Falling Down

CHAPTER 4: COME AWAY, O HUMAN CHILD


She's running. She runs so fast that her feet barely touch the ground, pelting round corners, never looking back, struggling to keep her balance as the world seems to waver from side to side. It's dark as pitch, but she doesn't stop to wonder why she isn't tripping over. She can't stop. That would be suicide.

Behind her, matching her pace, the thing that chases her growls, and lets out a terrible groan.

Another corner turned, and there's another swerve from the world around her, sending a wave of dizziness like a punch to her head. She's in a building now, and it's familiar to her, but she can't put a name to it - rows of lockers on either side of the corridor she's racing down, shoes squeaking as they hit the floor... One locker is open, and there's a strange noise coming from it, like somebody crying...

No time to comfort whatever it is. There's another noise now, a tiny pattering, like a hundred dripping taps. And then a clicking noise and a creak behind her - is it the locker? But it sounds like something opening, not closing.

A flash of white light, and the world changes again. She's outside, racing through the city streets, ducking through alleyways and holes in fences. All the buildings have wide windows, and she knows that someone is watching her through them, clapping for her...

With the sixth sense of the hunted, she knows her pursuer is catching up.

The towering buildings that trap her shrink in size until they are gone altogether, melting away into dark green. She's in a forest, and in the corner of her eyes she can see strange and familiar creatures. They wave at her, but she can't stop. The trees double in number, then triple, and branches scratch at her face as stray leaves block her vision.

The thing is so close to her now that it might be her shadow, her dark half. She's panicking. With her every frantic heartbeat, the world seems to shiver. Now there's nothing before her but black, and she finally stops running. Should she throw herself into the darkness? She's hyperventilating, indecisive...

The thing makes the decision for her. Somehow, without touching her, it gives an almighty push, and she falls. She's plummeting, and reaching out for something to hold, but there are no vines, no roots, no hands. (Hands? Why would there be hands?) Falling down, down, and bile rises in her throat as she knows that, sooner or later, she's going to hit the bottom and-

Sarah woke with a sudden gasp for air, her hands gripping the edge of the seat as she struggled for breath, still disorientated. But slowly her vision came into focus, and she realised that she was awake, alive, and still in Emily's bedroom.

She had only just calmed herself down when the thunder crashed once again, and almost gave her a heart attack. Closing her eyes, she worked on steadying her breathing - or "finding her inner calm", as all those self-help articles in trashy magazines would put it. Opening them again, she carefully took in her surroundings, reassuring herself that everything was okay, and she was safe. But something was strange...

Lightning flared outside, filling the room with white-blue light, and Sarah realised what had been bugging her.

"The curtains. I closed the curtains..."

But they were wide open, both of them, the white material looking eerie in the light of the storm, the true extent of which Sarah could now see through the rain-splattered glass. Rising from the armchair, she began to walk towards the window, her brow furrowed - something still wasn't right. A thought flashed through her mind: that creak in her dream. Was it the window?

No, it couldn't have been. Sarah examined the latch, and it was in its proper place, the window shut tight. With a sigh of relief, she placed her hands on the windowsill, looking out at the tumultuous sky.

And then she froze.

The windowsill was wet. Looking down, she saw that the wood was splattered with raindrops, a few of them even dripping down onto the carpet. The window had been opened during the storm, and then shut again - and not by her.

In the distant sky, thunder rumbled. Gripped by a sudden terror, Sarah turned around, and fixed her gaze on Emily's crib. A sense of déjà vu flooded over her as she slowly began to move towards where she had left the baby girl. For a moment, she was fifteen years old again, in Toby's bedroom, petrified by the sudden silence of her brother. But it was different now, wasn't it? She was different. She wouldn't be afraid.

"I'm not afraid," she whispered to herself, though her eyes were wide and her breathing quick and shallow. "I'm not afraid."

There was no movement in the crib. The blankets were arranged in a rumpled heap, Emily's toy elephant peeking out from underneath them. Sarah willed herself to be quiet as she reached out, willed herself not to scream. Biting her lip so hard she could taste blood she grasped the covers and, with a deep breath, yanked them back, unable to stop a gasp escaping her-

As she saw Emily, fast asleep, just as she had left her.

Sarah couldn't quite believe it. She had been so certain that she was going to find the bed bare, just as she had done with Toby's bed all those years ago. That goblins would laugh at her from all the corners of her room, that something, someone, would beat at the window, that she would find herself once again thrown into a quest to save an innocent baby from a life in the Underground...

"I must be going crazy," she muttered as she rearranged the blankets over Emily. Without really thinking what she was doing, she stroked her hand against the child's hair, smoothing it back behind her ears. And then, glancing down, she pulled her hand back like it had been burnt.

