"Yes, this is…"
"Oh yes, hello, this is…"
"This is my…"
"This girl, she's my…"
"She's…"
There were so many failed words and phrases. She stood there, a shadow on the stairs, so sharp, so quiet, so very different. She looked like the Goblin King; she had that edge to her that seemed so ragged against his softly painted world. She didn't belong here, in Boston, but he tried to pretend that he didn't really know that.
She said her name was Sarah but that was all she knew. She wore no shoes because she had forgotten what they felt like; she said they were cages. She had forgotten how to read. He wasn't sure she needed those words, anymore; she had found older ones. Her hair was long and tangled, so he pulled it back in a loose braid for her. She was like a child with ancient eyes—she had forgotten everything, but she had filled the absent spaces with terrible things he would never understand.
He told her the story backwards and forwards, all through the Labyrinth, but it wasn't enough. It would never be enough.
She just sat an apple in her hand, in fragments, her green eyes watching the light dancing off his skin. She didn't even know his name.
How was he to explain her presence from nowhere, out of nothingness with eyes like that? They were vague, dull, brilliant eyes that saw past everything yet revealed almost nothing of their magic. She was nothing real, nothing tangible. She was the air and the earth.
She was not his sister.
He didn't have a sister.
His sister was dead.
It didn't matter, though, because he had won (even if he had won a shell of a girl filled with something darker) and that was what really mattered. Winning, beating the King at his own game—no matter the price.
—
She was standing in the middle of the sidewalk again. She had become a somewhat familiar sight, a barefoot young woman who stared with wide green eyes at the flashing lights and the steady stable buildings, almost like a girl who was only beginning to realize she was terribly lost.
Toby walked up behind her with the groceries in his hand, hoping she wouldn't walk into the street, "Sarah, what are you looking at?"
The best method of dealing with her was direct talking, direct thoughts; she responded to bluntness well. She blinked at him and started, looking him over for a threat, before deciding he was harmless. He tried not to think about that.
"Sarah?" he asked again.
She looked away and brushed her dark hair behind her ear. "Nothing," she said.
Somehow, she knew it wasn't a real question. Toby didn't really care what she was staring at. The fae didn't waste words, and for the first few weeks, those first dreadful weeks, she hadn't known that it was possible to waste words. She hated it when he asked or said things he didn't mean. Worthless words, wasted words—you shouldn't say things you don't mean. Those words aren't real.
She had been different, then. She was getting better, he told himself. She was more fae than human, but not anymore. He had taken her to his parents' house because he thought they would have been pleased. But she hadn't aged. She suffocated in those walls and they asked so many questions she didn't know how to answer. She stayed there, but Toby visited; Toby was best with Sarah.
He took her hand and began to lead her toward the house where they would have a family dinner and talk about the things that hadn't happened to them and the things they didn't care about. She hated those dinners. So many wasted words.
She followed him dutifully, having learned by now that it is always better to follow and to observe than try to escape. Escape was painful and disappointing. It would come in time, she knew. Soon their small human minds would not be able to contain the depth and richness of the words she whispered at night. (They were words she meant, and this belligerent human family would never understand that.)
As they walked past the shops and streets and people, Toby realized he, Too, was disappointed. The princess, he had thought, was not only supposed to be beautiful but sane as well. People took for granted her sanity after being trapped for eighteen years in a tower, one hundred in a dream, or for a decade in an empty castle with only her thoughts.
It wasn't her fault. (Yet, Toby couldn't help but feel bitter; she could have tried a little harder.)
He had traveled far across the land, through darkness, only to find that his princess had gone insane. There was, he suspected, a certain irony, though he was too tired to label it.
He looked over his shoulder as they approached the house and the voices of his parents—so happy, so shocked, and saw the forest darken in her eyes until he could see the wolf's eyes (blue and green) staring back.
He tried not to think about it.
—
It couldn't last. Even Toby knew it couldn't last. He was teetering on the knife's edge and he was going to fall. Though she looked human, though she had once been human, she had been infected by the Labyrinth. She didn't belong with Toby.
The room was a disaster. Scorch marks on the walls, plants growing from the ceiling and the floor. She was sitting amid torn pages, her eyes closed and legs crossed. Nothing in her was human, nothing related to him. She was not what he expected (she wasn't what he bargained for).
He remembered he had tried to teach her to remember how to read. It had been working. He thought it had been coming back to her. She even smiled…
"…Sarah?"
She kept staring at the floor where flowers were beginning to bloom, rushing through their short lives as if they only had that single moment to live. It wasn't human.
He moved closer to her minding the plants growing beneath his feet. The room was becoming a forest like the ones she had left; he could make out the beginning of fireflies in the corner of his eye while the flowers bloomed and withered in only a moment.
"Sarah?" he asked more strongly, ignoring the feeling that he had used the wrong word again. It shouldn't make a difference how he asked, yet it always did.
He stepped on the broken back of a book whose spine he hadn't noticed before. He stopped walking as his eyes widened and he saw the torn fluttering pages around him, like silver birds making their way skyward. He stooped down and picked up the cover, pages torn out and dangling.
He hadn't thought there'd be so many memories. He hadn't even enjoyed it, not like he thought he would, and yet… There was something about seeing a book that way, an empty destroyed thing, flung like a carcass at his feet. There was no blood and yet…
He felt as if something had died.
The book fell from his hand. His fingers must have been shaking.
He looked away from the fragmented pages to see her staring at him from amid the rustling papers.
He felt as if the world had fallen away and he was in some other world, Sarah's world, where all was silent and time simply stopped. Her eyes held him there, in that place, in that time, and all he could do was watch. No words. No words in this place.
