Disclaimer:

Standard disclaimers apply.

The Labyrinth is the property of Jim Henson, David Bowie, and its script writers, including but not limited to Dennis Lee, Terry Jones, Elaine May, and A.C.H. Smith. Characters and concept are used without permission and not for profit.

Find the hidden song/literature reference(s)!

IMPORTANT (Well, maybe, kind of, sort of, a little....) -- Some of you might have trouble reviewing this chapter, if you reviewed the chapter previously. That's because I went back and deleted the silly one-sentence chapter, causing the chapter number to go back one. As a result, the system may think you've already reviewed this chapter. If that happens, well... submit as a review for another chapter?

Thank you everyone who responded to my shameless plea to be told I'm loved.

Cybernetic Mango -Imma pretend you didn't say that.
J Luc Pitard - Nice observation about the ring, but it was Sarah's own ring to begin with. I think. Maybe. Nice observation about the ring.
S.R. Devaste - Actually, I agree, Pavorotti all the way. I just wanted to point out that Paul Potts sang his way to fame and glory and triumph with this aria, of all the songs he could have sang. I'm not a Puccini expert, but I love him, especially his usage of Eastern influences and how he addresses the issues of Orientalism in iMadama Butterfly./i And there's always "O Mio Babbino Caro."
Insanity Fairy - My, my, jumping to conclusion, aren't we? Taking things for granted, aren't we?
All4grandtheftauto - God, that's a mouthful. Anyways...hold onto that thought. Personally, I'm a huge fan of Shakespeare. It's not his fault that iRomeo and Juliet/i has become a cliche over the past four hundred years. Unfortunately, as the author, I can't forget about Luke. Don't you understand that I can't? Besides, the story doesn't look that long.... But then, it could be longer than I think. At least I have more than thirteen hours to complete it.

Chapter 19

The Sleepless Beauty

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers....

-- T.S. Eliot "The Hollow Men," III

He was warm against her skin, under her skin, inside of her, possessing her like a ghost until she could not tell where her skin ended and his began.

Fierce and possessive at first, his kisses became gentle and sweet, easing over her lips until Sarah was limp against him, supported only by his hands on her waist, caressing her through his gloves and through the thin robe she wore over a thinner shift, and she clung to him like the spring leaf clings to the tree. Never stilling his kisses, he'd lifted her from the seat, and she'd wrapped her legs around him, pressing herself closer to him as he carried her to her bed. He kissed her like a man long since drowning, and she was his salvation, sweeter and dearer than oxygen. She was of life itself, and he drank her in hungrily. There was a fire burning inside her, threatening to consume her with its heat, and the fire was Jareth, inside her and possessing her.

He pulled away again with a soft sigh, lips lingering against hers. "Sarah, my darling, you seem determined to tempt me," he whispered roughly against her lips. She didn't have to see his eyes to know that they were black with desire. She could feel his hands trembling.

"And I thought it was the other away around. I thought you were supposed to be the dark seducer," she murmured in reply, claiming kisses he could not deny her.

"Ah, well" -- his mouth trailed lower -- "that was until five minutes ago."

"Every passing minute is a chance to turn it all around," she told him, and she drew him down onto the bed, her hair a dark halo about her face. Her robe had slipped open, revealing sharp clavicles that he traced with a tongue, exploring the little pool where it melted into her shoulder, the hollow of her throat, pausing in his ministrations to tear the glove off his hand with his teeth, even as that hand slipped daringly under the skirt of her robe to rest on her thigh.

She went still beneath his touch. Even through the silk of his glove, it was an intimate gesture, vaguely threatening in its intentions. There was no mistaking those intentions, and the implications of the situation began to catch up with Sarah Williams.

He had kissed her, and she had responded willingly. That part was easy to comprehend. Even without his pretty words, his kisses were enough to kill all critical judgment. She had never kissed anyone who kissed the way he did, who lit a fire in the pit of her belly and put all end to coherent thought. Yet somewhere between accepting his kiss and reciprocating it, she was here. In her bed. With him. The Goblin King. And his hand rested lovingly on her thigh.

Sarah struggled to sit up. "No, wait," she panted, fighting to hold on coherent thought despite the torrent of kisses he showered upon her. She placed a hand on his mouth, stilling his kisses.

"Whatever for?"

