A/N: HIYA FRIENDS IT'S BEEN A WHILE BOY HOWDY. The next chapter will not take almost a year, I promise. For a brief recap of the last few chapters, head on over to my tumblr (whenas-in-silks), where you can also find a deleted scene of Sarah and Ernie speculating about the Goblin King's reproductive capabilities. It's kinda sorta one of my favs and is 100% canon for this fic—I just couldn't find a way to work it into the chapter.
Thanks a bazillion to my wonderful beta, syntheticaesthetic, and also to S, for sitting still and respectfully silent while I read out scene revision after scene revision and talked out the sticky bits at him. You are a champ.
Chapter 10
All You've Got to Do
Now your smile is spreading thin.
Seems you're trying not to lose.
Since I'm not supposed to grin,
All you've got to do is win.
"Win," David Bowie
It's the dawn that wakes her. Sarah opens her eyes onto dazzling blindness. Disoriented, she turns to bury her face in the pillow, but the size and texture is wrong. Her sheets are missing and her back aches in unaccustomed places. This isn't her bed. What—?
She jerks upright as a sense of panicked urgency slams into her. There's something she needs to—she's made some kind of a mistake, a terrible mistake, and—danger and desperation and time, there's no time— She gasps, pressing her hands to her eyes to block out the light, raking through the tangled mass of memory and association.
Panic subsides as her jumbled thoughts resolve themselves, the overwhelming urgency fading into a more manageable insistence. Sarah presses a hand to her chest. She's got a hell of a lot to do and not that much time to do it in, but she probably still has time for a shower.
The jitters stay with her all through the morning. She gives up shaving her legs after she nicks herself for the fourth time. She can stick to pants for today.
She's still in the shower when Ernie calls, but she listens to the message over breakfast. Nina, he reports, is "totally in" and both of them are free after seven this evening if Sarah wants to meet up. Nina, he reports, hasn't heard of the Goblin King per se, but neither had she seemed particularly surprised that such a figure exists, nor that he has a long and checkered history with one of her boyfriend's closest friends.
"You know how she is," and even over the crackle of the phone Sarah can hear the smile in his voice, the mixture of pride and bemusement. "She just said something about there being no smoke without fire, and when I asked her what that meant, she said there were too many legends about soul-eaters and otherworldly baby-snatchers for them not to have some basis in reality."
Sarah listens to the message once through, then plays it again to be sure she hasn't missed anything. Ernie's words strike a discordant note, jarring against the hum of her anxiety. It's not the content of the message that perturbs her, exactly. Nina makes a decent argument, unconventional as it might be, and really, if anyone was going to accept the whole outlandish story on faith it would be Nina—Nina, who dabbles in palmistry and nineteenth century spiritualism and is hardly the poster child for rational skepticism. It's just…
Surely it can't be that easy. Ernie's casual delivery, Nina's ready acceptance—it all feels wrong somehow, out of place, like something out of the plot of a different story. It feels like cheating.
Which, Sarah tells herself firmly, is silly. The last thing she should be worrying about is potential allies trusting her too readily. Good god, is this how bad her life has gotten, that all it takes to throw her for a loop is for one measly thing to go right for once?
With an assumed briskness, she returns Ernie's call and confirms this evening's meeting. A glance at the kitchen clock informs her she has eleven minutes before she needs to leave for work. The sense of urgency, which seems to have settled between her shoulder blades, tingles discontentedly.
"Oh, shut up," she tells it, and heads to the bathroom to brush her teeth.
Eleven hours later, Sarah is sitting in the armchair in Ernie's living room, Ernie and Nina side by side on the couch across from her. Ernie has a notebook open on his knee and an uncapped pen in his hand. One of his feet is jiggling, as if his eagerness is too great to be contained within his body. Nina—and Sarah takes a moment to remind herself that she was an EMT for three years, she's dealt with far more stressful situations than this so get it together, Williams—is a little more sedate, regarding Sarah with patient expectation, as though she were a student waiting for the start of a lecture on a mildly interesting subject.
Sarah clears her throat.
"So," she says to Nina. "Ernie's filled you in on everything?"
Nina glances at him for confirmation. "I think so, yeah."
"Any, um, gaps I can fill for you? Questions you want me to answer?"
She tilts her head consideringly. "Nothing springs to mind."
"Only I realize it's kind of a lot to swallow," Sarah says, and bites her tongue. Why is she pushing this?
"Not really." Nina smiles disarmingly. "I mean, it comes down to a matter of trust, doesn't it? I trust your and Ernie's judgements and I trust you both not to lie to me, so…" She shrugs.
"Well." Sarah ignores the wrench in her stomach. (Alisse's face, raw and rigid with betrayal—) "Good to hear."
She sits up a little straighter in her chair, allows a note of authority to enter her voice. The urgency still stretched across her upper back and shoulders gives an approving throb.
"If Ernie's filled you in, you'll know that the ultimate goal here is to end the Tithe. That should let us fulfill the bargain without any further, um. Sacrifices."
Ernie is nodding.
"For now, I think our main focus should be intelligence gathering." The military term sounds good to her ears, weighty and competent. "I've—we've got a two-month grace period, and I think the best thing we can do is to take that time to find out as much as we can about the Tithe and the Labyrinth and—" and the Goblin King "—and all of that. I mean, if this has all been going on as long as… well, it must have left some traces, even if they're only in myths and stories. After all," she adds with a touch of wryness, as though she hadn't already half-scripted this on the drive over, "this whole thing started because I took a fairy tale too seriously."
"Or not seriously enough."
Sarah opens her mouth, and then shuts it, momentarily derailed by this interruption. She glances over at Nina. "Um."
"Sorry," Nina says, "just thinking out loud."
"Right." Sarah gives her head a little shake. "Anyway, Ernie, I was hoping you'd be able to take the lead here."
"Of course! Who better?" He smiles at her with cheerful egotism. "Actually, I was brainstorming some possible avenues for research. We should sit down together, identify key characteristics and narrative elements. I mean, just based on what you've told me so far—"
"That sounds great," Sarah says firmly. "Let's sort out the details later, okay?"
