A/N: Happy second night of Chanukah! 3

This one's mostly just a bit of fun, guys. Special thanks to S for being my sounding board/the person who sat there and let me drunkenly read rough drafts at him. What a mensch.

Chapter 11

Back to the Garden

We are stardust, we are golden,
we are caught in the devil's bargain,
and we've got to get ourselves
back to the garden.

"Woodstock," Joni Mitchell via CSNY.

Darkness, and the sensation of falling. Then—there is no landing, but the feeling of movement ceases, replaced by a cool and creeping damp. Sarah opens her eyes.

One hand flies to her mouth, too late to stop the laugh from escaping. It skims over a flat expanse of water, skipping from wall to wall until the entire chamber resounds her wonder and disbelief.

She scrambles to her feet. She's standing on a platform in the middle of some sort of cistern or underground lake. The roughness of the walls and ceiling suggest the latter, but the platform on which she stands is smooth and perfectly square—definitely not natural. It's also submerged in about an inch and a half of water, which explains the damp.

Another laugh is swelling in her chest. She clamps her hand more firmly against her mouth, but she can't suppress the grin which threatens to split her face at the seams. It worked. It actually worked.

A fissure in the stone overhead lets through a jagged slice of light. Sarah steps closer, craning her head for a glimpse of the world outside. As she moves, her foot slips and she goes down hard. The walls return her yelp of surprise as her ass hits stone, water spraying in all directions.

Gingerly, she pushes herself upright once more, rubbing her tailbone, which is already promising a massive bruise, and—

She stills as realization hits her.

—and that's really not supposed to happen, is it.

She squats down on her haunches, looking down at the palm of the hand with which she'd caught herself, at the specks of grit which cling to it. The lake ripples as she dips her hand into the water and again as she withdraws it, clean.

Well, shit.

Sarah rubs her nose, her damp hand shockingly cool against her skin. Okay. Either she's completely misunderstood what Nina had meant about spirit-walking—which is possible, except—

No. Phantom limb is one thing. Phantom hands, face, butt, and feet—she flexes her toes inside her sneakers, wincing at the squelch—is another thing entirely.

She straightens again. So. Something somewhere has plainly gone awry. Just how awry remains to be seen. Could something have happened with the ritual? She casts her mind back, but the last thing she can remember clearly is Nina lighting the censer. Everything after that gets a little fuzzy.

If she really concentrates she can get snatches of… something. A sense of buoyancy, and one of distance. She screws her eyes shut, but it's no good. Even if she can get past the ache of her tailbone there's the wet denim clinging maddeningly to her thighs, the water permeating her shoes, the goosebumps creeping slowly up her arms.

She opens her eyes. Time to think things through. The ritual has clearly taken her somewhere. So: does she take the emergency out Nina had described? Or does she take advantage of the time the spell has given her?

The first option—Sarah ignores the way her gut clenches at the thought—is maybe the most sensible. There are a lot of unknown variables here—an awfully high potential for danger. The smart thing to do would be to report back, tell Nina what happened, and let her adjust accordingly.

On the other hand…

Well, for starters, she doesn't even know where the spell has taken her. It could be the Labyrinth, but it just as easily could be… somewhere else. If it's not the Labyrinth, of course, then she'll go back straightaway. And if it is the Labyrinth…

She realizes she's holding her breath and lets it out in a rush. If it is the Labyrinth, she's still got four or five hours to explore before the spell pulls her back, hasn't she? What a godawful waste, after all these weeks of labor, to cut and run just because things haven't gone perfectly according to plan. And if worst comes to worst and things have gone so totally fubar that—that her return ticket is no longer valid, let's say—surely that's just as true now as it will be five hours from now. She'd already been planning to find an escape route. She might just… have a little extra incentive.

A small part of her wonders why she isn't more freaked out about all this. She shoves the thought aside.

Either way, no point wasting time arguing with herself. Not—she shivers—when there's a whole world waiting.

She rubs hard at her collarbone, just above where her heart is moving in an entirely unbusiness-like flutter, and begins her hunt for the exit.

