Chapter Text
Sarah woke up with a groaned gasp and half-elicited scream that got caught in her parched throat before she jolted herself into a sitting position. Her face was dripping with sweat, and her breath was ragged and intermittent.
Her mouth hung open while she tried desperately to fill her lungs with enough air to regain her bearings, and her eyes darted wildly across the sheets of her bed in the darkness.
Where was she?
She swivelled her head and reached for the lamp on her nightstand, hastily flicking it on.
The light, bathing her room into a soft yellow glow, had her relax quickly, and she took one deep inhale, followed by an even deeper exhale of great relief.
“Just another dream”, she mumbled and wiped the sweat-stained strands of hairs out of her damp and flustered face. “I need some water.”
As if on autopilot, she instinctively reached for her fully filled glass on the nightstand.
She kept it there for a reason.
Gulping down several large sips while wiping a few escaping drops off her chin, she returned it to the nightstand and let herself fall back onto her mattress and pillow with a loudly expelled groan.
“God, when will it stop. I can’t take this much longer.”
For the past thirteen years, she had been tormented by the same dream, night after night after night.
She was in the ballroom and tried to find someone; no, not someone; she tried to find him.
She was only allowed fleeting glances of his presence before he escaped her field of vision again, no matter how hard she hurried after him. He always disappeared amongst the mass of masqueraded and laughing dancers.
The search through the dense crowd of swaying bodies, arms reaching for her, and grotesquely masked men stepping into her way, trying to get her to dance with them, had her exhausted and frustrated.
The dream always ended in the same manner: the shattering sound of crystals followed by a horrible scream, and the unbearable sensation of extreme loss and sadness that had her cry out in agony.
It was his scream she heard night after night after night for the past thirteen years.
It nearly had driven her into madness, and she had consumed her entire adolescence and young adulthood going from therapist to therapist, trying out different medications that never helped.
Regardless of what she took or what calming meditation and yoga exercises she tried, the dreams remained a constant in her life and consumed all of her waking hours.
It made it hard to have a workable relationship with any man, and she soon had given up on ever finding her one true love with whom she could settle down and start a family.
Her night terrors and resulting isolation from friends and society in general, as they did not comprehend her mental anguish, had her turn into a recluse.
She left for college, moved away from her estranged family, travelled nearly half the globe in a futile pursuit of salvation, and finally settled in a small, mid-western American town, where no one knew her, to try and get her life in order.
And now, here she was at twenty-eight, a nightly mess of tears, sweat, and slobber, pining over the one she could not find, ever.
A dream that made her chase but never capture.
A yearning that increased with each night but was never stilled nor rewarded.
She flung back her sheets and stumbled into her bathroom, giving herself an intense stare in the mirror.
The dark rings under her eyes and sunken in cheeks were a testament to the consistent nocturnal torment she endured.
She exhaled a sigh at seeing her pitiful countenance and opened the medicine cabinet to reach for one of those latest anxiety pills she had been prescribed by her doctor a few weeks ago.
They were her bête noire, and yet she was incapable of discarding them.
She dutifully swallowed one with a cupped handful of water straight from the faucet and splashed her face to cool her hot clammy skin and rid it of the sweat that still clung to her eyebrows and nose.
“You are the bane of all my suffering. Why are you doing this to me?” she asked the mirror with accusatively squinted eyes focused sternly onto the rigid glassy surface, halfway expecting it to ripple and show her what was so clear in her dreams.
The mirror, however, remained a stark reflection of her questioning eyes and dripping wet face that had her appear as if she had been crying.
She dabbed the water remnants from her visage with her hand towel and exhaled another deep sigh.
She would not find her answer in this mirror nor any other mirror.
Wiping her hair back with both hands, she turned away from the framed reflective surface and slumped back into her bedroom. A quick cursory glance at her nightstand clock told her it was just after midnight.
An unusual time for her to have those dreams.
They always occurred at precisely three in the morning. Why was she up so early?
She briefly furled her brows, but then shrugged her shoulders and climbed back into her bed, although she did not feel tired.
Her mind was racing, as was always the case, and all she could do was for the pill to do its trick and lull her back to sleep.
Laying on her back and staring once more into the dark void of her room, she waited with desirous impatience for a dreamless sleep to overtake her.
“Sarah.”
The voice, spoken like a whisper on the wind, had her snap her head and listen intently.
Was she hearing things now?
Had she gone completely mad?
She could have sworn she had heard a distant female voice calling her name.
It was still, and the only sound came from the small fan that whirled on her vanity to provide a cooling breeze on this hot, stifling August night.
