Notes: I just wanna say that Pam is starting to sound a great deal like Abe Sapien to me at this point, from the Hellboy movies (adapatations) by Guillermo del Toro. Any Hellboy fans? And doesn't Abe just rule?

But enough of that.

Act IV

Mayte Orozco was pretty sure her family thought of her as a failure. In the Dominican Republic, she could have been a high school teacher, clambered up the ranks to become principal, a superintendent for an entire school district. She had the brains and the talent and the degree from the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra in Santiago de los Caballeros. Instead, she was bussing tables at Porter's Diner in White Toast Londonderry, New Hampshire, USA.

"Mija," her mother said over the phone, dragging the J. "Why you wanna serve coffee to those gringos? You come home to Santiago, do better for yourself."

"I'm happy, mami," she said. She turned the knob on her portable radio. Led Zeppelin thought she needed cooling, but what she really wanted was some good, solid Disco. A bass thump and grooving hand claps came in at 96.5 FM, and she settled back. "It's only for a few years, maybe less, and I'll be back at Santiago. You'll see." Her mother made a disbelieving noise in the back of her throat, and Mayte blew her a kiss. "Bendición, mami."

Bendición. I send you my blessings. Like some priest, always blessing her mother over the phone. On good days, it made Mayte laugh.

She liked having good days. For the most part, she had plenty of them. And then, on 17 August, Bill had said, "You got table 4, Mayte." He pronounced it May-T. Mayte had long ago given up on correcting him, or anybody else, for that matter. Too much hassle. She preferred to avoid hassles. And she liked table 4. At around 5.30PM that could only mean Linda, La Nena Linda.

"What does it mean?" Linda had asked after the second time Mayte had used the nickname. "You say my name twice."

"Linda means pretty in Spanish," she said. "And Linda is very pretty. Mija, I'd kill for hair like yours."

Linda fingered her hair and smiled in a shy, yet delighted way. She left a good tip. She always left a good tip. Mayte liked that a great deal. And she liked Linda. So when Bill pointed her towards table 4, Mayte weaved over with her usual smile, ready to pretend that she did not know Linda would order a salad with vinaigrette dressing on the side.

A man sat with Linda. He was gazing around him like a child at his first carnival. One blue eye, one muddied, damaged left eye. Mayte saw him and the air around her liquefied, heavy strands like water slowing her steps. She did not know him, could not place him, but she knew the aura coming from him, like thick tendrils of grass ensnaring her legs along a riverbank. She had not felt an aura like that in nearly sixty years. She had left all that behind, had clambered up to the world above and good riddance to all the pointless madness behind her.

And now someone from that world was here, at Porter's, across from Linda.

He did not pick up anything from Mayte, or, at the very least, he pretended not to. Outright cavalier, truth be told. He let his aura pulse and ripple all over the diner, so that Linda sat with her eyes locked on him, a dreamy smile at the corners of her lips. He conjured milkshakes and extra helpings of fries for her with the bald-faced audacity of someone so secure in his power that he does not give one damn for who (or what) might be picking up on the waves and echoes of his magic.

"I feel funny," Bill said the next day. "Does anybody else feel funny? Maybe we got a bad batch of coffee." He dug into his temples with his thumbs as he headed into the kitchen. "God, my head is killing me."

As well it should. The man with the mismatched eyes kept winding back time, so that 17 and 18 August kept coming and going like tennis balls. Most people did not notice. They put it down to confusion or lack of sleep. "Oh thank God," most murmured as Mayte handed them their coffee, staring at the date on their newspapers or the tear-away Betty Boop calendar above the pie display, "I really thought I'd missed a deadline." The man did it a brain mulching fifteen times (Bill looked ready to hurl by the seventh time it happened), before he decided to let the week unfurl as usual once more.

On 19 August, Porter's lurched sideways violently within Mayte, and Linda and the man were no longer at their booth. When she ran to check for a record of their order, there was nothing. Table 4 was marked as having been empty since 2.00 PM. Mayte bit her lip, looking at the empty table, and tried not to worry about Linda. She was very relieved when Linda walked in, followed, as always, by the man, on 21 August.

"The usual?" Mayte said. "For both of you?"

