Creatures of the Goblin King’s Realm 

She had to wrestle the door closed, watching desperately for small fingers scrabbling in the diminishing gap and only pulling hard once she was sure it was clear. Then she engaged the slide lock at the top of the door, turned to set her back against it, and slid to the floor. There was an extra-thick yoga mat tacked to the door, but the wood still vibrated as Luca flung his whole body at it, pounded his fists against it, then kicked it—she felt the reverberation of that blow in her lower back—and roared at the resultant pain in his toes. 

Meg tipped her head up and pitched her voice to carry through the door and over her son’s screams. “You can come out when you calm down, Luca. You want to try counting? I’ll count with you if you want.” 

“No. No counting. No counting ever ever ever ever ever no.” 

Luca battered at the door another minute, though he didn’t kick it again, then he gave up and turned his assault on his room. 

Meg and Drew were supposed to remember that Luca’s panicky rage, more typical of a toddler than a precocious nine-year-old, was entirely understandable given his particular experience of the world. 

“Imagine living inside of an Escher painting,” his psychiatrist had said once, “going up and down stairs that constantly change direction. That’s a bit like how Luca feels every day.” 

“So he lives in an Escher painting, poor kid,” Drew had said in response, “and we’re what—trapped in Munch?” 

Dr. Alderson had laughed, as she was meant to do. Meg had looked up at the Escher print on the wall of the office and thought of the other intolerable thing about all those stairs: they went nowhere. 

In the hallway, she got to her knees and began to collect the things scattered on the hall carpet, thrown out first by Luca when he’d gotten started and then by her when she’d recognized that they were headed to DEFCON 4 and it was time to clear the room of anything hard, expensive, dangerous, or breakable. Nintendo Switch, iPad, aroma diffuser, shoes, hairbrush, and velvet bag of D&D dice with its contents spilling out—and the pile of books that had started it all when Luca couldn’t find the one he wanted to read. 

Behind her, Meg could hear her son’s gasping breaths as—from the sound of it—he swung his pillow against the wall with the manic energy of a sword-wielding berserker. She knew she should remind him, in a clear, matter-of-fact voice, of the strategies he could use to calm himself down. 

She poured the dice back into their bag and pulled her phone out of her jeans pocket to check the time. Three-thirty. Drew would be home at five, maybe a little later. By then, if they were all lucky, this storm would have blown over. Meg crawled over to the tumble of books and tried to take an inventory, knowing that it was both useless and beside the point. Once Luca lost control of himself like this, they weren’t supposed to reward him by solving the problem that had set him off: replacing apple slices with a whole, uncut apple; restarting a Spotify playlist that had accidentally been set to “shuffle”; or finding the book he had been set on reading. So even if she could find the book Luca had wanted half an hour ago, Meg understood that she wasn’t helping him by giving it to him. 

She could look for the book anyway, of course. There were a few likely places. It could be in the car, fallen down between the seats or jammed into the side pocket of the door. It could be in the bathroom, where Luca loved to sit reading on the toilet long after he was done with whatever biological necessity he’d gone in there to perform. (As he’d explained to Meg once when she’d asked him to just please use the bathroom and then come out and read in another room, if he stayed long enough, he’d be in the right place when he had to poop or pee again!) It could be in their bedroom, half hidden under or behind their bed from the last time they’d read it together on a weekend morning. 

But what book was she even looking for? That was the other problem, the part that made her search useless. Because the book Luca wanted was, at any given time, one of the dozen he owned that were all variations on a theme, and while Luca had an exact and infallible catalog of them in his head, Meg sometimes got them mixed up—or worse, suggested that one would do as well as another. 

“Damn you, Jareth!” Luca bellowed, still swinging his pillow, “and damn me too!” 

When he was angry at himself, or ashamed, he let them know by quoting this line (or, sometimes, just the second, self-flagellating half). That was what Hoggle said after he betrayed Sarah in the labyrinth by giving her the poisoned apple from the Goblin King. 

***** 

Fixations were extremely common in neurodiverse kids. When Luca’s pediatrician first referred them to Dr. Alderson, Luca had been not-quite three and a walking, talking encyclopedia on all things dog. He could explain the biological differences between wolves and contemporary domestic dogs, narrate the history of that domestication, and recite the distinctive physical, behavioral, and temperamental characteristics of more than 50 breeds. 

When Meg had asked where this fixation could have come from—they didn’t even own a dog, nor did Luca ever try to interact with dogs he encountered—Dr. Alderson had posited some combination of fear that Luca wanted to control through knowledge and a precocious understanding of expertise as a currency in human interactions. She’d also predicted that Luca would continue to fixate, with the fixations becoming more nuanced and sophisticated as he matured. Many parents, she said, found this aspect of neurodivergence to be rewarding, especially if they could embrace the fixation alongside their child and explore it together. 

