Eulogy

by J.R. Godwin

Disclaimer: "Labyrinth" belongs to Jim Henson & Co. There's no money being made off of this.

Rating: M

MORPHEUS: Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?

-The Matrix

How beautiful is your love, my sister, my bride!
How much better is your love than wine,
and the fragrance of your oils than any spice!

-Song of Solomon 4:4

6.

Cassie smells like pumpkin spice and lavender. I should know, because right now she's got her tongue in my mouth. She's been baking. I can taste the sugar on her.

When I lick the sugar off, she laughs, and then she takes my lower lip between her teeth, sucks me gently, and every part of me contracts. Harry once told me black holes come from stars caving in on themselves. Making love to Cassie feels remarkably like that. For a second, I think I'm going to die, that all of me will vibrate so hard that my body flies to pieces. Is it possible to die from joy? If so, I can think of worse ways to go.

And my beautiful bride, oh God, she fiercely whispers in my ear, "You liked that!" Accusatory and playful at the same time.

I just made an embarrassing sound. Right now I don't care. I've got Cassie pressed into the mattress and her ankles are hooked around the small of my back and we can ride to glory together.

I won't deny anything she says, so I just laugh and gasp, and our heartbeats meet at the base of my spine. Think of something else, anything, but I can't. How can I? You're here, now, warm, this is all I want, all I'll ever want. I'd follow you anywhere. I'd follow you to hell.

If I never had another day with you, if all I had was this, it would be alright. It would be fine fine fine fine God Jesus fuck. My heart seizes in my chest. Flatline. Our hips, erratic but perfect together. She's shivering fit to die and then she's gone, fallen over a cliff and pulling me after her. For a moment, we're bigger than this room. We're everywhere and nowhere.

Then the world contracts and we're human again, a shaking mass of limbs gasping into each other's skin.

Liquid fire in my belly. I could sleep forever ... or maybe I did? Suddenly, I'm waking up and Cassie is combing her nails through my hair. The sweat against the curve of her neck smells incredibly good, better than perfume. I weave a leg between her thighs and lock us together.

"Mm, time's it?" My eyes search the dim light of the bedroom to where the alarm clock should be. Then I vaguely remember we knocked it over when I started fucking her into the mattress.

Cassie laughs under her breath. "Does it matter?"

"Guess not."

She turns my face to her, runs a thumb over my swollen mouth. "Just so you know, that was the best sex I ever had."

I'm smiling like an idiot. The last time I was this happy, Cassie accepted my marriage proposal. "That compliment will totally go to my head. You know that, right?"

Cassie kisses my ear; we've gone back to snuggling into the crook of each other's neck. "You deserve it."

The sun wakes us next.

We've shifted in our sleep. Now I'm curled around Cassie's back, a protective hand cupping her breast, the other cradling her belly. My arm hurts. It's fallen asleep under Cassie's body, and I'm afraid of waking her until I realize she's already up.

She sniffs against the pillow. I tuck us in from the sheets tangled at the foot of the bed.

"Make you breakfast?" I ask.

"No, thank you, baby."

"My throat hurts."

"You were yelling a lot."

I can tell I'm leering. "Sure was."

For a split second, Cassie looks unbearably sad. She's got a terrible poker face. "I mean, you were yelling in your sleep again."

Oh. "Afghanistan or Sarah?"

"Sounded like both."

Oh. Well.

Cassie's facing me again, so I pull her into me, and we curl into the warmth of each other's bodies. "I have to present my thesis today."

"Mm."

"I'm scared."

"You'll do great."

"I have to present to the panel. There's five of them. What if they don't like my thesis?"

"They'll like your thesis. You've been working on it for two years and interviewed a billion people for it. They'll love your thesis."

Cassie pulls me away from the crook of her neck and forces me to look her in the eye. "But what if they don't?"

I cradle the side of her head. She has a small skull, much smaller than mine. Cassie likes to joke that I'm descended from Germans, or Vikings, or possibly Frost Giants. I have these big meaty paws that could crush her head, given the inclination. "The panel will love your thesis. And they'll love you. That's a promise."

"Even if I start stuttering?"

"You're not gonna stutter."