“You really need to quit taken these pills. I think they make you see and hear things”, her reasoning mind admonished her for once again resorting to the drugs that rarely if ever worked and most likely came with hallucinogenic side-effect.
“Sarah”, the ghostly melodious voice called out again.
This time, she had heard it very distinctly, and she shot up into a sitting position, hastily flipping on the light on her nightstand with trembling fingers.
Her eyes dithered frantically across her room but could not detect a visible presence.
“You must come with us now and save him.”
There it was again.
It was faint, like a whisper on the wind, but unmistakable and perceptible, nevertheless.
Her head snapped to her right and then to the left.
Nothing.
Her room was as completely devoid of human or otherwise company as ever, and she was the only one present.
“Come now and save him before it is too late”, another female voice chimed in, equally, hauntingly beautiful and frightening at the same time.
Rotating her head to her other side now from where this voice had emanated, she tried to make out anything that might move around, but there was nothing.
“I must be going crazy.”
He eyes dithered with onsetting panic, and her heartrate increased and caused her breath to be ragged and shaky.
She could feel the sweat extruding from every pore of her body, and the palms of her hands becoming moist from her perspiration.
At this rate, she would require a shower before going back to sleep.
“Before it’s too late for you and him”, came the third, hushed on a whisper, female voice, as if finishing the statement of the other two.
“STOP IT. STOP IT”, she finally cried out over and over and held her hands against her ears, convinced she was suffering from delusions on top of her nightmares.
The scrunched her eyes to a close and grimaced her face with her palms pressing as hard against her ear-shells as possible.
“You are not here; I’m only dreaming this. You are not here. I am not hearing voices”, she now mumbled to herself on repeat like a broken record while her body continuously rocked slightly back and forth.
“Oh, but we are. Look at us”, came the first voice now, directly from the foot of her bed.
Sarah shook her head and intensified the squeeze of her closed eyes, trying hard to control her breathing to keep from outright panicking.
The new pill must have had some delusionary side effect that only now made its presence known. She would have to go and talk to her doctor tomorrow.
“It’s only the pill, side-effects from the pill. That’s it. There are no voices. There’s nobody here.”
She persistently repeated her mumbled words and kept up her rocking, trying her best to ignore the otherworldly presence, which seemed to intensify by the second.
“LOOK AT US”, boomed the voice, forcing Sarah’s eyes to snap open under their own volition from the ferocity of its sound.
Her terrified body froze in place, and her nonplussed stare rested on three ephemeral figures that had materialized between the foot of her bed and the window.
Lowering her hands from her ears, she scooted herself slowly onto her knees, ready to pounce out of their reach at a moment’s notice should she feel threatened.
“Now I’m seeing things too”, she mumbled with incredulity and shook her head as if to rid herself of the visions. “You are not real.”
“Oh, but we are very real, Child, albeit we have a problem being solid in your world. All we can show you are our spectres.“
She sucked in her breath, unable to utter another word.
After swallowing down the lump in her throat that prevented her to speak, she perused intently over the three hovering diaphanous figures.
They looked like middle-aged women in their fifties with lengthy, wavy hair of blonde, wearing long white gowns, nearly indistinguishable from each other.
A warm smile graced each one’s lips, and their freakishly glowing bluish eyes held no ire or ill will towards her.
“We have not come to harm you, Child”, the closest one declared with a soft smile and lightly stepped forward, as if she were floating on air, to be immediately followed by the other two.
“We are the three Fates. I am Clotho, the Spinner of your destiny. I weave the path of life for you.”
“I am Lachesis, the Allotter, dispensing your destiny”, the middle spectre declared.
“And I am Atropos, the Inflexible, and you do not want me to act on your destiny, but I will if you won’t come and help him”, the third warned and bore a stark gaze into Sarah’s bamboozled eyes while her hand gestures mimicked the cutting of the thread she held in her hand.
“What?” Sarah stammered and shook her head. “I got to be hallucinating.”
“You are not hallucinating, Child, and the sooner you realize this, the sooner we can get going on saving him, and you, from a terrible fate”, Clotho emphasized.
“Get going? Going to where? And saving him? Who is him? And why do I require saving? Saving from what fate?”
Sarah became more bewildered by the second and kept her thin sheet pressed tightly against her body.
She was fully aware that her pretend shield would not protect her against these ghostly visitors, but it comforted her with its instilled false sense of security and made her feel slightly less vulnerable.
“Show her, we are wasting our time here”, Lachesis hissed with clear impatience, and Atropos stepped forward, reaching her hand out towards Sarah.