Bright as it is, the light from overhead isn't quite enough to illuminate the deepest recesses of the cave. In these pockets of shadow, Sarah is reduced to feeling her way along the wall, thigh-deep in chilly water. The floor is mostly smooth, making the occasional ridge or pitfall all the more dangerous. One unexpected ridge nearly oversets her, sending her pitching forwards only to catch herself against the side of the cave.

A rasp of stone. Beneath her hands, the wall shifts.

Sarah lurches backwards, nearly tripping over the same obstacle. There's a moment of undignified flailing before she manages to right herself. Gingerly, she prods across the floor with her foot.

The source of her upset is about half a foot in height, even-surfaced and roughly rectangular, almost like… Yes, okay, like a step.

Carefully, she mounts the step and presses the wall once more. There's a moment of resistance and then, with a grating, ponderous groan, the wall swings out onto sunlight and a twenty-foot drop.

Sarah clutches at the side of the newly made opening, but it's not the drop that has her heart racing. It's the intricate landscape that stretches below her, a sinuous tangle of lines painted in varying shades of leaf-green, clay-red, and stony grey.

Sarah feels herself split in two, like an image shifting out of focus. Half of her remains frozen, trapped in that instant of recognition like a fly in amber. The other half flings its arms around the side of the doorway and squeezes it tight as butterflies take wing in her stomach, a bright and giddy maelstrom.

She did it. She did it. She's back.

Gradually, her split selves resolve, unified by discomfort—the rough press of stone against her cheek, the way the slight breeze presses her sodden jeans back against her skin. She peels away from the wall, straightens the over-shirt tied about her waist, and puts back her shoulders. To business.

Now that she's looking properly, she can make out narrow stone steps cut into the cliffside. There's little cover, but a careful survey turns up no sign of life apart from a large (and strangely lopsided) bird circling lazily overhead. Sarah waits until it passes before picking her way down the mountainside and into the maze beyond.

She finds herself in a fractured-mirror of a formal garden. Towering hedges form long corridors, opening at intervals onto odd, asymmetrical clearings. Some contain miniature labyrinths of their own; others, patches of not-quite wilderness; still others, assorted fragments of slightly misshapen architecture.

She moves carefully at first, edging around corners, sneakered feet light upon the stones. But the more she walks, the clearer it is that the Labyrinth—or at least, this section of it—is deserted. No friendly worms, no talking masonry, no carnivorous fairies. Not even an insect in the bushes or a bird in the sky. The Labyrinth is austere in its repose, quiet, except for Sarah's own footsteps and a teasing breeze that ruffles the leaves of the hedges and the wispy curls at the base of her skull.

Something else is prickling there, at the back of her neck. Not quite a sixth sense, but—just maybe—the lack of it. The feeling comes on her slowly, increasing by degrees. It's a little like walking through an empty fairground, the lights all dimmed, tents flapping in the wind, hollow as bone. These empty corridors and lifeless galleries share some of the same echoing strangeness. It's… well, it's a bit creepy, sure, but more than that, it's awkward. The one presence in a landscape defined by absence—what could be more intrusive?

She rounds a slight curve and sees an opening at the end of the gallery—a pointed stone arch dense with greenery and speckled with yellow flowers. There's something different about the style of the arch—an entry to a different part of the Labyrinth, maybe? Her pace increases along with her heart until she's practically tripping over her own feet in her eagerness. But when she puts her head through, she sees only another long corridor of mixed stonework and shrubbery.

"Hello?" she calls out, cautious, testing.

The green walls of the Labyrinth return only silence.

Damn.

Sarah knuckles her forehead, frustration kicking like a drum in her innards. She'd been so sure this archway would be the one! She rolls her shoulders, trying to dispel the tension growing there.

It's just that she remembers so clearly how it had been that first time, the way the very world had seemed to twist itself into knots to thwart her—to aid her. Has the Labyrinth changed so much since then? Or has she—?

But no, she knows what the difference is. It must have been Jareth's doing, before. He would have roused the Labyrinth, of course he would—would have wound it up and set it after her like those horrible cleaners of his. How many of the troubles she'd encountered along the way had he orchestrated? How many friends—

The thought curdles like sour milk.

