Ch 3
The sun was lazily sauntering upwards. Patches of it shone dimly through the branches in the copse of trees, glittering like old metal. Sarah was standing beneath the shade of a tree that, inexplicably, had a full-length mirror nailed to its trunk. They were in a hilly glen with a river coursing by not far away. In the distance, they could see the forest where Sarah had encountered the Fireys, and beyond that, the castle and the Goblin city.
Sarah didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Ten minutes ago, she had been on a feverish, clandestine search through the kitchen drawers for something sharp. Karen had pointedly hidden all the toxic chemicals, knives, glasses, and porcelain; anything that could be ingested or shattered to produce a jagged edge. The most humiliating moment of the week, strangely, had not been her forced return to her childhood home for supervision;
nor was it Karen's apologetic "open bedroom door" policy, or having to explain the nature of her abrupt disappearance over the phone to her boss. It was, instead, her family's new mealtime practice of using Styrofoam plates and plastic utensils, as the dangerous china and stainless steel had been hidden away ever since her father and stepmother had driven her home from the hospital. Her serendipitous discovery of a sole forgotten paring knife wedged in the back of a drawer had been a scorchingly bright nimbus of triumph in her miserable day… until three impossible ghosts of her childhood had dropped in out of nowhere to pull her into an achingly real hallucination.
She pinched herself. It hurt. She slid her feet out of her slippers and dug her toes into the soft, springy grass. She ran her hands through her hair and laughed nervously, still reeling from what had just happened.
"What is this place?" she asked. "I never saw it while I was here."
"Come, let us walk and I shall tell you," said Didymus. They began striding purposefully down the hill. "This is the Glen of Avarice. Mind your step- don't pick anything up."
"Pick what up?" She looked down and saw that the grass had markings on it. She stooped down for a closer look and was astonished to discover that each individual blade of grass was a tightly rolled up American dollar bill. They felt as soft as fresh grass under her feet, but there was no mistaking the little sliver of George Washington's face on each blade.
She stood up and looked at the trees. The trunks seemed to be constructed out of millions of Japanese yen that were held together by a thick layer of rust. The leaves were composed of lira, Euros, rupees, and many other currency bills Sarah could not identify. Enormous precious stones hung like fruit from the trees, swaying gently in the wind. Blunt chunks of diamonds that could possibly fetch enough to feed an entire village in India jutted from the ground, and strings of black pearls entwined like ivy around tree trunks.
Sarah found that her initial delight at the opulence was short-lived; she was overcome by the inherent wrongness of the scene. It felt unnatural, like a heinous parody of nature. An electric shiver of unease whispered over her skin.
"Sarah!" called Hoggle from the distance. Startled out of her reverie, she jogged over to her friends. "Keep up," said Hoggle, hurrying through the thicket. Sarah found his total lack of interest in the money surprising, given his penchant for hoarding precious treasures. Hoggle stumbled over a gold nugget the size of a football and quickly righted himself. "Come on, this place ain't safe."
"Why are we in this place?" Sarah bit out. Her left foot was starting to hurt strangely.
"We must leave the Glen of Avarice and find thy tree," said Sir Didymus, hopping over an upraised tree root made out of pennies. Ludo walked into a tangle of vines made of stringed pearls and moaned in agitation, eventually tearing them apart in a cacophony of flying white spheres.
"What is this about a tree?" Sarah's burning foot was not helping matters. "Can someone please explain what the hell is going on?"
"It's like this," said Hoggle. "Everytime someone goes through the Labyrinth, they leave something behind. An impression of their dreams. That's what the Labyrinth's made of. Everyplace you see- the hedge mazes, the Forest, the False Alarms- they were all created from the little bits of dreams. Some leave a bigger impression than others, o' course. It took more than 5,000 dreams to create the Bog of Eternal Stench, but only one to make the oubliette you fell into."
"So does that mean that you guys are made of dreams?"
Hoggle scoffed, clearly affronted. "No, o' course not! We just live here. The dreams are building blocks; they give us a home. It's the spirit of the Labyrinth that builds itself."
