Alia, Cara and Jareth stood in front of the wall at the foot of the hill and contemplated its slick surface.
"This didn't translate well at all. It's not right," Cara observed.
"No, it looks nothing like the real outer wall," agreed Jareth.
"It's too shiny and new," Cara continued.
"It lacks the air of age and impassiveness that even the wall in the movie had. This one is almost cheerful."
Alia lost patience. "Oh, enough with the critique already. We're wasting time. How do we get into the thing? I don't see a door anywhere."
"No, neither do I. There wasn't one in the movie, either," Cara said as she shooed away a fairy.
"How did Sarah get in?"
"The dwarf showed her," Jareth answered quietly.
"Well, I don't see one of them either. Now what?"
"Now we have to ask the right question," Cara answered Alia, remembering the movie.
Jareth obliged her. "How do we get into the Labyrinth?"
"'We gets in there,'" Cara said pointing at the wall at random. They all followed her finger and looked at the gate that had appeared in the wall.
"You seem to know an awful lot about the movie for only having seen it a few times," Alia commented as they walked toward the gate.
"I've been studying it. I had to do something while you were gone for Christmas. I was trying to figure out what all those people on that list of his saw in it."
As the trio approached the gates they swung open with a groan. Jareth walked boldly through them, while Alia and Cara hesitated in the gateway looking around cautiously.
"Cozy, isn't it?"
"Not really," Alia answered Cara.
"Will you be doing that for the next thirteen hours?" Jareth asked.
"Doing what?" Alia was lost.
"Quoting the movie."
"That depends on several things," Cara answered Jareth.
"Such as?"
"Whether it takes thirteen hours to get through this, for one," Cara said as she looked around
"And the others?"
"How much it annoys you." She turned to Jareth and grinned.
"I see."
"Do we go left or right?" Alia asked, interrupting their conversation.
Cara and Jareth both turned around and looked at Alia as if she had just grown another head.
"What?" Alia asked defensively.
"That was a quote from the movie," Cara explained.
"I've watched it, too. How do you think I recognized yours? So which way do we go? I think she went right in the movie. Do we follow that?"
"Well, it worked for getting in. Maybe we'll be able to follow it all along and this will be even quicker than we think."
"But why would she make it that easy?" Alia objected.
"Maybe she couldn't think of anything else. Don't ask so many questions. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Just take the break and run with it. Let's go right."
"Going left would be shorter," Jareth pointed out.
"But she doesn't know that, does she? That's in your Labyrinth, not the movie," Cara said.
"So we really don't have any good reason to go either direction," Alia summarized.
"By going to the right we could verify Cara's theory," Jareth conceded.
"Then let's go right," Alia decided.
"Should we run?" Alia asked a minute later.
"I sincerely hope not," Jareth said.
"How far do we have to go before we find the worm?" Alia asked.
"I don't know," Cara answered. "Should we be looking for side openings?"
"Not if we're looking for the worm," Alia pointed out. "Wouldn't be any point to finding them if we weren't going to use them."
"That's true."
Inside the Labyrinth, too, the walls had changed. The clean, straight bricks ran smooth and level, building walls with no hollows or sags. No weeds or saplings grew in the nonexistent cracks. The sloped floor of the passage had been swept clean. No drifts of leaves in the corners, no fallen branches to climb over. The lichen no longer grew at random where it could find a foothold on the wall. Now it grew in supplied wall sconces, placed regularly along the walls, making them look like a cross between a pot of petunias and a sentry.
As it turned out, they had no difficulty finding the worm. He no longer lived in a crack in the wall, but had house with a tidy little front door. It reminded Alia of old cartoons she had seen where the mice had front doors to their holes and little mouse hotels and bars down the street, complete with awnings, shrubbery, and red carpets.
Cara and Jareth had not yet noticed it and Alia had turned to point it out to them when a small voice said, "Good morning."
The worm, also, had undergone a makeover. This larger, sleeker, fatter worm had an all around air of greater prosperity. Instead of the little red woolen winter scarf, he wore a red silk scarf pinned with a stick pin. The blue tufts of hair that should have stood out from his head had been trimmed and tamed and were neatly slicked back.
"Did you just say 'Good morning?'" Jareth asked.
"Yes, I did."
"Shouldn't that have been 'Allo?" Cara asked.
"Whatever for?"
"No reason," Cara answered him. This definitely was not the worm she had expected.
"Do you know the way through this labyrinth?" Alia asked hesitantly, uncertain how this new worm would react.
Apparently similarly programmed, he said, "No, I'm afraid not. I'm a stay-at-home worm. Wonderful day for a stroll for you, though. Would you like to take a break? Come inside and meet my wife. Have some coffee."
"No, thank you," Jareth responded for them. Alia had to admit to herself that, any other time, she would have been tempted to accept just to see what Mrs. Worm looked like.
