Labyrinth

by A. C. H. Smith

  She looked back at him candidly. Whatever his game was, he played it badly. She had to bite her lip to stop herself from giggling at him. “I’ll tell you what,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “If you won’t take me all the way through the Labyrinth, just take me as far as you can. And then I’ll try to do the rest of it myself.”

  He looked disgusted with her. “Tcha! Of all the headstrong numbskulls I ever came across …”

  Sarah dangled the bracelet before his eyes. “Fair deal,” she offered. “No strings. One bracelet. Hmm? How about it?”

  The bracelet danced in her hand, and his eyes were dancing with it. Grudgingly he asked, “What is this, anyway?”

  “Plastic.”

  His eyes shone. Then he raised his stumpy arm for Sarah to put the bracelet onto his wrist. He looked at it there and could not conceal his pride. “I don’t promise nothing,” he said. “But” — he grunted resignedly — “I’ll take you as far as I can. Then you’re on your own. Right?”

  “Right,” Sarah agreed.

  He nodded. His eyes were still shining as he looked at the bracelet on his wrist. “Plastic!” he murmured, thrilled.

  “Come on, then,” Sarah urged him.

  Hoggle sprang into action. He seized the heavy wooden bench and, with a strength Sarah wouldn’t have suspected in his small and round-shouldered body, he upended it so that the seat was flat against the wall. Sarah was surprised to see two doorknobs on the underside of the seat, one on the left and one on the right, and she was disconcerted when Hoggle turned one knob and the seat became a door into the stone wall. That’s not fair, she thought. With a mischievous grin — because he was enjoying himself, showing off to the young miss — Hoggle walked through the doorway.

  She was about to follow him when she heard a crashing and clattering. Broomsticks and buckets fell out of the doorway into the oubliette. She grinned, recognizing the old broom-closet joke.

  “Oh, damn!” she heard Hoggle say, within the cupboard. He came out backward, and avoided her eye as he thrust the brooms and buckets back inside and closed the door.

  Still sheepish, he grasped the other doorknob. “Can’t be right all the time, can we?” he muttered. This time, he opened the door rather less boldly. He peered through. “This is it,” he told her. “Come on, then.”

  She followed him into a dimly lit corridor with walls of grotesquely carved rock.

  They were working their way along the corridor when a voice boomed, “DON’T GO ON!”

  Sarah jumped violently, and looked all around her. She saw no one, except Hoggle. And then she realized: carved in the stone wall was a mouth. Standing back from it, she saw that the mouth was part of a huge face. Similar faces lined both sides of the corridor. As she and Hoggle passed them, each intoned a deeply resonant message.

  “Go back while you still can!”

  “This is not the way!”

  “Take heed and go no farther!”

  “Beware! Beware!”

  “It will soon be too late!”

  Sarah put her hands over her ears. The warnings seemed to be echoing inside her head.

  Hoggle, bustling onward, looked around to see where she had gone to, and saw her standing. “Pah.” He waved his hand. “Don’t take no notice of them. They’re just Phony-Warnings. You get a lot like them in the Labyrinth. It means you’re on the right track.”

  “Oh, no, you’re not,” a face boomed.

  “Do shut up,” Hoggle snapped back at it.

  “Sorry, sorry,” the face said. “Only doing me job.”

  “Well, you don’t need to do it to us,” Hoggle answered, and led the way on down the passage.

  The face watched them go. “Shrewd cookies,” it murmured appreciatively.

  The passageway twisted and turned, but on the whole Sarah had the impression that they were moving forward, if such a direction existed in the Labyrinth, and she felt encouraged. They passed another carved face.

  “Oh, beware!” the face declaimed. “For —”

  “Don’t bother.” Hoggle flapped his hand dismissively.

  “Oh, please,” the face begged. “I haven’t said it for such a long time. You’ve no idea what it’s like, stuck here in this wall, and with —”

  “All right,” Hoggle told it. “But don’t expect us to take any notice.”

