To her credit, she did her level best to flee even so. First she stripped out of her wet clothes, tore them from the body that they clung to feeling as if she were watching from outside herself. Then she stepped into the shower increasing the hot water until it scorched her skin as she attempted to scrub the memories away. Yet each time her eyes closed she saw the face that no longer waited for nightfall to terrorize her. She fell into bed, still wet, too weary for the rigors of drying and dressing. From the night table to her left she plucked out a bottle of sleeping pills. Every now and again she’d take a pill when nights of only a few hours napping had gotten the better of her. Tonight, this morning to be more accurate, she took two only half caring if she ever woke up again.
Outside the rain continued to fall, pattering upon the windowpane like a lullaby until Sarah was lulled into a deep slumber. Despite the rapidly approaching sunrise the sky stayed dark, that darkness spilling into Sarah’s room like a cloud, a rolling, foggy ground cover. Having left the window open some while she was getting ready earlier in the evening seemed like a mistake now, but as the sleeping pills began to absorb the alcohol in her stomach, Sarah lost the ability to care. It was just a little rain after all. At most a few drops would moisten the sill as they crept in through the half inch crack, maybe dampen the back of the overstuffed chair she would read in occasionally.
She welcomed the feeling of unconsciousness that seemed to grab her from within the pillow top mattress and pull her down. It was the exact escape she craved and in a faint whisper she invited the sensation to take her away, far, far away. It would have been a perfect time for her to recall Karen’s warning to be careful what she wished for. Jolting once against the feeling of plummeting, Sarah surrendered to it. Her whole body went limp, even her jaw slacked.
Lightning crashed right outside her window as if there had been some sort of metal rod mounted just below the glass. What lights remained on in the city at this hour flickered and died. Blackout. It was a perfect night for a phenomenon just like this one. The thunder rallied with the wind to take hold of the upper floors of the high rise and rattled them. To Sarah it felt like a cradle rocking her deeper to sleep, the wind a mother’s lullaby. “Mommy,” she mumbled incoherently as a cool breeze swept a few stray hairs across her forehead.
Through closed eyes she seemed to be able to see outside herself. ‘I’ve killed myself,’ she thought. ‘Mixed pills and alcohol. Pulled a Steve Clark and left the band with one less guitarist. It’s my own fault,’ she criticized. ‘I wonder how long it will take someone to find me.’ Sarah looked all around for her body hoping she hadn’t done anything too vulgar before she accidentally killed herself. That even sounded ridiculous.
She could see the window and her chair, both running perpendicular to her. The carpet where she’d left her wet clothes. The alarm clock blending into the night’s shadows. Her peripheral vision only went so far. Total scope: Head board to toes, ceiling to floor. She couldn’t look behind her, couldn’t turn, couldn’t look down at herself. ‘Damn it!’ she shouted inside her own head. ‘I figured I’d at least get the omnipresent overview of things. I can’t even die right,’ Sarah sulked.
The drops against the window grew soft, traded their harsh slash against the glass for a gentle plop. Everything slowed down for her. Sarah swore she could see each drop let go of the sky and burst against the window. It wasn’t omnipresence, but it was a nice effect. Guess she would take what she could get at this point. For no reason she could imagine she found herself craving her mother. A woman who had never really been there for her in any sort of time of trouble, or otherwise come to think of it, and Sarah wanted her nearness, her familiarity.
Something odd, or so she thought anyway, occurred to her then and with such suddenness it made her catch her breath. Why hadn’t her father come for her? Was she doomed to see him as little in death as she had in life? Regret pulled the tears from her eyes. She could feel them hot and wet against her cheeks. ‘Being dead wasn’t all that much different from being alive,’ she concluded. Even so, she would have appreciated one last countenance with her father.
Something flew passed the window. What kind of storm was this? Would things be many shades of grey outdoors when it was over? Would Laney appear to her in a suit of tinfoil and ask her to journey to some great land with her? Great lands? Oh dear Lord no! She’d done precisely what she’d fought so hard to avoid. How she wished her heavy legs could swing over the bed and carry her to the window where she could see where she’d landed. There was no child to fight for this time. Perhaps she’d cut through all the bullshit and wind up right at the castle where Jareth could extract his revenge through whatever method he’d cooked up this time. Or maybe he’d refuse to even see her and instead cast her into some gloomy oubliette. That was more likely.
So, she was permanently assigned to this view, this sensation for all of eternity. ‘I’d rather be dead,’ she thought. If only she’d taken the whole bottle of pills instead of being so conservative. Why not? It was better than lying there paralyzed, his personal plaything. Oh how she bet he was having his laugh watching her in one of his crystals. Kicking back in his throne, legs tossed over the arm as if he’d landed there after falling out of the sky. His black glove perching the perfect glass orb up for his best view. He’d smile wide, she imagined, bearing those uneven teeth of his, a twinkle in his eye flashing between satisfaction and victory.
Whatever it was passed the window again. Compact, sleek, like a bullet. It blew the window open wide. Had the mention of Jareth brought him to her so quickly? No, this was nothing so awkward and cumbersome as an owl. Nothing so squat. Nothing so wide. In the time it took Sarah to make the comparative analysis, the thing had landed on the inside of the window. A flash of lightning shown it like it were day. Sitting on the sill, looking at her with great interest were wide yellow eyes set deep in the neatly feathered grey head of what she could only assume from the hooked beak was some sort of bird of prey.
‘He’s sent you to pluck out my eyes has he?’ Sarah challenged the bird who only continued to witness her with intrigue. ‘Go on. I’m in no position to object.’
Leaving the ledge, she spread her wings. A graceful hop and a swift glide and she joined Sarah in the bed. Despite the ease she’d shown only seconds early at the idea of being freed of her eyes, the woman welded them shut fiercely and braced herself. Against her forehead she felt the cold bone of a beak. Was the thing sniffing her? The voice she heard came from inside her own head, it sounded like her mother’s, that is to say the pitch was her mother’s, but the lilting tone held in it far too much tenderness to ever be mistaken for the woman who walked out on her when she was too young to truly understand.
“Can you hear me?”
“Mother?,” she said out loud without separating her lips.
“Open your eyes child.”