He nods, unoffended. "Sure thing."
"Awesome." Sarah shifts in her chair. "So that's the main thing. At least… it's the most easily achievable so I think it's where we should focus our fire for now. The other thing— well, to be honest I'm not quite sure how to go about it." She notices her fingers are pinching and pleating the fabric of her pants, and clasps her hands together. "There's probably a limit on how much we can find out up here, and I don't know how much opportunity for, um, unsupervised exploration I'm going to have when I'm down there, you know, officially."
Ernie is leaning forward, gaze rapt. "You want to find a way back into the Labyrinth."
Sarah nods. "A way there and back, yeah. Especially since—" She licks her lips. "I figure it's a good idea to have an escape route. Just in case."
He sucks in a breath.
A brief moment of silence. Then—
"Well," says Nina brightly. "I think this is where I come in."
Sarah blinks. "It is?"
"Of course!" And it's like an invisible spot-light flicking on, because suddenly the focus of the room has shifted. Nina flashes her a thousand-watt smile. "I mean, isn't that why you brought me in?"
"I, um. Well…" She glances helplessly at Ernie.
Because, of course, she hadn't. Because of course she hadn't. Not once in the seven-odd months of their acquaintance has Nina done anything to suggest her interest in the supernatural is anything more than a hobby. Nina tells fortunes at fairs and hangs around in New Age bookshops and goes on the occasional weekend ghost-hunt. She doesn't set herself up as a consultant for would-be heroes and help open doors to fairy-tale kingdoms!
…does she?
"Now, actual physical transportation," Nina is saying, "that's the tricky part." She taps her lower lip thoughtfully. Her fingernails are swirling galaxies scattered with pin-prick stars. "I was always under the impression these sorts of encounters tend to be 'don't call us, we'll call you' kinds of things. Unless you know the location of any portals—stone circles, magic wardrobes, things like that…?"
"Um," says Sarah, who is still stuck on 'these sorts of encounters,' casually flung in there as though people are popping between dimensions every day, "not really. At least, Jar— the Goblin King didn't use anything like that when we went to the Labyrinth."
Nina nods, absorbing this. "So it seems like connections between the realms are variable or manufactured, rather than fixed. Good to know."
She leans back, folding her arms. One finger comes to rest pensively on her chin. There's something contrived about the gesture, as if it had been practiced in a mirror for maximum effect, and Sarah feels a prick of irritation. She notes, with petty satisfaction, that the elaborate polish on Nina's nails is starting to chip.
"Well, like I said, the physical aspect is the hard bit. To be honest, opening bespoke interdimensional portals is a little above my pay grade—not that it can't be done, mind, and I'll definitely ask around, but you might be better off looking into that when you're on the other side. For the purposes of reconnaissance, though, there are a few possibilities that come to mind. I'll poke around, talk to a few people, see what I can rustle up, and get back to you when I've got something a little more concrete."
She dusts off her hands, smiles in a conclusory kind of way, and leans over to peck Ernie on the cheek. Then she's shouldering her bag and getting to her feet—
"Hang on a second," Sarah objects, starting to rise as well.
Nina pauses, looking at her quizzically, and Sarah realizes, half-way out of her chair, how confrontational the gesture must seem, so now she has a choice, doesn't she, between coming off as unnecessarily aggressive, and giving ground.
She hesitates a moment, then sits, trying to make it look as if she was just resettling herself in the chair. "I just thought maybe we should talk things over a little more."
"How so?"
Sarah opens her mouth. She has a whole shoal of questions she'd like to discuss, darting around her mind like brightly colored fish and just as difficult to catch hold of, and there's Nina standing there with her body angled towards the door and her head tilted inquiringly towards Sarah—
She settles for: "Well, for one, if you really think you can find a way back Underground, maybe that's what we should focus on. Ernie can tackle the general stuff for now, and I can help you with, you know, whatever."
Nina pulls a regretful face. "Honestly, I'll be much faster on my own. Anyway," she continues, before Sarah can think of a rebuttal, "wasn't Ernie saying he needed your help with the research?"
"Actually, yeah," Ernie says, a little apologetically. "You're the only one with firsthand experience of what we're looking for."
Sarah bites her lip, searching for a tactful way to put her uncertainty into words—
Only it seems Nina might have guessed anyway, because she laughs and hoists her bag higher on her shoulder. "Have a little faith, Sarah!" Then, in more mollifying tones, "Like I said, I'll keep you posted. You two hit the books and leave all the hocus-pocus to me—we'll have you back to Narnia in no time."
And before Sarah has even finished parsing this, Nina has blown them both kisses, mouthed an injunction to Ernie to "Call me!" and disappeared out the front door.
Sarah stares after her, trying to pinpoint where exactly she'd lost control of the conversation. She turns to Ernie, who gives her a half-smile and a helpless sort of shrug.
He waggles the notebook enticingly. "Shall we get started then?" He waggles the notebook enticingly.
Sarah glances at the clock. She'd been planning on going home, after, to sort out a few personal things—nested between her shoulders, the urgency begins to twitch and squirm—important things, she admonishes, like whether she can afford to cut her hours at work, and when to give notice, and how to break her lease, and what to tell her parents.
She imagines going home to an apartment silent except for the whine of the refrigerator and the skittering of mice in the woodwork, empty, empty, empty—
"Yeah," Sarah says, "let's go."
So that's how Sarah winds up playing research assistant to Ernie Ling. Which, as it turns out, sucks.
The initial interviews are bad enough. As it turns out, telling her story on (mostly) her own terms is one thing—sitting through a painstaking cross-examination is quite another. Like pulling teeth, the expression goes, and that's just what it feels like, agonizing and protracted, leaving her raw and bloodied and sore. Sarah could grow to hate the straightforward, almost clinical manner in which Ernie goes about extracting every detail of her experience as she sits there and watches her most jealously guarded secrets transform into data points. Still, she recognizes it for tact, this front of professionalism. It's worse by far when the mask slips and she sees the gleam of excitement in his eyes and feels resentment bubbling in her gut.
