There were reasons why some people did not have children. Very good reasons.
Sarah came to this conclusion only moments after Jareth's departure when no less than three of the cute little tykes in her charge simultaneously emptied their bowels, then ran around the throne room expecting her to chase them down, in the process, spreading the stench of their saggy diapers throughout the Castle.
The smell was bad. Anyone who has ever had to change a dirty diaper for their screaming baby brother knows. Some people would argue that dog shit or cat shit was worse, and maybe to some extent that was true, but you don't have to wipe your cat's ass for it. They are pretty much self-reliant creatures.
The only thing that she could say, without question, smelled worse, was Jareth's Bog of Eternal Stench, and at the moment, that wasn't very comforting.
Sarah lifted her eyes heavenward in a silent plea for patience and understanding as the baby girl at her feet plopped down on the floor on her poopy-diapered butt and wriggled around with a little grin on her face. The kids had yet to discover the joys of shit finger painting, but Sarah was pretty sure that given time—and prolonged contact with the goblins—they soon would.
"Come down from there right this instant," she said to a goblin up on a window ledge, who was swinging a toddler upside down from its ankles. She tried to use her stern teacher voice, and got basically the same reaction from the goblin that she had always gotten from her students. The cheeky little beast let go of one of the chortling baby's legs just long enough to flip her the bird.
She was sorely tempted to turn the lot of them to stone—goblins and babies alike—and let Jareth deal with the whole mess when he got back. That she did not do this was either a testament to her strong moral upbringing, or—and she rather thought this one more likely—a hint at some repressed masochistic inclinations.
"Oh no you don't" she said to a scrawny goblin in a blue waistcoat and pointy shoes. He had come up behind the little girl with the full diaper and, like a mother checking if it was time for a change, pulled the back of it back with one finger and peeked inside. "If you throw any of that anywhere, I will turn you into a scrub-brush and use you to wash it off with."
The goblin backed away cautiously, then scampered off to get into other mischief—or a different diaper.
"You, come here," she said to the little girl. She crooked her finger, and the child floated toward her, laughing and waving her hands. "Good God, you smell." She concentrated very hard on clean diapers, anything clean really, anything that did not smell like shit, in fact. When she checked the baby, there was nothing but clean, smooth baby bottom and the faint odor of talcum powder.
It was not the first time that she had found herself intensely grateful to the Goblin King for his amazing gift. It likely would not be the last.
It was in this way that she cleaned the rest of the soiled babies, and by the time the white owl returned to the Castle, she had almost gotten rid of the smell as well. Almost.
Jareth fanned the air in front of his face with a hand. "What is that smell?"
"Baby fecal matter would be my first guess—that's shit, if you didn't know," she added at his look of confusion. She pointed a finger at him and glared. "I am never having sex with you again," she said. "It makes me stupid."
He just crossed his arms over his chest and lifted a brow in that infuriating way he had.
"I don't know what the hell I was thinking to agree to such a thing. I am not—"
"You were probably thinking how guilty you feel," Jareth said quietly. "How this is all—inadvertently or not—your fault. How those parents are all probably worried out of their minds because their children have disappeared and they suddenly find themselves in a strange land, facing a daunting quest, at which they very likely will not succeed. Yes, I think maybe, unless I have entirely misjudged you, you were thinking something just like that."
Sarah sat down on the stone floor, tucked her knees up, and buried her face in her arms, ready to cry. Before she could get started, however, there was a sharp popping sound and she looked up to see two goblins holding yet another child between them. They raised it high over their heads and danced around triumphantly while the kid screamed fit to burst every crystal object within a thousand yards.
Jareth grimaced at the high pitched sound and Sarah gave him a bleak look. "Jareth, you have to do something."
"I can't do anything," he said irritably. "What would you have me do? Break the rules? Break the Labyrinth? The Labyrinth is one of my most powerful means of self-protection, and if I betray it, that protection is lost, for however long it may take to rebuild it. I cannot interfere on their behalf," he said, meaning the parents. "I won't."
"But you could interfere if it meant stopping them," Sarah said. "Like you did with me, with the peach, and the cleaners, and—"
"That was something different, and you know it," he said.