"Please," she begged, and he quieted, sitting back on his heels. His eyes were dark with unbridled lust, and she shivered under the intensity of that gaze. But if she didn't say anything now, she wouldn't be able to later. She swallowed, closing her eyes so that she wouldn't have to look at his eyes. "It's just...I've never really done this before," she squeaked.

Part of her observed the situation in disbelief -- she was discussing her sex life with the Goblin King. But then, stranger things have happened. She hurried on. "I mean, I have, once, but it didn't really count! I was so stupid, I regretted it later on. It was the only time I ever got drunk, I mean Aboveground, and I didn't even know what I was doing until I woke up the next morning and realized.... I don't even remember any of it. And so I told myself that the next time, I'd be absolutely sure, that I would make up for what I lost...."

Moments passed, and Jareth said nothing, and she didn't dare to open her eyes. She didn't want to see his expression, the accusation in his eyes. She didn't know if she could bare it.

And then he was cupping her face tenderly. "Sarah, look at me," he said. "Look at me."

She obeyed reluctantly, drawing in a ragged breath that hitched in her throat. Whatever she had expected, it was not the look on Jareth's face. There was no trace of laughter on his lips, no hint of anger or displeasure or judgment in his blue eyes, no dark passion that threatened to devour her. It was the expression of someone who'd been given something very precious and very fragile, and he feared to break it. As if she was precious and fragile.

"It doesn't matter," he told her fiercely, yet his fingers on her face were gentle. "May that boy pray he never meets me. I would never take advantage of you that way. I haven't taken advantage of you that way. If you're frightened, we'll stop. I will only go as far as you let me. I promise you."

"But you said, you're accustomed to taking whatever you wanted," she said in a small voice.

Jareth frowned, a small crease appearing between his black brows. "Ah, well," he hurrumphed, his fingers slipping into her hair, tangling into black curls as he pulled her forward gently by the back of her neck. "As I said, that was before you. You never make things easy for me." And he kissed her gently and chastely.

And she wondered later, lying in the circle of his arms, how she could ever have misjudged him. The candles had extinguished, washing the room in shadows and moonlight. It illuminated his skin with an ethereal glow, so pale that it was almost blue next to the golden rosiness of her own skin, as pale as the shift she wore. He was very still, so still she almost imagined that he was asleep if not for the hand that stroke her hair as lightly as the moonlight itself.

And she wondered if she'd misunderstood herself too.

She dreamt that she wandered a palace built of ice and snow. The walls were cold, colder than death, so cold that they took the skin off, and she was careful not to brush against them accidentally. Light from an invisible source streamed through their translucent barrier, distorted by unseen curves and cleavages in the ice, and the edges of the walls blurred together until Sarah could not tell where one walls of one room began and another ended.

She was searching for something. A boy.

She found him in the last room, a great antechamber where the floor shone as brightly as a mirror. Except it was cracked, splinters of ice that formed puzzles. The boy with golden hair sat in the center of room, playing with the pieces, and although his fingers were blue and his skin deathly pale, he did not seem to feel the cold.

"I've come to take you home," she told him gently.

"I can't," he sobbed, his fingers scrabbling desperately in the ice. "I can't go until I've figured out this puzzle. She won't let me go until I do. I have to spell it out, except I don't remember how. I can't remember at all. I can't, I can't, I can't."

"What do you have to spell?" she asked, crouching next to him. "Maybe I can help, and then we'll go home."

He turned his tear streaked face towards her, and Sarah froze at the sight of his blue eyes. She knew that face, even transformed as it was by youth and its expression of despair. She knew him. "My name," he said, pointing to the pattern he'd already shaped on the floor. "I have to spell my name, but I don't remember what it is."

He was Jareth.

The portrait was beautiful, so lifelike. The artist had capture the gleam in her eyes, a burning hunger that threatened to devour the world. He could almost see her breathe, chest swelling imperceptibly with each inhalation and exhalation. He imagined that she might step out of its gilt frame. But she didn't, for all the brightness of her painted eyes, and he gazed back at her captured beauty fearlessly, arrogantly, condescendingly.

How many times had he stood before this very painting, before this woman, searching her painted face for something he never found? How many years had he been frightened of her? How long had he hated her, this beautiful woman who terrorized the waking dreams of a creature that did not sleep? She had teased at the edge of his consciousness, always present, always there. But no longer... no longer....

"You will no longer haunt me," Jareth told the painting calmly. No longer, no longer, no longer. Quoth the Raven, nevermore.... "You will never haunt me again, because I don't care about you anymore. You made a mistake, and I paid the consequences. But no more. No more. I've thought about you long enough, and I will never think about you again."