In that regard, the first night is the worst. By the second day, they've already gone over most of the actual narrative, so things are a little more relaxed.
He spends most of that afternoon quizzing her about minutiae, and as tedious as it is to try and remember the shape of the leaves on the trees in the central hedge-maze of the Labyrinth, at least it feels less like a vivisection.
What she fails to account for is the embarrassment factor. Take Ernie's insistence that she provide a detailed physical description of every being she encountered in the Labyrinth. She makes it through Didymus and the others without much more than a pang—an old wound, that, though she can still feel its ache. But when it comes to describing their monarch…
Sarah chances a look at Ernie, and inwardly winces at the expectant look on his face. Come on, she tells herself, it's not that bad. It's like a police statement. Just describe the culprit.
And it isn't that bad, at least to start. Blond hair and blue eyes, she tells him. Pale skin. Is that even applicable?—yeah, okay, kind of European-ish. Tallish. Thin.
"And just to be clear, he looks entirely human? No fox tail, no tentacles, nothing like that?"
Sarah allows herself a cautious smile. "Not that I noticed. He, um. His eyes are funny. Uneven somehow. Not in height—color, maybe? And he's got weird eyebrows. Like…" She sketches out their trajectory in the air over her own brow.
He nods absently. "And would you describe him as particularly good looking?"
She jumps. "Would I— what?"
"Objectively, I mean."
"Jesus. I don't know."
Ernie looks at her over the rim of his glasses. "It could be important."
Sarah ducks her head, rubbing her nose. She doesn't need to call an image of him to mind to know the answer, but somehow there he is anyway, all grace and slender power— "Yeah," she says, shortly. "Yeah, he's good looking," adding rebelliously, "If you're into that whole thing. Kind of a frou-frou dresser though."
At his prompting, she defines frou-frou—"Oh, you know. Frilly shirts and glitter, like that." Only then he asks her for any other 'distinctive characteristics' and her face must do something because he notices and Ernie just doesn't let things go he never has until finally—
His eyes widen. Then he presses his lips together and turns his face away, the absolute bastard. "You'd, uh… you'd consider that a distinctive characteristic, would you?"
"He wears really tight pants, okay?" She can feel her face burning. "It's kind of hard to miss!"
Ernie chokes on a poorly suppressed giggle, shoulders shaking. "How F-freudian."
"Oh, fuck off."
"N-no, it's, uh, useful information! I mean, a lot of fertility deities are traditionally depicted with—"
Sarah shoots to her feet so fast she almost overturns the coffee table. "I'm going for a smoke."
"What? Oh, no. Sarah, I didn't— Come on, don't be like that!"
And that's just the second day.
Two weeks later and Sarah is seriously wondering how much more of this she can take.
It's not that the research is going badly, exactly. At least, Ernie says it's not, and he's the one with the undergraduate thesis on contemporary American mythographies, so she figures he should know.
He warns her at the start of it all that any traces of the Tithe, the Labyrinth, or the Goblin King that have made their way into legend are likely to be distorted and corrupted, possibly beyond recognition. Well, okay, what he actually does is launch into a twenty-minute lecture on something that sounds more like a sneeze than a philosophy (Humerism? Hemerism?) but she's pretty sure that's what he'd meant. And she gets that, really she does, she's not stupid, and it's not like she'd been expecting a smoking gun—at least, not much—but they're a quarter of the way through their allotted time and what they've got at this point is several dozen "maybes," a handful of "probably nots," one "probably," and not a single "no" or "yes."
The one "probably" is the only reference to a "tithe" that doesn't have to do with medieval religious taxation (Ernie insists those could still be relevant and forces her through a journal article and two monographs before he can be persuaded to drop this line of inquiry). They find it in an obscure Scottish ballad about a woman seduced by an otherworldly knight (Sarah carefully avoids Ernie's eyes, only later realizing that this might have been an even greater give-away). The knight tells his lover that every seven years the "Queen o' Fairies" pays "a tiend to hell," and that he himself is to be the sacrifice. The appointed hour for the sacrifice?
"Ernie," Sarah says, "It's Halloween."
She doesn't have to say anything else. He's just as capable of counting as she is. Six months from her bargain with the Goblin King…
"It's not exact," he says.
"It's close enough."
He looks at her a moment, then nods.
Her lip trembles. "Jesus," she says. "'Tiend to hell'? Seriously? Jesus."
He reaches out and grabs her arm. "Look," he says. "It doesn't necessarily mean— I mean, it probably is what it seems like, but that doesn't mean the explanation is the right one, you know? Cultures have very specific worldviews. Europeans used to explain pretty much anything they didn't understand with witchcraft or the devil, even stuff we now know to have a perfectly rational scientific explanation. And there are plenty of disparities. We can't know anything for sure, one way or the other. Not until we have some corroboration."
It's the one time she's actually glad to hear that argument. Still, she notices a few days later that the latest stack of books from the library include titles like Discernment, Possession, and Exorcism in Medieval Europe and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. She doesn't ask, and he doesn't comment, but the knot at the base of her spine goes just that little bit tighter.
For the rest of it, though, it feels like they're compiling an endless list of questions with not an answer in sight.
"We're just gathering information for now," he says, again and again. "Compiling data. We can worry about answers later—get enough information together and we'll start to see the shape of things."
"It's not a goddamn Magic Eye!"
"Actually," he says, thoughtfully, "that's not a bad metaphor."
Sarah doesn't throw her book at his head, which she counts as a significant personal victory.
The real problem, when she comes down to it, is that she's just not very good at this. Oh, she did all right in school but she'd always had something specific to look for—names and dates and numbers and facts. This kind of…scholarly intuition, which leaps from subject to subject, tying together a Victorian poem, a German folktale, and a discredited Italian saint, is beyond her. Ernie starts by trying to make her an equal partner in the endeavor—goes to what Sarah's fairly sure is considerable trouble to get her admitted to his university library.
"Biggest academic collection on the Eastern seaboard," he informs her, a bit smugly. "Go crazy."