Emily's ears were pointed.

Pointed.

Sarah couldn't take her eyes away from them, and her mouth was literally open in shock. It wasn't a trick of the light. The ears were as they had always been at the bottom, but at the top... delicate, little points. And, as Sarah traced the baby's skin, she noticed something else. Emily had always been a dark child, but now her complexion was not merely olive, but much deeper - almost a nut-brown.

"It can't be," Sarah's voice was hoarse. "It doesn't work like this." This wasn't what was supposed to happen. This wasn't what the Goblin King was supposed to do.

Things change, a little voice in her head told her. And in an instant, Sarah's eyes were narrowed with determination, her mouth set in a firm line. This was a different game, was it? Well, she had changed as well, and she wasn't a confused, naive, spoilt teenager anymore. She wasn't going to let this happen. She would find a way to fix this. And she knew just where to look.

--

Scrabbling under her bed, coughing at the dust from two years of not vacuuming properly, Sarah's hands finally found what she was looking for. Grabbing the handles of the trunk she pulled with all her might, falling back to the floor when it was finally removed from its hiding place. Quickly, she was on her knees and fumbling at the padlock, though her shaking hands meant it took longer than usual to enter the combination (which was, of course, her step-brother's birthday). With the numbers finally in place the padlock opened with a click, and after dropping it to the floor she flung open the lid, looking with trepidation at the objects of her most secret collection.

She had grown up, but she had been unable to part with everything. Instead she had simply chosen to lock her memories away - literally, in this case. All of the books from her childhood were here: the stories, the collections of mythology, the illustrated poems. And there were other things as well, like some of her dressing-up costumes, the shirt she had worn in the Labyrinth, the music box that played a song she knew so well... her fingers itched to wind it up, but she managed to resist. Instead she began delving into the depths of the trunk, hurriedly placing unneeded items on the floor. Finding what she was looking for, a book, she drew it up close to her face, tracing the golden title with her fingers.

"Encyclopaedia of Faerie".

Hurriedly, she flicked through the pages until she found what she was looking for, a section of the book that began with several poems, the first by Charlotte Mew. Willing herself to concentrate, Sarah focused on the opening stanza.

Toll no bell for me, dear Father, dear Mother,
Waste no sighs;
There are my sisters, there is my little brother
Who plays in the place called Paradise,
Your children all, your children for ever;
But I, so wild,
Your disgrace, with the queer brown face, was never,
Never, I know, but half your child!

As she read, Sarah could already begin to feel it sweeping over her - the knowledge she had cultivated in her younger years. She had devoured everything she could about fairy tales. In school she flunked math, but she could tell you the difference between a brownie and a pixie, or to banish a redcap. To tell the truth, Sarah was a little disappointed at how easily she was returning to this mindset, but given the circumstances she was also grateful. By now she had finished the first poem, and was working through others, murmuring the words under her breath.

"The child is not mine as the first was,
I cannot sing it to rest,
I cannot lift it up fatherly
And bless it upon my breast;
Yet it lies in my little one's cradle
And sits in my little one's chair,
And the light of the heaven she's gone to
Transfigures its golden hair..."

"Why with spells my child caressing,
Courting him with fairy joy;
Why destroy a mother's blessing,
Wherefore steal my baby boy?"

"I cross'd my brow and I cross'd my breast,
But that night my child departed –
They left a weakling in his stead,
And I am broken-hearted..."

Each poem was plaintive, tragic, and left Sarah feeling cold as ice. When she had first read these years ago, it had not dawned on her how terrible the idea of a changeling was. Now she knew the reality all too well, and she needed to find a way to reverse what had been done. At last, she found something useful - an actual description of changeling. Pointed ears, a complexion of earthy colours, like brown and dark green... that fitted.

"There must be some way to tell for sure..." The words were barely out of her mouth when she saw a line that said the hair of a changeling grew inhumanly fast. Quick as a flash, Sarah grabbed a pail of nail scissors from her dressing table, and hurried into Emily's bedroom.

She had hardly cut the lock from the girl's hair when, before her eyes, the little stump that was left began to wriggle, and slowly grow. It reminded her of a worm emerging from an apple. It stretched its way up from Emily's head, writhing into an unruly, messy curl as it did so. Sarah noticed with a start the rest of Emily's hair - before it had been in a short, boyish cut, and now it was nearly down to her shoulders.

This wasn't Emily. It looked a little like her, a darker copy, like a shadow of her, but it wasn't her. This wasn't human. This was a changeling. A fairy creature left in her place, while Emily had been spirited away to the Underground.