  The face brightened up. “Oh, no, of course not!” It cleared its throat. “For the path you take will lead you to certain destruction!” It paused. “Thanks,” it added politely.

  While the face was droning on, a small crystal ball had been rolling and skipping down the passage from behind Sarah and Hoggle. It overtook them as they turned a corner, and they saw it bounce on ahead of them. A blind beggar squatted with his back to the wall, his hat upturned on the ground in front of his feet. The crystal ball hopped smartly into the hat.

  Sarah heard Hoggle groan. She looked at him. His mouth was open, and his eyes were staring at the hat on the ground.

  The beggar turned his face toward them. “So what have we here?” he asked.

  “Uh, nothing,” Hoggle spluttered.

  “Nothing? Nothing?!” The beggar rose up.

  Hoggle froze. Sarah gasped. It was Jareth.

  “Your Majesty …” Hoggle bowed so obsequiously that he was at risk of performing a forward roll. “What …,” he swallowed, and smiled haggardly, “what … what a nice surprise.”

  “Hello, Hedgewart,” said the King of the Goblins.

  “Hogwart,” Sarah corrected him.

  “Hoggle,” Hoggle said, gritting his teeth.

  “Hoggle,” Jareth said, in a kindly conversational voice, “can it be that you’re helping the girl?”

  “Helping?” Hoggle prevaricated. “In what sense? Uh …”

  “In the sense that you’re taking her farther into the Labyrinth,” Jareth said.

  “Oh,” Hoggle replied. “In that sense.”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, no, no, your Majesty. I was leading her back to the beginning.”

  “What!” Sarah exclaimed.

  Hoggle forced his lips into an ingratiating smile for Jareth. “I told her I was going to help her unriddle the Labyrinth — a little trickery on my part …” He guffawed and gulped. “But actually …”

  Jareth, smiling pleasantly, interrupted him. “And what’s this plastic trinket around your wrist?”

  “This? I …” Hoggle looked wide-eyed at the bracelet, which someone must have slipped onto his wrist when he was snoozing and which he had unaccountably not even noticed there until this moment. “Why,” he stuttered, “er, my goodness, well, I never, where did this come from?”

  “Hoggle,” Jareth spoke levelly. “If I thought you were betraying me, I would be forced to suspend you headfirst in the Bog of Eternal Stench.”

  “Oh, no, your Majesty.” Hoggle’s knees were wobbling. “Not that. Not the Eternal Stench.”

  “Oh, yes, Hoggle.” Jareth turned and smiled at Sarah. “And you, Sarah — how are you enjoying the Labyrinth?”

  Sarah swallowed. Beside her, she heard Hoggle’s feet shuffling. Determined not to allow Jareth to intimidate her, she affected a nonchalance she was far from feeling.

  “It’s …” she hesitated. “It’s a piece of cake.”

  Jareth raised one elegant eyebrow.

  Hoggle’s eyes closed in dismay.

  “Really?” Jareth sounded intrigued. “Then how about making it a more entertaining challenge?”

  He looked up, and in the space of air before his eyes the thirteen-hour clock appeared. He gestured gracefully, and the hands visibly began to turn faster.

  “That’s not fair,” Sarah said.

  “You say that so often. I wonder what your basis for comparison is.”

  Jareth took the crystal ball from his hat and tossed it back down the tunnel again. At once, from the darkness, came a noise: a crashing, whirring, trundling noise, distant as yet, but getting closer all the time, and louder.

&nbs
p; Hoggle’s face was a mask of panic. Sarah found herself instinctively shrinking away from the approaching din.

  “The Labyrinth is a piece of cake, is it?” Jareth laughed. “Well, now we can see how you deal with this little slice.” While his mocking laugh still rang, he vanished.

  Sarah and Hoggle stared along the passageway. When they saw what was coming at them, their jaws dropped and they trembled.