"I did the other week when we went to dinner with Aunt Lisa and Uncle Moïse."

"Yeah, but they were always critical of you and Elsie. That'd make anyone nervous."

"But I'll be n-nervous in front of the panel. Oh God, there it g-goes." A sob catches in her throat.

"Hey, none of that." I mean to kiss Cassie on the corner of her mouth, but suddenly I kiss her like I'm trying to crawl inside of her. The sob in her throat catches, turns into a moan. When we pause for breath, I'm alarmed to see her cheeks are wet. "Uh, I guess I still gotta work on my kissing, huh?"

Cassie laughs through her tears. "Oh God, no. I'm just happy."

I don't understand women at all.

This time I wake up for real.

The James Baldwin novels still sit next to Cassie's side of the bed. The room smells sterile, the remnants of Elsie vacuuming the apartment. The bedsheets are crisp and clean. I'm wearing the pajamas Cassie got me at Christmas. The bed around me yawns into infinity, cold and empty and vast, a dark forest on the outer rim of the known world, and nothing on Earth or under it will make anything okay ever ever ever again.

The Goblin King finds me standing on the corner outside the apartment. Smug fucker is dressed to the nines again, with a long fancy coat and a scarf and tousled blond hair. He looks like a walking GQ ad.

He doesn't say anything, just stands next to me like a stranger debating whether to bum a cigarette off me, and all faith I have in a sane and sensical world dies. Last night wasn't a dream. Jennie is gone, Cassie is gone, Sarah is back, Goblin Kings are real, I need to go to bed.

We stand and watch the traffic pass on Park Ave for a minute, and then he says out of the corner of his mouth, "Searching for a handle on the moment?"

Dazed, I shake my head. I have nothing to say. I'm staring at the boogeyman. I don't care what he said last night, about living nightmares that eat the eyes out of children's heads. Maybe the Goblin King doesn't cannibalize people, but he's still a boogeyman, isn't he? He's the cause of this problem plaguing my city. He started all this.

His Majesty sighs. "Suicide is the worst possible thing you could do. You know that, don't you?"

I'm out of cigarettes, and my fingers are numb. "How would you know?"

He ignores my rudeness. "You think you can wait another fifteen years, see that Lucia grows up alright, and then end your pain. Maybe walk into traffic one day, or eat a bullet. Or maybe, just maybe, a heart attack will strike in the middle of the night, and instead of calling 911, you can roll over in that big empty bed of yours and let yourself go to sleep."

I hate him. I hate him. If there's nothing else I do before I die, I will end this man ... this man who isn't really a man.

The Goblin King, it turns out, has a very big mouth. It's almost too big for his face, with very thin lips and very sharp teeth. He could be the personification of the Big Bad Wolf. When he smiles, I'm reminded of a story Cassie once told me, an old Norse myth about Judgment Day, when it was said a giant wolf will swallow the moon and the sun, and our world will end in smoke and fire.

He looks at me curiously, and I'm surprised to see no malice there. I could be a specimen in a lab. "Such anger in you, Detective. You and Sarah are so alike, in that respect. When you're angry, you burn like a forest fire."

Before I can retort, a black Toyota cuts off a taxi and nearly causes an accident as it screeches up to the curb. The window rolls down. It's Harry. "C'mon you guys, haul ass. The press is gonna be waiting."

I stare - first at my partner, then the Goblin King. "What ...?"

His Majesty smiles and pops the passenger side door for me. "After you, Detective."

The drive to the precinct is gonna drive me crazy. I can't face forward in my seat and leave my back unguarded, so I keep my eyes glued to the rearview mirror and watch the Goblin King laugh silently under his breath in the back seat.

"Something troubling you?" he asks sweetly. "Poor sleep will do that to a person."

"What the fuck is he doing here?" I hiss at Harry.

Harry looks at me like I've got antlers sprouting from my nose. "He's here to help us with the case?"

"What?"

"Toby, you're the one who brought Chief Inspector Rex onboard as an outside consultant. The captain was all for it. Thinks he might be able to shed light on what's been going on."

"Dreadful thing, serial murder," His Majesty pipes up from the back. "It's especially terrible when it happens to children."

"Anything like this case?" Harry asks.