Immediately, Sarah scooted back against the back of her headboard and kicked her legs at the advancing apparitions.
She was not persuaded of anything and still felt she was suffering from medication induced hallucinations. She definitely would have a talk with her doctor tomorrow.
This could not be real, or could it?
After all, her Labyrinth run had been real. Or had all of this been a dream too?
She all the sudden questioned her entire last thirteen years.
“Get away from me”, she yelled out with renewed oncoming panic.
Tossing back her sheet to escape from the bed altogether, she was being grabbed by the eldritch hands on her shoulder, and before she could react, her entire world started spinning in ever-increasing circles.
She felt herself freefalling into a void of nothingness and elicited a terrified scream that escaped her throat unheard.
Her stomach began to revolt against the revolving of her surroundings, and she was afraid she would heave up her dinner from a few hours earlier.
Just as she felt herself succumbing to the queasiness, the spinning stopped, and she felt solid ground beneath her feet.
She charily peeked out from behind her mess of hair that had fallen over her face and charily glanced around with wild eyes.
A loud gasp caught in her throat as her mouth dropped open, and her eyes opened wide.
She was standing in the middle of the dance floor of the fancy ballroom from her dreams.
She could hear the music and the raucous colloquies and laughter from the merry revellers.
She could smell the intoxicating perfume that wafted like a seductive invite through the air and feel the sensation of several solid bodies bumping into her own as she was jostled around by swaying couples.
They only tossed her lecherous and interested gazes from behind their grotesque, goblinesque masks as they floated by.
Only now did she notice, her nightgown had been replaced by the same sugar spun, ostentatious white silk gown she had worn as a fifteen-year-old girl during her Labyrinth run.
Before she could ask what this was all about, she was rudely hustled about by another couple, and the three Fates speedily whisked her to the side-lines of the rumbunctious dance floor like a troupe of bodyguards.
“I always tell you to make sure of your destination”, Clotho hissed at Atropos with a scowl and readjusted her togalike cape that had been knocked out of alignment on the dance floor.
“How many more times do I have to tell you to concentrate”, she added with a sneer of discontent.
“How was I to know they would be in the middle of a fast dance”, Atropos justified her miscalculations with a likewise sneer.
“Because you always do this”, Clotho snapped back and threw her an irked gaze. “You never listen and always screw it up.”
“Do not.”
“Do too.”
“Not.”
“Too.”
“Not”
“ENOUGH”, bellowed Lachesis, tired of the same old bickering of her siblings. “We have more prominent issues here than your mishap in navigating. Zip it, Atropos”, she directed her pique at her sister, who was in the process of remonstrating once more.
Sarah had followed the intense squabble with stunned silence while her perplexed eyes had dithered back and forth between Clotho and Atropos.
She was certain now that this was just an updated version of her regular dreams.
Nothing this insane could be real.
The pill must have worked and put her back to sleep. She was just dreaming again.
“It’s not a dream, Sarah, at least not yours”, Lachesis informed her as if she had read Sarah’s thoughts. “It is King Jareth’s dream, or should I say, his nightmare.”
“What?” Sarah gasped with utter confoundment and shook her head as if to rid herself of the entire situation. “Are you trying to tell me I am in his dream? You are all crazy. I’m having one weird dream tonight.”
“She has spoken the truth. You are in His Majesty’s nightmare”, Clotho underscored Lachesis's claim.
“What?” Sarah repeated her muttered response, with the rest of her argument stuck in her throat, as she swung her head around at the feeling in the back of her neck that she was being stared at.
She immediately froze, and her breath failed her.
There he was, looking as gorgeous and alluring as ever.
His immaculate beatific face shimmered with golden flecks on his cheeks in the dancing light of the crystal chains.
His blue and white markings seemed more intense than she could remember in any dream, and his mismatched bewitching eyes held her gaze with such an intensity that it had her nearly melt under his stare.
Her heart ceased its beating, and the lump in her throat was too large to swallow and momentarily had her suck in her breath.
She could feel the oncoming tingling of butterfly wings inside her stomach, and she felt a weakness invading her knees.
“It is his dream. He has been stuck in this ballroom for the past thirteen years, ever since you had bested him and condemned him to his fate”, Atropos whispered into her ear.
“What? I have condemned him? I have done no such thing”, Sarah now argued back as her head spun back towards Atropos for making such an unwarranted accusation.
“Oh, but you did, Child”, Lachesis added with a warm tone in her voice that held a certain sadness.
At the wave of her hand, all action in the ballroom froze, and the sounds were suspended in mid-air, never to arrive at their destinations.