  A solid wall of furiously spinning knives and chopping cleavers was bearing inexorably down upon them. Dozens of keen blades glittered in the light, every one of them pointing forward and whirring wickedly. The wall of blades completely filled the tunnel, like a subway train, and it would chop them into little pieces in the blink of an eye. And, Sarah noticed with horror, along the bottom of the slashing machine was a busy row of brushes, for tidying up after itself.

  “The Cleaners!” Hoggle shrieked, and took off.

  “What?” Sarah was so terrified she was mesmerically rooted where she stood.

  “Run!” Hoggle’s shout came echoing from some distance away and brought her back to her senses. She dashed after him.

  The slashing machine came clanking and trundling remorselessly on behind them.

  All it needed for the story to finish now was that they should come to a dead end. Around a corner, they found one. A heavily barred door closed the tunnel in front of them.

  Chapter Six - Up and Up

  Sarah gasped. The whizzing blades were rapidly drawing nearer.

  Hoggle was pawing pathetically at the great door and mumbling to himself.

  But Sarah wasn’t listening to him. She was looking around for an escape — above, below. She dashed along the side walls, looking for a handle or button. There had to be some way out. That was how the Labyrinth worked. There was always some trick, if only she could find it.

  The clanking, whirring, seething, brushing noise was louder. She glanced momentarily at what Hoggle was doing. He was still just scrabbling at the door. It was no use trusting to him. What could she do? What?

  Her eye fell on part of the wall, to one side of the door, that looked distinct from the rest, a panel of metal plates. She pushed at it and felt it give a little.

  “Hoggle!” she shouted above the echoing din.

  “Sarah!” he answered, hammering his pudgy fists against the door and kicking at it, as though it could be expected to relent in the face of such frustration. “Don’t leave me!”

  “Get over here and help me,” she yelled back at him.

  Hoggle joined her. Together they shoved with all their weight at the metal plates.

  “Come on,” Sarah told him, “push, you little double-crosser. Push!”

  Hoggle was pushing. “I can explain,” he panted.

  “PUSH!”

  The panel caved in suddenly. They fell through the space it left and sprawled flat on it.

  Behind them, the machine slashed through the air just beside their feet. When it reached the great barred door, there was a terrible crunching sound as the knives and cleavers bit through the wood, spitting it out as splinters, which the whirling brushes swept up neatly. The machine was cranked along by four goblins, standing on a platform behind the wall of knives. They were grunting and sweating with the effort of turning handles and working levers to keep the contraption whirring. The racket clattered onward, through the demolished doorway, and off into the distance.

  Sarah lay on her back, recovering her breath. Hoggle looked down at her. “He’s throwing everything at us,” he said, and shook his head with a trace of admiration. “The Cleaners, the Eternal Stench — the whole works. He must think a lot of you.”

  Sarah answered with a faint, forced smile. “He’s got some funny ideas.”

  Hoggle was busy again. Eyes darting left and right beneath his bushy eyebrows, he clumped around in the shadows until he found what he was looking for. “This is what we need,” he called. “Follow me.”

  She sat up and looked. There, on the floor of the tunnel they had entered, she saw the base of a ladder. It led up into darkness.

  “Come on,” Hoggle was calling. The first rung was too high for him to reach, and he was hopping around trying to jump up to it.

  Sarah went over to him. The ladder looked unsafe to her. It was constructed of an odd assortment of bits of wood, planks, and branches, patched together with ends of rope and half-driven nails.

  “Come on, give me a hand,” Hoggle urged.

  She stood with one hand holding the ladder. “How can I trust you,” she asked, “now that I know you were taking me back to the start of the Labyrinth?”

  “I wasn’t,” Hoggle protested, and stared fiercely at her with those piggy eyes of his. As a liar, he was so bad it was quite touching. “I told him I was taking you to the start of the Labyrinth, to throw him off the scent, d’ya see? Heh-heh. But actually —”

  “Hoggle.” Sarah smiled reproachfully at him. “How can I believe anything you say?”

  “Well,” he replied, screwing up one eye, “let me put it this way. What choice do you have?”