She smiled, then, the Goblin King's smile, and time returned the book fallen to the floor, where it would remain. He took a step back. She was unmoved still smiling. Toby backed through the doorway and closed the barrier between them.
That was the first time, the first true time, that he knew he had failed.
—
Toby always knew the Goblin King would come back. He had been expecting him for weeks. The Goblin King was late, and he probably knew it. Judging from the expression on his face, he still didn't care a bit what Toby thought.
Toby didn't see him. He was staring out the window at the fall leaves dangling precariously from the trees outside. It was almost twilight, that time when all distinctions of reality seemed to fade, and for a moment he was back in the Labyrinth. Sarah would be staring out the window from her room, her room which changed day to day. (He no longer tried to explain it or rationalize it).
Toby didn't see him but he didn't need to. He could feel that pricking, inhuman stare at his back.
"You're late," Toby said without turning around.
"A wizard is never late, nor is he early; he arrives precisely when he means to."
Toby almost smiled, almost laughed, but it didn't really seem appropriate.
"She's worse than you know," Toby added, watching his own reflection in the blinding glass.
Here the Goblin King paused, as if sensing the gravity of the statement, but he continued regardless. "Why on earth did you think I let you take her, if I didn't know that already?"
Toby turned then to see the Goblin King sitting at his kitchen table. His hands were folded under his chin and his eyes glinted in the sunset. He was not smiling but looking more solemn than Toby had seen. Toby found he didn't care.
"But she's not worse. Do you understand, yet?"
Toby didn't answer the question, but merely stared with indifference at the desperate king. How much less terrifying he seemed now, after the story had ended.
"It was the Labyrinth, you see," Jareth explained with a wave of one hand. "It transformed her, split her in pieces, mixed human magic and fae magic… and now…"
"Now she's madder and more powerful than you can ever hope to be," Toby finished for him with dead eyes.
The Goblin King said nothing.
"It's true," Toby said with a shrug. "She can't stay here much longer. You were right; she doesn't belong here."
The Goblin King frowned and placed his hands on the table, looking at Toby with a cock of his head before smiling and saying, "Blunt and irritating doesn't suit you."
Toby shrugged again, "You should talk to her. You're closer to her than I am. She should be upstairs, or on the roof."
"So much effort for the princess, and you give up on her now?"
"I'm realistic."
The wolf's smile returned.
"Well then, perhaps I shall. We'll talk soon, Toby."
The boy would never see the words he could not speak, but he did know one thing: the Goblin King was sad and powerless, and did not have the strength to take her back. She was beyond both of them. She could touch the stars without burning.
—
Sarah came down from her tower, her hair loose and her feet barefoot. Flowers bloomed and withering beneath her as she stepped. She didn't smile; her face was nothingness, it contained no human expression. He had expected that.
He was reading in his chair but his mind was at the top of the stair with her.
She looked at him when she reached the bottom step. A wind wound its way through the house, and her eyes said nothing.
He didn't say anything for her.
(He didn't know when he had begun to despise her.)
"You sent him," she said finally. She hardly spoke; it was strange to hear her voice.
"No," Toby said and shook his head. "He went up all by himself. Jareth is a big boy, Sarah, he can do as he pleases."
Her eyes narrowed and for the first time, Toby thought, she looked as if she was angry with him. It was nice to know the feeling was mutual.
"You still don't understand," she said and again he felt as if the room had stopped moving, that he had been taken to that other world in which she lived. She smiled. "You think you're so wise now that the story's over and the play is finished. You've written me away already, written me off—I'm the insane princess you never bargained for."
Toby felt as if someone had struck a hammer upon his heart.
"Would you like to know how your play ends, Mr. Toby Williams? There is a story, and its name is Labyrinth. However, it is a story that never ends; it expands within itself and when it finds words already written, it takes them into its mouth and eats them whole. This is the end—but what end? The end that both eats and creates through a word, or with a star. You've brought the story back to life, Toby, you've brought me back—just never how you imagined. And now I'm going to devour the Goblin King. And once I've done that, I'll gobble you whole."
Toby picked up his book again and began to read. By the time he looked up again she was gone.
—
Toby knew what the universe dreamed.
The universe dreamed of his sister, or what once was his sister, or what never was his sister. Some days, it was hard to tell. It dressed her in bright fabric composed of stars and lakes and rivers, crowned her head with the aurora borealis. And in return she smiled back—a small thing—and reached a hand to pluck a star from the heavens as if it were a grape, or perhaps an apple. (She needed no serpent to offer her the Fruit of Knowledge.)
Slowly but surely, thought and dream conformed to her and became her iron throne: the Labyrinth, she thought she might call it. She idly began to twist it to whatever shape suited her caprice. And then she gobbled the universe whole, one star at a time. All the while, it dreamed of her.
He saw this vision, the woman with the starlit wine and the twisting throne, and he wondered what emotion he was supposed to express. A tale would demand horror or perhaps a touch of pity, but this was not a tale; it was real and it was a dream. And so he felt that he should feel something different.
The Goblin King knew this dream and didn't know this dream. He saw it in a dance, in a word whispered in his ear, as the world fell down. He saw her and saw something, but he didn't see her. She had grown beyond vision.
He wonders if she is still in her various pieces, scattered in the stonework of the Labyrinth. It's unlikely: the universe only dreams of one of them. She's too big to leave room for more.
How many stars are left in that sky?
How many runners have met a little girl in a boat on a lake?
This was the universe's dream, though, not his, and so it doesn't concern him as much as he tells himself that it should.
Toby dreamed, sometimes.
He dreamed that he was reading a book and thinking that he never had a sister and never found a Labyrinth.
He turned the page, and didn't think of death.