Her fall from grace begins fifteen minutes later, when he discovers her lurking haplessly by the card catalogue.
"You do know all that's been digitized, don't you?" he asks, scandalized, and hauls her off to the mythology section.
By the end of the day, he's given up on sending her to research independently and started her assigning articles; by the end of the week, he's changed his instructions from "look for anything familiar," to "take thorough notes on Chapter 7, pp 110-173." Even these notes seem to be of dubious quality, since every now and then she catches him thumbing surreptiously through the index of a book she's already read.
She could've borne it—the tedium, the indignity of being reduced to a glorified scribe on her own damn adventure—if only she thought she was being useful. As it is, the urgency on her back grows by the day. She pictures it as some kind of great cat prowling across her deltoids, restless and weighty and toothed.
Nina remains frustratingly elusive, her status updates as brief and unspecific as they are infrequent. She's chasing down this or that lead, which occasionally seems to require some legwork—Ernie reports that she's been to meet one contact in Brooklyn and another in Providence—but mostly seems to involve waiting for phone calls from unlikely-sounding places, like Pittsburgh, or Ottawa, or Beirut.
"She must be racking up a fortune in phone bills," Sarah remarks to Ernie, who just shrugs.
Nina has also taken to communicating exclusively through Ernie. Sarah tries not to be too annoyed by this. It makes a certain sense, given that people in a relationship are bound to spend a lot of time together, but still. She tells herself it's a group dynamics thing, the inevitable complications of working on a team, that what's really bugging her is not Nina herself but the loss of control she represents, and all of that's true, only…
It's not that she doesn't trust Nina, exactly. She—well, she likes Nina, most of the time, and believes her to be generally well-intentioned, and she trusts Ernie, who trusts Nina, which is basically the same thing. It's just that the Sarah only has Nina's word for it that she'll be able to deliver her promised "hocus pocus", and frankly, this utter lack of transparency isn't doing much for Sarah's peace of mind or for her temper. It's not like she's ever seen Nina do any magic, unless you count getting drunk at a party and reading Sarah's palm in an embarrassingly loud and melodramatic voice, which, to be clear, Sarah doesn't. And maybe it's narrow-minded of her—because here she is, defeater of the Labyrinth and favorite stalkee of the sinister and twinkly Goblin King and talk about your glass houses—but she can't help but think of Alisse back in her hospital room, rolling her eyes in almost comical disdain. "I was expecting her to break out the healing crystals at any moment." She can imagine with perfect clarity what Alisse would say if she found out how much was riding upon Nina's magical expertise.
Then she stops imagining it, because imagining anything to do with Alisse hurts too much.
Alisse has been home for a little over a week and half, but she might as well still be in the hospital for all Sarah sees of her. Part of that is down to their differing job schedules, and Sarah's, um, extracurricular activities don't help, but even on the rare occasions they're both awake and in the apartment, they never seem to be in the same room for more than a few seconds. Sarah knows it's deliberate. She just can't figure out what to do about it.
She'd found a second carton of milk open in the fridge about a week back, and a second loaf of bread in the cupboard. They'd always shared food staples before, milk and bread and eggs and coffee. It's without a doubt the stupidest thing Sarah has ever almost cried over.
All in all, it's a bit of a shock when she comes home one evening to find Alisse waiting for her in the kitchen.
Sarah's scrambled brains leap into action, struggling to string together a proper greeting—Hi, how are you, what's happening, what's new, I hate this, I miss you, I'm sorry, hello—
It's been a long day, though, and Alisse beats her to the punch.
"There's a message for you." She jerks her head towards the answering machine.
"Oh. Um. Thanks." A moment of silence as Sarah tries to pick this apart. Is it just an fyi, or is the message important? Does Alisse expect her to listen to it now, or should she wait until she leaves, or …
"It's from the police."
Oh.
Oh.
Sarah looks up, but Alisse's face, normally so expressive, is unreadable as she continues.
"Claudine's officially been reported missing. They want you to come in for an interview."
Sarah swallows. It's not like she hasn't been expecting that, though she thought she'd have a little more time before— Too late she remembers the normal, human response to that statement.
"Alisse, I'm so sor—"
Alisse shakes her head, a sharp negation, and Sarah stops. She's just wondering what to say next when Alisse speaks again.
"They had me in yesterday."
"Oh?"
"'Routine questioning.' I mean, what's the fucking point? I haven't spoken to the woman in years, and I've spent the past few weeks in a fucking coma, which is pretty unshakeable as far as alibis go, but it's all, 'Do you have any idea where she might have gone?' and 'Did your mother have any enemies?' Like, you mean apart from the entire 20th century?"
It's the most like herself Alisse has sounded since their argument, but there's something strangely probing in her manner, as if she's feeling around for a particular response.
"Alisse… That stuff I said in the hospital room, with Ernie—"
It's the wrong thing to say. Alisse's face transforms. "Did I tell the police about your loony little fairy tale fantasy, you mean? No, and I wouldn't either, if I was you. Cops aren't too big on people fucking them around."
There's such palpable disgust on her face, in her voice, that Sarah almost quails, but she pushes on: "No, I mean, that whole thing… It was stupid. It was me being stupid."
It's the truest thing she dares to say.
"You think?" There's anger in Alisse's voice now, and Sarah latches on to it, because anger is better, anything is better than this insurmountable distance. But a moment later, Alisse seems to deflate. "Why, though? That's the thing I don't understand. What were you trying to do?"
"I was being stupid," Sarah says again, almost pleading, but it's no good: Alisse has never been the type to accept half-assed martyrdom in the place of explanations.
"That's not an answer."
"I was—" Sarah closes her mouth, opens it again, searching for anything she can say, any lie she can tell to fix this, fix this.
Alisse watches her struggle for a moment or two, then jerks her face aside, pushes past her towards the kitchen door.
"I can't. I can't deal with this. I've got too much—"
"Alisse…"
Alisse stops short in the doorway. "I can't," she says, simply. "It's too much."
Then she's gone.
