12. The Clock and The Orb

There were stairs above him, their steps facing him as he stood on another stair. A viscous lump of whatever that slimy creature had been made of slid off his cheek and splattered on the stairs above him. David watched it with growing concern. If the stairs were above him, and the disgusting goop sliding off his skin was falling down towards them, then that would mean he was—David's heart attempted to escape through his mouth at this thought—upside down.

Within the space of a yelp and a lunge for the nearest wall, David found himself slipping off his stair and landing, on his feet, on another one. And he was still right side up, and there were still stairs above him and at every direction and angle he could look at. He found himself stepping back, thoroughly disoriented, only to find he had somehow walked right into a stair that had been across from him, to the left, and tilted.

"How am I doing this?" he said, voice rising in panic even as he continued walking. "How am I doing this? Stop, David, for God's sake. How are you doing this?!"

He looked down at a set of stairs that met at a door. He dearly wanted to just jump off from his current stair, land on the spot where the ones below met, and go through that door, but he could not figure out how. He tried simply jumping, only to find himself on some random marble stair he had not even been able to see from his previous spot. The door was now several feet away, and above him. Upside down.

"Damn this place, damn this place, damn this place."

He would not run. He felt he knew enough about The Labyrinth's screwy sense of direction to understand that it wanted you to run precisely because it would lead you nowhere. But jumping was not producing any positive effects, and neither was simply walking—other than causing David to gasp out pointless Briticisms in panic. He got through three stairs muttering, "Oh jolly good" and "Hullo hullo!" and "Tally ho, then!" before he wanted to slap himself.

Finally, he simply sat down. It was nothing but stairs below and above and to each side of him, with the elusive door somewhere in the vanishing distance. David dropped his head into his hands, eyes shut tight. Then, palms still pressed against his eyes, he stood up and walked off the side of the stair, not up or down it.

Gravity gathered at his navel, seeming to suck away all the contents of his body, and he could only dare to hope that he had done something right.

He landed with an electric jolt up his left elbow and a renewed gasp of pain from his ankle. He lay still for a while, waiting for the swirling mass of white pops and flashes to clear from behind his eyelids and for his centre of gravity to cease pretending as if it were on a heaving carnival ride.

"No more nasty landings," he murmured against cool stone. He tasted blood. His breath smelled foul. "Please. No more. It hurts. I hurt. My God, I hurt…"

He opened his eyes to darkness broken by a faint blue glow. It reminded David of lying on the living room floor when he was just a kid, a seat cushion propped up beneath him, the room dyed a flat, winter blue as Benny Hill cracked jokes on the tellie. It was a comforting thought, and he could almost feel the coffee table just behind his feet, could swear Mum was just around the corner, coming to tell him off for sneaking out of bed again.

David turned his head towards the glow and pushed his memories firmly away. For all he knew, he had been sent to die in this place, and he hoped to meet death with his mind firmly upon it. He did not, after all, believe in the supernatural. His parents would not sense his goodbyes. He believed only in what he could see and touch and hear and smell, as he could goblins and The Labyrinth.

With a grunt, he pushed himself off the ground and into a half-kneeling position. He pushed back his hair, looping it behind his ears and combing his fingers through it. Next, he straightened out his leather jacket and the cuffs of his shirt. He made sure it was properly tucked into his trousers before he heaved himself to his feet. He knocked dirt and insect carcasses and traces of goop off his boots.

Then, he walked towards the centre of The Labyrinth.

He cocked his head and waited for his brain to react, but all it wanted to do was catalogue his physical reactions, so that he was merely thinking about thinking that his brain should react. No sense in forcing it, then. He folded his arms over his chest and simply looked at the source of the blue light.

It was an orb, wedged into an upper crevice of an old, wooden clock. The clock's minute and seconds hands moved across its face in silence, the minute hand shuddering in a way that suggested that the clock's gears were in need of greasing. The hour hand was nearly two minutes away from the thirteenth hour.

"It's a pity George will never be able to see this," David said. He could not even bring himself to smile at his words.

He reached out to lift the orb away from the clock. It was slippery and floppy, almost as if David were holding an egg yolk. He found himself turning it this way and that within his palm so that it would not break apart and drip down his fingers. He peeled back his fingers and looked down at an eyeball.

"Oh no. Oh no no, no."

And yet he did not drop it. He heard his own voice, and he knew that something—someone within him—was afraid. But he felt this as if it were happening to the other David Jones, the sleepwalker who had fallen into a maze. That David stood holding an eyeball and he was terrified. But the David actually standing at the centre of The Labyrinth, gazing down at the eyeball resting on his hand, was calm. He merely observed as he rolled the eyeball toward his fingertips, so that he pinched it between thumb and index finger and brought it up level with his face.

Its iris was blue. David looked at it for a while, then, with care and patience, he brought it slowly toward his damaged left eye. He shut his right eye and found himself peering out into a world tinged in silver blue, like looking out through coloured glass. His body tensed, and then the geography and physical reality of his mind fell away.

