Work Text:
24 December 1980, Christmas Eve at the Williams’ House:
A ten-year-old Sarah sat with a pouting look on her pursed lips in front of her vanity mirror in her room. Her dark brows were scrunched together in disapproving brooding fashion, and every so often, she expelled a disgruntled huff, twitching her nostrils with lingering agitation.
It was evident that she was not a happy camper, far from it. Her father had just informed her that he was going to marry this dreadful woman, Karen was her name, whom he had been dating exclusively over the past two years.
The recall of the conversation elicited another pained groan from her.
Unlike the others, who all had turned out to be fleeting trysts and passing romances, his intentions appeared to be more significant with her.
In the beginning, Sarah failed to pay his true aspirations any heed and shrugged his courting off as merely another meaningless dalliance on his part.
He was a genuinely good-looking man in his prime, at only thirty-two. After her mother had abandoned the both of them in order to pursue her acting career, it was only natural that he felt lonely.
She understood that.
She felt lonely herself.
Abandoned and unloved.
This had to be the kind of painful feelings an orphan endured, or maybe it wasn’t since an orphan never had any parents to miss in the first place. They never had experienced the love of a caring mother or father, so how could they know of such loss.
She, however, had, and she missed her mum dearly.
How cruel the universe could be to provide her with a loving set of parents, only to rip one away in such a heartless manner.
It had come as an enormous, life-altering shock to a then seven-year-old Sarah.
For months on end, she had sulked and had felt sorry for herself. The depressions of her father did not help her own dismal situation. They both felt rejected and betrayed in their own ways.
After a year of sulking, her father had finally managed to drag himself out of his pitiful state at the advice of a few of his male colleagues, who had formed some sort of reassuring brotherhood.
“At least he had a support group”, she mumbled with bitter acid under her breath over the surfacing memory, a memory she couldn’t stop from unravelling.
Due to the relentless urging of his friends, Robert Williams finally began to attend blind dates, which had been set up for him, and started playing the field in search of a new wife, and a replacement mother for Sarah.
At first, nothing seemed to come of the efforts, and internally, Sarah was greatly relieved and cheering.
She had become used to living alone with her father. And if there was to be another woman in their home, it had to be her real mum, not some floozie he had picked up at some sleazy bar.
However, as the months dragged on, and a full year had passed, she noticed that he kept meeting the same woman for his rendezvous. It made her suspicious, but she still didn’t give the sincerity of his romance any credence.
It was only when he brought this ‘Karen’ home and introduced the interloper to her, proclaiming she was the one he wanted to settle down with and that she would be his new wife, and therefore, would become Sarah’s new stepmother, that Sarah’s biggest fear came to fruition.
He was about to replace her mother with this new woman, whom she didn’t trust nor found very pleasing to be around.
Although Karen tried her best to win over Sarah’s support, Sarah found her to be insincere, conceited, a gold digger, and cold as ice.
Sarah voiced her objections to her father, but all her carefully laid-out reasonings and arguments fell onto deaf ears. He finally became angry and told her to just accept it, she had no other choice, Karen was going to be her new mother, and that was final.
That had been only three days ago, and the wedding was to be held in early February of next year.
For Sarah, it had come as a complete shock that hit her like a ton of bricks. All hope, she had held out that Karen would eventually disappear like all the others, vanished at that very same moment.
She did not want a replacement mum.
She already had a mum, even though her mother never visited and only wrote her a brief note twice a year. One for her birthday, and one for Christmas.
It had been two years since she last had seen her mother, and that had been for but a short hour on her way to New York for an audition. I guess it had been convenient enough for her to make the stop.
No such convenience had occurred since.
She held the card she had just received in the mail in her perusing hands, twiddling it in slow absent circles.
After a deep exhale, she opened it up and read it once again, for the umpteenth time, as if this time it would magically say something different.
It didn’t.
Hello Sarah,
I had hoped to come by for Christmas and spend it with you, but unfortunately, I received a contract for another movie that is being shot in France, and the first day of shooting is on December 20th.
I am so sorry to miss it, but I’ll make it up to you on our birthday. I promise.
Love, Linda
Sarah expelled another, this time more forceful, huff through her nostrils and distorted her lightly freckled face into a grimace.
She already knew this promise would be broken, just like all the other previous promises had been broken.
Her mother’s assurances could never be taken at face value.
On top of that, she hadn’t even addressed her as ‘My dear Sarah’ or ‘Beloved daughter’, like any mum would. Nor had she signed it with ‘Love you, Mum’.
No, she had signed it with her first name. What mother would sign a card to her daughter with her first name?
“A non-mum. That’s who”, she muttered disheartened to herself and tossed the card into the rubbish bin next to ther desk, her sorrow eyes watching it fall to its very bottom.
“I don’t have a mum anymore, but hey, I’m getting a new one after Christmas. Yay, lucky me. Maybe this one will be better. Not.”
Her oozing sarcasm was literally overflowing her small room, and she made a face accordingly.
“What a way to ruin Christmas”, she grumbled under her breath and stared out of the window, with her eyes watching the birds come and go at the birdfeeder that hung outside her window.
It was snowing, and the still landscape, encapsulated in a thick blanket of white, fluffy snow, emanated a sense of peace and tranquillity. It was in stark contrast to Sarah’s feelings deep within her.
“If only I could be in a different world where things are much less complicated, and everyone seems happy. No breaking up, no heartache, just.... magical beings and.... agh, I wish....”