The police interview sucks exactly as much as Sarah had expected. She walks out of the station feeling ground down and unclean. She can feel her guilt like a layer of dirt lying just beneath her skin, and even though she'd known they couldn't have anything on her, there'd been something in the officer's expression that made Sarah wonder if the officer could somehow smell the culpability on her. What would guilt even smell like? Something damp, probably, and moldering. Surreptitiously, she sniffs her hair. Nothing but the vague floral scent of her conditioner. Still, maybe she should go home and shower anyway—take a little while to unwind.
But somehow, when it comes time to take the turning for home, she keeps driving. There's a squirming sort of restlessness upon her, buzzing from her head down to the tips of her fingers. On her back, the urgency is on the move, stalking and creeping.
She pulls up outside Ernie's building and parks the car. He answers on the second ring of the doorbell.
"Oh, hey! Wasn't expecting you so soon." There's something odd about his voice.
"What?" she says, walking past him into the apartment. "Expecting them to stuff me in a cell and throw away the key?"
"I mean, no, obviously…"
"What's going on?" Nina emerges through the bedroom doorway. Sarah glances from her to Ernie's flushed cheeks and rumpled hair, and decides she doesn't care. "Who's getting stuffed in a cell?"
"No one," Ernie says, shutting the door. "Sarah got called in for questioning."
Nina's eyebrows shoot up. "About…?" Then, as he nods, "How'd it go?"
The three of them are standing in narrow the hallway outside Ernie's bedroom, clumped together—like a blood clot, Sarah thinks.
"I gave a full confession and the nice men in white coats will be here to take me away any minute. How do you think it went?"
For some reason, no one seems inclined to offer their opinion.
Sarah sighs. "It was fine. I told the truth, right up until I didn't." She focuses her attention on Nina. "Haven't seen you in a while." She leans against the wall, a casual gesture which has the convenient effect of blocking off access to the door. "Been keeping busy?"
Ernie shifts uncomfortably.
Nina smiles, a smile full of secrets and self-satisfaction. "Oh yes," she says. "In fact, I come bearing glad tidings."
In the moment it takes her to process this, Ernie turns to his girlfriend. "You never said anything to me!"
"Didn't want to spoil the reveal."
"You mean…?" Sarah can barely bring herself to verbalize the possibility. It suddenly seems too incredible for words.
Nina nods.
"Really?"
Her voice comes out high and breathless, almost like a child's, but she can't bring herself to care.
Nina tsks and shakes her head in reproof. "Oh, ye of little faith."
And Sarah—
Sarah—
It's like the first trickle of water down a parched throat, the sweet and sudden shock of life. She's dimly aware of Ernie herding her into the living room as Nina explains that Sarah won't be traveling physically, at least not yet—"It's not so much transportation as trans-dimensional astral projection"—as if that mattered, as if anything mattered except for the fact that she's finally in motion. Nina says a lot of other things too, about "etheric travel" and "psychotopic harmonies," but Sarah only lends her half an ear. All her doubts, all her cares and anxieties seem to shrink away before this moment of blazing possibility. It swells behind her ribs, a bright bubble of warmth and promise.
Then Nina explains exactly what the ritual requires, and the bubble pops.
"No."
"Sarah…"
"No way. We're not doing it in Alisse's apartment."
"It's your apartment too."
"No."
"I realize it's not ideal," Nina says, glancing at Ernie, "but it has to be somewhere your spirit recognizes as home."
"'Somewhere my—' The lease is up in July! The only thing my spirit 'recognizes' is that it was the only affordable place on the market last summer that wasn't crawling with roaches!"
"Sarah." Nina's tone closely echoes Irene's 'disappointed voice' and Sarah wants to grab her by the shirt and shake the condescension right out of her.
"Maybe there's somewhere else that qualifies?" Ernie suggests. "What about your old house back in Robbinsville?"
"A childhood home would probably work," Nina agrees, cautiously. "It's a bit of a schlep, but it's doable."
They both turn to Sarah, who gives a short laugh.
"Fine," she says, scrubbing a hand through her hair. "Great. Anyone up for some light B&E?" At their uncomprehending looks, she explains, "Dad and Irene moved two months ago. I haven't seen the new place yet."
Ernie looks uncertainly at Nina, who shakes her head.
"It wouldn't work. The psychic resonances will have dissipated by now."
"Oh, of course," says Sarah. "The psychic resonances."
She walks to the window, which is as far from the pair of them as she can get without actually leaving the room.
From behind her, she hears Ernie ask, low-voiced, "There's really nowhere else we can do it?"
"Not if we want it to work."
"In that case…"
"In that case, nothing," Sarah interjects. "We do it some other way."
"Sarah," Nina says again.
Sarah whirls around, jabbing a finger at her. "We've only got your word any of this will work in the first place!"
Nina stiffens, then slowly arches a brow. Her voice is all poison and honey. "Well, if that's not enough for you, feel free to go with one of your numerous back-up plans."
Sarah bites her tongue on a "fuck you" and turns back to the windows. A light rain has begun to fall, misting the glass of the windowpane. She wants to reach out, press her hand against the glass, cool and solid before her, but Sshe holds herself still, fingers curling and uncurling at her sides. She feels all sharp edges, a jagged mess of peaks and points; any movement risks a wound.
After a few moments, she hears someone approaching her, feet light on the carpeted floor.
"Hey," Ernie says cautiously.
"I can't do it," she says, voice low. "I can't." Not in Alisse's home. It would be another betrayal.
"I understand where you're coming from."
If you understood, you wouldn't be asking me to do this.
"But we can be smart about this. Do it when she's at work, clean everything up before she got back. She wouldn't have to know."
Sarah smiles, without mirth. "What she doesn't know can't hurt her?"
"You know," he says, a hint of his old teasing back in his voice, "just because you say it all sarcastic doesn't mean it isn't true."
He's right, part of her thinks. Who would it hurt?
Me.
Yes. But you're expendable.
More footsteps behind her. She turns to see Nina with her jacket slung over her arm.