And the flames began to lick hungrily at the canvas.

Sarah was alone when she woke up again. Half asleep, she reached for him instinctively, her fingers tangling in the sheets instead of an open shirt. Her cheek lay against soft silken pillows and not a cambric clad shoulder. There was nothing to indicate that she had not slept alone, except the scent of him lingering in the threads of the pillow and the sheets, and it seemed like she still lay in his invisible embrace.

Il nome suo nessun saprà... E noi dovrem, ahimè, morir, morir!*

Luke was hopelessly lost.

The forest trail had vanished, abandoning him among years of undisturbed foliage. There were only the silent trees, their black leaves weaving a canopy that blocked out the sky. Turning slowly where he stood, he saw nothing but an endless expanse of glittering dark trees. Nothing to mark his position, nothing to indicate whichever direction he traveled, nothing to betray a world outside this dark, yawning forest of breathing trees. There were no cries of nocturnal creatures, no rustlings of woodland animals. No caws of birds, no growling of beasts.

Nothing.

Nothing except for the barn owl, silent and white against the blackness. Too white, illuminated by an unseen light, almost as if it the owl glowed with its own light. It watched him with wide eyes that were black against its white face. It watched with eyes that were too intelligent.

Defying the barrier of trees, a breeze whistled through the branches and disturbed the leaves. Luke jumped at a rustle, whirling around in anticipation of a goblin attack, a monster, a Wild Thing, or even the Goblin King. There was only more darkness, shadowy outlines of trees he could not quite see.

"Peaceful, isn't it?" asked a deep sophisticated voice. If not for its tone of arrogant amusement, Luke would've been very happy to hear it. He turned around again, slowly, slowly.

The Goblin King leaned against the trunk of the tree, dressed head to toe in glittering black and blue. Even so, he seemed to stand out clearly from the background, the edges of his silhouette sharply defined from the shadows. His cape of midnight billowed in the breeze, and it seemed that it was woven out of the shadows of the forest.

"I suppose that's one way of saying it," Luke replied acidly. "'Silent as the grave' also springs to mind."

"Do you want it to be yours?" Jareth asked innocently and considerately. "It would be a good place to spend the rest of eternity. I could always make arrangements. What is your preference, a glass coffin? Turned into stone?" -- a brief pause, then quietly -- "I imagine death would be peaceful."

A sliver of confusion pierced Luke for the first time. Had there been a note of wistfulness in the Goblin King's voice? Luke stared at the dark king, a creature of shadows and the deepest regions of his mind, and that confusion vanished as if it'd never been. Jareth stood there, strong and sure and arrogant. "Why don't you find out?" Luke answered. "Go ahead. You could just kill yourself. You'd be doing us all a big favor."

"It's not that easy."

"'What dreams may come must surely give us pause,' right?" Luke quoted nonchalantly. "I suppose if it were that easy, Hamlet would've done it. But then, we would never have known anything about him. No final battle against Claudius, no accidental poisoning of his mother, nothing."

"It's not that easy," Jareth repeated. "If I were held back only by the fears of dreams, I would have sought that long sleep lifetimes ago. There is nothing in dreams more terrible than anything I've already witnessed. Look at your own dreams. Look at where we now. Nothing but black emptiness, stretching on as far as the eye can see. How could I be afraid of that?"

"You'd be surprised how many people could be," Luke muttered, until something else Jareth had said caught his attention. "What do you mean, where we are now? What's so significant about this place? It's just a forest, isn't it?"

The Goblin King smiled a considering smile as he studied the other man. "It is a forest to you, because you make it so," he explained. "Others who've passed through may have seen something different. It might have been something horrible, or it might have been something marvelous. This forest reflects the depths of your imagination, which I must say I find sorely lacking."

"So if I just imagined that a path should appear suddenly, leading to your castle and free of all obstacles, it would appear?" Luke mocked.

"It's not as simple as just imagining, as you so eloquently state," Jareth said. "True imagination is subject to your subconscious, ungovernable and illogical."

The same gesture of frustration, a hand that made a greater mess of already untidy hair. "If you're just here to mock me, you can just leave," Luke snapped impatiently, turning his back on the taller man as he examined the trees for something, anything, that might betray something beyond the shadows. "I'm rather busy. You should know."

"You chose to run the Labyrinth. If you recall, I tried to dissuade you," Jareth pointed out with all the smugness of a child saying I-told-you-so to its parents. "You can give up whenever you want."

