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Chapter 4

Which is Which?

Sarah took a moment to compose herself. She was inside meaning the actual maze solving part came next. But looking around she couldn't figure out which way she was supposed to go.

She took a few steps in one direction to test the path ahead. What she didn't notice were the eyes growing out of a piece of fungus stuck to the wall. They watched her as she went by, whispering to themselves.

Keeping on walking she took her time stepping over logs and pushing sticks out of her way. Ahead of her the walls all still looked the same. When it was clear nothing was going to change she looked behind her once again.

"What do they mean Labyrinth? There are no turns or corners or anything. It just goes on and on..." She sighed. Hoggle's words came back to her then. "Or maybe it doesn't! Maybe I'm just taking it for granted that it does."

Hoping that by pushing on ahead the walls would eventually change she took off at a run. Admittedly Sarah wasn't the best athlete. Her focus was mainly on video games and not track at school. But she managed to run at a good pace for well over 5 minutes.

But slowly as she grew more and more tired her hopes started to fall. Her feet faltered causing her to trip over a fallen tree.

Frustrated she smacked her fists against the wall, screaming out in anger. She turned and did the same to the wall on her other side, but nothing moved. Defeated, she slid to the ground with her head in her hands.

What sort of stupid game didn't allow you to play? It wasn't fair! If she were in her room playing on her system she would plug her phone into the game and make a path for herself. But she supposed that is what broke the game to begin with.

"'Allo." A voice from beside her called.

She looked up, shocked to hear another person. But from where the voice came from all she could see was a small blue worm with white hair and a red scarf. She looked around for a moment, confused before looking back at the worm.

"Did… did you say hello?" She asked.

"No, I said 'allo," the worm said back, "but that's close enough."

"You're a worm aren't you?" Sarah needed confirmation.

"Yeah, that's right!" The worm said happily.

Sarah thought about that for a moment.

"You don't, by any chance, know the way through this Labyrinth do you?" She asked.

"Who me? Nah, I'm just a worm." He replied.

"Oh…" Sarah said, disappointed.

She should have figured he wouldn't know. After all, a worm wouldn't be able to move as far into the Labyrinth as she needed to go. For all she knew he was programmed not to move from the spot he was in. But still… it was worth a try.

"Come inside, meet the missus." The worm suggested.

"No thank you," Sarah said politely, "But… I have to solve this Labyrinth but there aren't any turns or any openings or anything! It just goes on and on and..."

The worm chuckled kindly. "Well you ain't lookin' right. It's full of openings, you just ain't seein' em."

"Well where are they?" She asked.

"There's one just across there. It's right in front of ya!" The worm told her.

She looked up directly into a solid wall. No matter which way she turned her head the wall continued looking to same. Maybe the worm wasn't programmed right…

"No there isn't." She told him.

"Come inside," The worm insisted, "Have a nice cup of tea."

"But there isn't an opening!" Sarah insisted.

"Of course there is," the worm laughed again, "you try walkin' through it. You'll see what I mean."

Sarah looked at him as though he had gone mad. "What?"

"Go on. Go on then." He urged.

Sarah took a long good look at the wall in case the worm was telling the truth. After all, what would he gain by making her look like a fool?

"That's… just wall. There's no way through."

"Things are not always what they seem in this place. So you can't take anything for granted." The worm laughed.

Hoggles words rang through her head again. Was it really possible?

Slowly she raised her hands out in front of her. There was nothing to lose by giving it a shot. When she started walking forward she expected her hands to come flat against solid stone. Instead, she kept walking and noticed that there in fact wasn't a wall there to begin with.

Just like if she had been altering the code on her phone she was able to walk through the wall with no problem.

"Hey!" She cried victoriously.

On the other side of the wall she could see a new path, lightly and less cluttered than the old one. She smiled, moving to one side of the wall.

"Hey! Hang on!" The worm called to her.

She paused. She hadn't even thanked the worm after all of the help he had given her. Quickly she stepped back into the opening.

"Thank you," she gave the worm a big smile, "That was incredibly helpful."

When she started to walk away again she heard the worm call out, "But don't go that way!"

"What was that?"

"I said, don't go that way. Never go that way!" He warned her.

"Oh," Sarah looked up the direction of the path seeing nothing wrong. Not wanting to doubt the worm she gave him another smile, "Thanks."

What Sarah didn't know was that the worm was right and that he was wrong. One should never go down that path but Sarah certainly should have gone down that path. Because the Goblin King had never finished designing that path meaning there was nothing from stopping her from skipping further into the game.

But sadly Sarah didn't realize it and continued on her own, happy that she had made past another of the game's challenges.

Far off in the castle Jareth the Goblin King returned to his throne, which he had created himself. To the side of the throne sat a chessboard, the pieces slowly moving on their own in time to Sarah's progress. She played as the white pieces and Jareth, of course, played as black. So far the game was even.

The castle, which held the throne room, wasn't anything impressive, though he could have made it into anything he wanted. All around him the Goblins danced happily to their own tune. He had programed them to act as a defense against the players of the game and he put up with them even though they bugged him most of the time.

In the center of the room sat Toby in a crib Jareth had created out of parts of the floor. From the moment he arrived he had not stopped crying.

He sat back in his throne, hooking one leg over the arm and observed the chaos around him.

Every corner of the throne room was packed with small green goblins of every size and variety. Their drunken chatter filled his ears blocking out even the sound of Toby's crying. Chickens roamed around trying to keep out of the grabby hands of the drunken goblins.

Jareth gave a wicked smile. Reality was nothing compared to this blissful entertainment.

He gave a quick glance at Toby, still dressed in his red and white striped onsie, his blond hair tousled, and his teary blue eyes. The poor child held no real interest to him at the moment. But he liked to think how useful he would be as an assistant in the game when he grew up. That lead him to his second issue.

