Chapter 4 : Beyond the stones

Sarah and Jareth walked in silence for a long time, wading in the swamp's mud. They were moving slowly, mostly because Sarah had to regularly avoid the roots under her feet. She could have sworn they were trying to make her stumble, and it became a certainty when she felt one of them wrap around her ankle and pull her back viciously.

Sarah would have fallen into the water if Jareth had not held her. He even let her lean on him as she struggled to free herself from the root. She gave him a silent thank you while she was regaining her breath.

"I'd prefer my companion to remains presentable. Mud in the hair is good for goblins, not for humans girls."

"You were a lot less helpful last time," Sarah retorted. "What happened, did you grow a heart?"
The face of the Goblin King darkened. He let go of her and Sarah almost lost her balance. She knew she should not have provoked him. She needed him too much right now.

"The last time, you wanted me to be your enemy, Sarah. You wanted me to be the villain of your lovely little story where you were the heroine who fearlessly faced the terrible Goblin King to free your brother. So yes, I was the villain because you refused to acknowledge that you were the bad guy. Didn't I made a good culprit?"

These words sounded like a slap to Sarah, especially since she had often secretly thought that. She clenched her teeth to contain her scream, ignored her guide and continued to walk. She would not give him the satisfaction of showing that he had hurt her. Behind her, Jareth laughed softly and followed her. Sarah made a point of not speaking to him or even look at him as she continued to move forward with determination. But the walk quickly became exhausting and, more than once, she reluctantly accepted his hand to stabilize herself.

Out of breath, her legs aching, she finally let herself fall down against a dead tree and grabbed her bottle of water in her bag. It was divinely refreshing in her mouth, but she dared not drink more than a few sips. She had to save it. Everyone knew you did not drink water or eat food from the Underworld. When she had recovered a little, Sarah looked around her. The swamp did not seem to end. It was just water and dead trees all around her. She looked back and almost cried when she realized that the island she had left for an hour at least was about thirty paces behind her.

"It's not fair, is it?"

The Goblin King did not try to hide his amusement. Sarah put back her bag on her shoulders and straightened up, but did not try to walk away. It was obviously useless. It was not the good way to get closer to her brother.

"Of course it's not fair. Your kind is never fair, are they?"

"It's against all our principles," he whispered in her ear like it was a secret.

"Because you have some?" asked Sarah.

She refused to show him the effect he has on her with his whispers.

"Some. You should ask."

"What are your principles? Never. I would be too afraid of the answer."

"I am your guide, Sarah. But I cannot help you if you do not ask me questions."

He looked almost as frustrated as she was, so Sarah stopped herself from retorting sharply. Besides, he was right. Again. If she had to endure his company, she should make use of him. She had dozens of questions to ask him, about this world, the labyrinth, Toby and herself. She just asked the two most urgent ones.

"The last time you gave me a time limit to find Toby. Is this the case this time too, and then, how am I supposed to know the delay? And how the hell do we get out of this swamp? There is nothing and nobody there."

"What question do you want me to answer?"

Sarah had not expected this answer, which was not helpful at all, and glared at him before realizing he was absolutely serious. He could not answer them both because it was not permitted. His role as a guide was going to be even more limited than she thought.

"The first one."

"Your time is short, of course, but I've got good news for you. I know how we kings and queens of the Underworld act. To add insult to insult, I'm sure they'll have left you more time than I had to prove their superiority over me. After all, sovereigns like to ridicule their rivals. Still, they can shorten the time if you insult them enough. I know it will be hard for you, but try not to antagonize them. You will have clues anyway."

These words awakened a memory buried in Sarah's mind. A ballroom where she danced. A clock that had reminded her of the moment and made it possible to escape the trap in time.

"Of course," she murmured. "You're required to leave clues. This is not arrogance, you have to do so to balance the chances just a little bit. This allows you to reinforce the idea that we can succeed, but it's just an illusion, is it? You respect some principles and violate all others."