Sarah involuntarily quirked her brows at this, impressed over the magic trick. So, the Fates, too, could manipulate time, even in dreams.
Her eyes travelled back to the Goblin King, equally frozen and unmoving. How enchanting and captivating he was with his ethereal beauty.
The voice of Clotho tore her eyes back to the Fates as all three floated around the king, lovingly caressing his still countenance with their bare hands, tossing him empathetic gazes.
“You see, Sarah, when you left and declared that he had no power over you, you unwittingly imprisoned his soul to the last place he felt happy and alive. Alas, here into this ballroom.”
“His real body lays suspended in a deep, comalike sleep in his chambers”, Clotho picked up from where Lachesis had stopped, “slowly withering away from the passing of time. His kingdom is in a state of flux, for as the power of the king wanes, so does the existence of the Labyrinth itself.”
“How can this be?” Sarah gasped with disbelief. “I never meant to bring this upon him. All I wanted was to take Toby back home with me.”
“What we mean to do and what often happens are two different things, Sarah”, Atropos responded with an accusative gaze. “Words here have meaning. You rejected him, and not only that, but you also took away his powers, and with it his soul.”
“He had no choice but to escape to this ballroom. It keeps his soul alive, for the time being, but his body will die and vanish like the sands on the wind”, Clotho concluded, and all three Fates stared at her in silence, their stark gazes holding all the divulged assertions within them.
Sarah stumbled back in shock and shook her head. She frantically pivoted to take in the entire scene of the ballroom, not knowing what to do.
She could absolutely not fathom that she had unleashed a curse on this world with her carelessly spoken words and condemned the king, her beloved villain, whom she dreamt about every night for the past thirteen years, to such a gruesome fate.
“No, no, I didn’t know”, she cried out in a panic-struck voice and spun around to look back at Jareth, who stood frozen, his intense gaze still prevalent in his unmoving eyes.
Eyes that held so much yearning and pain within, betraying his lecherous smirk that lay in wait around the corners of his enticing lips.
“It is his scream you hear in your dreams”, Atropos hissed into her ear from behind, and Sarah shivered involuntarily. “He cries out for you in his real form as he lays dying in his bed. Every night, he calls your name. Have you not noticed what the scream says?”
Sarah’s face fell as the realization sank in.
Yes, Atropos was correct.
The scream had been a cry of her own name in his agonized voice, she only had refused to acknowledge it over the years.
“I didn’t mean to....”
“Oh, she didn’t mean to”, Clotho now chimed in with mockery in her voice and, likewise, stepped close to her to hiss into her ear, a snickering Atropos by her side.
“You said a lot of things you didn’t mean back then, like wishing your brother away but then accusing the king of stealing him. Calling his Labyrinth ‘a piece of pie’.....”
“Cake”, Atropos interjected and earned herself a deathly glare from Clotho over the interruption.
“What?”
“She said cake, it’s a piece of cake, not pie.” Atropos set her straight but quickly cowered and shut up under the trenchant gaze of her sister.
“Calling it a piece of cake” she corrected herself. “But then calling him a cheat for taking away three hours in retaliation for the insult. Yes, you said a lot of things you didn’t mean to, didn’t you?”
“Enough of that”, Lachesis interfered and stopped both Clotho and Atropos from continuing their superfluous cruel taunts of Sarah, who was near tears over the accusations, which were all true the more she thought about it.
“I want to help”, she begged with a couple of rueful tears now streaming down her cheeks. “I’ll take back my words. He can have his powers back; I don’t want them. I never wanted them.”
“Oh, it’s not that easy, Child. You can’t just take back words and reason that will undo all the damage caused”, Atropos sneered but was immediately waved back by Lachesis.
“Sarah”, Lachesis now addressed the snivelling woman, whose eyes were filled with remorse and deep regret over her impetuous actions. “There is still hope, and that’s why we have brought you here. Do you realize that in thirteen days is the thirteenth anniversary of your run?”
“It is?” Sarah breathed and twitched her brows, trying feverishly to remember the date. “It is”, she confirmed after her contemplations. “What does it mean?”
“It means you have thirteen days to save King Jareth and his kingdom, and yourself”, Clotho piped in, completely disregarding Lachesis reprimanding glare over her intrusion.
“Thirteen days? How? Tell me; what must I do?”
“You must remain in his dream and convince him that this is but a dream and for him to break the crystal wall, just like you did when you had been trapped.”
“Say what? I have to stay here until he believes me?” Sarah verified Lachesis’s instructions.
A nod from all three Fates greeted her puzzled eyes.
