No Rest for the Wicked
Written By and in Collaboration with: Poor Little Match Girl and A Clever Ruse
Disclaimer: I don't own or associate with Labyrinth or the Jim Henson Company in any way form or fashion. ;-;
Note: If you haven't re-read Chapter 1: A Window, Again, it has been revised to clear up a few inconsistencies. Before you continue on to this chapter, goooo back, while you stiiiiill can!
Chapter 2: A Place to Forget
Toby felt his stomach turn. The sickening sensation he felt was akin to the feeling you have when you estimate one step too many on a dark stairway, and the dark surprise it instills in you in such a short amount of time. In a rush of silence, he collapsed onto the ground. The fall was, for the most part, cushioned as his body was met with a spongy, sticky resistance.
Toby meant to open his eyes, but found that they were already open. Despite this fact, it was dark.
If there was one thing that was almost completely absent from the life of Toby Williams, it was darkness.
The lights that had always guarded him had faded away with the all-encompassing white noise of before, without a trace or outline of their ever having been at all. Abandoned, the wide-eyed Toby scrambled to his knees. Sucking in a quick breath of cold, murky air, he clenched his teeth. His entire frame was tense with a growing sense of panic. Groping about the pitch, he found a wall of the same waxy material as the floor of the unfathomable chamber that the boy had found within a few moments of rustling and terrible uncertainty.
"Am I blind?!" Toby's voice was shaking heavily, never surpassing a whisper for fear of who or what might...or worse, might not be listening. Where was he? What had happened to the lights?
"You might be dead," came a young voice almost level in tone with Toby's from the far corner of the chamber. As the echo bounced from wall to wall, one could observe that the chamber sounded small in width and tall in height. However, the fair-haired boy was far too busy losing his footing while yelping with surprise in an almost embarrassingly high pitch to remark on the accuracy of echo-location. He was scarcely upright when a steely blue light was brought into the chamber following a series of shuffling noises and a light grating sound. Toby's eyes adjusted almost immediately, allowing them to roam wildly until they fell upon the source of the peculiar light. A thin, twisting stick served as the match for the flame that ate at its point. Bearing the match with long, thin fingers was a dark-haired boy, close in age to Toby, whose skin appeared bright blue in the strange, dim illumination. The only differing hue came from the pale golden glint of two small metal hoops that adorned the cartilage of one ear uncovered by his messy black hair and the pristine white bandages that covered his left eye and forehead.
"Who are you?" Toby attempted to demand but settled short at nervously inquiring, struggling to keep from stumbling over his words and save himself from sounding more ridiculous or afraid in apparently mixed company. His eyes darted back and forth from the blue flame to the stranger's face.
"My name's Rem," replied the other boy, still as a statue save for the movements of his lips. Coaxing another small, unsteady groan from Toby, the strange boy moved forward with alarming speed, halting abruptly when his nose was an inch or two from Toby's. Toby barely had time to flinch before he found himself looking into twin red irises, squinting and turning his head when the proximity made his eyes sore.
"What is your name? Or have you forgotten?" The other boy continued, shadowing Toby's evasive movements.
"Toby," he replied, giving Rem a push, wondering if he'd ever heard of personal space.
"Where am I? What is this place and what are you doing here?"
Impervious to one of Toby's most frequent shifts in mood from confusion to irritability, Rem tilted his head to one side, fluidly regaining his stance and following Toby with the light as he began to paw the walls cautiously to the right.
"An oubliette." Rem grinned, flashing an unnaturally sharp row of teeth. Toby felt a shiver up his spine. The waxy chamber was dank and well-like, though there seemed to be no opening or end to the ceiling above...assuming there was a ceiling.
"An oubliette?" Toby echoed, tearing his eyes away from Rem's mouth long enough to seek out his eyes, careful to remain vigilant in case the boy or creature who, in Toby's mind, was becoming less and less reminiscent of a human with every minute Toby looked. His expression suggested that Rem might have suggested that he'd go rather well with potatoes and pecan pie rather than given him a frustratingly vague answer. Still, Toby was afraid what he might discover if he looked too hard, but immediately eliminated the thought of looking away.
"Yes, an oubliette - a noose, a trap, a dungeon, a cell, a hold, a pit, a vault, a prison, a catacomb, a cavern, a cave, a place...to forget," Rem finished in one breath, taking the match in his other hand. His fingernails were nearly black and filed down to ragged stubs by chewing and grinding. His slender fingers seemed eerily elongated - a trick of the light, Toby rationalized.
Opening his mouth to reply with another of the pressing questions that plagued his mind, Toby suddenly stopped, recoiling back to the wall and standing up straight as if something had struck him.
"Oubliette…" He repeated it softly under his breath, his gaze falling to the ground for the second time as the world rung in his head. The chamber was made of what looked like wax from which an almost acidic liquid oozed.
Toby placed his hands on the sides of his head, as if trying to block out some invisible force that was keeping him from remembering something that seemed so crucial to the present…something that tugged at his thoughts and memory but failed to come through the haze that drifted about the Oubliette.
"That word…it means something…" Toby furrowed his brow.
"Thinking here will only drive the oubliette deeper into the Labyrinth," Rem interjected with more forward thought than impatience. Within the short span of time Toby had to collect his attentions upon the one elusive memory that threatened to obsess him, Rem had scurried as silently as an insect and found his way once more well into Toby's personal bubble and seized Toby's wrist in his unpleasantly cool grasp. Toby parted his lips once more to prepare for protest, jerking back a bit before receiving another jerk forward in return and a flash of a smug grin as the shadows created by the blue flame of the twisted, half-spent match danced across Rem's features when he turned toward the wall. Rem then patted a hollow sounding section of the waxy wall and knocked on it three times. The outline of an impossibly small door emerged from the spongy wall. The little doorway began to expand, creaking and groaning loudly with the sound of a growing tree - though trees normally grow with such steadiness that it is impossible to hear. When it reached Rem's height, the door halted its growth spurt and swung open before the two.
Strangely, a calm that was pregnant with anticipation of even stranger events washed over Toby, creating some semblance of defense for his sanity. The overwhelming weirdness of his current predicament helped numb him temporarily to the chaotic confusion of his thoughts. A tiny smile spawned by delirium twitched at the corner of Toby's mouth but disappeared shortly.
"Come on, I've found you so I'm getting you out. If you don't come with me, something else will find you," Rem said, finally releasing Toby from his grasp before ducking into the doorway that seemed to groan softly like a wide, dark mouth with the nearly-extinguished match.
This, Toby decided, was not very reassuring.