"What?" Alia turned and looked at her over her shoulder.
"Yep, definitely a muntjac. She looks like an innocent little dear, then you catch sight of those fangs. And yapping at you all the time. A fraggin' muntjac, that's what she is."
"Cara, what are you talking about?" Alia stopped and demanded. "You're babbling. Are you sure that lichen didn't do something to you?"
"Just trying to make conversation."
"What in the name of the Underground is a muntjac?" Jareth demanded.
"Don't you ever watch the Discovery Channel? No, I don't suppose you would." Cara sighed then said, "A muntjac is an itty bitty deer that lives in India. It looks like a normal deer, except it has these fangs, like some sort of vampire deer." She demonstrated with her fingers at the corners of her mouth. "And it barks for an alarm, so they call it the barking deer. Has loads in common with my mother, fits her to a T."
"Sounds a little like Caereh," Jareth commented and turned to start walking again. A movement caught out of the corner of his eye caused him to pause halfway and glance back the way they had come.
"Get down," he cried, diving for the stone pavings and dragging Alia and Cara with him. Something zipped over their heads.
"What?" Cara wanted to know. "What was that?"
"Your brownies."
"My brownies?" Cara demanded as she raised her head to look at him. "Why is it that all the problems are mine?"
"Fine. Then the brownies you mentioned five minutes ago."
"What about them?" Alia asked, tired of the arguing and wanting the information.
"Here they live in the walls." A chink sounded in the wall above them and they ducked as sharp splinters of stone sprayed down on them. "And they blow darts. Move before they find their aim." Jareth crawled for the nearest corner that would shield them from the brownies.
"Leave it to Caereh to arm them," Cara said once they were safely behind the wall.
"Be thankful she didn't give them heat-seeking missiles," Alia said.
"Shh. Don't give her ideas. Where do we go now?" Cara asked peeking around the corner. Another dart hit the stones near her head, chipping off more slivers.
Jareth carefully picked up the tiny dart that had ricocheted to the floor in front of them. "I don't think we can go back that way. I doubt these are simply darts. They're most likely drugged or poisoned."
"How do you know that?" Cara asked, rubbing her cheek where the stone slivers had hit it.
"If you were a brownie, would you defend yourself with tiny, plain darts? They'd only anger your target. You'd need to incapacitate it."
"What a horrible place she's made this." She rubbed the blood from her cheek off her fingers on her jeans, leaving smears whose animation did not quite match the path of her fingertips. "So we don't go that way and we can't go this way because it's a dead end."
"Not anymore, it's not," Alia said pointing. To their left the tiny courtyard contained the pair of doubled goblin guards.
"Alph and Ralph," Jareth said.
"I suppose that means there's a dead end behind us now," Cara said, looking over her shoulder. "Good. The more walls between us and those darts, the better."
"That's right. Annoying little buggers, aren't they? Always blowing darts at us. That's why we've got these shields," volunteered the guard on the left.
"Oh, what a lie! That's not why we've got them. They're for the rules. You know they have to pick a door to get out," countered the guard on the right.
"Look! She's changed the rules," Alia exclaimed.
"This is news to you?" Jareth asked.
"No, look. I mean they're not runes anymore."
The new rules covered the surface of both shields. Plainly lettered English dwindling into fine print replaced the old heraldic designs bordered with runes.
"ONLY ONE QUESTION PER PARTICIPANT OR TEAM OF PARTICIPANTS PER JOURNEY THROUGH THE 'LABYRINTH.' QUESTION MAY ONLY BE ASKED ONCE. QUESTION MAY ONLY BE ASKED OF ONE GUARD. GUARD GUARANTEED TO PROVIDE AN ANSWER. TRUTH OF ANSWER NOT GUARANTEED.
DEPENDING ON GUARD QUESTIONED, ANSWER WILL BE GUARANTEED TRUTH OR FALSEHOOD. MANAGEMENT NOT REQUIRED TO DISCLOSE IDENTITY OF TRUTH-TELLING OR NON-TRUTH-TELLING GUARD. MANAGEMENT NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR CONSEQUENCES OF ANY ACTIONS TAKEN ON BASIS OF GUARD ANSWERS.
"Odds of winning 1:13,000,000,000. One entry per customer. Void
where prohibited.
Management reserves the right to change the rules
at any time without prior notice.
If you want the full rules, you're
out of luck."
"We have to choose a door to get out, one lies, one tells the truth, and we can only ask one question," Cara summarized. "Well, at least that hasn't changed. It looks like the lawyers have been after the rules, though."
"Leaving us with a lot of words that don't tell us much. Typical," Alia said cynically. "Sarah got more information than this."
