitantly settling on the bed. The book rested heavily in her lap while her fingers flicker gently through the pages. "Chapter One," she read, "The Labyrinth." A haziness in her mind shifted from the familiarity of the words, but didn't quite dissipate.

Jareth smiled, thrilled that the first hurdle had been cleared so easily. A Bogeyman's influence depended upon how much of the book a victim had read, but once they started reading they couldn't seem to stop. It was always getting them to take that first step that was the hardest but Sarah's natural curiosity, combined with her spooked mood, had completed the task with hardly any effort on his part at all. One paltry chapter alone would give him the power to appear to her, if only in her dreams.

Time passed differently for him, since he spent most of it trapped in or around books, but he had felt the subtle march of the years. To him it had been a laughable amount of time, barely worth noticing, but to Sarah it might as well have been a small eternity. He suddenly, acutely, felt the years stretching out behind him, separating him from the girl until it felt like their last meeting had happened a lifetime ago. She could not slip away from him this time, Jareth thought adamantly, he would go mad with wanting for her and, if fate were strange enough to give him a third chance, who was to say how old she'd be when next they met. It was Bogey or bust this time.

Sarah made a strange noise, her fingers hovering over a woodcutting of a young girl running through the twisting passageways of a labyrinth. She had forgotten that event—human memory always tried to make them forget, as though that could somehow protect them—but something in her still knew.

Jareth ran an unseen had over her hair; she shivered, her eyes darting across the room for a moment. "Remember me, Sarah," he murmured into her ear. "Remember me so that you might see me with the same sweet terror you once did."

Sarah's mind struggled against the words she read. Each new sentence resonated within her until she could picture even the tiniest of details. As if she had been there.

Her thoughts heaved violently at the random musing. Again, she had the curious feeling that there was a haziness wrapped around her memories, but it was thinning now, letting small things back in.

"Through dangers untold," she quote from the book, "and hardships unnumbered—"

A decorative glass bottle rolled off the end of her desk and shattered on the floor, jerking Sarah away from the book for a moment. She stared at the mess in confusiont, knowing that there was no logical way for it to have done what it had. She shivered, eyes darting about her room once more. Why did it suddenly fell as though there was someone else in there with her?

A/N: I'm actually surprised at how many of you have seen Don't Look Under The Bed!

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Disclaimer: Labyrinth is Henson's. Don't Look Under The Bed is Disney's.