At least this time, whatever she finds—it's hers. Surely that's better. To have less, but to know it to be real?

Sarah snorts, and shakes her head. Who does she think she's kidding? She'd take just about anything right now, real or not, friendly or not, as long as it was alive. The cleaners, the headless monsters in the swamp—she'd practically welcome the king himself. At least then she'd have something to react to. At least then she'd have something to fight.

Her limbs twitch at the thought, a prickly jolt of restless longing. She puts out a hand to steady herself against the flowery archway, and snatches it back with a curse—there are thorns among the flowers. She puts her mouth to the point of pain and tastes the salt and copper tang of blood.

A breeze skims the walls of the corridor. The light from overhead grows warm, shading to gold where it strikes the stone of the path before her, as if a cloud had moved from in front of the sun.

She takes a step forward, then, at the cry of a bird, ducks back beneath the shelter of the arch. A shadow skims across the stones. A few moments later, the cry comes again, more distant now. She counts her heartbeats. When she reaches thirty, she resumes walking.

The goblin patrol finds her not five minutes later.

She hears them before she sees them—they're not exactly keeping a low profile, between the stamps and the shouting and jangling of armor—and immediately doubles back, moving as quickly and quietly as she can. Around this corner, down the left-hand passage and—there, yes, the corridor widens to make space for a small wooded pond. Sarah ducks beneath branches, wincing at the crackle of twigs beneath her feet, and hurls herself behind a large bush at the water's edge. Her heart is threatening to beat itself right out of her chest. She'd half given up hope on coming across anyone at all, and now, what sounds like an armed patrol? You'd think she'd have learned by now, she thinks, biting her lip against the bone-deep hum of anticipation, to be careful what she wished for.

She's only just managed to catch her breath when she hears once more the clatter of armored boots, overlain with a slightly off-beat cadence.

"Left! Right! Left, right, left!"

Sarah is a closed circuit, body abuzz with tension as the footsteps draw nearer, rattling and clanking.

"Right! Left! Right, right, left! Left! Left! Left, left, left!" Then, urgently: "Right! Right! Right, you fuckers, righ—"

A muffled crash, such as might be made by one or more armored figures colliding with a hedge.

Sarah is frozen. She can feel the expression on her face—the sort of expression her mother used to warn her might stick. Just— what?

For the next few minutes, she is treated to a symphony of moans, curses, and occasional clanking as she crouches unmoving behind her bush, torn between hilarity and horror. She'd been so careful, and this—this is what she's been afraid of?

Not that she didn't have reason—at the very least, she can't risk them reporting her to Jareth. But—god, the indignity of it! Couldn't they at least have the decency to be menacing?

As if in answer to her question, the sound of marching begins again, followed a few beats later by the chanting, transformed now into a call and response.

"Met my lady 'mong the stones!"

A ragged chorus of voices return the line: "Met my lady 'mong the stones!"

"Ate me up and crunched me bones!"

Sarah blinks. Surely she can't have heard right—

"Ate me up and crunched me bones!"

It's just then that the patrol comes into view: half a dozen figures in ill-fitting armor moving in a brisk military shuffle. Yet somehow, they don't seem so comical anymore. Maybe it's the spikes on their helms and shoulders, or the bullish deliberation of their walk. One of them turns its head in her direction and she stifles a gasp. No face there, human or goblin—just a sheet of brownish metal with holes for the eyes, a slit down the middle, and shadows beneath. The head turns away again, spear-butt thumping the ground in time to the tuneless song.

Wolfie's starving under hill
After lady's et her fill!

Then, thankfully, they're passing without a second at the copse where Sarah is hidden. She can still hear the echoes of their grisly little ditty winding down the halls of the Labyrinth behind them.

Kings an' peasants, beggars, priests,
All equals is at lady's feast,

For when the winds begin to blow,
Down the gullet they shall go!

Sarah waits until long after their voices have died away before she emerges from her hiding place. The afternoon seems different, somehow, cooler, sharper edged, as if the goblins had taken something away with them as they passed. Even the tenor of the silence has changed. She wonders, for the first time, if she is truly alone.