Sarah could still feel bone against her head, but the sound of her mother’s voice was so vibrant she convinced herself it had to be fingernails instead. Relaxing her eyes she let herself see before her a perfectly preened and surprisingly dry peregrine falcon. She jerked away, even though her body stayed still, her lids now more loosely closed, like sheers rather than bolted like metal panels. Her view the same as it had been before her guests arrival, only now of course it included said guest. “Mother?” she called out more desperately, feeling infantile.
“Settle yourself,” the bird suggested as she took the sheet into her beak and pulled it around the exposed parts of Sarah’s body. “I’m not here to harm you.”
“Why are you here?”
There was a shrill cry run through her head that made her wince. “Forgive me. I cannot always find my human words when I need them. I’m here to advise you Sarah. Your torment grows, I know this. Yours is not the only one. Two worlds must collide in order to end the suffering.”
“What two worlds?”
The falcon cocked her head in as much chastisement as a falcon can express. “My time is limited, please don’t make me exasperate it with answers you already know.”
Sarah’s voice came through in a pout, nearly a whine, “I can’t go back there. I won’t. Even if I wanted to, I have no one to wish away.”
“Be wise, not just now, but always. Your greatest strength is yet to be realized. You are the only hope for so many.”
“What do you mean?”
The falcon looked at Sarah, sympathy in her eyes. “My time is done,” she said giving a gracefully tip of her head before darting back out the window.
“Wait! Wait!” Sarah called after her. “I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me. I can’t even get out of this bed! Come back, please come back!” She began to cry through her closed eyes. Hot tears burnt her cheeks while she wished she could crease her elbow and wipe them away with the back of a sedentary hand.
Rain began ravaging the window again, the distinct plunk making her sure it had begun to hail. This was the most unusual storm she’d ever seen hit Chicago in all her years there. That is to say if she were still in Chicago. Stranger things after all had happened to her. Where she was remained somewhat of a mystery. The temperature was dropping at an alarming rate making her wish the well trained pigeon who’d visited her would have had enough manners to close the window when she left.
Water was teeming in through the open glass. Her chair appeared two full shades darker from the moisture, her wall had begun to ripple from the streams that raced over the ledge and down to the floor. If the power hadn’t already gone out, she’d have worried more about the outlets getting wet. Of course in all the hazards she imagined, the pool forming in her bedroom wasn’t one of them. After all, liquids had some of the best physical properties of any matter. Constantly striving to level itself on the surface, taking the shape of it’s container, easily victim to gravity.
So it should have found it’s way out the door into her lower floor and even there if it continued to accumulate it should have gone down the stairs to seek the lobby. At the minimum, the weight of it on her floor should have burst through the ceiling of the level below. Rather it filled the twelve by eighteen rectangle of which her bed was the center. If she wouldn’t have seen with her own eyes she wouldn’t have believed the flood line that crept up over her baseboard, to the underside of her outlets, then submersing them completely. ‘I wonder if my bed will float,’ she thought, feeling much like Alice in Wonderland.
Perhaps it was the onset of unusual circumstances that made one think in the same pomp and circumstance as a novelist under the influence, but she found herself having the most lyrical thoughts. ‘What if I should float out the open window and fall to the street below. Do you suppose they will wonder how a paralyzed woman hefted both she and her bed up and out of the penthouse floor of a high rise. Or if I’m fortunate, perhaps my bed will be wise enough to fly once we are outdoors. Who knows? I may fly to the moon tonight. I shall be the first to find that it is indeed made of cheese and I shall be the first to nibble off the nose of the man in moon. Then I will grow supremely large and he will serenade with ballads ode to my heavenly body and the stars so very near my eyes, how they pale in comparison to my beauty.’
‘How sad I’ll find the Earth,’ she considered. ‘For by then it will be very small and far away and missing me I should think. Two less feet to trod upon it. My absence will probably cause the entire marble to shift on its axis. The polar ice caps will melt and the South Pole will know it’s first sunlight. Yes,’ Sarah concluded feeling rather satisfied, ‘I’m quite sure that the Earth will be lost without me. It is a pity, if only I had been treated better when I was there. Perhaps I would not have been so easily wooed away by the celestial Casanova. And my dear friend Irmscher. At last I shall be able to look down upon he who has always looked so down upon me.’
Taking pleasure in that last thought was short lived as the bed began to rock in the accumulated waters of the room. She would have loved to have braced herself, but her arms remand rigid at her sides, her body rolling side to side in time with her 110 thread count, Egyptian cotton sailboat as it tried to find its partnership with the rain. ‘Well, I can float,’ she told herself. Happy with that much at least.
Furniture began to topple as the room continued to fill. She prayed the rain would spare her rather extensive collection of boots. What good it would do her she had yet to reason. Useless legs meant useless boots. It felt almost cliche to think it but she couldn’t help wonder if she’d ever dance again and just as it occurred to her, she heard the music. The haunting, bum bum bum, bum bum bum, bum bum ba bah of a classic box step. The waltz. Oh she how she loved the waltz.
Her wedding day when she and Timothy were announced, they danced a waltz. He had such perfect form, a good strong arm, a rigid back and feet that seemed coated with ice. She found it easy to dance with him, for he had done most, if not all of the work for her making so that she only needed to drop herself into his grip which she was glad to do. Step, step, step, turn. Step, step, step, turn. Step, step, step, turn. Not a box step, she reconsidered, but surely a waltz. A fine and elegant think, Viennese, Bavarian? Step, step, step, turn.
Why did this seem so familiar? Step, step, step, turn. She was dizzy from the rocking. Her stomach felt sick, no more like butterflies. ‘Nerves’ she cursed. ‘He’s shot my nerves.’ Jareth! Jareth and his pale blue eyes, the ones accented by his sapphire jacket and set into that porcelain but ethereal face and crowned by a wild mane of blonde hair, almost white, almost lost against his skin, but for the smile. Step, step, step, turn. He had held her once, hand mounted just above her waist, frame tight, her hand cupped gently in his. Step, step, step, turn. Her rich mahogany locks filled with those silver combs made it feel so heavy as he spun her that she couldn’t fight it when her neck buckled and her head would lull back. How different he seemed in that one moment.