A glance at the clock, hung grandiosely from a tree rooted in the room, told him that Sarah still had nine hours to beat his game. Every moment he had to fight himself from taking a look at her progress. No one had posed a challenge to him before. Then again, no game had ever been so challenging before.

From the moment he spotted her green eyes peering back at him through the screen, filled with determination matched by few others, he knew he had to challenge her. Even sitting in the safety of his throne room he knew she posed him a threat simply by existing within the plane he himself had created.

He closed his eyes and allowed the vision of her face swim through his mind. She would surely give him a challenge that he deserved.

His daydream of the girl in the white blouse with the green eyes was shattered by the escalating chaos. He needed something to keep his guards occupied while he decided on his next move.

"How about we listen to some music, yes?" He drawled.

The goblins around him froze, waiting to see what came next. With a wave of his hand the game generated a stereo system with speakers large enough to drown out even the loudest of goblins. All of his subjects began to cheer.

A song began to play allowing him some time to watch his chess game. Sarah was doing very well for the situation she was in… He would see how long she could keep it up.

All this while the music played.

"You remind me of the babe…"

Down in the Labyrinth Sarah had found herself in a whole new section of the maze. Instead of only two walls and one path she was now faced with hundreds of walls with many different paths to choose.

The walls were lower this time, and lighter in colour. Over the tops of the walls, rising on a hill, Sarah could see the castle far off in the distance. Seeing it only strengthened her resolve to get there in the time she had left.

As the corners and turns became more and more complicated Sarah started to get clever. One thing she always carried on her, on those rare occasions when she left the house, was a tube of lipstick. Though she almost never wore it, it was plenty useful to draw little arrows on the tiles to show which direction she had gone in. It was very clever if she did say so herself.

But what Sarah couldn't notice, as she often didn't, was the little men that came out of the ground after she had passed. She would never know who these men were or what purpose they served. Each time she drew an arrow and moved on they would pop out to switch the arrows so that they were facing another direction.

Deeper still into the Labyrinth Sarah moved thinking of how nice it would be to be back in her bedroom playing her games. It wasn't that a real game wasn't fun, which it really wasn't, but when your baby half-brother's life was in danger it took the adventure part of the game to a new limit.

She rounded a corner hoping to see something new besides the walls. A short dead end greeted her.

With a sigh she turned back, looking to her mark to show which directions she had already gone. What she found was the mark that she had drawn only moments ago was facing the opposite way. She looked around trying to locate the offender.

"Someone's been changing me marks!" She cried, tossing her useless lipstick away, "What a terrible place this is! It's not fair…"

"That's right, it's not fair." A voice called to her.

"But that's only the half of it!" Another voice chimed in.

She whirled around to see two thin man with bushy mustaches hanging upside down from two different colour shields. To her surprise two more heads popped out from above the shields, looking exactly the same as the men hanging from the bottom.

Glad to finally see something new, but still angry with the men, she approached them quickly.

"This was a dead end a minute ago." She accused.

"No," said one of the men, "That's the dead end behind you."

She turned quickly to find that they were right. Somehow she had gotten herself all turned around.

"It keeps changing!" She cried, "What am I supposed to do?"

"Well the only way out of here is to try one of these doors."

One of the men on the blue shield poked his head out from underneath. "One of the doors leads to the center of the Labyrinth and the other one leads to-"

"Duh-duh-duh-dum!" The others cry.

"CERTAIN DEATH!" The man finishes.

"Oh!" All four say together.

Sarah looked at both doors, seeing no difference besides the colours. "Well which one is which?"

"We can't tell you." The man from the bottom told her.

"Why not?" She said, pouting.

"Well, uh…"

"We don't know!" The second bottom man answered, "But they do"

The men from the top of the shield suddenly popped their heads out, looking nervously in Sarah's direction.

"Oh, then I'll ask them." She said, in a better mood.

"Uh, no, you can't ask us." One said.

"You can only ask one of us." Said the other, "It's in the rules."

Oh course there would be rules, Sarah nodded, this is a game after all.

"And I should warn you that one of us always tells the truth, and one of us always lies."

"That's real too, he's the liar." The blue one accused.

"No I'm not," yelled the red one, "I tell the truth!"

"Oh, what a lie." Said the blue.

The other men snickered at Sarah's predicament. She thought about it for a moment, recalling a riddle she had once heard that might help her in the situation. It didn't make sense to her when she was 15 but now she thought she might make sense of it.

"Okay," she approached the red man on the left, "Answer yes or no. Would he," she pointed to the blue man, "tell me that this door leads to the castle?"

The man ducked into his shield, whispering to the bottom man and the blue man to his right. When he popped his head out again he looked uncertainly at Sarah.

"Yes?" He answered.

"Then," she looked at the doors in front of her, "That door leads to the castle and this door leads to certain death."

"Oh!" The bottom man cry.

"How do you know?" The red man asks, "He could be telling the truth."

"Then you wouldn't be. So if you told me that he said yes, then I know the answer is no."

"But I could be telling the truth!" He insists.

"But then he would be lying. So if you told me that he said yes, then the answer would still be no." She explained.

"Wait a minute," the man said calling a timeout to talk to the man beside him, "Is that right?"

"I don't know," he laughed, "I've never understood it!"

All of the men start laughing again. But Sarah was determined now.

"No, it's right. I figured it out. I could never do it before! I must be getting smarter."

She hopped up on the step to the right waiting for the men to step away. When they moved from her path she pushed the door open and saw a clear path leading towards the Castle. She smiled triumphantly to herself.

"This is a piece of cake!" She announced.

But as soon as her feet touched the floor it gave out below her.

With a scream she tumbled out of sight and the trap door slammed shut behind her.