He saw his hands, tinged green and criss-crossed with blood, grasping a spear. He saw a gold-tinged waste that spread out in chaotic emptiness. He saw his hand as he bent down to pick up a stone, felt the stone breathe and sigh beneath his touch. Images formed and fell and crumbled and blurred and crawled by and leapt forward with a sideways yank. A moon pale woman with long black hair, stepping from and receding into and part of the darkness of a—the faces of his soldiers, muddied and crusted with blood and disfigured as they waited for—a door made of birch wood—the bottom of a well choked with leaves whose skin had faded to transparent networks of veins and—stars that were not stars, but creatures much older than himself and they said—a moment of pure vacuum, and himself hanging in it, looking around—his fingers as they closed around a white brick and carried it toward the crest of a hill. He saw his hand lay the brick upon the ground, felt the importance of the ceremony, the heat of the crowd behind him as he set down the cornerstone of The Labyrinth. He saw it all. He saw everything.

David dropped the eyeball.

And then he began to scream.

Once upon a time there lived a king named Jareth. He had led his people in battle many months ago, and now they lived upon an empty wasteland, squatters in army tents and makeshift huts. All around him he could hear the howls and shrieks of their enemies, prowling the borders of lands that had, after all, no clear boundaries. Only Jareth's magic held them at bay, and it cost him much. Jareth was weakening, and would soon be unable to protect his people.

And so Jareth gathered a small amount of power from the dreams of a human child who feared the creatures that lived in the woods behind his family's hut, and he picked up a stone. He ran his fingers across it in a caress, as a father caresses the cheek of his infant daughter so that she may wake. The stone stirred to life within his palm, and he whispered to it of foundations and walls and homes and a place to call their own. The stone replied in the voice of the earth beneath Jareth's feet. "Yes, I will do this thing." And Jareth smiled. He gathered his people and promised them safety and peace and growth and, with only his belief and the trust and yearning of his people as ceremony, he lay down the first stone of their new home.

To protect their home, he built high walls, and then broke the walls into zigzagging patterns, each one more dense and convoluted than the last. He murmured to the stones and the earth and the trees, and they spread out in ever-tightening mazes and pitfalls and traps. He assigned guards and sentries, staff and servants, so that his labyrinth could be well protected, as it in turn protected his people.

Jareth drank in the pulse of the labyrinth as it stirred fully awake. He still spoke to it, requested expansions and buffered its corners with strong magic. Soon, the labyrinth had developed a will of its own, and it continued Jareth's work without the need of his having to ask. Protect the city, protect the castle, and protect the king. That was its purpose, and it needed nothing more.

And Jareth's people were safe, and they had peace and they were happy. The years passed, and Jareth passed with them.

His successors inherited a world that barely needed them. They ruled and they passed laws and settled disputes and appointed maintenance crews to the farthest regions of The Labyrinth. Ten Kings Jareth watched as goblins began to keep almost exclusively to the city within gates they themselves erected, crude, large things protected by sentinels from a bygone era. They watched, not with disinterest, but without much concern, as myriads of creatures settled into and developed within The Labyrinth. They were tested every now and then, prodded for their loyalty, then left alone once it became clear that as long as they were left in peace, they could care less what the goblins and their king did or did not do.

And this suited the first ten Kings Jareth just fine.

But the eleventh King Jareth realized the folly of The Labyrinth. His people were safe within their city, growing ever more foolish and witless as the years dragged on. They lived in a stagnant world, protected—cut off—from everything outside. Nothing could reach King Jareth, and nothing wanted to.

King Jareth was lonely.

So, one cloudless night, he pushed open the birch door that led to the bowels of the castle. He descended into an empty room, and he summoned a portal. It drained him to do so. Humans barely believed in goblins anymore. His people had become a joke, plastic dolls and silly mascots for synthetically flavoured cereals, Hallowe'en masks without any real sense of the power of the rituals they had subverted into ridiculous holidays. But he found the dreams of a bearded man bent over an illustrator's table, sketching out fairies and gnomes and, finally, a king for the goblins, a tall and regal figure dressed in night, and Jareth held the strands of that dream between his fingertips, and the portal widened into life.

The human world waited beyond. A world with no boundaries, and no protection.

As a safeguard to his decision—a selfish and flawed one, he knew, with little remorse—he reached up and plucked out his left eye. This he left behind. Then he spread his arms and they were the wings of a common, white barn owl. And he left The Labyrinth.

But he had no desire to remain a common barn owl. It was interesting at first, but soon became mindless and tiresome. He circled above the country whose dreams had chiefly shaped The Labyrinth, and—with a perverse sense of random chance—he swooped down upon the first corner of the land his eyes landed upon. It was a place called Kent, a suburb of the sprawling city of London, full of everyday, perfectly ordinary English people. Nothing exciting about them at all, just as there was nothing exciting about Margaret Weddell or her new husband, Haywood Jones. Perfectly ordinary people living in perfectly ordinary Kent, with the war the humans called The Great War—as if no war had been worthy of them before—raining down in a series of minor, day-to-day inconveniences around their suburban home.

Jareth waited for the war to end—too much noise—and then he stripped his form down to nothing but the thought of a thought, and he burrowed deep within the mind of Margaret's newborn son.

And then he lay still, content to observe, and he waited for the moment when this perfectly ordinary human world would begin to bore him.

It bored him within thirty years.

Jareth decided it was time to go home. He had been away for far too long.