"Hello?"

Her voice cracks when she speaks, as if from disuse. How long has she been walking? She'd thought not even an hour.

There is no direct answer, but she swears she can feel something, some kind of tension, or—or not tension, exactly—something more like attention. The very air seems charged with it, still as a caught breath.

"Hello?" she says again, louder this time. The attention—though surely it must be her imagination—seems to sharpen, an eyeless gaze that sets the hairs on her arms to rising.

She begins to back out of the woods. She's just reached the edge of the copse when a sudden cry and the beating of wings send her diving once more for cover.

There's a rush of air, like something falling, followed by a thump and a faint squeak. Then silence.

Sarah counts out a minute in frantic heartbeats, ears straining for any further sound. Then, rising to her knees she leans forward and peers around the bush which conceals her, directly into a pair of saucer-like eyes.

Sarah freezes.

The creature before her is small, and shaped kind of like double scoop of ice cream, if scoops of ice cream came covered in brownish fur. The fur on the body-scoop is thick enough to conceal any limbs or appendages apart from the two webbed feet which protrude from under its bulk. Its head-scoop is adorned with two sail-like ears, a twitch of a nose, and those impossibly enormous eyes, which stare unblinkingly at a spot about two feet to Sarah's left.

Cautiously, she turns her head. Nothing but a few scrubby plants and a couple of yards of stagnant pond water, bounded by the ubiquitous green hedge. She looks back to the creature. Its gaze has not wavered. If it has noticed her presence at all, it gives no sign.

Careful not to stir so much as a leaf, she withdraws once more behind the bush. The creature doesn't look likely to be fast on its feet—if she goes right, she can probably make a break for it and lose it somewhere in the turns of the Labyrinth.

But why should she? She came here to find information, not to wander a bunch of empty corridors and bolt like a startled rabbit at the first glimpse of another living being.

Moving slowly, keeping her body open and unthreatening, she emerges from behind the hedge.

The little creature's head snaps round to face her, its pupils expanding and contracting like the lens of a camera.

Sarah clears her throat. "Um. Hi." Then, receiving no response: "Nice to meet you. What's your name?"

The creature says nothing.

Doesn't it ever blink?

"I'm Sa—ah, um. Searching. For something. I was wondering if you might be able to help me?"

Does it even understand speech? Last time, everything she'd encountered had seemed to speak and understand English, but this time around, things are plainly a little different.

Maybe she's just taking the wrong approach. If there's one thing the Goblin King has taught her about his world, it's that few things come without a price.

Hastily, she casts her mind about for a bargaining chip. Delving into her pockets, she comes up with a handful of slightly crushed nuts—the remains of Nina's cashews.

"Tell you what, why don't we have a trade? You share some information with me, and in return, I'll share some of my delicious snacks." She pops a cashew into her mouth and chews theatrically, molding her face into a mask of enjoyment.

"Mmmm!" Sarah swallows. "Delicious! Now you have one."

Still keeping her movements slow, she reaches out a hand and tosses one of the nuts. It skitters along the ground and comes to rest about a foot in front of the creature.

The creature stiffens, its gaze snapping to the nut, but, after a few moments, it relaxes and waddles forward a few steps. It bends forward, slowly, face to the ground, the curve of its body resembling nothing so much as a fur-covered slinky. Then it straightens. The nut is gone.

"Good, right? How about another one?" She extends her hand. The creature looks from it to her face, then back to the nut. "I promise I don't bite," she says, putting a smile into her voice.

The creature's gaze continues to flicker, back and forth and back again. Its ears droop piteously.

"Nothing to be scared of," Sarah says, reassuringly. "Here." She rises on her knees and shuffles forwards a few inches.

This is a mistake.

The creature rears back, ears flying out like the wings of a plane. Its scoop-like head sinks into its shoulders with a mechanical sounding clunk, and then, incredibly, begins to spin, slowly at first, and then faster and faster. Sarah scrambles to her feet as a sound emerges from that blur of brownish fur—something like an air-raid siren, deafeningly loud and climbing in pitch. She starts to run.