  Sarah thought about it. “There is that.”

  “And now,” Hoggle said, “the main thing is to get back up.” And he started again to try and hop up to the first rung of the rickety ladder.

  Sarah gave him a leg up, watched him start, and followed. At any moment she thought the thing might collapse; but then, as Hoggle had said, what choice did she have?

  Without turning his head, Hoggle called out, “The other main thing is not to look down.”

  “Right,” she called back, and, as though it were a playground dare, she had to snatch a little look past her feet. “Ooooh!” she cried. They had climbed much higher than she would have thought possible in the time. The wobbly ladder seemed to stretch down below her forever. She could not see the bottom of it, nor could she see the top. She felt unable to climb another rung. Clutching the sides of the ladder, she started to shake. The whole ladder shook with her.

  Above, Hoggle clung desperately to the shaking ladder. “I said don’t look down,” he moaned. “Or perhaps don’t means do where you come from?”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize …”

  “Well, when you’ve done all the shaking you want, perhaps we could continue.”

  “I can’t help it,” Sarah wailed.

  Jumping around like a monkey on a stick, Hoggle managed to answer, “Well, we’ll just have to stay here until one of us falls off, or we turns into worm food.”

  “I am sorry,” Sarah told him, still shaking.

  “Oh, good. She’s sorry. In that case, I don’t mind being shaken off to my certain death.”

  Breathing deeply, and looking resolutely upward, Sarah forced herself to think of happy, secure things: Merlin, her room, lovely evenings out with her mother, multiplication tables. It worked. She gained control of her body and started to climb again.

  Hoggle felt her coming, and he went on, too. “See,” he called to her, “you’ve got to understand my position. I’m a coward, and Jareth scares me.”

  “What kind of position is that?”

  “A very humble one. That’s my point. And you wouldn’t be so brave, either, if you’d ever smelled the Bog of Eternal Stench. It’s … it’s …” It was his turn to pause on the ladder, and control his shakes.

  “What is it?”

  “It makes me feel dizzy just to think of it.”

  “Is that all it does?” Sarah asked. “Smell?”

  “Believe me, that’s enough. Oh, dear me. You wait, you just wait, if you get that far.”

  “Can’t you hold your nose?”

  “No.” Hoggle shuddered again, but started to climb. “Not with this smell. It gets into your ears. Up your mouth. Anywhere it can get in.”

  Sarah thought she could see the top at last. There were chinks of daylight above her head.

  “But the worst thing,” Hoggle continued, “is if you so much as get a splash of the mire on your skin you will never, never be abl
e to wash the stench off.”

  He was on the top rung now. He reached up, fiddling with a sliding bolt and pushed open a wooden hatchway.

  Outside was a clear blue sky. Sarah had never seen anything so beautiful

  Chapter Seven - The Meaning of Life

  Sarah joined Hoggle on the top rung of the ladder, gratefully clutching the side of the open hatchway. It felt like firm land after a voyage at sea.

  They were looking at a garden, where birds were singing. It was surrounded by well-trimmed hedges — box hedges, she thought, and indeed they ran so straight, with neatly cut openings in them, and turned such precise right angles, and the lawn was so flat and tidy, that the garden was like a green box, with the blue sky for a lid. But that was not why they were called box hedges, was it? It was a rather formal garden, with carefully positioned stone monuments. On the stones were runic carvings, and a few faces — more of those Phony-Warnings, Sarah decided, preparing herself for gloomy predictions.

  The hatchway through which they had emerged was itself the top of a large ornamental urn, set upon a marble table. What a ridiculous arrangement, Sarah reflected, as they clambered out of the urn and stepped down to the lawn. Nothing was what it seemed to be. It was like a language in which all the words were the same as your own, but where they meant something quite different from what you were used to. From now on, she would take nothing at its face value. She looked with suspicion at the urn, and then down at the grass. She stepped carefully. It could turn out to be the top of someone’s head.

  Hoggle spread his hands. “Here we are then. You’re on your own from here.”