This, for whatever reason, reminded Sarah of dancing with him. Odd, but so like him. He would try to make her believe that he had killed her in the name of love. Jareth was forever cloaking his evil doing behind a mask of some passionate, yet maniacal pursuit. Did he find that charming? Was it some how more considerate to woo your victims before ending their lives? Sarah was certain it had nothing to do with the recipient of his misguided and intense emotions. No, everything Jareth did was ultimately about Jareth. About pleasing him, appeasing him. She wondered which her death would be.
The ceiling might as well have been lowering for as fast as she was rising up to meet it. So this was how it would end? Trapped between her mattress and the ceiling, waiting to be covered by rain, come in through the window opened by a bird who sounded remarkably like her mother. Two fantastical stories to tell in one lifetime, how had she grown so fortunate?
As the peaks of plaster roughed her cheek Sarah cursed the designer who said stucco was the way to go, all the rage. Her attempts to scream seemed as muffled as if she had stuffed her mouth with socks. The water rose over the sides of her bed. She could feel its icy kiss against her skin. Being a side sleeper suddenly proved a very unworthy habit as she realized she was losing the last few centimeters of survival having her nose above her lips would have afforded her.
Not once in all of the hours that had passed since she’d fallen lifeless into bed had Sarah thought to care if she lived. In fact, she had spent all of her last minutes preparing to die. Something deep within her was changing now as she found herself closer to that reality. Sarah had things left to accomplish, be they small or be they great, she wasn’t ready to die and more assuredly not for Jareth. She felt herself beginning to care about this life she’d been content to lose earlier and with it she felt strength. Shifting roughly, Sarah managed to fall over on her back. The rough stucco scrapped her cheek, but when she tore open her eyelids, that until now she had been content to see through, she didn’t see a million tiny white peaks. No, she saw a face, a pale, porcelain and perfect face with mismatched eyes, nose to nose with her. His hot breath singeing her skin. “You have no power over me,” she cried out. “You have no power over me.”
Like a rubber duck in a draining tub she spun clockwise as her seaworthy craft fell back to the ground. The window sucked out all the moisture it had just finished letting in. Sarah landed on her floor with a jolt that seemed to spark her whole body alive. She sat upright in bed padding at herself. She was moist with perspiration and the sheets were as wet as she was. Her room was much the way she had left it which helped her laugh it off as a dream.
Hands ground at weary eyes as they attempted to read the clock. 6:30. ‘Useless pills,’ she decided judging by the four hour nap until a waking part of her brain noticed the small red dot in the left lower corner of the display. 6:30 pm. A sixteen hour nap. “Eight hours a pill,” she chuckled. “Now that’s more like it.” Sarah fell back against her bedding worn out by her active imagination. She felt something jab her in the rib right where her side melded into her back. Reaching back she withdrew the object of her aggravation..a sleek grey feather with brown and black markings, the plume of the peregrine falcon.
***** ***** *****
There was a certain irony to showering away a dream about drowning, but Sarah showered nonetheless, wondering the entire time what exactly the world record for single most showers taken in a 24 hour period was. Her head was pounding like something small and fierce was trying to burst out of her skull from the inside. What possessed her to take those pills she could only guess. It was obvious that she understood very little about herself right now.
Down in the kitchen she was finding no more insight. Her stomach growled and tossed all at the same time seeming opposed to even the lightest suggested nutrition, adverse to even juice. She managed a two- pack of Saltines she found in the drawer next to the silverware, the one that housed take out menus and to go packets of soy and the like. But quickly lost interest in foraging for anything more substantial.
Collapsing on the couch, she pulled the chenille throw off the back and covered herself, more for comfort than for warmth. Fumbling with the remote she managed to get the damn thing to turn on. As she expected, nothing worth watching. So many parts of her already being disagreeable it was no shock to add her mood to the list. “Well I’ve got to do something,” she told herself. “If I sit here another minute considering the lunacy of what I dreamt last night I shall make myself certifiable.”
Back upstairs, deep in the closet, she rummaged for her stack of projects. Surely something needed making or mending. Concentrating on a needle as it repeatedly stabbed at the tender tips of your fingers was always a good way to occupy the mind. Her hands roamed the fabric of the dress she’d been asked to wear for her brother’s wedding. No sooner did the point of the shears poke through the threads of the long side seam did she forget about most of what went on the night before.
She went on that way for some time, sewing and cutting and measuring, marking, back latching and cursing as she tore out a fresh seam. Three hours later her appetite was fully restored and what was technically the last accouterment to a plan (the brilliance of which was yet to be determined) she had hatched became the inspiration for an outfit she needed to rustle up for the club tonight. Neo? Oh no! That was Ashton’s haunt. Let him have it and every harlot in it. There had to be some place better, bigger, befitting of a royal guest. Sarah was giddy at the notion of just how regally she would be treated.
***** ****** ******
Dancing over the field of half inch square keys Sarah’s fingers blurred. Google searches. Mapquest. Cityguide.com. She covered them all until at last she selected a new haunt, one that didn’t seem like it would appeal to Ashton. It was neither dark enough nor secluded enough, but rather grand and apparent. Grand and castle-like in its architecture. Part like a church, part like a prison. Even she saw the irony in trying to run away from life by running toward something reminiscent of a jail.
From what the internet told her, the club had a dark and somber past. During the Chicago Fire of 1871 it was burned taking the lives of a few women who’d fled inside seeking shelter. When it was rebuilt in 1892, it housed the Chicago Historical Society until it moved to Lincoln Park in 1931. It was in the summer of 1915 an excursion steamer dubbed the Eastland rolled over while partially docked.
Aboard were employees of the Western Electric Company, their spouses and their children. More than nine hundred people lost their lives, all within a few feet of the shore, most pinned beneath the massive vessel in one of the worst maritime disasters in American history. Sarah assumed that the Titanic disaster ranked above it, but likely little else. Investigations followed and raised a litany of questions about the ship’s seaworthiness. As a result of the disaster many buildings in the city had been converted to mortuaries to house the dead and injured. This club among them.
A variety of other agencies called this building home in the 54 years between the departure of the Historical Society and the inception of a nightclub called the Limelight, renamed in 1989 by the current owners. Each had their own stories of tragedy.
Still, the even spaced cinder blocks which made up the walls were a pale soothing grey and something about it was like a cool rag against her neck. This place felt right to her. She felt like she could make it hers. Ashton could have Neo and every two-bit floozy in it was welcome to their crack at him, just so long as she didn’t have to watch anymore.