For his fifth birthday, Luca got an activity book called Labyrinth! A World of Incredible Mazes and was immediately obsessed, dancing with impatience at Meg’s shoulder while she painstakingly attempted to untangle the thickets of lines on each page. Luca found her inability to solve the puzzles both baffling and gratifying. He could often trace the correct path with his finger within minutes of looking at a new maze but also never tired of looking at one he’d already solved. The first maze book was joined by a dozen more, bought as rewards for meeting his behavioral goals. Because Luca refused to let anyone touch the pages with a writing implement, he could occupy himself for hours finding the path on each one, then going all the way back to the beginning and solving them all again. 

A trip to a corn maze at Halloween, however, ended with Drew carrying his son screaming to the car, both of them scratched bloody from the desiccated cornstalks that Luca had blundered through in fury and fear, utterly unable to comprehend how they could have any relation to the elegant patterns mazes made when viewed from above. After that, Luca treated his books of mazes cautiously. Meg caught him more than once tipping his head sideways and squinting across the page as if trying to see the maze from the side. His occupational therapist said this was a terrific indication of cognitive development. It was also, Meg thought, yet another instance of the world betraying Luca, refusing to follow the only rules that made any sense to him. 

For Christmas that year, Drew’s parents got Luca Castle Mazes: Maze Craze, and after solving all 40 pages, he came to the dinner table intent for the first time on the illustrations around the mazes. 

“What’s that? What’s that? What’s on that man’s head? Why? What’s that?” 

A catapult. A siege tower. A helmet. To protect his head from getting bashed in during battle. A lance. 

And for the next three years, they immersed themselves in the whole of medieval European military history, which thankfully translated from page to screen to museum exhibit. (After a little research, though, Meg knew to avoid an evening at Medieval Times. The performers wore a hodgepodge of armor from different countries and centuries and wielded what Luca would have found to be an intolerably motley assortment of weapons.) Lying in bed at the end of the day, Meg and Drew would quiz each other—what’s the difference between a claymore and a bastard sword? What about a surcoat and a tabard?— partly in wry recognition that this was now their common language and partly to make sure they’d both paid attention to whatever topic Luca had lectured them on that day. 

And then a year ago, they’d been scrolling through the family-friendly movies on Amazon Prime and found Labyrinth. The teaser image featured the main character, a teenaged girl named Sarah, in the foreground in a snowdrift of white skirts. Above her loomed David Bowie as Jareth, the Goblin King, his eyes glinting with amusement made cruel by the set of his pale lips. 

Meg recognized the image as the original movie poster from the film, though she had certainly never lingered on the visual chaos of it, neither the gaggle of goblins and monsters at the bottom nor the perfectly square-edged labyrinth itself that framed the Goblin King. But Luca, entranced, appeared to take in every detail and smacked his father’s hand when Drew tried to skip to the next movie. 

“Stop! No! That says labyrinth and a labyrinth is a maze. Is this movie about a maze? Are those knights? Is that their castle? Is it inside a maze? Why do they look like that? Where are their horses?” 

Meg hadn’t watched Labyrinth since she’d been a teenager herself, around the same age as the main character. She didn’t remember any horses (because, as it turned out, there weren’t any). Nor were there any people in the movie aside from Sarah, her baby brother, her parents—who appeared only briefly at the start—and Bowie. The rest of the cast “looked like that” because they were all Muppets, monstrous to some degree or another. This included a dozen scraggly creatures who wore metal helmets rammed down over floppy ears and armor strapped haphazardly around furry bellies. Then there was Sir Didymus, a true knight even by Luca’s rigid standards, but for the fact that he was a fox. He even had a “noble steed,” a sheepdog named Ambrosius who was actually a dreadful coward. 

“That’s wrong,” Luca said, when Ambrosius ran away from a fight and cowered in a corner. “Sheepdogs are known for their courage and make very good watchdogs.” 

But he never took his eyes from the screen. 

As the movie unfolded and Meg began to vaguely anticipate what was coming next the way you do when you rewatch something after 30 years, she worried that Luca would be confused, a reaction that usually turned to fear and made him lash out. The plot, after all, was full of riddles and nonsense, while most of the characters were shaggy puppets who twitched and snickered and refused to follow any rules. There was Hoggle, who seemed good, then turned bad, then redeemed himself, and Ludo, who looked beastly but was in fact a staunch and gentle friend. 

And there was the Goblin King himself, long-limbed, thin-lipped Jareth. He spent most of the movie slouched in his throne with the stolen baby on his lap, sneering while his goblins capered around him. Occasionally he roused himself to flex his power, turning into an owl with a languid wave of one hand; stalking the teenaged heroine across a crowded ballroom; turning the world literally upside down when she denied him. 