From a distance, she hears shouts and the clamor of armor. Green corridors flash past her, the cobbles blurring beneath her feet. There's a whoosh of air, and she ducks just in time as with a cry, a great bird swoops down, missing her scalp by scant inches. She throws her arms across her head, looking desperately for cover as the shadow wheels and the bird plunges down for another pass.

Sarah lunges forward, but her feet are suddenly on unstable footing. The ground itself seems to rise up beneath her, and then she's hurtling headlong into the hedge. She puts up an arm and turns away her face—

Only it seems she's miscalculated, because instead of catching herself against a wall of leaves and branches, she keeps falling. Sarah hits the ground shoulder first and rolls to the side, expecting at any moment the scream of victory, the slash of claws.

It never comes. The only pain she feel is the bright ache of her shoulder; the only sound, her own laboured breathing.

Sarah pushes herself up and looks around.

She's all alone in a green passageway about eight feet wide and half again as tall.

The walls are a dense mass of greenery, shrubs and saplings and young plants all growing together. Branches come together over top to form an arched canopy, filtering sunlight but blocking the sight of the sky. It's almost as if, Sarah thinks, she's inside the hedge, and someone has carved out a tunnel through the center of it. But for that to be the case, the hedge would have had to grow much, much taller and wider. Or—with a rush of sudden alarm—she would have had to have grown much smaller.

She turns, shoving against the wall. Twigs catch at her hair, unseen thorns pricking at her skin as her questing hands meet an impenetrable lattice of trunks and branches. She tugs at the branches, testing their weight—if she can't force her way through here, maybe she can climb up to where the branches are thinner—and the hedge seems to contract, pinching her fingers between the trunks.

Sarah pulls back, panting and battered, but not beaten. If she can just pull away enough of the twigs and lesser greenery, she should be able to either break or climb the larger branches. As for the scratching and the squeezing— She unties the button-down around her waist and, after a brief hesitation, peels off her tank-top. As quickly as she can—she really doesn't want to be caught trespassing in the Labyrinth in nothing but jeans and a bra—she puts on the button-down, then, grasping one edge of the tank-top between her teeth, tears it into two roughly even rags.

Almost as if it senses her intent, the tunnel begins to darken as branches thicken overhead. A low susurration runs through the undergrowth, and the trees creak menacingly.

Sarah ignores it, wrapping the rags around her hands and tying them off with her teeth.

The passage grows chill as the trees seem to draw closer. Sarah ignores them, but the tunnel is rapidly approaching a sort of twilight as branches meet and mesh, blocking out the daylight. Wood squeals and groans, pressing towards her at an alarming rate as seedlings poke through the ground at her feet.

Branches reach down from the canopy above, scraping along her scalp and tangling themselves in her hair. She reaches up to free herself, but her half-bound hands are clumsy. More branches have joined the first, trapping her hair in a tightening web. Try as she might, she can't seem to tug free.

Almost sobbing with fear and frustration, she takes a step back, bracing herself for an almighty yank, only to trip on a root that swells through the ground at her feet. The branches release her and she drops, landing painfully on the earth. The air down here is thick and moist and she struggles for breath, nostrils choked with the scent of chlorophyll and rich earth. It's almost completely dark now, but all around her she hears it—the sound of rank and sickly verdancy—of monstrous growth.

She shrinks in on herself, and the trees follow, vines twining around her legs. Gasping, she arches her back as a rapidly growing sapling shoots up under her shirt, its budding branches scraping like fingernails up her spine. Leaves close in around her, whispering against one another and caressing her face. Buds open, filling the air with a cloying perfume as some great, multifoliate flower opens its petals against her neck like a kiss.

"All right!" The words are torn from her throat in that instant of sensual horror, of unsought, unnatural touch. "All right, all right, whatever you want, just leave me alone, just stop—" and then she's choking as the leaves enter her mouth and then—

Silence. Light. Air.

Sarah opens her eyes to find that she's lying curled in the middle of the tunnel, cheek pressed to the earth and face wet with tears. The hedges and trees arch above her, distant and sedate.

