She's not going insane, Sarah knows that much. That demented bird, Goblin King, man, thing, entity really was following her. In the supermarket once she had passed by somebody that had the same strange, masculine lilt to their voice, but when she whirled to inspect them it was only Mrs. Trevers, who definitely did not share the Goblin King's way of speaking, and instead sounds like she comes from Georgia.
It happened on the way to Aunt Emily's house; Sarah had been gazing despondently out the car window when she happened to notice the driver in the car beside theirs—blonde hair up at odd angles, the same sharp cheekbones. Sarah slid down behind the door, feet almost up on the dash.
And now, of all times or places. The grief counselor's office is supposed to be a therapeutic, calming place where people could get together and talk out their problems. Her father had assured her that he and his wife would be attending too, most days when they didn't have something else to do. Today was one of those days, so by the time Sarah spots him it's too late to beg Karen to come back and pick her up. He's sitting in the circle already, hands clasped and head bowed, the perfect picture of grief in his black shirt and casual jeans.
Somehow he manages to make even the innocuous outfit seem sinister, and Sarah stops just short of shuddering; it only reinforces her dislike of the color black.
"Sarah, come sit." The counselor smiles gently at her and offers a seat beside the newcomer. Sarah declines and picks a chair on the opposite side of the circle. Jareth doesn't look up, and she chooses to ignore him too.
Eventually, the rest of the circle members wander in and the counselor begins the session, starting off with introducing the newcomer—Gareth Beaumains—and the rest of the members introduce themselves. When it is Sarah's turn, she barely mumbles her name and stares at the floor. People speak; she doesn't bother to pay much attention, submersed in her own thoughts as she is.
What are you playing at? The more peaceful part of her wants to ask him. The rest of her just wants to throttle him, and to hell with his shady motives. It doesn't really matter why he's there, other than he just is and he's probably not going to leave her alone anytime soon.
"Now, Gareth, is when newcomers usually speak of what is troubling them. We understand if you are not ready yet, but—"
"I am ready." He tells her gravely. "I'd like to get this off my chest."
And he flashes the room a watery smile that makes Sarah want to gouge his eyes out. One of the ladies a seat of two down from Sarah sighs dreamily.
Why can't he just let me be? She screams internally, why can't he just let me go?
"And who have you lost?" The counselor asks soothingly in the gentle, maternal way she has. It normally doesn't bother Sarah, she actually finds it comforting most of the time, but when it's directed at him, Sarah hates it. It's because he's lying, and this is supposed to be a place of truth, of sincerity and safety…
He's tearing it all apart for her.
"A brother-in-law." He sighs, sweeping the assembled crowd with mournful eyes. He lingers a little longer on Sarah and she fidgets in her plastic chair, suddenly intensely uncomfortable.
"Tobias. He really was very young, you see—his parents had his older sister at a very young age and he was a bit of a surprise—but losing him has been very rough on the entire family, especially my poor darling."
He says the word the same way he said it while masquerading as the doctor and Sarah's heart almost stops. She squeezes her eyes shut and grips the edge of her chair, wishing that she were anywhere but there. Anywhere—she'd almost prefer to be back at the hospital in the waiting room.
"He died of a wasting sickness, something that his parents didn't quite manage to catch in time. Not that there was much to be done; it seems to have been something that even modern medicine here could not heal."
This sets her on edge because the way he says it—modern medicine here...? she seethes—makes it seem as if he knew what was wrong and could have fixed it. Other people don't notice and a few nod in sympathy. She narrows her eyes and brings her gaze to his; from across the circle they make eye contact, both offering threats that neither one is willing to back down from.
It is "Gareth" that finally breaks the connection, though. He turns back to the counselor and inclines his head slightly.
"His sister especially blames herself."
Sarah's nails scrape against the textured plastic of the chair when her grip tightens too sharply and sends her fingertips sliding across the surface. A few people turn to look at her but she stares at their mutual counselor, watching the false mourner out of the corner of her eye. He smiles a little, and only for a second. If she hadn't been looking directly for it, she probably would have missed it.
Gareth's turn ends and it is time for somebody else to speak; Sarah keeps her head down, studiously investigating her knees and the faded denim that covers them.
When the circle reaches her, she refuses to speak. It's not worth it if he's there.
The moment that the second hand in the clock on the wall turns the hour, Sarah stands and makes to leave the room. As soon as her hand touches the door to push out, the air around her seems to warp, almost, and when she looks behind her to see if anybody else took notice of it, she is alone.
The room had been full a minute ago, she had been the first to stand, so why…
With twin dawnings of dread and realization, Sarah slowly turns around to face the door again. Instead of the solid, safe wooden barrier, the tip of her nose almost brushes cool black Goblin King armor.