Sarah chewed on this for a minute. "So did I leave something behind?"
"Surely you recall the pit of the enchanted peach you ate?" replied Didymus. Sarah didn't miss Hoggle's wince at the mention of his betrayal, and she reach out and squeezed his shoulder comfortingly. She tried to ignore the increased burning in her foot. "That pit grew into an enormous tree," Didymus continued, "the likes of which no one has ever seen. I daresay it has grown even taller than the highest tower of the castle."
Sarah couldn't help but smile at that image.
"Its roots pushed away the junkyard and its aura enchanted the soil, creating a haven of arable land. It wasn't long before it was venerated. Families of goblins built their homes under its shade and partook of its endless bounty of fruit. The soil around it for half a mile was the richest in the land, and the best for growing crops. It was said that a ring of magic surrounded it, granting good fortune and excellent health. It wasn't long before the land beneath that tree became one of the most beautiful spots in the Labyrinth."
"But I thought everything in the Labyrinth was an obstacle? I mean, the oubliettes, the bog… they were all there to stop me from getting to the castle."
Hoggle brushed some flecks of silver off his shoulder. "Not everything was an obstacle. The helping hands, the bridge in the bog; they were all useful. Well, not very much, but you get the idea."
"It is not fully understood exactly how a dream impression will manifest itself," said Didymus, still hopping nimbly. "But some say that that the nature of the runner reflects what they will leave behind. And remember; a majority of those who transverse the Labyrinth are… shall we say, not the kindest of souls; thus, the appearance of dangerous or simply annoying constructs."
Sarah heard the unspoken thoughts in his pause and mentally filled them in. Selfish wastes of space. It stung a bit, as she remembered that she too ran the Labyrinth as a result of her own selfishness and immaturity.
"The Glen of Avarice is constructed from the greed of those who favor wealth over the children they wish away. It is assembled largely from the dreams of relatively small minded people, so thousands of individual dreams built this place. However, the more potent the dream, the more grand the construct. And being that you are the first person to ever solve the Labyrinth, I can say with no hesitation that the only person who has ever contributed more to the Labyrinth than you is King Jareth himself."
Sarah nearly tripped. "What?!"
"Indeed, my lady. The castle itself is built out of the Goblin King's dreams."
They paused their conversation, having reached the brook running through the glen. Instead of water, a foamy, gold-colored liquid swirled and eddied by, carrying tiny gems in the current. Searching briefly for a means to get across, Didymus soon discovered an old log that had fallen across the pond, composed entirely of Canadian toonies. After testing its stability under Ludo's massive bulk, they gingerly made their way across the coin log, the coins crunching under their feet. This reminded Sarah uncomfortably of their trek across the stepping stones Ludo had summoned from the depths of the Bog of Eternal Stench, and for one horrid moment, she wondered if the yellow tide consisted of bodily wastes. But that couldn't be right; it was bubbly and the heady aroma smelled of weddings and festive evenings. It's a river of champagne, she marveled, stepping onto terra firma once more to continue hurrying on at her previous pace.
Then, she recalled their conversation from earlier and shivered at the mention of the Goblin King. As hard as it had been to push away her fervent memories and beliefs in the Underground, she'd never been able to stop believing in Jareth at all. He sat like an indelible mark on her brain, resistant to the transitory nature of memory. It was like he didn't care that he needed to be forgotten and outgrown; he arrogantly clung like a ubiquitous blot to her daily waking thoughts… not to mention her dreams. When Sarah was younger, Jareth was an amalgamation of regal haughtiness, villainous perfidy and ruthlessness. As she grew older, she was alarmed that some more slippery characteristics began to enter the mix- such as the aura of deeply sexual menace and predatory wherewithal that she'd been too young to fully understand.
She said, "Wait, you guys said that Jareth is missing. What's happened to him?"