"Sarah made it through. At age fifteen. That means it's beatable," Luke countered, turning around at last. "You're beatable."

The Goblin King drew himself to full height, unfolding himself until he seemed to tower as tall as the trees. The world seemed to shrink around him, fading into the background as the dark unearthly king gathered himself, his presence crackling with power. His cloak was not the darkness, but a void that threatened to absorb the shadows and forest and everything it touched. Luke took a hasty step backwards.

"Little Sarah had a great deal more imagination than you ever will," Jareth breathed, and his voice was colder than the winter night. "Her will is far stronger than yours will ever be, and I will not be beaten by a boy who thinks himself equal to her."

"My will is strong enough to beat you," Luke replied. Yet his voice quavered, and his words sounded empty and boastful.

Jareth smiled, showing pointed teeth. It was a smile that reminded Luke of Big Bad Wolves that gobbled up little girls. How many little girls had this wolf devoured already? "But first you might fight your way to the castle beyond the Goblin City," the king reminded. "Then we shall see how strong your will is. And as you seem to have lost the first present I gave you, here is another one."

The crystal ball he threw to Luke turned out to be a ball of string, the thread as fine as a spider's web and as strong as moonlight, which nothing can sever. The end of it disappeared into the shadows of the forest, gleaming silver where it caught the light.

"What am I supposed to do with this?" he asked confusedly.

"Why, slay the Minotaur, of course," answered Jareth's voice. It echoed around the little clearing, but the speaker had disappeared. Only a white owl, that flapped its wings and flew high into the leaves and disappeared among the stars.

Ma perciocchè giammai di questo fondo
Non tornò vivo alcun....**

-- Dante, "The Inferno," The Divine Comedy

She found the door at the end of a long hallway. No candles lit at her approach, and as her feet disturbed the heavy dust that covered the floor, it swirled around her feet like dancing children. The door itself showed signs of decay, its rotting surface hidden under a patina of dust, the key in the hole rusted. Yet it turned under her hand, and the door creaked open on hinges that groaned with years of disuse.

She climbed the stairs that spiraled upwards. There were no torches, no candles, only the candle she had brought with her when she set off on her exploration. It cast a small circle of light around her, no more than a feet or two, and she did not know how high the stairs reached or how far she'd already climbed. As if she watched herself climb the stairs, Sarah thought distantly of Disney's Sleeping Beauty. She seemed pulled by the same hypnotic force that had gripped Rose, climbing stairs for no reason other than that they were there. On and on she climbed towards an unknown destination. It seemed that she climbed towards the stars.

And suddenly she reached the top. The stairs leveled into a landing, another hallway that opened suddenly into a room.

She had been in this room before.

It was a large room, and once it had been richly furnished. But like the stairwell and the hallway, it too showed signs of abandonment. The beams of its lofted ceiling were hung with cobwebs, trailing downwards in long wispy strands like gossamer curtains that graced the beds of sleeping princesses. Tapestries and paintings decorated the stone walls, smothered with the weight of a hundred years until they were unrecognizable, and dreams lay thick and heavy in the air around her, singing lullabies in whispered voices. But where once there had been a canopied bed, there was only a cradle of silk and ebony, a treasure chest at its foot. They were the only objects in the room untouched by time or decay.

And on top of the treasure chest, there was a little flower in a pot. It was a rose, its petals a dark blue as deep as the moonlit sky.

There was a portrait on the wall behind the cradle. Blue eyes gazed out through the dust, and she lifted a hand to brush away the grime, trying to unmask the mysterious subject of the portrait. The most she could reveal was long pale hair and sculpted cheekbones. Yet Sarah recognized the burning hunger in the blue eyes. She had found the missing portrait of Jareth she had not seen in the portrait gallery. Even rendered in oils and buried in dust, his eyes bore into hers, and she turned away uncomfortably.

Something caught her attention, a glimmer in the corner of her eyes. A large mirror, much like the mirror in her room, leaned against the distant wall, its surface smashed into a thousand fragments. Someone had painstakingly refitted the shards back together, save for one last piece. If she squinted and did funny things with her eyes, she could almost make out a pattern in the cracks, a picture maybe, or a word....

"How are you enjoying yourself?" There was only mild interest in that unmistakable voice.

Sarah whirled around, panic in her green eyes.