She regarded him silently for several long moments. "How was it different?" she asked at last.
"It was," he hesitated, then shrugged, "personal."
She just stared at him. She didn't need him to explain how it was personal; she understood. It was different, and more personal, when two people were set against each other in combat—whether intellectual or physical—than when an entire flock of desperate people were essentially running a race to the finish against nothing but time. It was more personal because it mattered more. Not that the race of these mothers and fathers did not matter—it did, to them—but with herself and Jareth it had been a matter of pride as well; to win, to not be defeated by the other. In retrospect, Sarah supposed the whole thing was sort of like two wild cats fighting for the right to mate—the male wanting, and the female, though wanting, not willing to relent unless the male could effectively pin her. It was a demeaning analogy, but an apt one for the situation they were in right now. She had been, without question, pinned.
"Alright, I'll allow it was personal," she said. "But the fact remains, you can interfere if you want to, can't you?"
"Only to impede their progress, not to aid them," he said. "Putting obstacles in their way and flashing a bit of magic while I do it makes them believe more."
"This whole thing makes no sense," Sarah said, shaking her head in frustration. "It's some of the most fuck-all logic I've ever heard."
Jareth sighed heavily and paced a little away from her before turning back. "I am bound by laws that are older than myself."
Sarah blinked and rocked back. She put her knees down and crossed her legs at the ankle, thinking. "But I—I am human," she said. "I am bound by no such laws."
"They are laws older than you too," he said dryly. "Older than your entire race."
"It doesn't matter, don't you see?" she said. "They are not my laws; not mortal, not human, not of my world, nothing whatever to do with me, and . . . and I have no power here, the Labyrinth does not get its power from me, and I do not get any power from it."
"But you get your power, what power you have, from me," Jareth said.
She thought about that. The Labyrinth got its power from Jareth, but that did not mean that Jareth got his power from it. She got her power from Jareth, but what was the connection between that and the Labyrinth? There really wasn't one that she could see. "Does that matter?" she asked. "If you created it, does that matter?"
"I don't know," he admitted. "Nothing like this has ever happened before. Years ago, when belief in the Aboveground was stronger, children were sent here all the time. Some of them were rescued, some were abandoned, and some were forgotten, but until now, until you, I have never honestly felt that badly about it. Certainly not to the extent that I considered for even an instant risking the maze for one of them."
Sarah got up and walked over to him. She placed a hand on his crossed arms and felt the tension under her hands that he had been trying to disguise by his stillness. "Let me try to help at least some of them," she said. "I am sorry to ask it, but I must ask it. Let me fix this if I can."
He took her in his arms and held her tightly against him. She came into his arms easily and willingly, without fear or hesitation. He still felt wonder that such a thing, with this woman, his Sarah who had haunted him for years, could be so simple. He rested his chin on top of her head for a moment, then took a deep breath, inhaling her scent of sweet violets and below that, the smell of soap and water, and let it out slowly.
"Alright. I'll let you go," he said. It wrenched at him to say it, even though he knew she was not leaving, not really. She was not going anywhere. She would venture into the Labyrinth to salvage what she could of a difficult situation, and only that because he could not do it himself. She would come back to him. She had to. He told himself these things, but he still could not escape the uneasy twinge that he got at the idea. "I'll let you go, on one condition."
"Bleeding Christ, Jareth," she said, but she was laughing. "What now?"
"Do not endanger yourself," he said. He moved back a bit to look her directly in the eye. "You are not exempt from the dangers of the maze, even with that little bauble around your neck. Promise me that you will not risk your life or safety for them. Promise me that if it comes down to a choice between them and you, you will be selfish and pick you."
"Jareth, I'm not—"
"Promise me, Sarah, please," he insisted. "And don't lie."
"Of course I promise," she said. She touched his face, laying the back of one hand against his cheek, almost a caress. "I will come back."
"I know that," he said. "Just come back to me without any parts missing."
She smiled because she knew he was only half joking. "I will."
"Good." He sighed and reluctantly stepped out of her arms. "And while you are doing that, I'm afraid I'm going to have to go Aboveground and find a way to fix this book problem, or else more children will keep coming."