"Oh, fuck you."

She pushes herself into a seated position and spits onto the earth, trying to rid her mouth of that persistent, vegetable taste.

"Was that necessary?" she calls out, her voice shaking.

Silence.

Sarah rips off the makeshift gloves and shoves them in her back pocket, scrubbing her hands over her face. Then she takes a deep breath, and clambers to her feet.

"Don't you dare try to pull anything like that again, do you hear me? Don't you dare."

More silence, but the grass and weeds around her curve away from her, as though some faint, intangible breeze were emanating from all sides. There's something about their gently bowed forms that seems almost...contrite. Apologetic.

Unless, of course, as seems entirely possible in this moment, she is actually going totally out of her fucking mind.

Sarah glances around at the trees. "You can understand me, right?" she asks, hating the quaver in her voice.

A rustle of affirmation.

"Awesome. Super." Sarah presses the heel of her hand to her forehead and heaves a shaky sigh. "Well, what exactly do you want?"

A shiver goes down the length of the passage, a fluttering of leaves and branches that starts to Sarah's left and rolls past her like a wave, disappearing into the distance.

"Sorry, didn't quite get that."

Another shiver, although this time the leaves are moving in an actual, tangible breeze. It sends strands of hair fluttering across her face, and little twigs and stones skittering across the tunnel floor.

"Yeah, still not sure what you're trying to tell me," Sarah says, using her fingers to comb the remaining twiglets and leaves from her hair.

A blast of icy wind barrels down the passageway, knocking Sarah back several steps. Grimly, she raises a hand, trying to hold her place but the pressure of the wind is too much to bear, and she's forced to back up another step. Instantly, the wind drops.

Realization dawns.

"You want me to go this way?" she asks, pointing to the right.

A breeze ruffles her hair in a gentle affirmative.

She takes a few more steps down the corridor, then stops.

"Hang on, though, I remember how this works. It's never the way you think it should be. Which means I should really be going left."

Another gust of wind hits her from out of nowhere.

"Cut that out!"

The wind picks up, whipping around her ears and teasing her hair from its ponytail, always pushing, pushing—

"I mean it! I won't be bullied!"

The wind abates slightly.

"Good! Now, you can settle down so we can discuss this reasonably, or I'll stand here and wait until you do."

The wind blasts her full in the face, but Sarah doesn't budge, standing with her arms folded and her eyes screwed up tight, waiting it out. Gradually, it peters out to the barest of breezes.

Sarah glares up at the canopy of trees. "Christ, I'd forgotten how pushy this place can be."

Silence.

She sighs and rubs her forehead. "I need a smoke," she mutters.

Something drops from above, striking her on the forehead.

"Ow." Sarah rubs her forehead, crouching down to see whatever it was. As she bends down, something else strikes her on the top of her head and slides off. She pivots, snatching up it from where it landed on the ground. A plain book of matches. Turning, she finds the original projectile before her: a (now slightly battered) pack of Winstons.

At least, they appear at first glance to be Winstons, but a closer inspection of the label reveals that the familiar golden eagle has been replaced by an owl in flight.

"Cute," she mutters, canting her eyes up towards the canopy.

The pack seems to grow warm in her hand. Looking down, she sees that the name on the label has changed from Winston to Winsome.

She narrows her eyes. "There's such a thing as too cute. Anyway, I appreciate the thought, or whatever, but I'm not smoking your weird, magic cigarettes. I had enough of that in college, thanks."

The pack heats again, sharply and suddenly, enough to make her yelp. Glancing down, she sees that the pack now reads Willsome.

"Yeah, I get that a lot."

She sighs. It's not impossible that that isn't some sort of trick. It probably wouldn't actually kill her to be polite to otherworldly, tobacco-distributing tunnels, especially when she's in the middle of trying to teach them the benefits of civil persuasion.

"Maybe later though. Thanks."

Another brief blossom of warmth. If temperature could convey a sense of smugness—which it almost certainly couldn't—this would. Welcome, says the label.