Linda nodded with a dazed look in her eyes. She kept clasping and unclasping her hands under the table. Mayte saw her gaze at a B&W picture of a little girl at the beach, brows hovering in a half-frown. The man had a fond, secretive smile stamped on his face.

Mayte had not finished turning away to hand Bill their order when Porter's lurched within her for a second time, with such violence that Mayte was knocked sideways. An old man in ripped blue overalls helped her up. Through the triangle formed by his elbows, Mayte could see that table 4 was empty.

Now, she sat in her one-room apartment, an R&B ballad playing softly on the radio, reading and re-reading a few sentences on a B&W police flyer.

MISSING Since August 21, 1977. Name: Linda Williams. Last seen near Porter's Diner at 5.30 PM.

Not good. Bad juju. Very bad juju.

Mayte clambered across her bed on her knees. She took up a cheap, plaster statue of San Antonio de Padua. She plunked it down on the floor and lit a small, white votive candle. She gazed at the flame for a while, feeling as if her skin were trying to crawl right off her muscles, before she took a deep breath. She loved her mother, Doña Orozco, very much. She had, perhaps, not loved the Dominican Republic as much as she should have, but it had been an okay place, all things considered. At least she had not chosen some place like Iran or Chile, where she would have been liable to get blown up or raped or both. And she had managed not to get herself deported from good ole'USA. Most important of all, she had kept under (above, she thought with a wry grin) The Labyrinth's radar for a good fifty-three years. It had been a good run, and she was not looking forward to what she was compelled to do now.

But, damn it, she liked Linda. She deserved a warning, at least.

Mayte took a deep, deep breath. She inhaled and ingested the flame of her candle, and then said, "I summon the Singer of Spells."

A sound like thousands of tiny pebbles rushing toward the centre of her room, and her statue of San Antonio de Padua glowed a faint, pulsing white, like morning sunlight on snow. A voice like a mother's caress nestled within Mayte's mind. It took Mayte by surprise that the feel of that voice made her sigh in relief, like a child who has feared herself lost and is found again.

"What does she wish?" the voice murmured.

"I wish to help Linda Williams. She has been unlawfully taken within The Labyrinth."

"The woman Linda Williams did not wish it?"

"No. I saw it. A creature from The Labyrinth took her. I saw the pendejo with my own eyes. Jerk's borrowed a human form, same as me, but I'd know those auras anywhere." Mayte frowned. "Whoever, whatever he is, he's broken the law. He took without the correct words having been spoken."

The light died down a bit, as if the Singer were considering Mayte's words. After a while, San Antonio flared up once more. "She may not have the authority to help Linda Williams." The Singer must have felt Mayte's disappointment, because it added, in a soothing, spring water voice, "However, she may be placed in contact with ones who have just cause—within the rules—to enter The Labyrinth. She may find that, in aiding them, she may aid Linda Williams."

"Super," Mayte grinned. "What've I gotta do?"

"She may go to Kent, England."

Mayte pulled a face. "The wet, stuffy place?"

"She may not go to Kent, England, if she so wishes."

Tricky Singers. It was enough to make Mayte think that she could detect a trace of sarcasm in its voice, gentle and whispery and ethereal as it was. She thanked it as was proper, and her little San Antonio de Padua reverted back to a simple plaster statue. She packed it into a duffel bag with a large Dominican flag on the flap, along with a whole, rattling slew of fresh votives. Then she stood at the centre of her room and pondered her options: Airplane, or air, plain and simple. Airplanes took time and a great deal of money, and they gave Mayte the willies, hovering there between more than one reality, possible dimensions prodding her like some lout at a bar. Not that air was any better. She would have to change in order to travel through air, not so plain and simple after all.

Time, a voice that sounded a great deal like Doña Orozco, is many miles ahead of you, mija, and blowing up your options as it goes.

"Oh, fuckity fuck fuck," she muttered.

Then, she reached up to grasp the flesh below her eyes. She had not quite decided whether wincing made these things hurt more or not before she simply ripped at her skin and then whether it would hurt or not was immaterial because it hurt like fire ants chomping down every inch of her.

With a crash like several houses crumbling down, a group of five goblin engineers lowered the machine for North down into its place below the throne room. They paid little attention to Pam's distressed calls of, "Careful, careful!" and they certainly did not give a dead possum's stiff behind for his wails of, "Gently! For the love of my dear mother, gently!"

