"That's gonna leave a bruise," Cara said with a groan, as she moved and started a small avalanche of blocks.
"No, it's not," Alia contradicted her from a nearby pile of children's security blankets, wubbies, blankies, and (insert your blanket's name here). "You're a hologram remember? You only bruise if you think you bruise. Just be thankful you don't have a wormy, half-eaten peach in your hand."
Cara slid to the foot of her pile in a rush of blocks and watched as Alia scooted down off of her pile. "That's easy for you to say. You landed on something soft. Now where's Jareth?"
"Don't know. I don't see him."
"He's got to be around here somewhere."
"You can't watch where you're going if you don't know where you're going," declared a strident voice from somewhere on the other side of the piles of children's things.
"Agnes," Cara said heading for the voice.
"Who?"
"Agnes. The junk lady that meets Sarah in the movie," Cara explained to Alia. "Come on. I'll bet she has Jareth."
They rounded the pile of blocks just in time to see Jareth disappearing around another pile, presumably trailing after Agnes offering to show him another treasure.
"I wonder what she lured him with?" Cara said, running to catch them before they disappeared.
"Beats me. It's hard to imagine Jareth as a child."
They rounded this pile to be confronted by a shaggy dog bounding at them, instead of Agnes and Jareth.
"Merlin!" This time Alia recognized the movie character.
"What?"
"Merlin. Or Ambrosius. The dogs from the movie."
"I don't think they're as friendly here," Cara said backing away from the barking dog and another who had joined him.
The girls backed away from the dogs around the corner and then back past the pile of blocks. Alia grabbed a few of them as they passed.
"What are you doing? You're going to drive them off with blocks? You're a lousy shot."
"No, first I'm going to try playing fetch. Then if that doesn't work you can try driving them off." She showed the dogs the blocks. "Here guys, see them? Go get 'em." She threw them down another aisle between more piles. The sheepdogs ran after them, hair flying.
"Come on, let's go." Cara said.
"Hang on." Alia ran to the pile of blankets and grabbed what looked like a sturdy one.
"What's that for?"
"In case they come back," Alia said, tying knots in opposite ends. "You'll see if they do."
"Whatever." She ran back to where they had last seen Jareth. "Now how are we going to find him?"
"Well, how did they do it in the movie?"
"I don't know. I never thought about it. Maybe the dog did it," Cara suggested.
"That doesn't do us any good. We don't have one."
"What about your buddies?"
"Merlin and Ambrosius? Even if they come back, they don't know who to look for," Alia told her. "And what if the holograms weren't programmed for that?"
"Well, he's got to be around here somewhere. Look for a sign he passed this way. Footprints, snagged clothing, things Agnes might have dropped –"
"Bread crumbs," Alia added.
"I was being serious."
"Come on, Cara. Like Caereh's going to make it that easy."
"Have you got any better ideas?"
"No, but –" Alia was interrupted by the approaching sound of dogs' muffled barking and then a moment later the two sheepdogs galloped around a pile ahead of them. They dropped two letter blocks at her feet and, for lack of tails, wagged their hindquarters enthusiastically instead.
Alia looked from their panting doggy grins to the slimy blocks at her feet and said, "Now, we know they were programmed to drool. If you think I'm touching those again, you're mistaken. Here, go play tug-of-war instead." She presented each dog with a knot in the blanket and shook it. They grabbed it and soon growled at each other merrily. "That should keep them busy for a while."
"Shame on you, Alia. Corrupting the guard dogs."
Alia shrugged. "They weren't much as guard dogs anyway. Let's keep looking. Maybe we'll find something."
.….
"Come on over this way. I've got some nice stuff here you'll be interested in," Agnes said as she lumbered toward a group of large leaning piles of childhood artifacts. "Here we are. I keep 'em hid here," she said in a loud, conspiratorial whisper as she pulled back a corner of a threadbare carpet. "Go on in. Have a look 'round."
He ducked under the carpet and entered a large room – a bedroom in a castle.
"Here ya go, Dearie. It's just the way you left it. It's got all the stuff your girlies gave you."
He stood lost in the middle of the room as Agnes wandered around examining items. She found a paperweight and brought it back to him.
"Here. You remember this one, don't ya?" She placed it in his hand and he looked down at the velvety red rose embedded in the polished lump of glass. "Rose gave ya that one didn't she? Remember her? Ya liked her, didn't ya?" She nudged him in the ribs and gave him a knowing leer through the hair hanging over her face, then wandered off again to find something else.