Sarah snorts and tucks the pack in her breast pocket.

"So," she says. "Talk to me. Or…whatever it is that you do. You want me to go right. In my experience, going the way I'm supposed to in this place nearly always ends in disaster. So why should I listen to you now?"

From behind her comes an earth-shaking crash. Sarah whirls around to see an enormous tree trunk lying across the disfavored path. The tree is far too large to be part of the structure of the bower, and has, in its falling, knocked great holes in the hedge to either side. Sarah starts forward, hoping for a glimpse of the Labyrinth beyond, but she's too slow. The holes are already being plugged with rapidly growing verdure, all sprouting twigs and snaking vines.

Her flesh crawls in recollection, and she turns away.

"Give me some reason that isn't a threat," she says loudly and firmly.

For a moment, nothing. Then, from somewhere to the right a faint noise, like a tea-kettle going off very loudly and very far away.

She takes a step towards the noise, striking her foot painfully against something raised and solid on the ground. Something which had most definitely not been there only a moment before.

Crouching down and clearing away the grass and weeds, she uncovers a long, metal bar, rising several inches off the ground and bolted to a wooden plank.

The bar is buzzing.

"You have got to be kidding me."

The whistle comes again much closer now—unmistakably the sound of an old-fashioned steam engine.

Sarah scrambles to her feet. The tunnel is only just wide enough for a train to pass through. If she can't find some kind of cover...

For the second time that day, she throws herself against the walls of the passage, desperate for an exit—for some avenue of escape—but they're as impenetrable as ever.

The train barrels down the track towards her, its wheels on the track rumbling like thunder.

She runs down the track in the other direction, towards the fallen log, and begins trying to climb, but the tree is chest-high and surprisingly slippery.

The train is getting closer. She can feel the hum of the rails down to her very bones. She screws her eyes shut and waits for impact—

Impact never comes.

Opening her eyes, she sees the train waiting a few feet in front of her, patient and eager as a Labrador retriever. The whistle hoots twice, signaling the all-aboard.

She lets out a trembling breath, straightens her shirt, and, wiping a few stray tears from her face, shoots another deadly glare up at the canopy.

"I hate your sense of humor," she mutters, and climbs aboard.

She fancies she hears an answering purr from the engine before the train takes off down the track, back in the direction from which it had come, moving at a brisk but far more sedate pace.

Sarah leans over the back of the rail, watching as the tunnel recedes and the tracks fade away into the green. But that fading, she realizes with an unpleasant jolt, isn't just the result of distance. Before her eyes, the weeds and grasses are creeping back over the rails, hiding them from sight. She shudders, the memory of that lush, unnatural proliferation still fresh in her memory.

"Creepy," she mutters.

The train gives a little lurch of indignation.

"Yes, you," she tells it, clutching the railing for support. "Don't think I forgot your nasty little trick with the trees earlier."

The wheels on the track rumble disgruntledly.

After fifteen minutes or so (time is hard to estimate without a watch), Sarah gets tired of standing and watching a landscape of undifferentiated green, and enters the carriage. To her surprise, she finds it quite nicely furnished, with comfortably overstuffed leather seats and polished tables of solid oak, each set with a cut-glass ashtray. There's even a jukebox. She wonders if this is someone's idea of apology, and if so, how she feels about it.

She ignores the ashtrays, unsure whether or not they represent a nice gesture or another example of Labyrinthine pushiness. Either way, she has no intention of putting magically produced cigarettes into her body. Imagine being like Persephone and having to spend one twentieth of your life Underground because you hadn't been able to wait for a nicotine fix.

She does, however, make use of the jukebox, which has a surprisingly decent music selection. Amazing, how much easier it is to ride inside an anthropomorphic train controlled by some unknown power that apparently thinks attempted murder makes for a hilarious practical joke when you're doing it to the sounds of "Don't Stop Believin'."

Sarah gets through six more jukebox plays before the train finally comes rattling to a halt. The door swings open and she carefully climbs out.

The landscape she sees is virtually indistinguishable from any that has gone before it, a textured swath of eyewatering green. Sarah notes with an irritating surge of apprehension that they seem to have reached the end of the passage—unless she finds a way off the tracks, the only way out for the train will be through her.