"But we're not Sarah, are we?" Jareth asked rhetorically as he brushed the nonexistent dirt from his jeans. He slipped one of his loafers off and dumped out a stone chip. Cara thought he looked totally out of place in the slip-on shoes. "Boots would have been so much more practical," he muttered. "Everyone always portrays me as so unfair," he sneered at the word, "to Sarah, but at least I gave her all the information she needed. These poor excuses for guards probably don't even know what is behind those doors."
"But what sense would that make?" Cara objected. "How –"
"Yeah, I'll bet they haven't got a clue," Alia interrupted. "They just stand around all day telling lies because Caereh doesn't trust them not to blurt out the answers."
"You're right there. They don't look trustworthy to me. Entirely too slickly drawn. What do you think Cara?" Jareth asked, looking at Cara significantly as the guards began to mutter among themselves.
He was trying to tell her something, but Cara was not catching it. "What –" she began before Alia cut her off again.
"For all we know these doors could lead back to the beginning, or to the bog, or nowhere at all. Maybe that's it. They're such sorry excuses for guards that they can't guard anything important, just fake doors," she ended derisively.
One of the lower guards could not take any more abuse. "We do too know! One door leads to the castle at the center of the Labyrinth and the other leads to certain death."
The guard on the bottom of the other pair backed him up. "Yeah, that's what we were told."
"Ach, now you've done it. You weren't supposed to tell them that," one of the upper guards scolded.
Alia smiled smugly. "Now we just have to ask the question."
"Would you care to do the honors?" Jareth asked Cara as he gestured toward the guards.
"No, thank you. I don't want any criticism later," Cara told him. "You do it."
"As you wish. If everyone will please remember to refrain from commentary..." he instructed, raising an eyebrow and looking at Cara and Alia, then approaching the guards.
This, Cara got. "Right, no quoting."
He addressed the upper guard on the right. "Would that guard," he pointed to his left, "say that this door leads to the castle?"
Without hesitation, the right-hand guard answered, "No."
"Thank you. Stand aside," he commanded the guard in front of him.
It sidled away from the door. Alia and Cara stepped up to follow Jareth as he opened the dark paneled wooden door. They stepped cautiously into the corridor on the other side of the door, treading lightly, anticipating the floor to drop out from underneath them, and looked around. Nothing happened, so they moved farther down the corridor.
They had to walk in single file – the walls sloping inward did not allow them to walk any other way – but they kept close together. At the intersection with the cross corridor they stopped to decide which way to go. Looking back the way they had come, the smooth, pale, yellow ocher stone wall – just like the rest of this section of the Labyrinth – gave no sign of the door they had just passed through.
Alia tapped Cara on the shoulder to point this out to her. Cara jumped.
"Don't do that," she hissed in a loud whisper.
"Sorry. Look. The door's gone," Alia told her, also in a whisper that caught Jareth's attention as he paused to consider which way to take.
"What? So it is. I think we'll go to the left this time. Follow me."
They turned to follow him and then the floor dropped from under them.
After the first startled yelps – screaming was beneath Jareth's dignity and Alia and Cara were not the type – they fell almost silently until the Helping Hands lining the slick walls of the shaft caught them.
"Ow, Sarah was right. They do hurt," Cara said as they halted her fall, pulling and pinching bare skin – even animated bare skin – painfully and grabbing forcefully regardless of body part.
From somewhere below her Cara heard, "You will remove that hand or I will remove it. I may be animated, but I am still the Goblin King and I expect to be treated as such."
Cara tried not to wonder about the location of the hand. Looking around in the faint light from above, she noticed that Caereh had customized the hands as well. They were no longer wrinkled, calloused, and caked with dirt, but cleaned up with animation, resembling mannequin hands more than the Helping Hands from the movie. Cara thought she saw nail polish on several of them.
"We're helping. We're the Helping Hands," came the chorus of voices from all around them.
"Which way do we want to go?" Alia asked from above. "That should be the next question they ask."
"Up. Definitely up," Cara answered.
"I agree," Jareth said.
"Then it's unanimous," Alia said. "I always wondered why she chose the way she did."
"Which way do you want to go? Up or down?" queried the chorus.
"Up," they nearly shouted back as one voice.
"Up?"
"They chose up?"
"Too bad," a rusty voice said and handed them downwards.
"Hey! Wait a minute! We chose up. Why aren't you handing us up?" Cara demanded.
"Because you're going down. You always go down."
"Then why do you ask?"
"We like for you to feel you have a choice," another voice answered, sounding as if it was talking around a handful of marbles, as they dropped into the oubliette and the grate clanged shut behind them.