"Don't you dare destroy my book," Sarah said. "I spent more than five years trying to get that fucking thing published. Don't you dare ruin it."
He laughed at that. "What possible difference could it make to you now? You're dead up there, and even if you wanted to, you can't get any money from it."
Sarah laughed right back at him and tossed her hair over her shoulder. "Do you think that's why I wrote it, to make money? Do you honestly think that's why any writer worth half a shit writes anything? I never put a single word on paper because I thought someone was going to pay me for it. Sure, I hoped to make a living at it one day, but only so I could do the thing I loved and not have to get up every morning to teach imbeciles."
"I thought you liked English, words, that sort of thing," Jareth said.
"I do. I love them, and that's why I'm not going to let you destroy my book."
He grinned at her. "Then you'll be pleased to know that I never had any intention of destroying your darling book. I'd have to be more of an imbecile myself than I like to think I am to throw away such a ready-made source of power. I am in this book of yours, I assume?"
"You know damn well you are." Sarah chuckled. She saw it now, how her story, a story about Jareth, the King of the Goblins and his fabulous maze of booby-traps, could get into the minds of impressionable and imaginative children and make them believe. How that much belief could make him extremely powerful in the Underground, where belief in other things was so short in supply. "You devious bastard," she said.
He smiled, then to her delight and amusement, he sketched her an elegant, if out-dated, bow over one bent leg. "Thank you, my lady. Such compliments . . . I hardly think I deserve them."
She went up to him, took the back of his head in one hand, and pulled him down to kiss. She caught his bottom lip between her teeth, tugged lightly, then stepped back. "Don't be modest, Jareth. It doesn't suit you."
His eyes were dancing with mischief and amusement. "I don't believe I've ever been told that before—and definitely not like that. Most people would suggest I give modesty a try. In fact, many have."
"Well, they don't know what they're talking about, do they?" Sarah said. "Nor do they know you that well, I would guess."
"Some of them do," he said. "That's precisely why they suggest it."
At that moment a little boy, a bit older than the others, two, maybe three at the outset, tugged on the hem of Sarah's shirt to get her attention. "Pee," he said.
Sarah gave Jareth a pleading look.
"I believe the child has to relieve himself," Jareth said, grinning in a way that particularly annoyed her for some reason. Maybe because he did not have a kid hanging onto his clothes asking him for permission to 'pee'.
"Since you are going Aboveground, you can pick me up a few things while your there," she said, leading the child by the hand to the nearest bathroom—another of one of her architectural additions, but one that Jareth had allowed to stay once he figured out what it was.
He followed her and waited patiently while she helped the little boy unfasten his zip-up pajamas.
"What could there possibly be up there that you cannot summon here by yourself?" he asked.
"Nothing," she said. "But for some reason, summoned cigarettes and Southern Comfort don't taste as good, or pack quite the whollop as the genuine article. I think it must have something to do with my sensory memories—which I admit are not always at their best after I've had a few."
Jareth agreed to get her cigarettes, and after she described exactly what it was and where he could find it, he agreed to bring her back a fifth of her favorite drink as well.
"You're being very agreeable," Sarah said, kneeling in front of the boy and helping him with his zipper.
"What makes you think I can't be agreeable?"
She shrugged and watched the little boy scurry off to play with his new friends and the goblins. "Nothing, I guess," she said, "except past experience and what my mother used to call 'women's intuition'. Based on that, I would say your capacity for being agreeable isn't very vast."
He snorted and slung a companionable arm around her waist. "What's it to me if you want to breathe smoke like a dragon and get falling down drunk? It's not so hard to be agreeable about something like that." He looked down at her and gave her a cocky wink. "Besides, I've never seen you drunk. It might be fun."
She smiled back at him. "I have it on very good authority that I am very fun when I am drunk. But just because I intend to drink does not necessarily mean I'm going to get drunk." Who was she kidding? She hadn't had a decent smoke or a decent drink in months. The second that bottle was in her hot little hand, she was drinking it, by God, every lovely drop. "But I probably will."