She never finished her sentence, but in her heart, she knew exactly for what she was wishing. It didn’t need to be spoken aloud, and wishes never came true anyway, except in fairy tales, and her life was everything but a fairy tale.
With a sigh, she turned away from the window. The last birds had left for the day, and the sun was beginning to disappear behind the houses of the neighbourhood. It was almost dinner time, and she needed to change her clothes.
Her father was having Karen over and had requested that she dress accordingly and behave like the perfect little lady; he knew she could be.
Sarah scoffed at the recollection of their conversation.
That repulsive woman would spend the entire Christmas week with them and not return to her own apartment until Monday and today was only Wednesday.
Sarah wanted to gag at that fact and felt a sudden nausea invading the pit of her stomach.
But like the good daughter, she tried to be, she padded over to her closet and picked out a nice dress for their Christmas Eve dinner.
“It’s a piece of cake”, she murmured to herself as she changed out her clothes and ran a brush through her long, raven coloured hair.
With a resolved, “Let’s go feet”, she walked out of her room and firmly shut the door behind her.
It was just a tad after nine o’ clock before Sarah returned to her room. A mixed sigh of relief and exhaustion escaped her after she closed the door behind her, and she let herself fall flat on top of her bed, staring with empty eyes up at the ceiling.
Her facial miens clearly reflected the inner turmoil she experienced.
“I survived that one”, she mumbled, followed by a deep exhale. “Only four more dinners to go, plus breakfasts, and lunches, and.... agh, gag, this Christmas will be a never-ending torture.”
Letting a drawn-out grunt of frustration escape the depth of her throat, she rolled over onto her side. Immediately, her eyes beheld a small package on her nightstand, wrapped in scintillating golden paper, unlike anything she had ever seen, and an expertly tied red bow attached to the top.
She sat herself up and squinted her eyes in confusion as she perused over the small but elegantly looking gift.
Where had this come from?
The wrapping was exceptional, and the entire present oozed a certain magical aura; one she could not explain but felt deep inside her heart.
Slowly, with her intrigue rising by the second, she scooted herself to the edge of the bed, hastily tucked a hair strand behind her ear, and reached charily for the mystery gift.
“Where did you come from?” she addressed the package, as if it were a living being, not that she expected an answer.
After another brief moment of procrastination, she charily took possession of it and held it carefully in her exploring hands.
It didn’t have too much weight to it, and it felt solid.
“Huh, I wonder what it is.”
Not wasting another moment, she meticulously untied the bow and opened the wrapping, careful not to tear this expensive looking paper. It seemed to have its own allure, and she planned on keeping it safe in her drawer.
Upon loosening the last of the taps that held it all together, she reached inside with eager fingers and extracted a small, red hardcover book, with a small envelope attached to its front.
She quickly retrieved the envelope that had her name written in clear cursive on its yellowish outside and extracted the small, folded up parchment paper that seemed to sport a watermark of an owl in flight, clutching a clear crystal in its talons.
She furled her brows over this aberrant piece of paper. Nothing like it had ever crossed her path. With a shrug and sigh, she set the envelop aside and read the succinct message that consisted of only three words.
Enjoy your journey!
“Enjoy your journey? she wondered aloud and scrunched her nose. “What journey? And no signature? How do I know from whom it is?”
She turned the note and envelope over several times in hopes of finding a name or address from the sender.
Nothing!
After a few moments, she shrugged her shoulders in defeat and held the small red book up to her eyes, which widened slightly at reading the gold-lettered title, written in the same cursive as the note, a fact that went unnoticed by her young mind.
The Labyrinth!
Meticulously opening the cover, her face morphed from a puzzled look to a broad smiling mien, and she quickly leaned herself back against the headboard and flipped the page.
Her lips moved along as she silently read the first line.
“Once upon a time there was a beautiful young girl, whose stepmother always made her stay home with the baby.”
Grabbed by the story, she instantly forgot about her concerns over the sender or the peculiarity of the envelop and its seal and instead buried her nose into the book.
This appeared to be a magical fairy tale, and she loved fairy tales. The stories gave her the opportunity to escape her own dismal life and allowed her to pretend she was a participating character in this enigmatic and ethereal world that was so close and yet so unattainable.
Or was it?
All the sudden, Christmas was no longer the drab holiday, she had to endure with unwanted company.
She now had her own world to which she could escape. A world filled with creatures more to her liking, and a place called the Labyrinth where anything was possible and where to always expect the unexpected.
As she fell deeper into the spell of the book, she completely missed the vanishing of the wrapping paper, which she had planned to keep, the note, and the envelope, leaving behind only a few small specs of glitter as the items vanished into thin air.
*************
In another realm, wholly undetected by mortals, a diaphanous spectral being grinned broadly as it stared into a pool of glowing blue water and watched the mortal girl esuriently consuming the story in the little red book it had bestowed onto her.
“And so, your journey begins, Ssssaraaah. Your fate, as well as my king’s, has now been set in writing”, the spirit sibilated as it vanished the girl’s reflection and, like a nebulous spectre, weaved its way through the many dark tunnels, only to break through the surface and fly over the vast expanse of a giant maze-like structure, overlooked by an enormous gothic castle in the distance where its enigmatic ruler resided, alone and surrounded only by goblins and other mystic creatures.
Unbeknownst to any of them, the curtain had risen on an opening act of a new story. A story that would change all of their futures for eternity.