Sarah stumbles back but catches her foot on the leg of one of the discarded chairs and she lands in it with a squeak.
"Why?" Is her only plaintive question. He advances and she scrambles back over the chair, leaving it between them as if it could offer her some sort of protection.
"Give me your book, Sarah."
"Take it! You can have it!" She drags another chair in front of her to join the other.
"Give it to me." He orders.
"I don't have it now." She tries to explain. "Do you think I carry that thing around with me?" A nervous, half-hysterical laugh bubbles out from between her lips.
"Just go get it, leave me alone!"
"What do you think lies within your future, Sarah?" The chairs are gone, and she's not sure where they've gone but she wishes they were back. He still takes languid step after languid step towards her and she's quickly running out of space to escape to.
"I don't know!"
"Think."
"I—I… I'll go to college, get a job—something—I don't know!" She sidesteps quickly away from the wall directly to her back, but too late she realizes that in another fifteen feet when the new wall comes to end, she has herself trapped in a corner.
"Think again, precious."
"I don't know!" She tells him again. "I don't know!"
He takes five or six quick steps and she has to counter with her own, tripping over a metal chair leg—
He smiles.
—and into the wall.
"What do you want?" Sarah whisper-wails, voice breaking to a sob at the last word. Though he's easily two feet away from actually touching her, he has her pressed up against the wall, unable to move either forward or to the side. He seems to consider her question, holding his head at an angle.
"What do I want, Sarah?"
He leans forward, and Sarah is sure, in that moment, that her eyes have never been as wide as they are now. The corners even hurt.
"What I want…" He says, more to himself than to her, staring at her jaw and finally tracing it with one finger.
"What I want…" He repeats. In a lightning-fast moves that surprises Sarah, he grabs her chin and yanks her face forwards, painfully, so that they are mere centimeters away from touching. She breathes out sharply and he releases her.
Sarah slams into the wall, focusing on not having a heart attack, image complete with her gasping and pressing a hand on her chest as if that would prevent anything.
She still watches him warily, but he steps back, nods once, and disappears.
Like a frightened colt, she bolts for the door before he can change his mind.
Her parents are waiting in the car, parked in front of the building when she sprints out of the glass doors, letting them slam behind her.
"Bathroom." She mutters by way of an explanation, diving into the back seat and slamming the car's door behind her too.
"For fifteen minutes?" Karen asks, incredulous.
"We got out late." Sarah snaps venomously. "It's not my fault."
"Of course not." Her father replies placidly.
"Sarah, are you okay?"
It's her father, again, but as always, he only bothers to knock and talk, never enters her room.
Which might actually suit her, right now.
Sarah lies on her back, staring at her ceiling with her hands folded over her stomach.
"I'm fine."
"Dinner is ready, if you're hungry."
"I'm not."
"… Okay then."
She listens to his footsteps retreat from her door, down the hallway and then down the stairs, and as soon as she can hear him in the kitchen, she swings her legs over the edge of her bed.
In one swift movement, she crosses her room, yanks her window open, and hurls the little red book out. It lands on the dry grass below with a soft thud. Sarah slowly closes her window and makes sure to lock it. At some point in the past few days, somebody moved her blinds back up—she makes sure that they're down again.
There. If he wants the book, he can just damn have it.
Sarah retreats back to her bed and flops out on it again, burying her head in her pillow this time.
Within seconds of her finding a comfortable position, there's that scratching at her window that tells her the owl is there. She half wonders if he took the book or not but then decides that she doesn't care—if that's what he wanted (he demanded it, at any rate) then he'd take it. If it wasn't…
She'd find a way to cope.
Perhaps a trip to the library would yield results. Maybe she'd figure out what he is, what banishes him… That idea actually sounds good, and she sits up with and a sudden fervor, springs out of bed.
"Karen dad, I'm taking the car to the library, bye!"
And she's out the door before they can respond, or even really register what she's said.
The library has a plethora of information, of course, but three books in, she's not sure if anything is relevant to her needs. Goblins, according to the mythology that she has read so far, are never mentioned as having a king. That doesn't rule it out, she knows, but…
Surely there would be some mention of a king so different from his people in the way he is somewhere, but there doesn't seem to be. He doesn't look anything like the goblins; he reminds her just a little of Tolkien's elves, but…
Oh.
Oh.
Sarah flips to the index in the book, finds Elves, Sprites and Pixies and skims the incredibly long section. Something called an Erlkönig stole children, though there seemed to be some debate over what to call him—Elfenkönig or Erlkönig—but when she pursues the "stealing children" route, she is sorely disappointed.