"So what now?" she wonders aloud.

The train gives a little hoot in response and Sarah jumps. She'd half-forgotten that it was—her mouth pulls at the strangeness of the thought—that it was listening.

"I think you've misplaced your station," she says.

The train lets out another whistle, low and long, like a sigh. Then it begins to rumble back down the track towards her.

"Hey!" Sarah scrambles backwards. "Hey, cut that out! I thought we were done with this shit!"

The train, unsurprisingly, ignores her, shunting her another three yards up the passage before grinding to a halt.

"And what exactly— Oh."

Because there it is, an opening in the green. The angle had hidden it before, but now she can plainly perceive the mouth of a second tunnel, blessedly free of tracks.

"You couldn't have dropped me off here in the first place?"

No answer.

Typical.

Sarah takes a step towards the passage, then turns back to look at the train.

"Well," she says, and stops. You sure as hell didn't thank someone for kidnapping you, and 'be seeing you' might be taken as an invitation. She clears her throat. "Bye, then."

Not so much as a whistle.

Sarah sighs and steps into the passageway. Behind her, the train rumbles to life, and she turns to watch it disappear back down the track. Shaking off a small and utterly inexplicable pang, she squares her shoulders and starts off down the passage.

The passage is short, but what initially appears to be a dead end is revealed, as Sarah approaches, to be a pair of massive double doors, apparently fashioned from a mix of wood and metal, but so overgrown with creepers and ivy that it's difficult to be sure.

Sarah eyes the doors speculatively. "I'm guessing you want me to go through?" she says, glancing towards the leafy canopy for affirmation.

Silence.

"What? Nothing to say for yourself?" She pulls out the slightly battered packet of cigarettes. "What about you?" she asks it. "Any wisdom to share?"

The words on the label appear to shimmer for a moment as the pack heats in her hand.

Wisdom, they read, an inquiring tilt to the letters, as if to say, "who, me?"

Sarah snorts, and tucks the pack back into her pocket.

"Well," she says, "come on feet," and, pushing the doors open, steps inside.

A/N: The Labyrinth plays rough, you guys. It's kind of low-key my favorite character.

Also, does Sarah have the cheesiest taste in music or what? The early nineties were hell for her—imo the real reason it took her so long to fall off the supernatural bandwagon was that from '91 to '94, she was too busy trying to fake an appreciation for grunge. A person can only live so many double lives at once. You know all that college time we glossed over in Chapter 6? Picture a two-minute continuous take of Sarah unconvincingly headbanging to "Heart-Shaped Box," and, like, yeah. In a nutshell.

Various inspiration for this chapter comes from Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, The Hobbit, and Alice in Wonderland, but I feel like all of those are pretty much a given and I should stop citing them alla time. Visual references for are linked to via the chapter post on my tumblr (whenas-in-silks), but include the Tunnel of Love in Ukraine for the train bit and Quinta da Regaliera for everything forever. Vaguer inspiration comes from surrealist art. Which surrealist art, you ask? Yes.

Songs:

"Woodstock," by Joni Mitchell (CSNY cover, no playin)

"Out of Nowhere," by Wye Oak

"Welcome to the Jungle," by Guns 'n' Roses (this was so close to being the title song of this chapter)

"Freight Train," by Peter, Paul & Mary (I love this because it makes me picture an old-timey cartoon train with a big ole smile chugging down the track and swaying to the music, and inside there's Sarah absolutely fuming like "You think you so fukkin cute." It does. It does think it so fukkin cute.)

Thanks to lily5lace, Anneige, Sazzle76, lavenderspark, Anon, Mistress DragonFlame, Sixseedseternalbond, allisonfreedman, kittyspike08536, theNiceDevil, COOLER, Whack-the-beetle, Saphira113, and guest for reviewing!

Happy holidays/generalized wintertimes, and I'll be back with another chapter in the new year! In the meantime, if you enjoyed, please drop a line and let me know, here or at whenas-in-silks on tumblr!