Jareth slipped his owl skin in a back alley, out of the sight of curious human eyes. Though belief was a very sought-after thing among the Fae, and he was obviously no exception, there were unspoken laws to Fae dealings in the human world. One of the most serious ones was that belief was never allowed to become solid, provable fact. If such a thing ever happened—and it had happened before—the transgressor was dealt with swiftly and violently.
Though Jareth was not terribly bothered by the possibility of becoming an outlaw in the Underground, he still would never have revealed himself so openly. He was a firm believer in the idea that belief, by its very nature, required some doubt for it to have any meaning at all. Not much doubt, just a little.
It was not often that the Goblin King ventured into the Aboveground if there was any way he could avoid it. He loved the lights, the noise, the way life moved fast and ruthless on the busy mortal streets, and the way things never seemed to stay the same for two minutes at a time, but what he could not abide was the sheer amount of cold iron that existed there. Everywhere he turned, it seemed there was something else that he had to take great care to avoid, and even close proximity to the metal for any length of time made him shivery and anxious.
He always wore gloves while he was there, but even so, did his best not to touch anything, even if he thought it was safe. Humans had recently taken to painting and dyeing every damned thing, even metal, so that what looked like a plastic device could actually be something much more dangerous. The absolute last thing he wanted was to be stranded in the Aboveground without his magic just because he happened to mistake one thing for another. He did not let himself take anything for granted. He couldn't afford to.
It had happened once before, long ago when he was young and careless, and it was not an experience he was likely ever to forget—and one he did not wish to repeat. His mother had come to his rescue that time. If it were to happen again, now, he doubted he would ever find a way to return home.
He emerged from the alley, turned a corner, and stopped at a newsstand, just like he belonged there. Which, considering it was Manhattan, was not as unbelievable as one might think.
Jareth picked up a newspaper—touching paper was still safe. As far as he knew, there were still trees, and miraculous as their technology was, humans had yet to start making it out of anything else. He noted the date—Monday, April 7, 1997—without much interest. The baby disappearances were front page news, though somewhat overshadowed by an article about something called Hale-Bopp Comet. He scanned this article, reading enough to understand that it was about a mad cult group that had all killed themselves—'mass suicide' and a 'tragedy' the paper called it. Jareth thought that really depended on who you asked. In his opinion, thirty-nine people who got it into their heads that death was somehow like a ride on a spaceship deserved exactly what happened to them, and hardly counted as a tragedy—then shifted his attention to the article about the 'kidnapped' babies. It wasn't very informative. But then, he hadn't expected that it would be. It did tell him what the humans knew about the situation—nothing whatsoever—but then it went off on bizarre conspiracy theories, and he turned the page.
There were more articles about arrested criminals; murderers, rapists, burglars, even an update on what seemed to be an on-going sensational case involving a man who had bombed a building and killed more than a hundred and sixty people. The cleverness and ingenuity of mortals never failed to amuse him. They were always coming up with new and more interesting ways to kill each other. And themselves.
He skipped the business and sports sections completely, paused when he came to a bunch of announcements about some famous people who had died that month and the latter part of the previous one. There was a multimillionaire, an author of children's books, a 'beat poet'—whatever that meant—and a man who had written, produced, directed, and been the co-creator of something called Sesame Street. They had all died well into adulthood, and probably comfortable in their beds, so Jareth didn't see what all the fuss was about. But then, one of the announcements could have been about the death of the Princess of Wales and he would have thought much the same way.
He closed the paper, folded it neatly, and under the curious and watchful eyes of the vendor, put it back on the stand and walked away.
The Princess of Wales actually would be dead in a little over four months. A car crash in Paris, and she would die with a pack of reporters clicking the shutters of their cameras as fast as they could move their fingers. But even had the Goblin King known this, it was doubtful that he would have cared.
