Labyrinth by A. C. H. Smith Page A

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