Even the name of her new haunt, Excalibur, it well - epresented the phase she was about to embark upon. Sarah would assume the role of Arthur, pull the sword from the stone and find her own place to be king, or Queen, as it were.
Becoming even a self proclaimed dictator brought with it a strange cocktail of superiority which helped her better understand why a certain memory was as full of himself as she imagined him to be. With that moment of understanding came another sort of realization, an idea that seemed to take from things she’d done innocently enough at first, things which suddenly had purpose.
She dashed about tossing this and that on her bed, boxes, hose, a blouse, under things and when a nice sized pile had begun to accumulate, she stripped nude and began layering on the garments she had chosen.
A black silk thong slid up and over her legs, settling comfortably at her hips. In sharp contrast, an off white lace bra. A white shell covered her mid-section. Modified black riding pants clung to her legs making slipping into a sleek pair of $1300 Manolo Blahnik boots, easy enough, also black, almost seamless against the breeches. A chunky heel, no more than two inches high, a square toe and a commanding clack off the hard floor. A flouncy white blouse hid the shell, the edge of both top pieces were tucked neatly into the waistband of the black pants. Now it was coming together very nicely, nicely indeed.
She felt authoritative, tall, lean, indestructible. This was what it was like. It wasn’t any one thing, not the title or the clothes or the confidence, but the precise combination of them all. Even so something wasn’t right Sarah thought as she spun and tilted, assessing herself in her bedroom mirror. Something was missing, or perhaps some things were too prominent.
Her hands smoothed over her bosom as her face rumpled with vexation. There was a quick concept flash that snapped in her eyes before she disappeared into the bathroom returning with what looked like medical supplies. Sarah undid her blouse from her waistband, discarding it and the shell in one swoop over her head. Pulling her arms free of her bra-straps, she struggled only a moment with the clasp before sending it sailing to the hamper.
Her hands worked nimbly as they wrapped her ribs with layers of gauze. Building her trim mid-section into something a bit more bulky and pronounced. When she seemed satisfied with her newly added thickness, she picked up the first of two ace bandages, three-inches in width and bearing a convenient Velcro closure. She began the wrap under her left arm, just at the point where her breasts began to jut out, and sadly, down. Once she managed that first circle, her left hand was free to help press down the fleshly lumps she was trying to restrain.
Catching sight of herself in the mirror should have shocked her, but on the contrary, she grew ever more intrigued at her quandary as it came into fruition. If she couldn’t get Jareth to face her and give her the answers she sought, then she would crawl inside him and find the answers from the core out. Hands that seemed not her own continued to tuck away her femininity until the second bandage joined the first and smoothed the gap between flesh and gauze making a uniform trunk which looked impressively manly even without garments to keep Sarah’s secret.
With the shell and the blouse back in place, it was only Sarah’s pretty face that betrayed her. For added security, she procured a pair of thick socks from her bureau and fashioned them into a bulge, mimicking the size and shape of the one she’d remembered from her youth, embellished in her young adulthood and fondly recalled in her maturity. Almost school girl embarrassment crimsoned her cheeks as she shoved the lump down the front of her skin tight breeches, avoiding even her own eyes as she did so. There were some final adjustments made from outside her pants until it was settled more believably.
At her vanity she plucked her brows, mostly at the far corners of her eyes. As a base she applied some stage make up. One of her mother’s tricks of the trade when a role required a skin tone she hadn’t been blessed with and one Sarah had modified to cover the ill effects of several bad sunburns in the past. Using several earth tone shadows and an eyebrow pencil she built slowly and precisely the beautifully arched brows that haunted her at night. The curve, the subtle trail off into the temple, the brilliant flash of gold, the liquid bronze, the warm café au lait, which made his full face glow. A bit of ruddy shading dumbed down the hard lines she’d made until the face she built could have easily been her own. Just a smudge of tinted lip gloss and she was feeling like she’d managed to go from girlie girl to metro sexual male.
Drawing her hair back into a tight ponytail at the nape of her neck, Sarah silently thanked her mother for another of her tricks. She filled her hands with gel rubbing them together briskly before applying a liberal coat which was meant to trap any strays which had escaped her reaping. A six inch tail hung low on her back. Had she truly neglected a hair cut for so long. Couldn’t have been? And yet the evidence said it was. Plucking another band from her vanity she procured it into a tight ball.
From the closet she drew the pale blonde, almost white mane. Fingers from her right hand stroked the hairs which rained down from the pedestal of her left fist. She fit it snugly over her matted down locks and cleverly pinning it just behind the hair line. When she returned to her vanity her surprise at her appearance caused her elaborate eyebrows to arch, confirming for Sarah that she had done well when she had sat down to do her make up. With a fixative spray and a teasing comb she worked at creating Jareth’s signature style, topping it off with a glitter spray she had left over from Toby’s wedding.
Black leather gloves left the corner of her dressing table rushing to cover her hands as her look settled in. She had succeeded in taking on Jareth’s appearance, from the top of her platinum crown to the tip of her seal skin black boots. There was but one more piece, one final layer to make it all complete. The dress which had once been designed to rivet her miles of leg and highlight the dramatic curve of her lower back was now a tapered waist coat with tails. Sarah slid her arms through the narrow openings which she’d turned up and cuffed, adding a hole to be filled by the cuff links Timothy had worn on their wedding day. The back was solid now, the front split open to reveal her elegant silk beneath. The skirt was half missing and split up the back to make the tails. When she took in her reflection, Sarah started at her toes and slowly roamed up the mirror image fixated on a satisfied grin she’d been on the wrong end of too many times before.
***** ***** *****
Best she walk, Sarah decided in the elevator. Give herself more time to grow comfortable in his skin. If she could harness even a fraction of his power, maybe she could stop these visions which had begun to haunt her both night and day. Her legs snapped when they walked. No, no, too rigid. She experimented with different swaggers until she found one she thought summed up the King’s ability to be cool and controlled but still steelly and determined all at the same time. Something quick, but purposeful, sure and steady. Mastering the stride as she made her way north on Michigan Avenue had set her upper body into a graceful swing she was pleased with, further enhanced once she remembered how straight he’d held his shoulders. And the chin, jutted out and up, her bottom lip in just the slightest hint of a pout. Eyes keen and observant, narrowed in on various inanimate objects until she felt she’d mastered the glare to use on humans.