The Goblin King leaned in the doorway, his arms crossed in front of his chest. His blue eyes blazed with unadulterated anger. It rolled off him in waves, hot as dragons breath and equally malicious, an unseen force that petrified everyone and everything it touched. Sarah could not move under the malevolence of his fury.

"Well?" he asked, dropping his arms as he sauntered too casually into the room. His fingers trailed briefly against the surface of the treasure chest, along the rim the flowerpot, along the sides of the cradle. Each gesture seemed so careless, so bereft of the wrath that twisted his lips until she felt that she no longer recognized him. He was not the Jareth that had held her lovingly while she slept, nor was he the wicked Goblin King from her childhood, because in her sheltered childish innocence, she had never imagined such hostility, such vehemence, such vengefulness. His hand caressed the bonnet of the cradle. "I asked you a question, precious, precious Sarah. Are you enjoying yourself, playing by yourself in my room?"

She found her voice, a rough timid imitation of it at least. "Your room?" She turned around. "There's no bed. There's just... a cradle. This is a nursery, isn't it?"

"So it would seem."

Her panicking mind floundered, grasping at something -- anything -- other than the vengeful Goblin King. "How do you sleep if there's no bed?"

"I don't." He was in front of her now. This close to him, his fury was a scorching heat, and she closed her eyes against it. But he was not so merciful. "Look at me," he snarled, gripping her face tightly, without any of the tenderness he'd only recently displayed. She was forced to open her eyes. "I'm a creature of dreams. We don't sleep, and we don't dream, not when we haunt the dreams of mortals. What use would I have for a bed? So what you take for granted as a nursery is in fact my room. High above the castle, in the tallest tower, where I quite clearly forbade you to enter. What should I do with you now? Shall I punish you?"

"I -- I-- I didn't..." she gasped.

He tilted his head, regarding her mockingly. "Didn't what?" he asked, fingers tightening painfully in her hair. She grabbed at his arms, and he released her face to grasp her wrists in hands as strong as steel. "Didn't know? Didn't care? You didn't what, Sarah? You didn't mean to? But then, you never mean to do anything. I told you, Sarah. Consequences. I cannot always be generous for you. I already gave you my heart to play with, was it not enough? Was it so paltry a toy that you had to intrude in my room for new things to play with?"

He forced against the wall, hard, knocking the breath out of her lungs. "What have you touched?" he demanded.

She shook her head. "N-n-no-nothing," she stammered.

"Nothing, nothing, tra la la?" he repeated quietly. He bent his head and pressed a kiss against her shoulder. "Sarah, precious, I don't believe you. Such an inquisitive girl as you...."

"Really!" she begged.

He bit down, hard, where he had kissed, and she hissed with the pain. "Don't lie to me, Sarah," he murmured against the wound. He lifted his head. "I've never lied to you, it would not be fair for you to lie to me."

There were tears in her eyes, yet she refused to cry. She'd forgotten how cruel he could be, because surely this was cruel, to be so kind one moment and so vindictive the next. It was cruel to taunt her like this, as if he had never said the things he'd said only a while ago. "I tried to brush the dirt off the painting, that's all!" she cried out. "Absolutely nothing else. I promise you. I swear, I swear to God, I'm telling you the truth."

"I care little for God," he said coldly. "But you swear you touched nothing?"

She shook her head, her dark hair falling in front of her face as she refused to look at him, refused to let him see the tears that could not be held back. "I swear," she replied in a small voice.

He let her go, and she fell to a heap on the floor, weak with terror and disappointed hopes and bitterness. She hated him in that moment. Most of all, she hated herself, hated herself for being so weak, hated herself for having believed that he wasn't the villain, that perhaps he was something else entirely, and hated herself for fallen in love with him.

The Goblin King knelt down on knee next to her and thrust his face close to hers as he hissed, "Now, get out. Get out of my castle."

Now that lilacs are in bloom
She has a bowl of lilacs in her room
And twists one in his fingers while she talks.
"Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know
What life is, you who hold it in your hands";
(Slowly twisting the lilac stalks)

-- T.S. Eliot, "Portrait of a Lady"

* No one will know his name... and we will have to, alas, die, die!

** But since never from this abyss/ has anyone ever returned alive

Author's Note: Haha, so we have the truth of the matter. Sorry, everyone who assumed that they slept together in the previous chapter. Sex is fun and all, but foreplay is better.

Moral of the story? Thou shalt not take things for granted.

Sorry, I can't seem to keep off the Princess Turandot references. Much madness is divinest sense? Perhaps