Sarah was so shocked that she lost her grip on the small pair of scissors. They tumbled out of her hand and, before she could stop them, landed flat on top of the blanket that covered "Emily's" body.

Under the blankets, the changeling began to move. Its arms stretched, in a perfect baby-like gesture, and its eyes opened sleepily. But one look in its eyes told Sarah the truth once and for all. Emily's eyes had been a dark brown, but these were a deep emerald green, almost black. And though it looked and moved like a baby, in its eyes Sarah could see that it was far older than it seemed to be. Older, and nowhere near as innocent. The changeling opened its mouth, and for a second Sarah expected to see hideous, sharp teeth...

But instead, it began to cry. Still, this was almost as shocking to Sarah as teeth would have been - Emily almost never cried. She was quiet through-and-through. But this thing was crying, wailing, now it was screaming, a practically inhuman sound, a mixture of the wailing of a cat and a strange gurgling. It kicked the blankets off from its body, and wriggled wildly, looking so uncomfortable that it reminding her of a beetle stuck on its back. To see something that half looked like Emily do this... it made her sick to her stomach. Unable to watch anymore she walked out of the room, closing the door firmly behind her, though it only muffled the awful screaming sound.

Now she knew what she was fighting, it was time to learn how to fight it.

--

It was around half-past three in the morning (still no sign of Holly - Michael must have been more than just a pretty boy, it seemed), and Sarah had finally finished all the research she could do. Changelings, it seemed, were common across the world, but there were comparatively few ways to be rid of them. There were several obscure stories about brewing beer with eggshells and acorns - Sarah didn't know the first thing about brewing beer, or why this would help, not to mention the fact that it sounded just too obscure to be real.

Of course, there were all the usual ways one could repel some type of fairy, such as iron, salt, rowan and garlic. Or she could simply toss the changeling on a fire. But, despite what it had done, Sarah didn't want to hurt the changeling. It was a baby as well, just not a human baby. And it looked so much like Emily that she knew she never could bring herself to harm it, even if she wanted to. But there was another way, one that seemed relatively painless to all parties: if somebody could make a changeling laugh, then it would be taken back to its true home, and the original baby returned.

"Easier said than done," Sarah grumbled. The baby was still screaming in the other room. Laughter seemed a bit of a stretch at the moment.

Sarah cursed at Jareth under her breath. She didn't know how he was doing this, or why he was messing around with changelings all of a sudden, changing his modus operandi, or why he was doing it at all, but she'd be damned if she was going to let him get away with it. And she would face him prepared.

She'd taken the time to change her clothes, for a start. After putting on a clean pair of jeans, she'd toyed with the idea of putting on the white shirt that had seen her through her last Labyrinth adventure, but decided against it. Jareth needed to see that she wasn't a little girl anymore. So it was back to the outfit that had become her staple nowadays: the white t-shirt, the black leather jacket. It wasn't exactly an original get-up, but it made her feel more adult, more confident, tougher.

She'd also taken the time to put on a pendant she'd picked up in a thrift store a few years ago - an small iron horseshoe, which she hid under her shirt. Iron and horseshoes were both said to resist fairy magic, and it couldn't hurt to have it on her, especially considering she drew the line at filling her pockets with salt and garlic from the kitchen. As an afterthought, she also pulled on a couple of bracelets and rings, in case she ran into Hoggle once again.

She didn't feel like Sarah Williams the actress anymore, but she didn't feel like her childhood self either. She felt... purposeful. Different. New. It wasn't altogether unpleasant. And now, it was time to go and make a baby laugh.

...As she had thought, it was easier said than done.

Sarah tried every trick in the book, everything that had ever amused Emily or Toby. Funny faces, peek-a-boo - the changeling remained the epitome of a tough crowd. She progressed to jokes, from knock-knocks, to three-men-in-a-pub, to a couple of more risqué ones that she felt positively perverted telling to some kind of baby... but if the changeling understood them, it showed no sign of it. It just carried on screaming.

Just when she felt like she was about to cry from frustration, Sarah remembered a movie she'd seen in the cinema a couple of years ago, one that she'd loved: Who Framed Roger Rabbit. There was a scene where the hero defeated some bad guys by making them laugh themselves to death, and the form of comedy that had worked best? Slapstick.

Well, was she an actress or wasn't she? It couldn't hurt to try.

Sighing, Sarah gave the appearance of giving up, and started to walk out of the room. But on the way, as though sliding on an invisible banana skin, she tripped, and fell flat on her back. She tried to get up, but only fell back again with an even louder thump.

In the crib, the changeling stopped screaming.