So this was what it was like to sit above the world, to hold them all as subjects to you and to believe that you were their one true king. She imagined little goblins at her feet and curled her lip in disgust at them. Taking in a teenage boy on a skateboard who’d shouted out, “Nice costume, dude”, Sarah arched a brow, but didn’t say a word. Talking had only now just occurred to her. There was so much clothing and make up and a wig could do, but there was no disguising her voice. No matter she decided when a couple on the street headed her way clung to the walls as she passed them stabbing daggers with her eyes.
Jareth never needed words. He could convey anything in those eyes, in his face. She’d seen the gambit, love to hate and everything between. Once she thought she saw fear and in the end, regret. Part of the romance in watching him was the hunger his mouth built up in her belly. Wishing she could watch it move, the soft pink ripples caressing one another as his speech sang from his lips. Wanting to be the thing that they caressed next, when he was done speaking. Sarah got lost in her ideas to the point that had that bulge she’d constructed been a real one, it would have now been quite prominent.
When she reached Ontario Street, she turned left, headed west in search of Excalibur. There was a good crowd formed at the doors already beginning to sway to the industrial and alternative mix they offered Wednesday, Friday and Saturday nights. From across the street she observed them, as Jareth would. She imagined him in her world, curious for what the humans did inside these establishments, intrigued by the sensuality of it. Drawn to this particular spot because as his own home was, it was castle-like, layers of evenly chiseled stone. It may as well have risen up out of the Underground and settled here.
‘Look at them,’ she told herself hearing his voice hissing in her head, ‘imbibing themselves, carefree, fearless. How I could ruin them. How I could disillusion them. How I could make them mine.”’ Her fists balled at her sides as she leaned nonchalantly against a street sign. A short, round woman with a pudgy little dog on a long leash smiled at her but she only looked down her nose in irritation at having her concentration disturbed. Had she taken her little act too far? No, not yet.
With purpose, her legs pushed her across the street with little regard for the passing cars. Honking and screeching tire announced her arrival. A gargoyle marked each side of the entrance. Approaching one with interest, she stroked it like a pet, giving it a small glimmer of pity as she noted its sedentary state. She took the front step in tiny quick steps, keeping her back stiff, her shoulders square. Taking in the men at the door, Sarah combined the scroll of her eyes with a nod of her head as she observed them, evaluated them. The small one knitted his brow, the larger one indignantly asking, “You comin’ in or what?”
Sarah narrowed her eyes on him, gracefully side stepping him. Inside was as royal as the outside had been as filled with mystique. The music was loud and she could feel her chest shaking with the beat. Beyond the bar a terrific staircase. Ascending over three stories, the Cabernet covered steps were marked by an ornate filigree wrought iron rail. From the landing she felt like she could feel eyes on her, but no body there to match them. As Jareth would have, she cleverly cocked her head side to side taking everything in as she strode about rich with arrogance.
The ceiling was harlequin, red and black, broken up by Bavarian supports held with metal joists. In the space between the bar and the lounge lighting hung down supported in the crook of three strips of curving wrought iron, a large illuminated crystal ball. Sarah looked out the tops of her eyes, tipping her chin up no more than an inch. The notion that a king would tilt back his head and gawk absurd to her. Velvet curtain kept out any remnants of day light, any false pretense of street lights. Paneled walls made everything seem neat and symmetrical. She followed deeper inside.
A parlor to the left of the bar was set up as a sitting/smoking room with leopard skin chairs and chaises, dimly lit by candles in sconces and filled with tiny clusters of contemporary furniture organized around tables. Sauntering through the lounge formidably, she enjoyed the way they looked at her. The men curious, fearful. The women filled with intrigue, interest. Two steps lead to two sitting areas separated from those four in the sunken portion. She took them both in one step, her eyes set on a semicircular chair, which she draped herself across.
From there she surveyed the fools as they drank and laughed, all ignorant to the power that sat among them. She sat above them now, master of all she surveyed. On the walls were pictures of old time beauty queens and an array of nudes. She could see the balconies from which the patrons looked down at the dance floor. She could see everything, everyone.
Sarah Williams would have felt the call of the dance floor. Her body unable to resist the pounding beat of heavy bass, but Jareth the Goblin King was ignorant of such mindlessness. He much preferred draping his legs over this chair and passing judgment on those who passed him, those who dared to catch his eye. Too fat, too bald, too old, too pathetic. Those who displayed courage enough to sit in his presence were disregarded. Striking up a conversation got you a clear shot of the back of his head. That is to say until a chestnut brunette strode into the club looking out of place with her innocence hung around her neck like an albatross.
She wore white, she gaped at the sights, she trembled as she ordered her drink. She called out unheard excuse me’s as she followed her friends, forcing her way through the crowd. She averted her eyes from the couples in the dark corners who made each other promises they didn’t intend to keep. She gasped at the women who sprawled on the chaises in poses for the men to watch. The whole time Sarah watched the girl thinking that this was how he must have seen her when she too was just a fawn in the woods, like prey and he was the hunter.
It was all about timing. Too fast and the frightened thing would run away. Too slow and it may be too late. She let the girl catch her a time or two as Sarah stared at her, always the girl broke the glance first. She waited for a song, one that was low, slow, seductive. One Jareth would have admired. When the music began she swung her legs from their perch, rising as the drum beat kicked in and taking the steps in time to the music. The first verse rang out as she closed in on the girl whose heart fluttered like a caged bird.
She swings from somewhere you can’t see
She sits in the top of her Venus tree
She sends out an aroma of undefined love
Drifts on down in a mist from above
She’s just a girl, a girl, a girl you want.
She’s just a girl, a girl, a girl you want.
This is exactly how Jareth had seduced her in the ballroom. He had caught her eye, walked slowly to her, pointedly. Sarah plucked the drink out of the girl’s hand. Obviously shocked, she protested only a moment. Passing the drink to one of the girl’s friends, Sarah pinned her around the waist and crushed the girl to her. Surely that well placed bulge pressed into this stranger’s stomach. She was like a doll in Sarah’s arms, easy to sway about the floor. Even while she tried to look away, seem uninterested, Sarah gazed at her, eyes conveying need and mouth spilling out seductive tenors of desire.