Hoggle was already below the throne room, every wrinkle and fold on his face etched out in soot and oil and several layers of clay coloured dirt. He transferred his cigar from behind his ear and back into his mouth, and dove into the lengthy task of making sure the machine had all of its parts, and that those parts were bolted down securely. A gaggle of excitable, trainee engineers kept bouncing and clambering all over him and the machine.

"Wot next? This next? Wot next, eh?"

"Get off!" Hoggle growled. "You stupid goblins, you're supposed to screw those down, not screw them off!" He swatted a small, round goblin away from his line of sight, kicked a few more for good measure.

"Jest tryin' t'help!" they protested in high-pitched voices. One of them showed his displeasure by biting into Hoggle's ankle.

Hoggle grabbed it by the scruff of its neck and propelled it up into the throne room.

It ricocheted off the ceiling and landed with an altogether overjoyed, "Who-hoa!" into what felt like a bony hoop covered in fabric. The bony hoop shifted and became a pair of arms in elbow-length velour gloves.

Jareth allowed the goblin to clamber up onto his right shoulder as he leaned over to glance into the bowels of his throne room. What he saw made him pull his lips to the side in amused distaste. "Well if it isn't dear Wattle," he said. "Who else would go about kicking my goblins?" He pretended not to hear Hoggle's protests about his name. Tiresome, that. "Every other cardinal point in the castle has its machine ready to go, Hockle, why am I still waiting for the Northern Machine?"

Because your precious goblins can't even remember where they put a wrench seconds after setting it down. "I'm on it!" he rumbled out instead. "Let me do my job! Ain't you got other, more important things to do?"

"Not until you finish," Jareth said, knocking the trap door above Hoggle's head closed with the back of his foot.

Pam hopped over two goblins dragging a length of pipe in order to reach Jareth's side. "Your majesty," he said with a slight pant, "the Singers have chosen."

Jareth gave him a blank look. He shooed off the goblin on his shoulder, snapped the fingers of both his hands as he motioned for another goblin to stop pulling feathers out of Cecile and pass her to him instead. He stroked her back, murmuring kisses into her fleshy crest as she heaved a long, low, nearly unbroken cluck of displeasure, before he gave Pam a second blank look, even vaguer than the first.

"The Singers, your majesty," Pam said politely, "have chosen a position for the portal from aboveground."

"Ah." He yawned, and he stood, with Cecile under one arm and Pam—stiff and wide eyed—beside him, in the sloping, impeccably manicured lawn of a public park at the outskirts of a Londonderry suburb. Jareth tossed the park an unimpressed glance. "They're getting lazy, those Singers. I much preferred the alley in Kent. It had… personality. This is so," he favoured a beautiful, dew kissed yellow rose with a disdainful look, "pretty."

Pam coughed. Never-been-aboveground-never-been-aboveground his heart thundered, a locomotive this close to veering off its tracks. In a measured voice, aided considerably by running one trembling hand down to the silk bow at the nape of his neck, he said, "But most useful, sire. Observe its many pathways, shadowed corners, and gnarled, somewhat ancient tress (as humans measure these things), your highness. Would they not offer ample opportunity for—"

"Brats get lost in parks all the time!" Jareth cried in delight.

"—for, well, for that very same occurrence." Pam bowed with a flourish of long, feathered arms. "Your majesty is truly wise."

"Brilliant," Jareth said. He blew both Cecile's and Pam's minds by yanking them back to the throne room in the space between half a millisecond. He tossed Cecile into the air, where she squawked and made a great, flapping mess of spotted feathers out of clawing through empty space toward anything to perch on. "Make sure Hortence doesn't blow up the Northern Machine, Pam, and call upon me only once it's finally set up."

He leaped gracefully onto a window ledge, russet feathers fanning out behind him in a wide, translucent cape even before he had taken the shape of a barn owl. He screeched in pleasure, flapping great, mottled wings, then dove down and out of sight.

Pam pulled Cecile off the top of his head. "As you wish, your majesty," he said with grave decorum.

"And good riddance!" came Hoggle's voice from below his feet.

George was dreaming. He knew that well enough by now. Black skies spread out above him, strangely flat and unreal, as if someone had merely stretched a photocopy of a black page from one horizon to the other. The sand below his feet was no longer green but hot pink, and it had the lazy, wide strokes quality of somebody colouring in a B&W photo badly on purpose.

