Labyrinth

by A. C. H. Smith

  Sarah gasped. “Which is which?”

  Jim shook his upside-down head. “We can’t tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “We don’t know!” Jim crowed triumphantly.

  “But they do.” Tim nodded confidentially at Alph and Ralph. That took some doing, upside down, Sarah thought.

  “Then I’ll ask them,” she said.

  Before she could say anything more, Ralph was speaking in a very slow, pedantic voice. “Ah! No, you can’t ask us. You can ask only one of us.” He appeared to have difficulty in getting the words out at all, especially the C’s and K’s.

  “It’s in the rules.” Alph’s voice came fast and sneering, and at the same time his eyes shifted uneasily. He was tapping a finger on some ciphers on his shield, which were presumably the rules. “And I think I should warn you that one of us always tells the truth, and one of us always lies. That’s a rule, too.” His glance flickered at Ralph. “He always lies.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Ralph said, sententiously. “He’s lying. I’m the one who tells the truth.”

  “That’s a lie!” Alph retorted.

  Jim and Tim were snickering behind their shields, rather insolently, she thought. “You see,” Tim told Sarah, “even if you ask one of them, you won’t know if the answer you get is true or false.”

  “Now wait a minute,” she said. “I know this riddle. I’ve heard it before, but I’ve never figured it out.”

  She heard Ralph muttering to himself, “He’s lying.”

  “He’s lying,” Alph replied.

  Sarah was scratching her brow. “There’s one question I can ask and it doesn’t matter which one of them I ask it.” She clicked her tongue, impatient with herself. “Oh, what could it be?”

  “Come on, come on,” Tim said tetchily. “We can’t stand around here all day.”

  “What do you mean, we can’t?” Jim snapped. “That’s our job. We’re gatekeepers.”

  “Oh, yes. I forgot.”

  “Be quiet,” Sarah ordered. “I can’t think.”

  “I tell the truth,” Ralph declared pedantically, from under his helmet.

  “Ooh!” Alph answered mechanically. “What a lie!”

  Sarah was trying to work it out logically for herself. With a finger thoughtfully in the air, she reasoned, “The first thing to do is find out which one’s the liar … but, no, there’s no way of doing that. So … the next thing to do is to find a question you can put to either one … and get the same answer.”

  “Oh, that’s a good one,” Tim was guffawing. “One of us always tells the truth and the other one always lies, and you want to find a question we’ll both give the same answer to? Oh, that’ll be the day. That’s a good one, that is. Oh.”

  Sarah narrowed her eyes. She thought she might have gotten it. “Now,” she said, “whom shall I ask?”

  Alph and Ralph pointed at each other.

  With a little smile, Sarah said to Ralph, “Answer yes or no. Would he,” and she pointed at Alph, “tell me that this door,” she pointed at the door behind Ralph, “leads to the castle?”

  Alph and Ralph looked at her, then at each other. They conferred in whispers.

  Ralph looked up at her. “Uh … yes.”

  “Then the other door leads to the castle,” Sarah concluded. “And this door leads to certain death.”

  “How do you know?” Ralph asked slowly. His voice was aggrieved. “He could be telling you the truth.”

  “Then you wouldn’t be,” Sarah replied. “So if you tell me he said yes, I know the answer was no.” She was very pleased with herself.

  Ralph and Alph looked dejected, feeling that they had obscurely been cheated. “But I could be telling the truth,” Ralph objected.

  “Then he would be lying,” Sarah said, allowing herself a broad smile of pleasure. “So if you tell me that he said yes, the answer would still be no.”

  “Wait a minute,” Ralph said. He frowned. “Is that right?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Alph airily. “I wasn’t listening.”

  “It’s right,” Sarah told them. “I figured it out. I never could until now.” She beamed. “I may be getting smarter.”

  She walked to the door behind Alph.

  “Very clever, I’m sure,” Jim remarked disappointedly, and stuck his tongue out at her.

  She stuck hers out back at him as she pushed open the door. Over her shoulder, as she left them, she said, “This is a piece of cake.”

  She stepped through the doorway, and fell straight down a shaft.

  Sarah screamed. The top of the shaft was a fast-dwindling disk of light.