You can hear her calling everywhere you turn
You know you're headed for the pleasure burn
The words get stuck on the tip of your tongue
She's the real thing but you knew it along
She’s just a girl, a girl, a girl you want.
She’s just a girl, a girl, a girl you want.
After a minute the girl was powerless to resist Sarah’s stare. She grinned in satisfaction as the pools of shimmering mink returned her unspoken emotions. He really did have power and now she had a little of it too. Turning her victim left, then right, causing her to arch her back to keep time, making her feel drunk until… What is it that Sarah had always wanted from Jareth but could never seem to find? What is it she sought from that dance that she had never received? Ah yes, she remembered now. The girl’s mouth waited, as Sarah’s had. Lips just a whisper apart, fluttering with eagerness she wouldn’t admit. Her eyes flickered from Sarah’s eyes to her mouth and back.
She could have laid her down on one of those chaise lounges and done any number of unspeakable things to the girl in her arms, just as Jareth, in any number of nocturnal recreations of the ballroom scene could have easily had Sarah herself. But she hadn’t asked to be taken. She hadn’t asked to be ruin for any mortal man to come. She’d only craved a kiss. One kiss. But Jareth was stingy with his affections. Now she was Jareth and this was no adolescent child in her arms.
Sarah brought her mouth crashing down over the girl’s. For a second she resisted, her breeding convincing her it was the right thing to do. But as the last verse of the song seemed to say the things she hadn’t been able to admit on her own she returned the kiss. Sarah held her as she had dreamed Jareth might do, the thumbs of her leather gloves cool against flushed cheeks, fingers full of her hair. She clung back. The voice in her head instructing her. ‘Deepen the kiss.’ She heeded. ‘Taste her.’ She heeded. ‘Retreat and attack again.’ So she did.
Look at you, your mouth watering
Look at you, your mind spinning
Why don’t we just admit it’s all over
She’s just a girl you want
She’s just a girl, a girl, a girl you want.
She’s just a girl, a girl, a girl you want.
For more than two full minutes she twisted side to side caressing every point on the girl’s mouth. Sarah’s tongue explored the warm, wet cavern between her teeth. She nibbled at her flesh. Left her mouth to trail her neck. She could feel her pulse against the lips that ravaged her. Laughter rung in her mind, Jareth’s laughter. Sarah pulled back, looking into the wide eyes of the confused fawn. Beneath that confusion lay desire, Sarah had brought it to the just below the surface. An emotion the naďve girl had done her best to bury and she had unearthed it. She knew the look, she had given it herself years ago to a man dressed as she was now.
Then she knew why he hadn’t kissed her, why he had shown restraint. One kiss sounded, in theory, innocent enough, but in fact it only made you crave another. If the passion was strong it made the both of you crave another. Who was he protecting then when he saw her eyes beg the way this girl’s did? Himself or Sarah? What had she done?
She bowed once to the lady, once to her friends and in a retold version of Cinderella jaunted off into the night, cries of “Wait!” rising up behind her. Neither did she wait nor leave behind any evidence that she had ever been.
***** ***** *****
Free of the eye shot of anyone at the club, Sarah ripped the wig loose, stuffing it in a trash can she passed. Alone on the streets her heels echoed as she ran. It made her feel as if she were being followed which made her run faster and she reached the Michigan Avenue intersection in no time. A glove flew from each hand finding themselves homeless in the gutters. Her fingers snapped the thin bands in her hair and dragged them loose, clumps of hair accompanying them. Blowing wild behind her, her hair whipped and snapped like a crop driving on a thoroughbred. Over the bridge her pounding feet drove her on.
She stopped under the street lamp dwarfed by the spot lights on the Wrigley Tower. Tearing free of the coat, she balled it up, prepared to throw it into the river. The cufflinks stopped her. Undoing them, Sarah tossed the coat which only unraveled on its way to the water. It glided on the air, dancing down, patiently until it met it’s waiting partner beneath. The sparkle in the garment picking up the light and twinkling as it went off.
In Sarah’s hands the links felt heavy. She looked at them as if they hadn’t been part of what she wanted to believe had been the most important day of her young life, as if she’d just stolen them from a stranger. The pressure of the kiss still warm on her lips, she grew distracted. It wasn’t the kiss of a strange girl she felt, not Timothy’s kiss on their wedding day, but it was Jareth’s kiss. Phantom and foreign, but she felt it none the less. Felt him fresh against her listening to his own commands. “Deepen the kiss.” “Taste her.” “Retreat and attack again.” Impossible. Her imagination the culprit, her own guilt, her own disgust with herself. Without hesitation, she tossed the links in after the coat. Twin blurping sounds reached her ear as the greedy river swallowed the treasure.
Every piece she discarded freed her some. The blouse was the next to go. Sarah looked down at her flattened chest. Desire to claw free of the bandages was something she needed to suppress as she trod home, defeated. Her hands mangled her hair as if the answer for her behavior lied at the root of her locks. What was she thinking? Dressing up like Jareth, going out into her world that way…that girl…that innocent girl who she’d ruined. Perhaps she’d never come to know the truth about what happened that night. Perhaps the real Goblin King wouldn’t want anything to do with her now that she had been soiled by his doppleganger. Perhaps she’d escape the real power of the Underground. For Sarah it was too late. That power compelled her now, drove her to cross limits she’d never imagined.
Sanity is a fragile thing, she imagined. Not fragile like a caramelized sugar, hardened but easily cracked, but more like the wings of a fly, the legs of a spider. It seemed strong, impervious, but in the wrong hands it could be ripped free of the very thing dependant upon it and there was no remedy to repair the wound. Sarah felt like a wingless fly, like a legless spider as she snuck in the freight elevator of her apartment and into her penthouse. Numb fingers dialed Laney’s number. There was no answer. She hadn’t expected one, not at this hour. “Laney,” she wept into the phone, “help me.”
***** ***** *****
When the phone rang a few minutes later, Sarah found the receiver still clutched in her hand. “What’s wrong?” Laney asked, sleep still prevalent in her slurred speech.
“Nothing. Go back to sleep.”
“I’m up. It’s fine Sarah. You can tell me.”
“I said it’s nothing.” She sounded monotone, automated as she lied.
“I’ll be right over,” Laney promised. “Don’t do anything. Don’t even move until I get there.”