Jareth's sparkling eyes and half-smile confirmed her suspicions. And then, she realized Jareth's information applied to more than her deadline. Sarah looked more closely at the swamp. The trees, she realized, were all exactly the same, a thick trunk with three big main branches rising from a hollow at the top. She had not noticed it, too busy watching for the dangerous roots.

"The oubliettes have doors hidden inside," she murmured. "Crystal balls can be broken to escape. I wandered in an infinite straight line through your labyrinth before I find the real entrance. We are in a vestibule."

Suddenly feeling better, Sarah grabbed a branch to climb the closest tree. If there was a passage, it was in the ridge or between the roots, under the water. She hoped it was the first. Relieved, she found a hatch in the hollow between the branches and lifted it. The interior was dark. She tried to stand up to signal Jareth she found the answer, but the hole suddenly widened, and she fell, screaming.

Fortunately, her long fall was stopped when she fell on a sort of spongy carpet formed of vines. Moments later, Jareth landed there with more grace than Sarah. He seemed to be having a blast. Sarah choose to ignore him to observe their surroundings. The position seemed very precarious, and it was better to abandon it as soon as possible. Vines sprang from this nest in all directions. Jareth could have given her some advice, but Sarah preferred to keep his help for more crucial questions.

She grabbed a vine that went down into the darkness and slid away just in time. The lianas of the nest were already assembled to form a mouth ready to devour it. In the centre of it, the Goblin king turned into an owl and began to fly to join her. Sarah took a deep breath and let herself slide.
The fall was so long that the vine's contact put her hands in blood. Most of the time, she couldn't see anything around her, not even the vine she was holding. When the darkness receded, she saw a dark cave that became a narrow passage on which she injured her knees and shoulders. Finally, the narrow pass led to a corridor with stone walls. Sarah dropped on the floor. At the end of the corridor, there was a door, and it was slightly open. Above it, was a monumental clock which indicated not twelve or even thirteen hours on display, but twenty-seven. Jareth was right, and Sarah allowed herself to breathe normally again. She had time. But she was still worried, and she began to run to the door. Then she stopped dead in her tracks, struck by a sudden realization.

She was alone.

Worried, Sarah went back under the tunnel from which she had emerged, and she scanned the darkness. The liana was still there, but she heard nothing, not even a flutter of wings.

"Jareth?", she finally called.

A violent wind blew from the narrow passage, and she almost fell. This was her only answer.

Sarah did not linger to think about it. Jareth had abandoned her or had been separated from her, but she couldn't wait for him. Her only objective was Toby. Even more determined, Sarah pushed the door. If she was in the house of the kidnapper, she only had to explore it from top to bottom.

Perhaps the house, or maybe the castle, wasn't a labyrinth. Still, it was just as confusing, Sarah decided when she collapsed, exhausted, under a crystal clock that announced that she had twenty-one hours to succeed. She had wandered for hours, and she wasn't further advanced. She had tried to draw a card on a paper she found at the bottom of her bag, but nothing made sense. Some windows showed the outside, a purple moor under two pale white suns. Sarah had turned three times to the right, but every time the two suns were exactly in the same place as if there were no east, west, north, or south. On her map, rooms of different sizes and shapes overlapped on the same level, but if she turned around, the rooms were still the same. It was as if each room occupied its own dimension without worrying about any architectural logic. Disgusted, Sarah threw away her pen.
She was thirsty but did not dare to take out her bottle. It was more than half empty yet, and Sarah could not help but think of Proserpine and her pomegranate and Jareth's peach. Eating or drinking something from here could be deadly, or worse. She would not take the risk. Thirst, hunger, she could live with it.

Fatigue ... It was something else. Sarah was exhausted, both physically and mentally. Last night, she had barely slept, and it began to weigh on her shoulders. Her feet hurt since the swamp and her hands sting from the rope. She dreamed of sleeping, just for five minutes. Five minutes, it could not be so dangerous.