  Chapter Five - Bad Memories

  As she screamed, dropping backward down the shaft, Sarah realized that her fall was being slightly impeded by things brushing against her. Large, thick leaves they might be, or some sort of tough fungus sprouting from the walls of the pit. Whatever they were, she tried to grab hold of one, to save herself from the terrible smash she expected every instant. She was falling too fast.

  Then, by blind chance, her wrist landed smack in one of the things, which at once closed firmly. With a jolt that almost disjointed her, she found herself dangling by one arm. “Oh!” she gasped in relief, and felt herself heaving for breath.

  She looked down the shaft, to see how close she had been to breaking every bone. All she could see was a long tunnel, lined with the things that had broken her fall. She looked up. The doorway through which she had entered the shaft was very high above her.

  As her eyes adjusted to the gloomy light, she saw what it was that had caught hold of her: a hand. All around her, protruding from the sides of the shaft, hands were groping in the air, like reeds under water.

  Her relief gave way to a sick feeling: she was in the grip of a hand with no arm or body attached to it, and she had no apparent means of ever releasing herself. Perhaps they were carnivorous hands, or like those spiders that simply dissolved you away over a long period of time. She looked nervously up and down the shaft again, this time to see if there were any skeletons dangling there, as in a jungle trap. She saw none.

  And now she felt other hands reaching for her and finding her, taking hold of her by the legs and the body. There were hands on her thighs, her ankles, her neck. She shuddered, and shouted, “Stop that!” Knowing it was futile, she called, “Help! Help!” She writhed, trying to shake them all off, and with her free hand reached out for a hold, in a despairing attempt to climb away. All she could see to grasp hold of was yet another hand. Hesitantly she put hers in it, and it responded immediately, grasping her hand firmly. With the idea of perhaps climbing up the hands as though on a ladder, she tried to free her wrist from the first hand. It was no good. Now she was more tightly held than ever, stuck in a web of hands.

  “Help!” she whimpered.

  She felt a tap on her shoulder, and turned her head to see what it was. To her bewilderment, she saw that hands to one side of her contrived to form themselves into a face of sorts, with finger-and-thumb circles for eyes and two hands working together to fashion a mouth. And the mouth spoke to her.

  “What do you mean, ‘Help’?” it said. “We are helping. We’re the Helping Hands.”

  “You’re hurting,” Sarah told them. It was not quite true. Fear, rather than pain, was what afflicted her.

  Now there were several more faces of hands around her.

  “Would you like us to let go?” one of them asked.

  Sarah glanced down the shaft. “Uh … no.”

  “Well, then,” one of the mouths said. “Come on. Which way?”

  “Which way?” she asked, nonplussed.

  “Up or down?”

  “Oh …” She was more confused. “Er …” She looked back up the shaft toward the light, but that would be a kind of retreat. She looked down, into the unknown, unfathomable abyss.

  “Come on! Come on!” an impatient voice urged her. “We haven’t got all day.”

  Haven’t you? Sarah
thought to herself.

  “It’s a big decision for her,” said a sympathetic voice.

  “Which way do you want to go?” asked an insistent one.

  Everyone in the Labyrinth was so peremptory. I’ve got good reason to be in a hurry, Sarah felt. I’ve only got thirteen hours to find my baby brother, and heaven knows how much time has already gone by. But why are all these people — if you can call them people — so bossy?

  “Come on! Come on!”

  “Well, er …” Sarah still hesitated. Up was chicken, and down was dreadful.

  Many faces were watching her indecisiveness. Several of them were snickering, covering their mouths with another hand.

  She took a deep breath. “Well, since that’s the way I’m pointed … I’ll go down.”

  “She chose down?” She heard the snickerers behind their hands. “She chose — down!”

  “Was that wrong?” Sarah inquired timidly.

  “Too late now,” said one of the hand faces, and with that they started to hand her down the shaft, not roughly. She heard them singing something like a shanty.

  “Down, down, down, down, Down, hand her down, boys. We’ll all go to town, boys. Down, down, down, down, Down, hand her down, boys, Never a frown, boys, Down, down, down, down.”