“You keep saying to save myself; what do you mean by that?” she added quickly with oncoming presentiment and took a step back, tossing a fleeting glance back at Jareth, who still stood frozen in time.
A pitiful smile curled itself around the lips of all three Fates, and Sarah started to experience increasing sensations of imminent doom deep within her stomach.
“If you fail, your soul will be trapped here as well, while your mortal body will wither and die.”
“Wait, what? Where is my mortal body? I thought.... Are you saying I am....”
She glanced down at herself to see if she started to be diaphanous or spectral, but to her reassurance, she remained solid.
Her disquieted eyes rested back on the three Fates before her.
“Your mortal body is still laying on your bed, Child”, Lachesis answered her question, and Sarah gasped in horror.
“But.... so, this is just....”
“Your soul, Child”, Atropos grinned and held up a string that represented Sarah’s destiny and life. “I hold your mortal life in my hands. Don’t make me snip it.”
“That is quite enough from you, Atropos”, Lachesis scolded her sister over the superfluous threat and motioned her to step back.
“She needs to know the truth”, the Inflexible retorted with a low growl, but receded obediently into the background.
“And she will”, Lachesis assuaged her sister with another wave. “But we also don’t want to frighten the poor thing more than necessary.”
“Wait, I can’t stay here for thirteen days. Even if I’ll be successful, my mortal body won’t be able to sustain itself without food and water for that long.”
A commiserated twitched smile in the corners of Lachesis’ lips, and a pair of eyes filled with pity and anguish, had Sarah hold her breath as her heartrate increased, and she felt herself becoming lightheaded and unable to form clear thoughts.
Her eyes flicked over to Atropos, who gleaned at her with a chuffed grin and hungry eyes, as if she was already assessing her for the next gourmet dinner she was about to throw.
Clotho expelled a sorrowful sigh and cast her despondent eyes towards the floor.
“I’m not coming back, am I?” Sarah asked more as a statement than a true question.
“That is completely up to you, Child”, Lachesis replied in a motherly tone and stepped forward to gently touch Sarah’s cheek with the back of her hand.
To Sarah’s own surprise, she did not flinch from the featherlight contact, and the touch felt comforting and soothing, stilling her most dreadful cogitations.
She even briefly closed her eyes and lightly leaned into the caress.
“Every thirteen hours here, you will be released from the dream for enough time to sustain nourishment”, Lachesis assured her and smiled gently down on her, as if she were a mother speaking to a child, trying to erase doubts and fears and instead instil confidence.
“We are not cruel, and we won’t let you wither away while you are trying to save this world. Should you, however, have failed by the thirteenth day, you will remain trapped here for perpetuity along with King Jareth. Your souls will be trapped in a continual ballroom dance while your bodies will vanish like the frolicking dust flecks in the beam of the fading light as the sun goes down for the night, taking all of their existence with it.”
Gone were the brief feelings of assurance, and Sarah’s face became distorted upon hearing Lachesis’ casted verdict of her fate.
She fell to her knees and sat back onto her heels, weeping unabashedly into her hands in which she buried her face.
Her body trembled from the mournful waves of sobs coursing through her being in predictable intervals.
“Now, now, come on, Child. Are you giving up so easily? Are you already considering yourself vanquished before you have even begun? Are you that insecure in your abilities to woo the king and persuade him to break his own crystal dream walls?”
Clotho’s soft-spoken words of encouragement slowly penetrated Sarah’s consciousness, and she lifted her gaze to look into the eyes of the three Fates, who now stood around her in a semicircle, smiling warmly down at her.
Even Atropos held compassion and ruth within her gaze.
“Stand up, Child, and wipe away those tears.”
Lachesis proffered Sarah her hand, and after a hesitating moment, she accepted and lifted herself off her knees, wiping off her dress and dabbing away the tears with a handkerchief Clotho handed her.
“Thank you”, she murmured gratefully and handed the handkerchief back to Clotho, who motioned for her to keep it.
“So, what’s going to happen now?” she inquired with still lightly swollen and reddish eyes.
With the wave of Lachesis’ hand, her eyes were once again clear of the tears, and her cheeks were rosy and fresh.
“Now? Now you start persuading the king to break out of his dream to save you both.”
With these words, the three Fates nodded and dissolved before her eyes while the music blared loudly through the ballroom, and the goblinesque masked revellers once more laughed and twirled across the parquet.
Sarah hesitantly pivoted around and locked gaze with a mesmerized Goblin King as he walked up to her with a coy smile around his glistening lips, holding out his hand in an invite to dance with him.