Jareth continued, "We must solve this labyrinth, but we haven't found any turns or openings in this corridor. Are there any? Did we turn the wrong way?"
"There's one directly across the way there."
"Do you know where it leads?"
"Left and right. I've been told that the left one leads directly to the castle and the right one leads further into the Labyrinth, but I've not been far enough in myself to see anything."
"That would agree with the movie," Cara said.
"Then let's take the short cut," Alia said.
"Thank you for your information. You've been very helpful," Jareth told the worm.
"Oh, my pleasure. You're sure you won't stop for a minute?"
"Thank you very much, but we couldn't. We have a deadline to meet, and I'm afraid we'd never fit in your little house," Alia told him.
"That's too bad really. Do come back sometime when you have more time. Enjoy your walk," he called after them as they turned down the left passage.
"My, my," he said once they had gone around the corner out of earshot. "I do believe I may have given them the wrong information. Now was it really the left way that led straight to the castle, or was it the right? Now that I think of it, it may have been – yes, yes, it was – the right passage. Whatever will they do?" he continued with much innocence. "Ah, well, all roads lead to the castle... eventually," he said with a hint of a smile.
.….
"They just passed my worm. And they took the long way. Good," Caereh reported, watching a crystal the program had produced for her.
Tieran, sitting on a windowsill he had cleared of filth and debris, did not answer, but continued gazing out the window, as though he could see them at this distance and find them in the vastness of this computer-generated labyrinth.
Hadrian lounged in a chair he had conjured for himself. He amused himself by firing pebbles from a slingshot he had taken from a goblin at anything that wandered within several yards of his chair.
"That's fairly good progress for less than an hour, but then, that is an easy section," he commented, loosing another stone. He watched Caereh as she began pacing, kicking aside the occasional goblin or chicken. She approached the area around his chair looking for clear floor where she could walk unimpeded. Even the computer-generated goblins had learned to avoid the area for the most part.
Hadrian toyed with the idea of aiming a pebble at Caereh, just as he had at any other thing that had come within his designated boundary, but he discarded it. Maybe he would use it later. Doing it now would spoil everything.
"They're still in the brick maze. What else is in there?" Caereh demanded.
"Only the lichen," he answered her.
.….
"...The ants go marching four by four. Hurrah! Hurrah! The ants go marching four by four, the little one stops to shut the door and they all go marching down, into the ground, to get out of the rain," Cara sang with enthusiasm.
"How many verses of that are there?" Jareth asked irritably.
"As many as I can rhyme, I think. I could do bottles of beer on the wall if you prefer."
"I'd prefer nothing at all. Why are you singing?"
"Marching music, keeping our spirits up, and all that. Besides, this way you know I'm still here."
"Well, it is getting kind of annoying, Cara," Alia agreed with Jareth. "And I think you're waking up the lichen and they're starting to give me the creeps. One or two clumps in the movie was cute, but a pot of them every 25 feet is too much. And these don't act the same."
Jareth considered the nearest pot of lichen that Cara had woken. Every eyeball watched them intently. Cara walked up to it to get a closer look.
"What do you think they're going to do, Alia? Jump out of their pots and start crawling after us?" Cara reached up to feel one of the stalks extended toward her. The eye pulled back very slightly, but continued to watch her intently.
"Careful, they bite," Jareth murmured next to her ear just as she was about to touch it.
Cara jumped and snatched her hand back, then wheeled and glared at Jareth. "Was that really necessary?"
He shrugged. "Perhaps."
"What are they going to bite me with? We don't even know if they do. It didn't say so in the movie."
"Precisely. We don't know what they will do, but Alia is right. They are not behaving in the same way as the ones in the movie or the ones I know. Usually, if you were to approach one that closely, it would withdraw, like a snail into its shell.
"We're relying on the movie script too much. We can't expect Caereh to follow it exactly. Unfortunately, she's not quite that stupid. And just by being here, the three of us have already changed it. Now shall we continue?" Jareth gestured onwards.
They walked in a subdued single-file down the path between the brick walls, Alia in front, giving the pots a wide berth, and Cara trailing behind the other two, muttering sullenly under her breath.
"Could have just told me... I'm not stupid... didn't have to scare the crap out of me... pompous, arrogant, know-it-all... acts like he's the only one with any sense..." She fumed in this vein for some time, until Alia, still in the lead, reached a dead end.
Since she was the closest, Cara turned back to the side path they had just passed. Alia and Jareth followed her.
"Now we'll see who's got sense. Now that I'm leading the way we'll get somewhere."
Her mind full of thoughts such as these, Cara set off with determination, as though sheer willpower would force the computer to give her the way to the castle beyond the Goblin City. Never hesitating, Cara took the turns that came to her and Alia and Jareth quickened their pace to keep up.
Rounding a corner, Cara came face to face with a giant eyeball. Before she could scream or step back, a limb wrapped around her and pinned her arms to her sides. Another snaked out and pulled her feet out from under her.