  And down she went, far down, until she found herself held momentarily above a manhole, while Helping Hands removed the cover of it. Then the lowest hands let go of her, dropping her neatly down the manhole, and the last she saw of the hands was their waving goodbye helpfully.

  As she landed on the stone floor of a dark, small cell, the cover was replaced on the manhole, with a clunk.

  In pitch darkness, Sarah sat down. Her face was blank.

  ———

  ——

  —

  The picture of her silent face was clearly beamed to a crystal in the chamber of the Goblin King.

  “She’s in the oubliette,” Jareth observed.

  The goblins cackled wickedly, dancing and prancing around. Their jaws gaped with merriment, and they slapped their thighs.

  “Shut up,” Jareth told them.

  They froze. Their heads twitched around to look at their King. A sly goblin inquired, “Wrong laugh?”

  “She shouldn’t have gotten as far as the oubliette.” Jareth was still staring at the picture of Sarah’s face in the crystal. He shook his head. “She should have given up by now.”

  “She’ll never give up,” said a keen goblin.

  “Ha.” Jareth laughed mirthlessly. “Won’t she? She’ll give up soon enough when she has to start all over.”

  It pleased him to think of his Labyrinth as a board game; if you got too close to the winning square, you might find a snake taking you back to the start. No one had, and very few had gotten as far as this disturbing girl, who was too old to be turned into a goblin. Jareth examined her face in his crystal. Too old to be a goblin, but too young to be kept by him, damn her innocent eyes. She had to be sent back to square one immediately, before she became a serious threat to Toby, and he knew the snake for the job. “Hoggle!” he called, spinning the crystal.

  Hoggle’s face appeared in it.

  “She’s in the oubliette,” Jareth said. “Get her back to the outer walls.”

  Hoggle cocked his head, grimacing. “She’s quite determined, your Majesty. It won’t be an easy —”

  “Do it.” Jareth flipped the crystal into the air, where it vanished like a bubble.

  He chuckled, imagining Sarah’s face when she found herself beside Hoggle’s pond again. Then he threw back his head and roared.

  The goblins watched him uncertainly. Was it all right to laugh now?

  “Well, go ahead,” Jareth told them.

  With the simple glee that is natural to evil-hearted folk, the goblins launched themselves into their full routine of cackles and snickers. The keen goblin directed them, like a conductor, bringing them up to a crescendo of malign mirth.

  ———

  ——

  —

  Sarah sat on the floor of the black cell wishing she had asked the Helping Hands to take her up the shaft, toward the light. What could she hope for in this place?

  Four of her senses sharpened in the darkness; she detected a little scratching sound. “Who’s there? Who’s there with me?” Her body was tense with alarm.

  “Me,” a gruff voice replied.

  There was another noise of scratching, followed by a glare of light as a match ignited, and in turn set a torch aflame. Hoggle was sitting there, on a rough bench, holding the torch up so that he and Sarah could see each other.

  “Oh,” she said, “I am glad to see you, Hoggle.” She was so relieved she could have hugged him.

  “Yes, well,” Hoggle said brusquely, as though he were slightly embarrassed by the situation. “Well, nice to see you, too.”

  Sarah went to stand beside him, in the torchlight. “What are you doing here? How did you get here?”

  Hoggle shrugged, and half turned away. “I knows you were going to get into trouble soon as I sees you. So I — I’ve come to give you a hand.”

  A helping hand, Sarah thought, and shivered. She had had enough of them. “You mean,” she asked, “you’re going to help me unriddle the Labyrinth?”

  “Unriddle the Labyrinth?” Hoggle answered scornfully. “Don’t you know where you are?”

  She looked about her. In the circle of torchlight she saw stone walls, stone floor, stone ceiling. One rough wooden bench was the only luxury.

  “Oh, she’s looking around now, is she?” Hoggle’s scorn had turned to sarcasm. “I suppose the little miss has noticed there ain’t no doors — just the hole up there?”

  Sarah peered as hard as she could into the shadows, and realized that he was right.

  “This,” Hoggle was saying, “is an oubliette. The Labyrinth’s full of them.”

  She was stung by his knowing, mocking tone of voice. “Really?” she replied, matching his sarcasm. “Now, fancy that.”