"I thought you didn't like the Punks," George said. He knew David was behind him. "You said you wanted to do somethin' jazzy instead, that Punks 'ad misused their energies in repetitive, three-chord melodies."

"I sound so elitist," David remarked.

"You could be."

He crossed his arms over his chest and looked at David, carefully, critically, as if looking for faults in a work of art everybody else gushed about needlessly. David stood still, then turned slowly, as if to give George the full picture.

"Damn you," George said. "Wot's goin' on?"

"You're dreaming," David said, an edge to his voice. He began to pace. "And as such, I cannot fully control what happens. This is not my dimension."

"You seem to be in control of the backdrop. Keep meetin' ye in this fuckin' ugly beach."

David gave a short, humourless laugh as he continued to pace. "Well, then, the joke's on you, because I'm as blameless for this beach as you are." He stopped and glared at George. "Curse you. I destroyed my memories of you. I ground them into powder. And yet I still found myself compelled to visit you in dreams. And now you've started to remember. I need you to forget."

"My son?"

"Everything! Forget everything, George. Forget about Joe and David Jones and all of it. Move out of Kent if that's what it takes. Divorce Sandra. I don't care. Just stop—" He halted his words with a struggle, teeth bared as something battled within his eyes. "Stop," he hissed, the knife of anger in his voice. He balled his hands into fists, slowly, the fingers of his hands like clawed talons. "I will not—God, just—STOP!"

He doubled over, panting.

George backed away.

"I dunno who you are, but I no longer think you're David Jones. I knew David Jones. I knew Davey. He disappeared, jest like my son. I didn't wonder about it then, but I think it's because somethin' keeps messin' with my 'ead, out there," he pointed up at the photocopy black sky, "where I'm awake and I can't remember things I remember clearly when I'm in 'ere."

David looked up from his half-slumped position. He looked so much like the Davey George had known—hopeful and open faced even as he looked as if he feared the world had tricked him somehow—that he nearly reached out to him. He checked himself with a curse.

"You came to my house, the night Joe disappeared. And I kept thinkin', somethin' ain't right 'ere. You had 'air down to yer shoulders one minute, short the next. And you were trailin' this…" He stared around him, as if he expected the right words to write themselves out on the sand. "This… stuff, like sand or—or glass. It was—"

"George, please. Forget about Joe. Forget about me." He straightened, looking tired. "If you forget, if you'll only forget, I promise you that everything will be all right. Things could be better. I could make them better."

"I've lost my son and my best friend," George scoffed. "How could you make things better?"

David reached into his coat pocket. He pulled out what looked like a marble. He held it up between three fingertips, like a jeweller appraising a cut diamond. "You have such little dreams, George," he said. George could not decide whether he sounded sad or merely observant. "But they are still yours. A moderately successful band, as a hobby, and a job designing record sleeves." The marble grew a bit. "Ah, perhaps not satisfied with such commonplace things after all."

He held out the sphere.

George made as if to take it, brows knotted in sceptical wonder. Before his hand closed over it, though, he frowned. He knocked the sphere out of David's hand. It rolled across the sand, where it grew transparent and inconsequential and finally disappeared.

"Think you're the devil, do ye? Think I'd trade my son an' my friend for a good job? Bollocks, mate. Bollocks."

David smiled. "I do love you, George," he said wistfully. "You're the one thing I truly missed. But I can't go on dreaming about you, or letting you see me."

He stepped closer to George. He raised one arm and placed his palm against George's cheek. He felt George start, try to pull back in alarm. David's other arm snapped up, closed around George's wrist, held him in place. He searched George's face, as if he could see beyond it, to a place within George not even he could reach. George struggled, found he could not break free.

"George?" David said, quietly, as if calling to a child. Then he leaned forward, head tilted, and kissed him.

As he drew back, George could see something wet and shining on his lips. More of the strange, shimmering substance coated David's fingertips and his palm as he drew his arms away from George's cheek and wrist. He took slow, careful steps away from George.

"Who am I?" he said, wiping his lips.

George opened his mouth to say, "Don't be a fool—" but then he realized that he well and truly did not know the man standing across from him. He blinked. "I—I've never met you in my life. Should I know you?"