She closed her eyes but stopped herself immediately. She had to resume her exploration, she couldn't be weak. She could not. Sarah sat up.

The corridor she chose to take was dark and unpleasant, but she had already explored the other two passages that were leaving the room where she was standing. She engaged in it, carefully. So far, she had not met any inhabitant of the castle. It made her more and more nervous. Obviously, traps were waiting for her.

She wondered by what miracle she had not started any yet. Then she heard a sound that awfully looked liked a child crying nearby. Sarah froze, then rushed in that direction. Toby needed her, now. Still running, she opened the door in front of her while frantically searching for her brother's. She stepped forward and did not think to look at her feet before it was too late. She fell screaming in terror, unable to see anything.

When she hit a water surface in a loud crash, she briefly lost consciousness. The cold water rushing into her lungs soon brought her back to herself, and Sarah swam to the surface. She spat out some of the water she'd accidentally swallowed then swam in the dark. Silently, she begged tho find the end of what was probably a lake before she was too cold to move. Her swimming created an echo far away. The lake was huge, and the ceiling very high.

Finally, Sarah reached the shore of this subterranean lake and found a gravel beach under her feet. She moved away from the water, just enough to feel safe and slid into unconsciousness.

Sweet music awoke the young woman, and she opened her eyes. Expecting to find herself in darkness and on a bed of pebbles, she was surprised to discover herself in silk sheets. She was wearing the same clothes, but they were dry, and she would have sworn that her left sleeve, had been torn a few hours earlier. Now, it was intact. Her bag lay on the floor next to her bed. As she straightened up, she put a hand to her forehead. It hurt, but someone put bandaged on her wound. Earlier, she was so scared she did not even realize she was hurt.

A curtain of pearls rose in a soft tingle. Sarah turned to see a dozen smiling girls in gorgeous silk dresses. She mistrusted them immediately. The girls were smiling too much, and when she looked at them from the right angle, it was evident that they were not human. Their smiles make them look like snakes.

Did they think they could seduce her where the Goblins King had failed?

To give the change, Sarah smiled at them and stood up to pay her respects in turn. The girls laughed loudly while exchanging satisfied looks. They caressed her face and gave her comforting words. It was an obvious trap, but one you could get caught to none the less if you were not careful enough. The fifteen-year-old Sarah would have been seduced by these comforting faces, relieved to find compassion and kindness far from her enemies. However, Sarah was now an adult and educated. She allowed herself to be comforted and pretended to follow the girls when they invited her to choose a dress among dozens. All were more elegant and less practical than the others. As soon as they began to take these dresses out, Sarah seized her chance, grabbed her bag and rushed to the door.
She did not go far. Clawed hands, covered with scales, seized her and pulled her back. Sarah clung desperately to her bag and tried to pull away from their clutch, in vain. One of the girls, now obviously snake-like, grabbed her by the hair and pulled her head back. Another forced her mouth open and made her swallow something sticky and bitter. Sarah tried to spit out, but they only let go of her head when they were sure that Sarah had ingested what they had made her eat and that she would not vomit. Satisfied, they released her and Sarah fell to the floor, nauseous. Around her, the walls were shaking. The colours seemed to blend into each other. A hand grabbed her face, and one of the girls stared while tracing two deep cuts on her cheeks with her claws. Sarah could not distinguish her features. Everything was blurring.

"Common, even for a mortal," murmured a woman's voice with disappointment. "I was expecting something a little more exceptional. Your name?"

"Sarah," she said in a slurred voice, half-conscious that she should shut up.

"Who are you? What are you doing here?"

