Back in the Aboveground, the first printing of The Labyrinth by Anna Williams hit the shelves, and just as quickly, flew off of them. Out of some kind of loyalty to Sarah, Laura had made sure the book was promoted to an outrageous degree. Advertisement was aimed at older children, meant to appeal to young teenagers and a certain type of adult—those who harbored a secret love for their childhood dreams—but some of them made their way into the homes of toddlers and infants, however inadvertently.
In the nursery of a little colonial house in Acton Massachusetts, Gregory Walsh sat down beside his daughter's antique wrought-iron crib with the book he'd bought on his way home from work. He smiled at the plump-cheeked, smiling baby Emma and adjusted his spectacles, then began to read. After less than thirty minutes, under the deep melodious rhythm of his reading voice, her eyes began to droop. Ten minutes after that, she lay down and curled up with her chubby little thumb in her mouth.
"Sarah stood with her hand on the handle of the door," Gregory read. "'I wish the goblins would come and take you away—right now,' she said, then turned off the light and closed the door." He marked the place with a bit of paper and set the book down on the nightstand. He got up and went over to tuck the blanket around his sweet sleeping Emma, then turned out the light and closed the door behind him as he left.
The next morning his wife, Carol, would call the police, in tears, frantic. Her baby was missing, she said, her baby daughter had been kidnapped . . . please, oh please . . .
In a little loft apartment in downtown New York, twelve year old Meredith Jacobs was reading to her little brother. Ben was two, and he listened to the story with uncommon interest for a child his age. His blue eyes were wide and excited, and he giggled whenever Merry did the voices for the goblins.
"'Where did she learn that rubbish?' the second goblin scoffed," Meredith read, lowering her voice to a reptilian hiss, which made Ben clap his hands over his mouth to hold in his laughter. "'It doesn't even start with 'I wish!'"
"Say the words," Ben said, rocking forward eagerly.
With her finger tracking the lines, Meredith scanned down the page to the spot. "'I wish the goblins would come and take you away—right now."
The bedside lamp that she had been reading by went out as though the plug had been pulled. There was a sudden wind in the room, though there were no windows in the room that it could have come in through. There was a rustling, a smell like the inside of a candy-shop, a sound that was almost music, then silence.
Meredith blinked in the darkness and reached out to find the bed beside her empty where Ben had been sitting. "Ben?"
The emergency phone lines began ringing like crazy exactly one hour and seventeen minutes after the first copy of The Labyrinth left the first bookshop in the hands of the first unwary reader. Babies and toddlers began spontaneously disappearing all over the country, with no explanation other than that they had been kidnapped. But how was that possible? All over the country? Could it be a gang of kidnappers?
That actually wasn't far from the truth.