“No problem,” she heard Sarah sigh before the line went dead.
***** ***** *****
Laney arrived not long after, a long raincoat covering her nightgown and mismatched tennis shoes on her feet. Sarah’s door was open a crack so she walked in. “Sarah? Sarah, it’s Laney.”
“Over here,” a voice peeped in the dark. She was still sitting in the chair, clinging to the receiver, shoulders slumped, head hung.
Kneeling before her, the tiny woman lifted Sarah’s heavy head, “What the hell happened?” Her palms were wet with tears and sticky from the coat of pancake makeup on Sarah’s face. “Jesus Christ!” she exclaimed when she saw Sarah’s eyes. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do it. He did it. He can’t come here to get me, so he came through me. He came for her.”
“Her who?”
Sarah met Laney eye for eye, a vacant stare down. She hadn’t anything left to lose so she told her oldest friend the whole story. What really happened in the courtroom, the dreams, Ashton’s indiscretions, making the coat, going to the club, kissing the girl. Her tears fell like a faucet had turned on behind her eyes. She never sobbed. She’d moved past that, far past.
Laney sat on the arm of the chair and pulled Sarah to her. She tried to exude the love and acceptance of a mother as she pressed Sarah’s head against her chest and began stroking the knots out of her hair. “You’re not crazy baby. You’re just stressed out from everything that’s gone on with work and that bastard. When I see him Monday…” Motherly instincts aside she was still Sarah’s fierce protector.
“Please don’t.”
“Don’t what? Give him the riot act? He’ll be lucky if I don’t wear my pointiest shoes and kick him square in the balls!”
“What does it matter?”
“Sarah?”
“What does any of it matter Laney?” She clung to her dear friend, begging for a reason, a remedy for what she had become. “I don’t know who I am anymore. I used to. I used to know exactly what life had in store for me. I’d become a partner in the firm, work my way up to shareholder, land a corner office, run for judge one day. Now, I don’t even know if I’ll wake up tomorrow.”
“Stop it!” Laney shook her by the shoulders, but Sarah’s head just lulled. “You stop this right now. You are Sarah Williams and you will become those things if that’s what you really want, but Sarah, I don’t think that is what you want. Otherwise you wouldn’t be thinking about a lifetime you thought you were done with.”
Like a slot machine Sarah’s eyes registered on Laney. “I was done with it. It’s not done with me. He’s not done with me.”
“He has no power over you, remember?”
Sarah looked at her. If only Laney had met him back in the days when he could come at her call, when she’d seen that owl perched on her sill at night, peering in at her. Then maybe she could understand. “But he does. I tried to deny it, but I was wrong. I was so wrong. His power is stronger than I ever imagined. I don’t think I ever really beat him. I think he let me go. Now he’s decided to toy with me again. I’m a puppet.”
“I entertained these wild fantasies of yours when you were younger Sar. I bought into the man you had created to ease the pain of your parents divorce to explain the strange stirrings we all experienced at that age, but I will not let you sit here and tell me he is controlling you. Sarah, Jareth isn’t real. He’s a fantasy.” She hopped off the chair and went to the kitchen. “You’ve obviously been drinking. I’m going to make you some black coffee. Why don’t you go wash your face?”
Sarah rose and disappeared upstairs. When she returned, the make up about her eyes was still prominent. She looked like a zombie descending the steps. Her eyes lifeless. She thrust her hand out at Laney, the peregrine falcon feather in her palm. “This was in my bed when I woke up. Not a big nesting ground for falcons, Chicago.”
“They’re migratory.” Laney defended.
“Look at it a little harder,” Sarah insisted.
Laney picked the feather up and twirled it in her fingers. “It’s a feather, it’s just a feather.”
Sarah went to the entertainment center and pulled off a small red book. She flipped the pages with her thumb. Then held it open for Laney. There was a drawing of a horned amulet, a simple scroll design embossed at it’s peak.
“So,” Laney asked.
Precisely, Sarah positioned the feather in Laney’s hand so the vane faced her. There in the barbs was woven the same delicate pattern. “Tell me again how it’s all a fantasy. Please, help me understand how this isn’t real.”
Grabbing the book, Laney switched her eyes, blinked and switched them again. She looked at Sarah whose face was desperate for any rational explanation. Laney wished she could give her one. No words rushed to her tongue.
“You can’t,” Sarah pardoned her. “You can’t because I’ve tried and I can’t. I reread this book cover to cover and it ends happily each time. It never talks about what happens later.”
Busily trying to rub the emblem off the feather, Laney ignored her.
“It won’t come off,” Sarah told her. “I tried.” She put the book and feather on the coffee table at their feet and held Laney’s hands. With heavy seriousness she told her, “I’m not asking you to step into my nightmare. I’m just asking you to please, take care of Toby, take care of Eldora and her daughter if I don’t come back. I have a safe deposit box at the bank, the key is in my jewelry box with my wedding rings. There are letters to explain where my money should go. The penthouse is yours, the car Toby’s. You’ve been my dearest friend for my entire life.” Clutching her, Sarah kissed the side of Laney’s face. “Thank you for that.” She held her friend at arm’s length before she turned to go upstairs once more.
“Where are you going?” Laney cried out through tears.
“I’m going home. I’m going where he can find me and then I’m going to finish this.”
“Sarah?” At the mention of her name, she turned on the stairs to look down at Laney. Her eyes were flooding with tears, her face distorted by disbelief. “You can’t just go. You faced him alone once, and he just came back, let me go with you.”
Pointing at the red book on the table, Sarah reminded her. “I have to face him alone, read the book. That’s the way it’s done.”
Laney took the stairs two at a time, clutching Sarah’s arm when they met. “He can’t have you,” she moaned through tears. “You’re mine, my friend. He’s immortal. He doesn’t need you. I do, dammit, I do!” Sarah looked through her. “I don’t remember my life without you in it Sar. I need you.”
“I’m leaving in the morning,” she replied coldly.
“Leaving for where?”
“The last place I was able to call Hoggle.”
“The farm house?” It was a beautiful piece of property Sarah and Timothy had bought after they were married. A sweet old place in upstate New York. Chestertown to be exact. Eighty acres. Sarah swore she’d sell it after they split up, but she never managed to get around to it. She’d returned there only once since they split up, when her father died.