Sucking in her breath, Sarah seemed to use all of the energy in her body to practically hurl herself up from the ground, only she took it too far. Upon getting to her feet, she was unable to stop herself from careening forward, right into the wall.

With her face pressed against the wallpaper, her lips mouthing a silent prayer that this would work, Sarah couldn't see it - but the changeling smiled.

Staggering around, Sarah made her way back to the crib, her walk uneven and disorientated, her arms stretched out in front of her like some kind of zombie. She kept on walking, and her hands went straight through the bars of the crib. She tried to pull them out, but it seemed they were stuck fast. She pulled again and again, shouting and huffing and puffing, but it seemed nothing could pry them loose. She moved her head in for a closer look and, misjudging the distance, hit her forehead squarely against the edge of the crib. A few seconds of dizzy looks and crossed eyes, and Sarah sunk down to the floor, her hands now sliding easily from the bars, seemingly unconscious due to her own clumsy ministrations.

And now she kept her eyes tightly shut, hoping against all odds that the course on mime she took last autumn, and years of watching Saturday morning cartoons, had been enough. She counted the seconds of silence - five, ten...

Then laughter filled the room. If the sound could be called laughter.

It was just as disconcerting as the screaming had been, just as clearly not human. On one level it was the laughter of a hysterical baby, on another the cackle of a witch, at once a low chuckle and a high-pitched giggle. Sarah got to her feet, her face ashen with fear, watching the changeling convulse in glee. It seemed twice as wild as it had when it had screamed. In fact, now it was shaking so fast that it almost looked as though – as though steam was rising from its body.

Around Sarah, the bedroom seemed to shift, as though parts of it were melting. Or as though it was a photograph that someone was rippling up and down in their hands. More and more steam rose from the changeling, which now seemed lost to madness, and other noises began to join the frightening laughter, though she couldn't pick out any single one of them. Her head started to feel heavy, dizzy, and even blinking her eyes didn't help. She felt like she was going to throw up, faint, perhaps both at the same time - but she wasn't going to let this beat her. She was going bring Emily back, no matter what.

With her last ounce of strength, she reached out and grabbed hold of the changeling's arm. Now the room was still shifting, but she wasn't trapped in it anymore. She was fading away and leaving it behind her. The changeling was returning to where it had come from, and Sarah was hitching a ride. The room gave one final shudder, and everything went black...

--

It might have been seconds or hours later, but when Sarah next opened her eyes she found that she was standing in the open air. It took a minute to adjust to the light, but when she did, she could make out the breathtaking scenery before her. The land rolled into the distance, into forests, strange shaped buildings, mountains, waning into a dusky sky. It was like something out of a dream, familiar to anyone who had ever read a fairy tale. But the Underground was more familiar to Sarah than most.

Five years since she had last been here, and now she had returned.

She heard a slight rustling behind her, and could not stop herself from giving a little, smug smile. So Jareth expected her to turn and beg for mercy in his presence, did he? He expected to surprise her? Impress her? He could think again. She took a moment to steady herself. She had defeated him once, she could do it again. She just had to keep a level head.

Closing her fists in determination, she spun around to face her enemy. "Just what do you think you're playing at, Ja-"

But the name of the Goblin King died in her mouth, just as all her steely determination drained from her body.

The man facing her was clearly not human. Tall, clad in black, he gave off the inexplicable aura of the otherworldly, and had a strange kind of handsomeness about him. A strong jaw-line defining an otherwise almost-delicate face, piercing grey-green eyes and golden hair. Had his smile not been so mischievous, so arrogant, he would have seemed practically angelic. Emily lay in his arms, looking impossibly small.

He belonged to the Underground, and he had stolen Emily. But he was not Jareth. In fact, judging from his slightly surprised expression, he didn't know who Sarah was at all.

"Well," he laughed, his voice clear and steady. "What do we have here?"

Sarah couldn't respond. All her bravado had been knocked out of her. She merely gulped.

This was not what she had been expecting.

--

AN: The title of this chapter comes from "The Stolen Child" by Yeats. The other poems quoted are: "The Changeling" by Charlotte Mew, "The Changeling" by James Russell Lowell, "The Fairy Boy" by Samuel Lover and "The Fairy Child" by John Anster.

A long chapter this time... with a bit of a cliffhanger! Jareth's not behind this? Bet you weren't expecting that. Who is this strange man? What does he want with Emily? What's Sarah going to do now that she's back in the Underground? Tune in next time for answers to all these questions and more!

A massive thank you to all of you who have been reading, and a special thank you to my first two reviewers on AFF! I really appreciate your kind words, and I hope you're still enjoying the story - and don't worry, our favourite Goblin King won't let Sarah steal the show for much longer!