"I look forward to it," he said. He looked around at all the babies and goblins swinging, and running, and dancing, and jumping, and basically wreaking havoc everywhere and in every way they could. "Now what do you think we should we do about them?"
"Lock them in the dungeons," she said instantly.
As it turned out, that was actually a pretty good idea, the only feasible idea when it came to the goblins anyway. Jareth commanded them all into the underground dungeons, slammed the door behind them, locked it, and just for good measure, set wards on the door so that they could not pass the doorway, even if they somehow managed to get the door open.
The babies were another matter entirely. They couldn't very well lock a bunch of defenseless—breakable, don't forget, breakable—kids up in a dungeon with a pack of crazy goblins and expect to find them safe and sound when they returned to let them out. So to compromise, Jareth suggested they put them to sleep. Not like unwanted puppies, mind—that would kind of defeat the purpose—but with a spell, sort of like something from Sleeping Beauty. A state of suspended animation, where they would neither need to eat, drink—or shit, thank you Jesus—and from which they would wake when Jareth lifted it as gently as they would from an afternoon nap.
This was surprisingly easy. Sarah had envisioned some horrific game of tag while they tried to round up all the rambunctious little youngsters and send them one by one to Dream Land. What really happened was Jareth lifted his arms, said some strange, faintly Gaelic sounding words, then lowered them, and as he did, the children yawned, blinked, then curled up wherever they happened to be and began snoring and sucking their thumbs.
"Wow," Sarah said as they went around making the children comfortable with blankets and pillows. She fished one particularly adventurous child out of the toilet, cleaned him off, dried him, and tucked him in.
"You say that so often," Jareth commented.
She looked at him, remembering the last time he had made that observation about her. Her mantra at the time was 'it's not fair', and it certainly hadn't been, not any of it, but she had made peace with that a long time ago. "That's because 'wow' is often the only thing I have to say. At least about this place."
They finished getting the children to bed, then stood in the throne room, looking around at all of them.
"What happens if another one shows up while we're gone?" Sarah asked.
"Can't happen."
"What? Why not?"
"Because," he said patiently, "the goblins have to come and take them away. Don't you remember the words? You wrote them down for the entire world to read, or say, or sing to the rooftops, you should remember."
She chose to ignore that—pick your battles—and said, "What's to stop them?"
"They can't very well go popping off to steal babies if they're locked up tighter than a spinster's cooch, now can they?"
Sarah looked at him and laughed. "What the hell is a 'cooch'?"
He smiled. "I think you know very well what I meant."
"Well, if you're going to be crude, Jareth, you ought to do it right. Not pussy-foot around the fucking thing with silly substitute words like 'cooch'. Jesus."
"I haven't quite mastered the art of gutter language yet," he said. "But give me time enough and world enough—and more interesting conversations like this with you—and I'm sure I'll get the hang of it eventually."
Sarah rolled her eyes. "One can only hope." She studied him out of the corners of her eyes for a while, then turned to him. "Speaking of; please tell me you're not wearing that to the Aboveground."
He looked down at his clothes, black trousers tucked into knee-high leather boots, a simple tunic with a lace-up collar, and his ever-present gold amulet. "What is wrong with this?"
"Nothing, except up there you'll look like a gay glam rocker hopped up on crack." When he just looked puzzled at this, she attempted to translate. The best she could come up with was, "Jareth, you'll get your ass kicked."
That he understood. He also found it amusing. "I doubt that very much."
She shrugged. "Whatever. It's your funeral."
"If it will make you feel better—"
"Actually, it wouldn't," she said. "I find the idea of you in Levi's and Reeboks sort of disturbing. Like dressing up a pet poodle in a tutu. But then, I also find the idea of you with a broken nose that has to be reset before it heals magically fast and leaves you looking like a Picasso masterpiece faintly disturbing as well. A little funny, but disturbing."
It was obvious that the Goblin King had understood very little of this—Levi's, Reeboks, poodles, tutus, and Picasso all in one fell swoop was a little much—it would have been a little much for anybody with the kind of severe cultural divide that separated him from the human world—but he had gotten the basic idea. He did not change his clothes to go to the Aboveground, and as she watched him fly out the nearest window, Sarah decided he could probably take care of himself.