"It's your call, of course," she says. Sarah wonders why it doesn't sound like a concession. And then: "You have to decide what's more important."
The words hit her like a pile-driver. God. God.
"Think about it," Nina says, not unkindly, and leaves the room.
Sarah drives home in a daze. The wheels of her car find little traction on the damp asphalt, and as she almost skids into the car in front of her when she pulls up short at a stoplight. A chorus of klaxons tells her what her fellow motorists think of her driving skills. She waits patiently for the light to turn, then puts her foot on the gas.
The city looks different in the rain, dreamlike, only half real. Sarah feels half real herself. When had this become her life, this endless series of impossible choices?
Except, of course, that they aren't impossible. She already knows what she's going to tell Nina.
She just wants to pretend, for a little while, that she doesn't.
She runs into Alisse as she enters the apartment, quite literally, upsetting the basket of laundry Alisse is carrying.
"It's fine," Alisse insists as Sarah helps gather her scattered clothes. "No, seriously—"
When everything is back in place, they stand for a moment looking at each other. Sarah feels a sharp pang of something like hunger, only sadder. Longing, maybe.
"Well," she says, "I'll just let you—"
"Actually," Alisse says, talking over her, "I'm glad I ran into you."
And here it is, proof positive that the heart is an idiot, and there's no emotion stupider than hope. Sarah's dumb, stupid heart is suddenly pounding with it, insistent against the bars of her ribcage.
"I thought about leaving a note but it seemed kind of…" Alisse shrugs, a spasmodic twitch of the shoulders. "Anyway, I'm going to be staying with a friend for a bit. Her roommate's out of town and I thought, well…"
"Oh." All the air has been sucked out of the room. Alisse's words echo impossibly through the vacuum. "Um, yeah, right. Okay. Great."
"I'll still be paying rent and shit," Alisse hastens to assure her. "I just… won't be around. For a little while."
Sarah wants to ask how long a little while is, but she knows better than that. "And if I need to contact you?"
"Oh, uh…"
"For, you know, apartment things."
"Right. Well, you can always call me at work but… I guess I can leave you her number."
"That'd be… yeah, thanks."
They stand there for a moment, skittish and awkward as two foals.
Alisse makes a move towards the hallway and her bedroom. "Anyway, I'd better—"
Sarah takes an involuntary step forward. "Alisse, I—"
Alisse shakes her head, looking suddenly very, very tired. "Don't do this, Sarah. Not now."
Sarah drops her gaze, biting back the words massing on her lips. She nods once—in understanding, in acquiescence—then turns and heads into the kitchen so Alisse won't have to pass her on the way out. Some time later, she hears the front door close.
She's thinking about what Nina had said. The place your spirit recognizes as its home. She breathes out a laugh, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands.
Then she gets up and goes to the phone.
She dials the number and waits. After four rings, there's a click.
"Hello? Nina Shapiro speaking."
"Hey, it's Sarah. Looks like I've actually got the place to myself for a little while, so we can do this, you know, pretty much whenever."
"How long is 'a little while'?"
Sarah wraps the telephone cord round and around her middle finger until the finger is fat with it, other digits splayed uncomfortably to make room. "Um. A week, maybe? Maybe more, I'm not quite sure."
And she's praying that Nina's not going to ask her anything more, because she's the last person in the world Sarah wants to talk to about this.
A brief silence on the other end. Then: "I can be ready by Sunday."
Two days later, Sarah opens the front door to find Nina, lashes crusted in mascara, hair glowing like a coal in the sunlight. She is, inexplicably, wearing what looks like a kaftan over cut-off shorts and leggings. The leggings are black. They have skulls on them.
Sarah feels a throb of guilt at the sight of her—her very presence, bringing with it all that unrestrained Nina-ness, seems like treachery in itself. But Nina is already greeting her and leaning forward to press a kiss to each of Sarah's cheeks. She pulls back.
"Ready?"
"Born ready."
Nina laughs and sails past her into the stairwell.
"Top floor," Sarah tells her. "Door's open."
She steps back to make way for Ernie, who is staggering slightly under the weight of a cardboard packing box.
"Let me take that."
"Nah, it's good. Just need a minute," he says, propping himself against the wall.
Peering into the box, Sarah sees an enormous bronze censer, a few boxes of tealights (one still bears a sticker listing its price as $1.99 On Clearance), assorted sandwich bags and Tupperware containers, and a large packet of…
"Cashews?"
Nina's voice comes floating down the stairwell. "Rituals always make me snacky. Do you mind if I use your phone?"
"It's in the kitchen," Sarah calls back. She turns to Ernie, mouthing, snacky?
He shrugs, resettling the box in his arms. "You just kind of go with it."
Between the two of them, they wrangle the box up the two flights of stairs to the apartment and deposit it in the living room. Nina's voice can be heard from the kitchen, although Sarah can't make out any actual words.
"Should we…try and start setting up?" she asks Ernie with an uncertain glance towards the box.
"Start by clearing a space?"
They push the sofa and coffee table back against the walls.
"Rug too," Nina says from the doorway, making Sarah jump a little. She shakes a packet of something out into one hand, and turns to Sarah. "Nuts?"
"Um," Sarah says, and receives a fistful of cashews for her pains.
"Nice place," Nina remarks. "Cosy."
"Thanks." Sarah stares uncertainly down at the nuts in her hand.
"I didn't know you were a fan of P. J. Harvey."
She looks over to see Nina examining a poster of a strikingly pale woman in a red dress The woman is floating face-up in some indeterminate body of water. Her hair spreads out beneath her like ink, and her eyes are closed, as in pleasure, or death. Sarah has always found the image unsettling.
"That's not mine," she says, shortly, and kneels to help Ernie with the rug, stuffing the cashews into her back pocket and wiping her hand surreptiously on her thigh. It's not like she's wearing her nice jeans anyway.
"Williams isn't too big on decorating," Ernie remarks. "You should've seen her dorm room: it was like a monk's cell. I've been in hotel rooms with more personality."
"Yeah, well. I've got better things to spend my money on."