“It’s like Bowie’s in a totally different movie,” Meg whispered to Drew over Luca’s head. 

“No kidding,” he whispered back. “An R-rated one.” 

“Too loud,” Luca said. “Be quiet.” He flicked his eyes to the remote on Drew’s knee and added, “please,” just in case his father had been about to pause the movie to make him say it nicely. 

Luca wasn’t scared or confused, not the way he was about so many things, from the sensory overload of a crowded public place to the speed at which hot food left on his plate turned cold. Instead, he sat mesmerized through that first viewing, which perhaps shouldn’t have been surprising. 

“A dog, a giant maze, and a whole cast of weird little knights,” Drew marveled after they got him to bed that night. “That might have been Luca’s perfect movie.” 

As indeed it was. By the next morning, Luca seemed to understand Labyrinth in the same way he instinctively understood mazes: as a puzzle that offered wrong turns, dead ends, and infinite distractions, but also a clear path through. The Goblin King, disguised as an owl, flew around listening for people to make wishes he wanted to grant. Sarah wished that the goblins would take her baby brother and they did. Now she wanted him back. To make that happen, she had to stand in front of the Goblin King and tell him that he had no power over her. Admittedly, she had to overcome a labyrinth that came to life and rearranged itself, creatures determined to trick or stop her, and the wiles of the Goblin King himself. Nonetheless, Luca knew that there was a path through and so the twists and turns of the plot held no menace. They merely fascinated him the way even the smallest pieces of medieval French armor (rerebraces, worn on the upper arm) had once fascinated him, because he understood them as parts of a whole that he could learn, memorize, and eventually use to exert some control over his world. 

Learning Labyrinth started with rewatching it the next day, then the day after that and the day after that. By the time Meg took Luca to see Dr. Alderson a week later, Luca could recite whole scenes and was responding to some conversational cues with lines of dialogue. Unfazed, Dr. Alderson admitted to Luca that it had been a very long time since she’d seen the movie and asked whether he thought she should watch it again. 

“I do need you,” Luca said. “I need all of you.” 

“That’s from the final scene,” Meg explained. “It’s—it’s a little hard to explain when you haven’t seen it recently, but it’s what the main character says to all her friends from the labyrinth when they show up in her bedroom.” 

“Ah,” Dr. Alderson said. Then she turned back to Luca. “I tell you what, kiddo. I’ll watch Labyrinth this weekend so we can talk about it next time.” 

“I was thinking,” Meg said carefully, “that we could watch this weekend too, that it should be a weekend treat, not every day.” 

Luca shook his head, picking up speed until he was swinging his whole upper body back and forth in negation. 

When they first talked about having kids, Meg and Drew had agreed that they wouldn’t be the parents who used television as a babysitter. Luca had initially made this easy, since he found most shows and movies either overstimulating or boring. But sometimes, if a show meshed neatly with one of his fixations, he wanted to watch it over and over and over. Meanwhile, it was Meg’s job to keep him on a daily schedule, to make sure he ate, bathed, moved his body, got fresh air, and practiced things like fine motor skills and human interaction. 

“It’s just that movie stories are special, sweetie,” she pressed on now, “and because they’re special they take a long time to tell. That’s why we have Saturday Movie Night at our house, you, me, and Dad—” 

“No, no, no—” 

Meg then risked a look at Dr. Alderson, who raised her eyebrows. They weren’t supposed to look at the psychiatrist when they talked to Luca about difficult things, like his behavior contract and coping strategies. If Luca caught them looking at her, Dr. Alderson had explained, he might well pick up that she was the one with the authority, not his parents, and that would mean that they’d lose all control once they left her office. 

“We could still talk about Labyrinth when we’re not watching it,” Meg tried. “We could listen to the music during Dance Party after lunch. Or we could—” 

Luca tipped back his head and began to howl, a tuneless monotonous sound. Meg did not bother explaining to the psychiatrist that Luca was trying to call the rocks the way Ludo did, because he felt, like poor Ludo, that he was being poked and prodded and made a prisoner. She wondered what Luca would want the rocks to do if they did come at his call. She imagined boulders smashing through the windows of the room, knocking over the doctor in her comfy chair, landing on Meg’s lap and pinning her to the sofa. 

She waited for him to draw breath and said the only thing she could think of that might calm him down and still let her enforce this boundary: “We could read some books about Labyrinth.” 

Howl. Howl. Howl. Pause. Luca’s eyes remained tightly shut, but he turned his face slightly toward Meg. 

“Labyrinth is a movie, not a book,” he said. “How can there be books about a movie?” 

Dammit. Meg clenched her hands in her lap. What if there weren’t any? 