The Goblin King's mismatched eyes meet mine in the mirror. "No. Not like this. It's very worrisome to me."

"What would you care?" I demand. In the driver's seat, Harry makes a sound of embarrassed protest.

The strange, otherworldly man has the indecency to look hurt. "I care every time a child suffers, Detective. Children are my sole concern in this world."

Concern, my ass. I stare the Goblin King down in the rearview mirror, and he stares right back, but there's a wariness to him that I haven't seen before. Good. Keep him on his toes. Asshole. Our eyes stay locked on each other the rest of the way uptown.

A detective named Torres meets us at the door of HQ. Her mouth is grim. "You guys aren't gonna like this."

"What?" I ask. "What's going on?"

We find the rest of the precinct gathered around the TV, where a talking head from Channel 7 jabbers away with the horrified enthusiasm you find at traffic accidents. The newswoman stands, perfectly dressed and coiffed, alongside the river. It looks like where we found Jennie. Stomach sinking, I push my way through the crowd and turn up the volume.

The voice blasts across the room. "-was looking forward to her eighth birthday next month. Instead, her journey ended here, when last night police pulled the body of little Jennie Ortega from the East River." They show Jennie's picture next, and interview her grieving mother, and a few parents who've clearly been caught by reporters on the way out of Jennie's school.

"It's scary," says a dad holding a squirming little boy. "It's, uh, real scary. My wife and I are thinking about moving out of the city. We've lived here our whole lives, but this? There's no word for this. I can't raise a family here no more."

The camera cuts to a woman who won't stop fidgeting. Despite her dark sunglasses, it's clear she's wound tighter than a guitar string about to snap. "Everybody at my house is sleeping in the living room. We don't let the kids go to the bathroom alone. Why aren't the cops doing something? Shouldn't they have this guy by now?"

I glare at the Goblin King, who stands and watches this without a shred of emotion. "You know, we should. But your boogeyman likes to make things difficult for people, doesn't he?"

His Majesty's eyes narrow without turning away from the screen. "It's in a boogeyman's nature to destroy, Detective."

"This is your fault. Don't think I haven't forgotten that. All of this." The dead children. Sarah. He must be able to hear it in my voice.

The Goblin King snorts. I didn't think such an uncouth sound was possible coming from him. "Me? I don't inflict anything on the world, Detective. I merely observe and respond to it."

All conversation stops as the captain hustles into the room looking like an accident victim.

"Sir?" someone asks.

He barely spares the group of us a glance. "I'll handle the press. Williams, Rosenfeld, Torres, I need you downtown. Take Chief Inspector Rex with you. There's been another one."

The bottom drops out of my soul. "Where?"

My mind races across a mental map of Harlem, running a tally of all the neighborhoods where you'll find the most vulnerable. Did a kid get snatched from El Barrio? Maybe the Boogeyman's branched out, hunting down children in Sugar Hill or Astor Row, Brooklyn Beach or Death Valley. Who was it this time?

"48th Street, near Rockefeller Center."

The fuck? Midtown?

Rockefeller Center is across the street from Saint Patrick's, where I go to see Father Bill. During the holidays, the Center's fancy boutiques set up fanciful window displays you don't see outside of a theater production. They make an ice rink out of the restaurant's courtyard on the ground floor. Tourists come to skate there, and Channel 7 comes to film them. For a century now, it's been where they set up the big Christmas tree.

Hollywood has probably shot more movies at the Center than anywhere else in Manhattan. Despite only being separated by blocks, the area is a world removed from the shlockiness of Times Square, with its garish lights and the carnival atmosphere of Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum.

No, Rockefeller Center means comfort. Money. People of privilege.

Julio's parting words echo in my head like the clap of a gun ... or a warning.

Look, nobody gives a shit when little black and brown kids go missing. We're animals, right? Who cares when we're killing each other? But now a white dude's moved uptown and hunting our kids. And sooner or later, he's gonna start touching your kids. And then you'll give a shit.

"Toby?" The concern in Harry's voice breaks my reverie. He and Torres are seriously spooked by the news that the Boogeyman's spreading out. I'm surprised to see the Goblin King look perfectly neutral.

I shake my head. "We're gonna have a panic on our hands. We need backup."