All sorts of creatures from all over the world stole babies—when they were replaced, the replacement was called a changeling.
But that doesn't help Sarah, and she grows increasingly frustrated, flipping the pages at a furious rate to find something, anything that would help her.
And then she sees the word iron, and she's pretty sure she's found it.
Cold iron in particular, though cold iron is defined simply as a poetic or archaic term for simple iron. She's pretty sure there has to be something iron around her house, so she breathes a sigh of relief and leans back in her chair.
The next item on the list is also laughably attainable—salt, of all things, was believed to ward off the fey.
And there was something about clothes, though it confuses her more than anything else. Turning an article of clothing inside out was supposed to make you unrecognizable to any fey (or fairy or sprite or what-have you—the different names are starting to confuse Sarah).
And with another turn of the battered book's page, Sarah's lighthearted hope takes a turn for the worse.
In some folk beliefs, she reads, the fey are equated with dead spirits. Similarities have been noted in the commonalities of the legends told of both ghosts and fey, the sídhe in actuality being burial mounds, it being dangerous to eat or drink—her stomach turns—in both Hades and a fey's rath or sídhe, and both the dead and the fey living underground.
Sarah stares at the words on the page, mouth open, and tries to assure herself that it's just words she's seeing, written down by somebody who probably doesn't even believe that fey are real. She blinks and rubs her eyes and, ignoring the growls from her stomach, turns back to the changeling section.
Faeries play pranks, blah, blah, bl —oh, here it was…
But far more dangerous behaviors have also been attributed to fairies. Any form of sudden death might stem from a fairy kidnapping, with the apparent corpse being a wooden stand-in with the appearance of the kidnapped person. Consumption was once a disease thought to be caused by faeries forcing a young man or woman to dance at a revel every night, leading them to waste away from lack of rest, food, or drink.
She leans back again, as if to get away from the book, and almost tips her chair back. Reconsidering her action, she leans forward, reads the passage again and then slams the book shut.
Disgust mars her face.
"Is that considered a joke?"
Perhaps it's hitting a little close to home—after all, she did eat there, she did dance hours away—and she rationalizes this.
There's nothing to be upset about, she reminds herself. You came back, didn't you? No harm done. You came back.
She breathes out a heavy sigh and picks up the book, taking it over to the librarian so that she can check it out.
You came back. She tells herself again. Besides, you don't even know if that's what he is, and the book—well, the book could be wrong. They have been before.
But before she goes home, she stops at a corner store and purchases an extra large container of salt. It's the only thing she buys and probably a waste of the five dollars she pays for it, but holding it in her hands makes her feel at least a little more comfortable than she had been preciously.
When she gets back to the house, she surprises the two adults watching television by whistling cheerfully.
"The library had some good books." She tells them, heading off any questions they might ask. "And it's going to be a beautiful night."
It truly might be, because she plans on putting some of the salt on her windowsill.
But the owl is there when she gets back, and she recoils from her window as if struck; she didn't expect to see it there, and its sudden appearance at the drawing of the blinds did not please her.
Slowly, her horrified expression turns to one of lazy triumph.
"I read all about you." She tells the owl through the glass, waving the library book. "Who knew you didn't like salt?" The salt container joins the book.
Sarah drops them both when the owl beats its wings at the window and screams. It actually sounds… angry.
She pulls the blinds down again and catapults herself onto her bed, a safe distance away from the window.
Her chest heaves up and down with the effort of her breathing, and Sarah decides that it is not a good idea to taunt the otherworldly being. She probably should have been clued in by the strange expression he managed to wear, even as an owl, but their last encounter had left her grappling for some sort of power, some sort of sway over him.
Well, she got it.
And then promptly dropped it.
A little puddle of salt sits on her floor; she supposes that the salt broke open. The book it okay when she picks it gingerly up because it managed to land on the cover and not the pages.
Tentatively, Sarah scoops some of the spilled salt up and peeks out her blinds—the owl is gone. Smiling a little warily to herself, she pours a steady line of the white substance until she reaches the furrows in the woods.
Smile turned now to a frown, she traces them. They're about the right size for talons to fit into… Damn it.
Maybe there was something in the book about owls or shape shifting too.
A/N
Incidentally, have any of you actually ever been surprised by a barn owl's screech? It's absolutely terrifying… especially walking in the woods at night. Alone.
And yes, I totally felt like a monster for Toby.
Some history/mythology nerds like me might gut a tiny chuckle out of "Gareth," but in all seriousness I did read somewhere that that might have been the inspiration for Jareth's name.
0928soubi: I know. I didn't really like writing it.
Broken Memories: There are so many questions that I want to answer, but I can't! I have a bad habit of spoiling my own stories to people.