“I bet there are some,” she said. “It’s a famous movie, remember?” 

Luca considered this, rocking slightly back and forth. 

“Mom,” he said finally, carefully—he said “Mom” or “Dad” when he was trying his hardest to make a connection—“that’s true. It is a famous movie. And it’s about a labyrinth. Lots of people like labyrinths. We will get some books about Labyrinth and read them in between when we watch the movie.” 

*****

The good news was that there were plenty of books about Labyrinth. There were board books for toddlers that taught directionality (“Left is where the Goblin King has his lair/Up goes the baby on the stair”), picture books that taught the ABCs (“O is for Owl, which is King Jareth’s disguise”), and blank journals with tooled leather covers proclaiming homage to the film. Meg didn’t bother with any of these, or with the novelizations for adults, the graphic novels that took artistic license with both story and character depiction, or the making-of books that revealed behind-the-scenes secrets. 

Even with these genres filtered out, though, there were plenty of books to acquire: the series of comic books that lovingly reproduced virtually every shot of the film, coloring books featuring both characters to color and mazes to solve, and several enormous (and expensive) hardback books that became Luca’s prized possessions, such as Labyrinth: The Ultimate Visual History and Labyrinth Bestiary: A Definitive Guide to the Creatures of the Goblin King’s Realm. 

Gathering the discarded and confiscated books into a pile on the carpet, Meg confirmed that it was one of these two crucial books that was missing and that she’d made things worse by conflating the titles. As Luca’s panic over not finding the book he “absolutely needed to consult right now” had intensified, she had stupidly asked if it was Labyrinth: The Ultimate Bestiary that he was looking for. That was when he’d head-butted her. 

“Luca,” she called now through the door, “I’m going to go look for your book. I’ll be right back, okay?” 

His only reply was a gasping indrawn breath that ended in a cough because of course now his poor throat was sore. Meg did a quick visual sweep of their bedroom and bathroom next door—no luck—then dashed down the stairs, almost slipping in her bare feet, and made for the back door to check the car, only to do an about-face when she caught sight of something white out of the corner of her eye. There, on the sofa, tucked down between the arm and the cushion and half hidden under a throw blanket was Labyrinth Bestiary: A Definitive Guide to the Creatures of the Goblin King’s Realm. 

She made herself wiggle the book loose rather than yanking it free. It had a paper dust jacket that Luca refused to let them take off, even just to keep it from getting torn or creased. He delighted in the reveal of the book’s hardcover once the paper was swept aside: the same exact image and words, a reveal that wasn’t even a reveal and which Luca seemed to find all the more satisfying for that fact. 

With the book safely under her arm, Meg grabbed Luca’s water bottle from the fridge and ran back upstairs, reaching the top just as her son threw himself against his door again. Meg flinched and dropped the book, which smacked corner-first into her foot before thumping to the floor. Meg followed it down, knowing she’d have a bruise tomorrow, and crawled back over to the door. 

“Luca, Luca, hey—I found it,” she said. “I found the book.” 

“Labyrinth Bestiary: A Definitive Guide to the Creatures of the Goblin King’s Realm,” he said, his voice hoarse from shouting. “That’s what it’s called. I need it.” 

Meg shifted to set her back to the door again. The water bottle was dripping on her jeans. She set it on the carpet and pulled the book closer. 

“I know,” she said, “but you have to do calm down first, okay? You want to do four-four breathing toge—” 

His answering roar vibrated against Meg’s spine through the door. 

“Sweetie—” 

A jolt as Luca slapped the door with both hands. 

“I wish the goblins would come and take you away!” 

The exact line, down to the emphasis on would. The words that let the goblins in. Luca had never repeated the line before. 

Meg drew in an unsteady breath, heard her son do the same on his side of the door. Then he was scrabbling at the knob—“Mom? Mom? Mom! Mommommommom!”—and she was on her knees turning the lock to let him come out and fling himself against her, his arms around her legs, his head in her lap. 

“Shhh,” she murmured, smoothing the sweaty hair back from his hot face. “Shh, it’s okay, I’m right here. It’s okay.” 

Luca’s thin shoulders shuddered under her hands. He hadn’t meant it, of course, not even a little bit, like Sarah had. What’s more, he believed in the line as an invocation. Meg could feel his breath coming in little hiccupping bursts against the waistband of her jeans. 

“Breathe in with me,” she said. “Come on, nice and slow, one, two, three, four. Hold it. Good. Now out. One, two, three, four. Good job. Again.” 

She stopped talking, kept her hands light on Luca’s back as he gradually relaxed. In the ensuing hush, she thought she heard the rustle of wings, the low chuckle of an approaching owl. She held her breath, shut her eyes, and wished with all her might.