  “Don’t try to sound smart,” he told her. “You don’t know what an oubliette is.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes,” Hoggle said, with a touch of pride. “It’s a place you put people to forget about them.”

  She remembered her verbs in French class, and, pleased with herself, said, “Of course. It comes from the French verb oublier, to forget. But you already know that, naturally.”

  Hoggle raised his chin to scratch it, at the same time letting his eyes roll portentously around the cell.

  What he had said began to sink in, and Sarah looked at the flickering stone walls and shuddered. To forget about them … Was that what Jareth was doing with her? Just forgetting about her? She began to feel indignant. It wasn’t fair. He had challenged her to his contest. All the odds were stacked against her, but she had made a brave enough start — he couldn’t, now, just dump her in here to rot. Could he?

  Hoggle had taken the torch and waddled into one corner of the oubliette. He beckoned her to follow. She did, casting a great shadow across the walls. Lying in the corner was a skeleton, on its back, knees bent, head propped against the wall.

  She put her hand to her mouth and was about to scream, then thought better of it. She would force herself to remain cool.

  “You see?” Hoggle was squinting up at her. “This Labyrinth is a dangerous place. No place for a little girl.”

  She looked at him. Who was he calling little?

  He nodded at the skeleton. “That’s how you’ll end up if you keep going. In an oubliette, like him. Lot of bad memories in the Labyrinth, I can tell you. What you got to do, little missy, is get out of here.”

  “But I must find my baby brother.”

  “Forget all that. Now it so happens,” Hoggle said, scratching his cheek with a forefinger, “that I knows a shortcut out of the whole Labyrinth from here.”

  “No,” she said at once. “I’m not giving up now. I’ve come too far. I’ve done too well.”

>   He nodded, and in a smooth voice assured her, “You’ve been wonderful.” He shook his head, and made a sucking noise on his teeth. “But this is only the edge of the Labyrinth. You’ve hardly started. From here on in, it gets worse.”

  There was something in his confidential tone that made Sarah suspicious. “Why are you so concerned about me?” she asked him.

  “What?” Hoggle sounded aggrieved. “I am. That’s all. Nice young girl … terrible black oubliette …”

  “Listen,” Sarah interrupted him, “you like jewelry, don’t you?”

  He pursed his face. “Why?” he asked slowly.

  “You’ve got some very nice pieces.” She pointed to the chain of ornaments dangling from his belt. In the torchlight she could not be sure, but she fancied that a smirking little blush was on his whiskery cheek.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “If you’ll help me through the Labyrinth …” She took a break. “… I’ll give you …” she slipped her bracelet off. It was only a cheap plastic thing, not one of the special ones that her mother had given her, and which she wore only when she was going out. “… this,” she concluded, holding it out to him.

  “Hm.” Hoggle licked his lips and eyed the bracelet appraisingly.

  “You like it, don’t you?” She could see that he did. He also had an eye for the ring on her finger. That had no intrinsic value either, though Sarah was fond of it because her mother had worn it when playing Hermione in The Winter’s Tale.

  “So-so,” Hoggle said. “Tell you what. You give me the bracelet and here’s what I’ll do. I’ll show you the way out of the whole Labyrinth. How’s that?”

  “You were going to do that in any case,” she pointed out.

  “Yes,” he replied. “That’s what would make it a particularly nice gesture on your part.” He held his hand out.

  “Oh, no!” Sarah withdrew the bracelet abruptly. “For this you must show me the way in. The whole way.”

  Hoggle snorted. “What makes the little miss so certain I knows my way through it?”

  “Well,” she answered, “you got here, didn’t you?”

  “What?” Hoggle clucked, shaking his head. “Yes, yes, but … I told you, this is just the fringe of it all. You’ve got nowhere yet. Come on, where’s your common sense? You don’t want to go farther than this. Really. You’ve done all you can, and more. You have proved you’re a smart, brave girl, and you don’t deserve what would become of you in here.” He glanced pointedly at the skeleton, which seemed to be jiggling in the flicker of the torchlight. “No, no, you deserve to be saved from that. I’ll say that much for you. So — how about it?” He gazed up at her with eyes of piggy shrewdness from beneath his sprouting eyebrows.