Nina merely frowns at the poster as though it has let her down in some way. "I suppose no one can be wrong all the time." She turns back to them, brisk and businesslike. "Shall we get started?"
At Nina's instruction, Sarah strips down to her tank top, tying her shirt around her waist, and sits cross-legged in the middle of the floor, while Nina sets about applying ointment to her face, chest, arms and shoulders with a pastry brush. The ointment—or 'unguent,' as Nina calls it—is thick, greasy, and pungent, and Sarah anticipates with an inward sigh the blocked pores to come. Her skin is generally pretty clear, but even it won't be able to resist such extraordinary provocation.
"What's in it?" Ernie asks, peering into the Tupperware container, a mixture of fascination and revulsion on his face. Nina must have been keeping it refrigerated, because the stuff has congealed to near-impenetrability.
"Goose fat," Nina answers absently, and Sarah wrinkles her nose in agreement. "Rosemary. Lavender. Yarrow. Damn." This as her hand slips, depositing a greasy lump on Sarah's blue-jeaned thigh. "Hellebore. Other things. It should be machine washable," she adds to Sarah.
"It's cool." If by some miracle this actually works, it'll be worth spoiling a pair of old jeans.
Ernie opens his mouth, presumably to ask about the "other things", but Sarah stops him with a minute shake of her head. On balance, she's pretty sure she doesn't want to know.
"So," she says, after a brief period of silence. "Do you do stuff like this often?"
"What, send people on black ops missions to fairytale kingdoms? That's a new one on me, I admit."
Ernie snorts.
"I meant more, uh, broadly. The magic… stuff."
"I'm not a complete novice, no," Nina says, sounding amused. "Worried?"
"No," Sarah says. "It's just, I never— I mean, I knew you were into all this stuff, but I didn't realize you, uh…"
"I'm aware," Nina says, dryly. She lays down the brush and sits back a little, looking Sarah in the eye. "I know this is all a little weird to you, but I need you to relax. Stop trying to psych yourself out. You've come too far for that."
"I'm not…" Sarah trails off. She hadn't thought she was psyching herself out, but since Nina mentioned it… There's a buzzing anticipation that seems to have settled under her skin. Could that be nerves?
"You're in zero danger here. Your soul is tied to your body and your body is bound to your home. That's why we had to do the ritual in your apartment. If anything goes wrong, the ritual just won't work. Nothing to worry about."
"I wasn't," Sarah lies. "Go ahead," she adds as Nina brandishes the brush in an interrogatory fashion, splattering Sarah and the carpet with droplets of grease. Nina resumes her application.
"Now remember," she says, "once you feel the spell start to take effect, all you need to do is relax and let it happen. Your spirit knows the way, even if your brain has forgotten it."
Sarah nods, as if this makes perfectly good sense.
"Once cast, the spell should last until the last candle burns out, so you'll have four or five hours to explore. If for any reason you need to leave before then, just concentrate on your body. You'll be able to feel some kind of connection, even in spirit form, and if you need to you can follow that back. Got it?"
"Got it."
It's not really a lie, Sarah tells herself. This is at least the fourth time Nina's been through all of this—Sarah's probably understood as much of it as she can without experiencing it firsthand. Anyway, she's always been good at thinking on her feet.
"—and there we go!"
Sarah blinks, only vaguely aware that Nina has been talking all this time. It takes a moment to process her last words. "Oh. You mean—?"
"Consider yourself duly anointed. Pass me that roll of paper towels? No, not you, Sarah, honestly, I just spent all that time putting the stuff on you."
Having wiped any stray unguent from her hands, Nina proceeds to chalk a circle on the carpet, about four feet in diameter with Sarah at its center.
"You're sure that'll come off?" Sarah asks, shifting position slightly. The last thing she wants is for Alisse to come home to the remnants of a magic circle on their living room carpet. Then she remembers Alisse won't be coming home any time soon.
"In about five seconds with a wet cloth," Nina is saying, inscribing a square within the circle. "Now relax."
At each corner of the square, she places a candle. "One for each of the four corners of the globe," adding with a grin as Sarah and Ernie exchange looks, "You don't change a winning formula."
In spite of her not-quite-nerves, Sarah breathes out a laugh. The feeling has expanded, the buzzing beneath her skin joined by a flutter in her stomach, a giddy lightness in her chest.
I'm going back, she thinks, experimentally, and is unprepared for the rush of excitement, the way it sets her extremities tingling with possibility.
I'm going back, she thinks again, more confidently, and for the first time, she finds she actually believes it.
Suddenly uncomfortable, she pushes back against the feeling—she needs to stay focused, stay skeptical, needs to go into this with a clear head. It's no good. The thought bubbles up once more like water from a mountain spring.
I'm going back.
The urgency on her back digs in its claws, lashes its tail, and purrs.
Ernie is wrestling with the censer—the thing really is incredibly unwieldy—finally managing to deposit it in front of Sarah in the half-moon formed between circle and square.
"Make sure it's completely inside the lines," Nina instructs. She's kneeling on the edge of the room with half a dozen herb-filled sandwich bags open in front of her, snatching pinches from each apparently at random and tossing them into an open Tupperware container. "And be careful not to smudge the chalk!" She returns to work, muttering under her breath as she does so. Sarah's not sure whether it's some kind of incantation, or just a recipe.
"You couldn't have brought something smaller?" Ernie complains, rotating the censer with some difficulty.
"It's an antique," Nina informs him haughtily.
"Yeah, well, after hauling it up two flights of stairs I'm starting to feel like an antique myself."
"What you are," she says, coming up behind him, "is in my way. Shoo." She reinforces the command with a nudge of her foot.
As he moves obligingly aside, she tips the mix of herbs into the censer, lights it, and steps back. Sarah catches a whiff of the incense—a thick, complex odor, spicy and sweet, with a strong piney undercurrent. She takes a deeper breath, trying to pick apart the different components.
"That's right," Nina says, bestowing upon her an approving smile. "Deep breaths. You're doing a fantastic job."