It was near dark, but still daylight in the Aboveground, so Jareth had some time to kill. He had a plan for fixing this problem Sarah had gotten them both into, and it was a simple one, but to do it right, in a way that would cause the least chaos, he couldn't do it yet. He wasn't exactly planning to walk in the front door of the publishing house and ask to see the manuscript. This would probably result in him being laughed at, or carted off by whatever passed for guards in the modern world, or both. And break-ins, whether you were human or Fae, were best conducted at night.
So instead of getting his task over with and getting the merry hell out of the Aboveground as quickly as possible, as he would have liked to, he had to find something to do for the next hour or so until full dark.
Jareth went shopping.
He located a smoke-shop about a block away from the newsstand and spent nearly his whole hour wandering around. His first impression of the place was of a marketplace held inside a small perfumed room that was much too small for it. A marketplace that sold the strangest things, some of which he could not—and honestly, did not even attempt to—understand the use of. There were racks and boxes of little sticks covered in smelly stuff. It was these that caused the place to be so smoky and smell like the inside of a perfume bottle, as there were about ten of the little things burning on stands all around the room. There were t-shirts like the ones Sarah liked to wear, except that to the best of his recollection, she had never wore one with the witty declaration I'M JUST A SOCIAL DRINKER, BUT I SMOKE CRACK LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER emblazoned across the front of it in an agonizing color of puke purple.
He flicked through the t-shirts to see what else they had to say, and was told bluntly that MEAN PEOPLE SUCK, MEAN PEOPLE NEED PROZAC, and, as if there had ever been any doubt, MEAN PEOPLE PRODUCE LITTLE MEAN PEOPLE. Jareth had no idea what Prozac was, but he was pretty sure whoever had designed these things probably ate a lot of it. If they didn't, they should.
He moved down the isle reading the t-shirts, and actually enjoying himself without realizing it. He paused for a moment to consider a shirt decorated with the words MY KARMA RAN OVER YOUR DOGMA and wondered just what that was supposed to mean. 'Karma'? 'Dogma'? They sounded like the names of people. Or pets. Not names he would think anyone would want to be stuck with, or that he would ever wish on any poor unsuspecting creature, but what else could they be? And if that was the case, were they so common now in the Aboveground that it was just assumed everyone had a Karma or Dogma lurking in their family tree or hiding under their front porch?
On another rack he came across some with things like JESUS LOVES YOU. EVERYONE ELSE THINKS YOU'RE AN ASSHOLE, JESUS IS COMING—AND BOY IS HE PISSED, and JESUS WOULD SLAP THE SHIT OUT OF YOU. He naturally concluded that whoever this Jesus person was, he was not a nice guy.
There were more shirts, bumper-stickers, pins, magnets, lighters, and shot glasses throughout the store, and they dealt with everything from mental problems and religion to drugs and just plain silliness. Then on a rack in the very back he found two of these ridiculous garments that made him laugh out loud. He took them down and made his way toward the front counter.
There was a girl at the counter with pink spiked hair, a nose ring, and a tattoo of a cute little red devil with a pitchfork on her upper right arm. She was also wearing a t-shirt, and hers let him know that ALL THE SANE PEOPLE QUIT HERE YEARS AGO. Again, as if he had ever doubted it.
Jareth put his purchases down on the glass topped counter, then knelt to peer into the case below it at an artistic collection of pipes and bongs. They were very pretty. He especially liked the one that looked like a fire-breathing dragon.
The girl behind the counter popped her gum and lifted her eyebrows at the top of his head. "Ya want anything else?" she asked. The guy was weird, but she'd definitely seen weirder.
Jareth stood up and looked around at all the different cartons of cigarettes, the round tins of snuff, the baggies of pipe tobacco, packs of rolling papers, then back at the girl. "I need cigarettes," he said.
"Don't we all," the girl said. "What kind?"
He looked blank for a minute. What kind? He really didn't know. "I don't know," he said. "What kind do most people like?"
Okay, scratch that, he had just made a spectacular leap in weirdness. But she was a native New Yorker, she could handle it as long as he didn't pull out a big knife and start telling her about his 'voices'. "We got practically everything," she told him. "Pall Malls, Luckys, Marlboros, Mistys, Merits, Camels, Winstons, Kools, Dorals—we even got them little cigar things that taste like cherries, if ya want."