The man shook his head no. "Did you ever have a son?"

"A son?" George screwed his eyes in thought. "No. No, I didn't. Sandra and I tried, but… Well, it never quite worked out."

"Look at me, George," the man said. He had quite striking eyes, different colours, quite brilliant. George found himself smiling. "Very good," the man said. "Now listen. I've exerted quite a lot of power here. This is not my realm, and working magic here is tricky. I'm doing the best I can, George. Do you understand?"

George nodded.

"Good. Now, wake up and don't throw all of this effort on my part to waste. You are George Underwood, you are married to a fine girl called Sandra. You have no children. And you are happy."

George nodded. "Well of course I am, mate."

He woke smiling, and turned to hug his beautiful wife. She pushed him away, and this puzzled him, but the dream had left him too happy for this to worry him for long.

Jareth appeared within his throne room in a gust of powdered glass and feathers that drifted from a mottled white into black. He walked to the trap door that led to the Northern Machine and threw it open with his mind.

"Hoggle," he said coldly. "I tire of Kent, and I tire of waiting. Is the machine ready?"

From his place at the machine's heart, Hoggle could only look up at Jareth at first. Jareth had not used his real name in a long, long time. Once, they might have been close, when Jareth had still been David Jones and had arrived at The Labyrinth like a little boy to an adult's party. But Jareth—once woken to consciousness once more—had done away with David, and Hoggle's despaired anger at the loss of David, whom he had been fond of, in his own way, had angered Jareth. And Jareth did not forgive a slight readily, if ever. His voice was as disdainful as ever now, hard and dispassionate, but something mingled with the edge of his words, something vulnerable and hurt, and it threw Hoggle completely.

"J-Jareth?" he said.

"I tire of this place, Hoggle. I wish to leave."

Behind Hoggle, the heart of the Northern Machine lurched. Heat spread along Hoggle's back and legs as he struggled to crawl out of the machine before it became fully operational. Steam hissed from exhaust pipes and from between gyrating, rattling joints and pivots.

"I wish," Jareth said in a terrible, dead voice, "for The Labyrinth to move to Londonderry, New Hampshire. I wish to leave Kent forever."

With one last hiss, the Northern Machine's heart flared to life. Searing red light pushed Hoggle against a wall and down to his knees. Steam and powdered glass buffeted his face. Shielding his eyes, already half closed from the heat and noise and steam, he groped for the exit ladder. He pulled himself onto the throne room floor, panting, gasping great gulps of air into his lungs. The entire castle groaned and rumbled beneath him, the force of it fit to shake his bones to dust. He could not think for the roar of stone in his head and within his very mind. It was as if the castle were dying and clawing at every life it could hold onto in its attempt to survive. Hoggle had never felt so much pain in his life, as if hundreds of shards were ripping him into bloody shreds from outside and within.

Through the haze in his mind, he thought he saw Jareth bend down and move him clear of the trap door, but that could not have been right. Jareth would not ever help Hoggle.

And Jareth never cried.

Standing outside her house on the hill, Linda saw a great cloud of ochre dust rise from the place Jareth had called The Labyrinth. It shot in a billowing, writhing mass to the sky, then spread as it came rolling towards the borders of The Labyrinth. It roiled and heaved like a living thing, a great lung expanding in a burst of faces and arms and legs and hooves and creatures crawling forward in a feeding frenzy. Ahead of it came a roar that grew into a din that reached such a magnitude that Linda could no longer hear anything.

Jareth. Where was Jareth?

She had to run into the house, close the door. She threw the bolt as the door slammed shut. She saw her right arm, long and pale, as she stumbled across the floor, skirts gathered in her left hand as she made her way towards shelter.

A table. There, by the couches. She dropped to her knees and crawled below it. Beyond her the light slanting in through the windows, already choked with colliding particles of dust and debris from her roof, dropped away, as if hands had pushed down against the eyes of her house.

Jareth, her mind panted. Jareth. Jareth.

In total silence, emptiness so complete it blanketed even her thoughts, Linda watched as the cloud crashed into the windows. She saw glass implode, felt something slam into her side and into her chest.

Sarah, she thought in a sad panic, I wanted to see Sarah one last time.

But the world had already dropped away, and with it her thoughts.