Do I get a gold star? Sarah thinks, but without real irritation. For something so complicated, the incense is oddly soothing.
"Hang on, shouldn't we disable the smoke detector first?" Ernie asks.
"Oh no," says Nina blithely, kneeling to light each of the four candles in turn. "The smoke's only for Sarah."
Ernie blinks, owlish in his glasses. Sarah blinks too. Her eyelids feel curiously heavy, furling and unfurling like roman blinds.
"Um," he says, "that's not how smoke works."
"That's how this smoke works," Nina says definitely.
Sarah opens her mouth to tell them that the smoke detector in the living room has already been disabled, but there's something wrong with her lips. Her tongue lolls strange and unwieldy in her mouth.
"Nina," she manages, the sound coming out slurred and just barely recognizable. Eee-uh.
Nina's eyes rake over her. Then she rocks back on her heels, looking pleased. "Oh good, it's working! How are you feeling? Still relaxed? Don't try to speak, just nod or shake your head."
With some effort, Sarah nods.
"Excellent."
Ernie glances from one to the other. It's hard to make out the details of his expression, but there's a note of worry in his voice. "What's going on? What's wrong with her?"
"It's just the smoke. I'm told it can have an anesthetizing effect, at least at first."
"But there isn't any—"
"I told you, it's just for Sarah. Now hush."
Nina begins to chant. The words are unfamiliar, with a lilting cadence and an undulating rhythm.
Sarah takes a deep breath, lets it out, takes another. Things are going fuzzy, her world fading at the margins. With each breath, it contracts further. She lets her eyes fall shut. Somewhere far away and growing farther by the minute, she can still hear Nina's voice, its rolling, alien musicality.
Inhale.
Exhale.
She is shrinking in upon herself, past walls of skin and muscle and bone. The bars of her ribcage expand and contract, drawing her inward like air to the lungs. How had she never realized how loud her body is, the way her bones creak with every tiny movement, the wet thunder of her pulse?
Inward she goes and further inward, the clamor of her body crescendoing into indistinction. Senses begin to blur, sound and scent swelling in her like a tide. It eddies around her, bearing her upwards on its crest.
Even after the tide retreats, the feeling of buoyancy remains. Inside her skull she is lighter than air, a helium balloon gently nudging a roof of bone.
She doesn't notice the precise moment she leaves her body, only gradually becomes aware that she is floating somewhere above it, caught in the pull of some strange gravity. Nina had said—and oddly, the thoughts come more clearly now, cool and bright as crystal—Nina had said there would be some sort of connection, a line leading back to her body. She concentrates. Yes, there's something, long and ropy, like a psychic umbilical cord. As she focuses on it, something brushes across her mind: not so much scent as the memory of it. She reaches out for more connections and finds a flutter of voices, a ripple of warmth, a quaver of light—the barest echoes of physicality. Holding each connection in her mind she tugs, feeling a distant jolt of response.
For one, brief and disjointed moment, sense returns—sight, scent, sound, taste, and touch. Then she is drifting once more into emptiness.
She feels again for the connections, but it's as if she's attached to her body with putty and chewing gum. Already the ties are thinner and weaker than before, spooling out thin and threadlike at the merest touch of thought. Even as she withdraws, she can feel the stretch.
Warmth is stealing over her. She sinks into it, the lines to her body pulling finer and finer as she drifts towards some great void—a nothing-plane of the mind.
Abruptly, the movement stops. Sarah can feel herself floating in some indescribable ether, tethered to her body like a balloon. She reaches out for the connections, but the ties are beginning to lose their ductility. She brushes against one and her mind is filled with voices, brought to her as if on a telephone wire.
"—fuck is going on?"
"Can we just—"
"Sarah? Sarah?"
"Don't let her—"
"—go of me!"
"Listen to me, please, it's—oof—"
"Ernie!"
"—wrong with her? What have you—"
"I'm okay, I'm—"
"Sarah? Can you hear me? Sarah? Sarah!"
With every moment that passes, more of the warmth retreats, the lines to her body growing rigid and brittle. She feels the first stirrings of panic. One of the strands throbs in tandem with the quickening beat of her faraway heart. She needs to act, and act quickly. With an enormous effort of concentration she reaches out, wrapping her thoughts around the threads, and yanks—
Something snaps, jarringly, like a guitar spring breaking, and for the barest instant she feels in a feeling beyond sensation the sting of the recoil, before the world and everything in it falls shuddering into darkness.
A/N: Nothing sketchier than someone telling you something is completely 100% safe. Like, people are killed in freak dishwashing accidents. And if you're in a story you gotta be EXTRA careful, cuz, ya know, situational irony innit. In the immortal words of The Lonely Island: "Don't be dumb,/ Don't trust anyone,/ 'Cause you only live once." YOLO, my dudes. YOLO.
The theory Ernie mentions is called "euhemerism," named after the Greek philosopher Euhemerus, who proposed that the gods were once mortal kings whose stories had been inflated and corrupted in some sort of mytho-historical game of telephone (I paraphrase). Isn't it cool that there's a name for it though?
In other news I AM SO FREAKING ExcIte to leave these pesky OCs behind for a while! The next chapter has maybe my favorite scene that I've written so far—it might not be yours but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .
Thanks so much to everyone who reviewed (lizlizard12, tooralooryeaye, glasshibou, PixiedustWishes, Saphira113, kittyspike08536, Sazzle76, Mistress DragonFlame, Whack-the-beetle, SarahlouiseDodge, FelineNinjaGrace, quaintlullabies and guest) or dropped me a line over the past however-many-months—I know I haven't been so great about replying but they all meant a ton. As always, I'd love to know if you're about/still reading, or to hear from new readers. Also, any questions you have as the plot continues to thicken/twine about itself like the lovechild of the worm ouroboros and a paticularly tangly ball of yarn, send them my way—I will answer them where I can without spoilers, and continue to sow chaos and confusion where I cannot, what fun!
Songs:
"Win," by David Bowie.
"Under Pressure," by Queen feat. David Bowie.
"Season of the Witch," by Donovan.