She did not answer. She had no idea. She was Sarah, but she knew nothing else about herself. Yet she should have known. She was there for a reason, but she couldn't remember it right now. All she knew was that she had something to do, urgent, that the hour was ticking and that she was not going to succeed if she did not even remember what she was doing. Panic overwhelmed her, cutting her breath. Sarah cried. A hand rested on her back and began to caress her. Someone hummed to soothe her and helped her up.
"It does not matter. You know what? You can leave here you want. You just have to find yourself."
She was pushed into a new room where the light was so intense that Sarah closed her eyes. There was a loud burst of laughter and the sound of a door being shut, then she was left alone. Gradually, her nausea faded, and the world stopped spinning. Looking around, Sarah realized that she was standing in the centre of a room with eight walls, all covered with dozens of human-sized mirrors. She saw herself reflected in all of them. At least, she assumed it was her because the reflections mirrored her gestures. Yet she did not recognize herself in any of them, and all were different from each other. Some of the Sarah were adults, some other children or old women. All returned her frightened look.

"Only one of them is me, is it?"

Nobody answered.

With hesitation, Sarah stepped toward a mirror. Her wrinkled face gave her an uncertain but reassuring smile. She did not feel old, but maybe she was. The burden she felt on her shoulders could be her age. No, this Sarah looked happy, and she did not feel like it. It was not her.

"Are you sure about that?"

She was. Almost. Just as she was almost sure she wasn't one of the child Sarah, the one with the happy smile in her pink lace dress, or the one who cried without being able to stop, nor the one with the pierced jeans and the insolent look.

"Are you this one then?"

A mirror began to shine more than the others. The mirror Sarah was fifteen years old and wore a beautiful white ball gown. She was stunning as Sarah had always dreamed of being, not like some other reflections. It was the Sarah she wanted to be, beautiful, attracting the light on her like a flame. Sarah came closer, hypnotized, admiring her proud expression, her perfect hair and the way the jewels cascaded in it. She was so close to the reflection that her breath was settling on the mirror. Then, she noticed that this Sarah's look was looking so empty that she might as well have been dead. Disgusted, she turned away and stared at the opposite wall. A laugh accompanied her movement.
"It's time to choose."

The threat was evident in the voice that popped up from all sides and seemed to bounce off the mirrors. Sarah took a deep breath and put her hand on a mirror where her reflection, dressed in a stern suit and her arms laden with books, gave her a satisfied smile. Instantly, the mirror disintegrated into dust, revealing a corridor in which Sarah rushed. She ran to a door, opened it, and found herself again in the mirror room.

"Bad choice."

These words, the voice repeated them over and over again while Sarah mistakenly recognized herself as a frightened girl, a middle-aged woman in a black dress, a dishevelled young woman with mad-eyed eyes and dozens of others. At each wrong choice, she ended up in the same room again and again, except that the mirrors, the choices multiplied, the room becoming immense and her image reflected everywhere, always distorted and never right.

Sarah finally froze in the centre of the room, desperately searching for a sign telling her who she was among the hundreds of reflections that weighed her with sarcastic indifference. She must have been there somewhere. She had to.

Then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a reflection different from the others. She turned again and again, but whatever she did, the strange reflection was still on the periphery of her vision, as if deliberately trying to prevent her from seeing it. Sarah forced herself to stop looking for it and, intentionally, stared at another reflection. Looking vaguely in that direction, she could glimpse the one that interested her. She had to struggle to look indifferent as she realized what was wrong with it.
She was not alone on this reflection.

There was a second shadow behind her, tall and dark, that seemed to envelop or hug her.

Sarah could not see its face and could not tell if the gesture was tender or threatening. It could be a trap. It was probably one. However, if they tried to make sure that she did not notice it, it might be something else. A clue. She took a deep breath, certain that she would not be given another chance. She ran, wringing her neck, so her looked stayed fixated on the first mirror. At the last second, she hit the one she had chosen, and her and Jareth's reflection exploded into millions of shards of glass.

No, she wanted to shout, it's not me, it's not part of me. Convinced that she had made a mistake, she continued running, pretty sure she would end up again in the mirrors' room. But the hallway continued, she remembered Jareth and Toby, the labyrinth, and herself and finally, she realized that she had won this test. Exhausted and disoriented, Sarah stopped running, dropped to the ground and fell asleep almost immediately.