“The farm house,” Sarah confirmed. “Alone.”
“Let me go with you. I can watch out for you. I won’t stop you from contacting him, maybe I can help.” Suddenly they were awkward teenage girls again. Sarah took Laney’s hand and led her upstairs. She bent to wash her face while Laney watched her. “I’ll follow you if you don’t let me go Sarah.” She watched her friend pull the shell over here head and unwrapped her chest and mid-section. “I’ll follow you and I’ll tell Toby to meet me there.”
Slipping on a nightgown, Sarah did away with the boots and the riding pants she’d been wearing. She sat Laney on the bed, then sat beside her. A calmness she wasn’t expecting swept through her. Now someone else knew it was real. Admitted it and in confirming that, Laney had given Sarah a new strength, an assured determinacy. “If you follow me, I’ll call the police and demand a protection order.”
“I’d never hurt you Sarah,” she said smoothing back the long strands that meet her face.
“I didn’t mean for me.” Sarah went about turning down the bed. “You’re welcome to stay.”
Laney undid the tie on her coat and tossed it over Sarah’s hamper. She crawled in under the covers. She faced her friend. Tears soaked the pillow beneath her head. “Promise me you’ll come back.”
“Promises are easily made and easily broken,” she told her.
“Not between us. I’ve kept every promise I’ve ever made you Sarah, and you’ve done the same for me. If you promise then you’ll have to come back.”
“Then I can’t promise,” she admitted closing her eyes, Laney’s pain too much for her to take. “He’s going to hunt me until he kills me, I’d rather not be toyed with indefinitely.”
“But I thought he loved you.”
“Once, a long time ago, it was said that the Goblin King had fallen in love with a girl and given her certain powers. I can feel him. I guess that’s my power. All these years, worlds away and I can still feel him. I destroyed his home, brought it crumbling down in pieces around him. Would you love someone who’d done that to you?”
“I would if it was you. I would forgive you anything Sarah, not because it’s written in a book, not because it’s how things must be, but because I love you. Because you have forgiven me. Because once you love someone a part of you always loves them.”
“Please don’t make this any harder than it has to be.”
“Harder! Harder for whom? You’ve got enough practice at leaving the people who love you!” Sarah’s eyes switched open. “You left your father, your brother, your husband, and now you’re leaving me. Are we so hard to love? Are we so difficult to live with?”
She surveyed Laney’s face keeping her eyes moving to absorb the forming tears. Her hands reached for her friend’s shoulders and she pulled the tiny frame tight to her. “Loving the lot of you is the easiest thing I have ever done, easier than breathing. Do you think I meant to leave all those times? I wasn’t good enough for my father. I caused too many problems for him and Karen. Lord knows I let Toby down more than I can count and I couldn’t even give my husband his own child. They deserved better. You deserve a better friend than someone who forgets about you for some one night stand.”
“We never saw you that way.”
Sarah smiled at how hard Laney fought for her. “This isn’t about all of you.” Laney could feel tears searing the back of her gown. “This is about me. I couldn’t live with the way I treated people. I became everything I hated when I was young and positive, when I thought the world could be filled with white knights.” She pressed Laney back letting her hands caress the length of her friend’s arms until she clasped her balled up fingers. “My fantasies have finally caught up with me and I think they’re pissed that I ran away from them too. My father forgave me. Toby forgave me. Timothy forgave me. You have forgiven me. Jareth hasn’t.”
“He will. When he sees you, sees what you’ve become, how smart, how beautiful…”
Closing her eyes Sarah indicated she no longer wished to hear the showers of praise. She bowed her head, pressing her lips against Laney’s knuckles. “Please,” she begged. “Please be quiet. I need to get some sleep if I’m to face my demons tomorrow.”
“Could you not say demons,” Laney requested. Sarah nodded her agreement.
***** ***** *****
When Laney stretched to open her eyes, she saw Sarah, suitcase flung open at 180 degrees. Neatly stacked jeans, folded shirts. She was making a basketball game out of packing her socks just then. “Damn,” Laney said as she shook off sleep. “I was hoping last night was just a bad dream.”
“Don’t get me started again. I’m going. Nothing you could say can change my mind.”
Laney smiled, “Even if I tell you you’re being a selfish megabitch?”
“Even that,” Sarah smiled back as she tucked some underwear into her bag. Slamming it closed, she pulled the zipper around the edge and sighed. Retrieving the leather bound miniature copy of the Labyrinth from her night stand, she pitched it at Laney. For morning reflexes, she managed to intervene in time to save her nose from a rough blow. “Keep this for me.”
“Won’t you need it?”
“I know it well enough, hell, I’ve had it memorized since I was,” her eyes grew distant and she chuckled nervously, “since I was fifteen. Besides, if there’s a way to get me back hidden in there somewhere, I’m counting on you to find it.”
“How will I know if you’ve...you know...gone?”
Sarah sat by Laney’s knees, “I’ve got 12 days vacation left, if I’m not home by then, assume I’ve gone. Otherwise, I’ll call you the minute I get back here.”
Wrapping her arms around Sarah’s neck, Laney let a small sob escape. “Take care of yourself alright because when you get home we’re going to have a lot making up to do.”
Sarah shook her head, but remained silent. Any sort of acknowledgment of what was there to be done when, if she returned home was as good as promising she’d be back and Sarah didn’t want to start breaking promises now. “Get your fat ass out of bed and drive me to the airport.”
“Fat ass! Fat ass!” She picked up one of Sarah’s bed pillows and swatted her host with it. “This ass is as tight as...oh to hell with it! It is getting a little chunky isn’t it?” She rolled over and gave her glutes a shake with her right hand. “Fuck it all, on my way home from the airport I’m going to pick up the two sexiest men I know and spend the afternoon in bed with them pining over you.”
“Two sexiest men huh?”
“Oh yes, Ben and Jerry. It’s a guaranteed orgasm in my mouth.”
“So many comments, so little time.”
Laney popped out of bed borrowing some of Sarah’s clothes. A pair of capris and mid-riff top fit her full length. Short could be a very useful thing at times. “Can’t change your mind then?” Sarah shook her head. “Can’t go with you?”
“Absolutely not. No further than the departure terminal at O’Hare.”
“I’ll take what I can get,” she settled as she took Sarah’s keys from her hand.