I kept walking and was disappointed but not necessarily surprised to find that there was just more of the Labyrinth ahead of me. After all, the door guardians hadn't promised me a straight shot at the castle, just death on one side and the castle on the other. Damn loopholes.

A wheezy breathing sounded behind me, and a very large old man with a bird on his head shuffled by me and sat down heavily on a very large stone chair that he nonetheless filled.

I approached him. "Excuse me, sir?"

"Huh? Oh, the young woman," he mumbled.

The hat, it seemed, had a mind of its own because it looked at me and went, "woo woo!"

I gave it a dirty look but said nothing to it and spoke directly to the old man. "Do you know the way to the castle, sir?"

"You want to get to the castle," he echoed mystically.

"How's that for brain power?" The bird trilled.

"Be quiet," the old man yelled at his hat.

"Aw, nuts!"

The old codger turned his attention back to me. "You see, my dear, sometimes the way forward is the way back."

"Sorry?" I asked.

The bird made a noise of disgust. "Would you listen to this crap?"

"Enough!" The man thumped his fist on the arm of the chair.

"Alright!"

"Finished?"

The bird grunted in what we took for a yes.

He cleared his throat importantly. "Quite often, young woman, it seems as if we are not getting anywhere when in fact…."

The bird broke in, "we are!"

"We are," I could hear the disgust in his voice.

"Well I'm not getting anywhere standing around here."

"Join the club!" A loud snore turned the bird's and my attention back to its host. "Uh, I think that's your lot. Please leave a contribution."

I looked at the peach in my hand. "Would you like this?"

"He can't it eat, and what good would it do me? I'm just his hat!"

I fished around in my pocket and came up with a dime, which I dropped in the box by the old man's right hand.

"Grazie, signorina!"

"There's one born every minute," I said to myself, choosing the nearest pathway in the maze. "That was a Chinese fortune cookie."

The path I chose turned out to be so full of twists and turns that my head was spinning. I sat down to rest and the smell of that peach started to get to me. It was a pain carrying it around… I ought to just eat it. I held the fruit up to my lips and was about to take a bite when I started to have some doubts. What happened the other times people accepted tempting pieces of fruit from a mysterious stranger? Fig leaves and glass coffins resulted. Then again, those were apples.

I pressed my nose against the peach the way I would any other piece of fruit to see if it was good, and something behind me sneezed. I also heard another muffled sound that sounded kind of like "Gesundheit." Startled, I stood up very fast and turned around to see two doors that had clearly not been there when I first sat down. Each door had a knocker with an ugly face on it. The ring on the first knocker was in its ears; the other face held the ring in its mouth.

"It's very rude to stare," the one with the ring through its ears yelled.

"I'm sorry! I just…."

"Huh?"

"Mmf nn gnd…" the one with the ring in its mouth said.

"Don't talk with your mouth full!" The first one snapped.

The second one made an angry muffled retort, and I pulled the ring out of his mouth. "Ah! It is so good to get that thing out!"

"What did you say?" I asked.

"I said it's no good talking to him; he's deaf as a post!"

The first one groused, "Mumble, mumble mumble! You're a wonderful conversational companion!"

"You can talk! All you do is moan!"

"No good! Can't hear you!"

I looked at the one I had freed. "Where do these doors lead?"

"Search me; we're just the knockers!" He cackled, no doubt thinking himself very clever.

I set down the ring and tried the door. It wouldn't budge. "How do I get through?"

"Knock! And the door… will open!"

"'Seek and ye shall find,'" I replied, knocking on the other door.

"Ouch," the deaf one yowled. "My head!"

"Sorry!"

"What?"

The other knocker and I groaned in unison, and the door slammed shut behind me. I took in my surroundings. I was in a junkyard… the mother of all junkyards. I'd never seen anything like this, not even in my Biology class when we watched that disgusting movie about pollution or when the little boy I babysat wanted to watch There Goes a Garbage Truck three times in a row. Then again, this was the cleanest garbage I'd ever seen. There were no food scraps or anything like that. It was old toys, furniture, and other random junk like that. Dusty but not rotten.

I saw a Strange Change Machine like the kind my dad and I had played with when I was a kid on a nearby pile and reached for it, but something screeched at me.

"Hey, that's mine!"

I looked down and realized that the pile I was staring at was a bundle of sorts on the back of a very little woman. The pile was two or three times bigger than she was at least.

"I'm sorry," I apologized, startled.

Muttering, she shuffled on her way.

"Well, I'll be damned," I said to myself, and without thinking, I held the peach up to my lips and had a bite.