He stared at her, She popped her gum and waited for him to decide—or figure it out, 'cause that's what it really looked to her like he was trying to do.
"What would you pick?" Jareth honestly didn't give half a shit what she liked or thought, but he knew when he was out of his depth.
"Don't smoke," she said with a jerk of her shoulder.
"Oh." Well that was no help. "Marlboros then," he decided, picking the brand just because there seemed to be more advertisement posters and fliers on the walls than any other kind. And they were one of the few boxes that did not have an animal of some type as part of their insignia.
"Regulars or lights?" She thought it best to not bother him with menthols at all. She didn't want to see the guy blow a circuit.
"Regulars," he said doubtfully.
"One hundreds?"
"Uh, yes?"
She reached behind her, snagged a box, and put them down on the counter. "That it?"
"Yes," he said. He sounded relieved.
She punched in the prices for the shirts and scanned the carton of cigarettes. "Forty-five, eighty-nine," she said.
Jareth took a small leather draw-string purse from his belt and picked out two gold coins and a ruby the size of the tip of his thumb.
The girl's mouth dropped open and her gum plopped out on the glass counter-top.
He looked between her and the purchases, considered, and added a small silver coin to the rest. "Is that not enough?"
"Are ya kidding me, man? Ya can't fucking pay with that."
"I assure you it's real."
"But ya can't pay for cigarettes with that kind of shit. What the hell's wrong with you?"
Jareth folded his arms over his chest and glared down at the girl in his most superior way.
She stared back at him, undaunted by the gleam in his eye or the set of his shoulders. She'd spent her early childhood scrapping with the neighborhood kids and dodging the cops, she wasn't afraid of some wack-job that looked like a traveling Renaissance Fair reject.
"Since when is gold no longer an acceptable form of currency?" he demanded.
"Since maybe the fifties," she said. "That's the nineteen-fifties, Shakespeare."
"Well this is all I have," Jareth said.
She studied him intently for almost a full minute, then sighed and scooped up the coins and the ruby. "Look, you seem like a sane enough guy. You could do with a hair cut and some new threads, but still—"
"Bite it," he told her.
She glared at him. "Listen, you crazy fuck, I don't have to take that kind of—"
"The coin," Jareth said with what he considered to be infinite patience. "Bite the edge of the coin."
She continued to glare at him, but did what he suggested and clamped her teeth down on the gold like an old miner in a spaghetti-western. When she took it out of her mouth and looked at it, sure enough, there were little indentations left by her teeth.
The look on her face was enough to give him permission to take his purchases and walk out of the store, which he did. He stood on the sidewalk and took a deep breath. The perfumed atmosphere of the smoke-shop had left him a little light-headed. He folded the material of the t-shirts around the box of cigarettes, then just kept folding until he had a small little package no bigger than a domino, which he put in his leather purse for safe-keeping.
The next store he visited was similar to the first, except there was no smoke or perfume, and it was a lot brighter than the smoke-shop. He did not spend much time walking around looking at the bottles. If you've seen one bottle of wine, you've pretty much seen them all. He did pick up a bottle of some violently green liquid and swish it around experimentally, but then he went straight to the counter and asked for Sarah's Southern Comfort. When he paid the man with gold, this time Jareth did not have to prompt the grizzled old man to test it with his teeth. He did it without being asked, and when he found it to be real, he considerately wrapped up Jareth's bottle in a paper sack, and even gave him a toothy smile as he was leaving.
The only way Jareth knew to explain it was the changing of time. Time passed, that was one of the things that was unavoidable no matter which world you lived in. And the old man at the liquor store evidently came from a time when gold was a perfectly acceptable currency—even a preferred one.
The sun had long set and it was now full dark. Time for him to find Sarah's manuscript and get his real work over with so he could go home. He'd already been wandering through streets dappled and bristling with a thousand different forms of cold iron for long enough to make his damned teeth itch.