Hoggle hesitated, then spoke haltingly. "That's what all of this is about. Two weeks ago, something changed. Your peach tree… it died. The peaches all withered up, the leaves fell off, and the dirt went dry as a bone around its roots. The crops died in the village beneath it. People started getting sick and wolves started coming into the boundaries at night to carry of their livestock. Everything went wrong around it.
"Jareth got real agitated. He used to come to visit that tree every night anyway, so he…"
Hoggle paused, realizing he'd said too much.
"Go on," said Sarah, ignoring her intrigue at that little revelation. As well as the singeing feeling of her foot.
"He… he noticed the changes right away, and he started flying off as an owl all the time. Wouldn't tell no one where he was going o' course, but he'd stay away longer and longer. He ain't come back in four days now. I ain't gonna miss the rat, but we needs a king and someone to protect us from the Kindly Ones."
The name was spoke in a hushed tone, the way one might speak of any wild-eyed, slavering horror that waited under beds or inside closets.
"What are the Kindly Ones?"
They had been crashing through the glittering brambles and vines, stomping through puddles of champagne, and picking bits of topaz and garnet out of their fur and hair.
Abruptly, they emerged from the thicket into startlingly bright sunlight. The money grass ended neatly at a high stone wall that stretched as far as the eye could see. There was an entrance with a stone archway not too far from them, and they made their way towards it.
"We're almost out of the Glen. Now remember, make sure you ain't got nothing in yer pockets, nothing in yer hair or clothes. You don't want to take a single thing with you out of the Glen of Avarice; it's real bad luck." Hoggle began brushing down his arms, and legs, and clothes, and the rest of them followed suit, flicking the occasional glittering speck off of their skin or hair. When they were content that they were clean, they passed through the archway into a stone maze not unlike the one in which Sarah had first met Hoggle.
"Hoggle, what are the Kindly Ones?" Sarah repeated. It was hard to ignore her foot, which was burning like crazy now. She was resolute, however not to be a whiny little brat like before.
"The Kindly Ones… well, let's just say they ain't what you'd call kindly at all. They look like really long shadows, but are shaped kind of like monkeys with really long arms. They're attracted to the sound of heartbeats, and will do whatever it takes to listen more closely to the sound of your pulse… even if it means ripping you apart to get rid of the flesh that's in the way between them and your heart."
Appalled, Sarah noticed her own heartbeat quickening at the horrific description. Hoggle shuddered, as though recalling a gruesome memory. "They don't even seem to realize that there'll be no more heartbeat to listen if they do that; they just move on to find another one and the whole thing starts again. Persistant buggers too; they'll hunt you for days without giving up once they target you."
"To think, our once noble Labyrinth is now home to such abominations! Why, in my day, we would never-"
"I'm sorry, but I need to stop for a minute." Sarah couldn't stand the burning in her foot any more. She slipped her foot out of bedroom slipper and leaned against the cool stone wall, grabbing her ankle to raise the bottom of her foot to the light. A dark red blister had formed on the dry, cracked skin. She gingerly touched it and then hissed with pain.
"Sarah hurt?" rumbled Ludo, concerned.
"I don't understand how this happened," she said. She picked up her fuzzy slipper and checked the underside. A single rolled up dollar bill was stuck to the underside, surrounded by a dark ring of scorched plastic.
"Oh god, it's money from the Glen!" cried Hoggle. "We have to take it back, right now! Oh Sarah, this is bad, we have to go back, we have to—"
A low growl rumbled behind them; a nightmarish sound like the metallic groan of sunken ships settling into the ocean bed, teeth rending coils of throbbing viscera, and crazed bloodlust lit only by the moon.
Very slowly, Sarah and her friends turned around.
I promise, there'll be some J/S interaction soon. This is, after all, about them.
The Kindly Ones are a euphemism for the Furies of Roman mythology, or the Greek Erinyes. Other than this, I don't plan on introducing a lot of plot elements that I'll need to do a lot of research for. I'm writing this for fun and I don't want to start treating this story like I would a school project.
Reviews would be most kind.