"Ah, here's a nice one, this is. Such a pretty one. And she wrote you a little note here at the bottom, see? 'To J – All my love, Linda.' Aw, in't that sweet?" She slapped the glamorous photo of a dark haired woman in a gilt frame into his chest and left to hunt again, picking through the things scattered around the room.
"Ooh, what's this? A little sparkly. You'll want to keep that one. Who gave you that one? Her name was Ronni, wan't it?" She shoved the small object on him, forcing him to take it before she quickly turned away again. He tucked the photo frame under his arm and looked at what Agnes had given him. It was a cut crystal drop from a chandelier. He frowned at it, having no idea who gave it to him or why.
"She told you it was so you could remember how you met. When you was chasin' that other woman singin' in the show. Phantom somethin' or other she called it," she reminded him as he stared at it. No matter how hard he tried he could not remember ever having met the woman she was talking about. He stuffed the drop in his pocket, still none the wiser, as she came back with another picture frame.
"Lookee here at this one. This one's you. One of 'em painted a picture of you. Even signed it here at the bottom." Agnes pointed to the bold signature that read 'Aeris.' "She's pretty good, not the sort of style you see ev'ry day, but she wasn't an ev'ry day girl now was she? You'd better keep that one, too." She handed him the small painting and patted his arm before leaving for another treasure.
Agnes continued searching the room and bringing the items to him, always she knew the item and who had given it to him. He sat down on the bench at the foot of the bed and she began piling them around him and placing them on the bed. There were odds and ends scattered everywhere and still she brought him more. But he recognized none of them, no matter how much she told him about the item and its giver and the emotions between them, he could remember none of it, had no feeling for any of it.
"And here's another one, from that young girl you almost lost." She wound up the music box and the tiny figure in the white dress twirled to the music in her gilded cage. "Silly little Sarah. Sayin' you had no power over her. Lucky for her you took her anyway when she changed her mind, eh?" The music box continued to play as she went searching again.
"All these sweeties you had. Bet there's one you wished you stayed with, hmm? One you'd like to meet again. Yes, yes, I bet there was a special one somewhere. Which one was it? Hmm? Think. Had to be one you like better than the rest. Who was she? Let's see..."
She looked around the room, searching for something in particular. "That one. She was it," she said and made a beeline for an item he couldn't see. When she finally turned around he saw it was a bird cage of sorts, an octagonal pavilion of silver and gold and translucent wavy glass that he did not remember noticing in the room before. He thought he could see movement in it.
"This one had to love you best. She gave you the biggest present. Fancy bird cage with a pretty little birdie in it to sing to you. Did she sing to you, too?" She set the cage in his lap.
He looked into the cage, curious about the contents, which he remembered no better than any of the other gifts she had shown him.
"Yes, Isis was your favorite, wa'nt she?"
He could not remember anyone named Isis. And it did not look like a bird in the cage as Agnes said. It was too small for a bird, nor was it shaped like a bird. And there was something familiar about it.
"Yes, yes," Agnes babbled on. "You should find her again. Call her back. She's the one you should have kept. Make a nice Goblin Queen she would. Forget all the other women. This one's the only one you really need." But Jareth had ceased paying attention to her, instead standing up and starting an avalanche of bric-a-brac, looking around the cage for a door. He wanted to let the creature out. If it was what he thought, it did not belong in the cage or with these gifts.
He found the door and flipped the clasp. The flash of silver darted from the cage which Jareth dropped to one side carelessly as he watched her flight to the window. He followed the tiny dragon and pulled aside the heavy curtains cloaking the window to expose cloudy panes. He unfastened the latch and swung them open to see only darkness and murky shapes beyond.
Behind him Agnes had noticed his actions and followed him to the window where she now tugged at his sleeve, trying to recapture his attention. "Nobody out there, dearie. No, no, nothing to look at out there. Come back in here and look at your pretty gifts. All these nice memories, all these nice girls. Come back and see. We'll look at them all." She pulled at him more insistently and he shook her off roughly.
"Go away old woman and peddle your false memories to someone else. I don't believe them." He climbed over the windowsill and vanished into the darkness beyond.
"Damn," she muttered after she watched him disappear, beady eyes flashing greenly from behind the curtain of hair hanging over her face.
.….
Jareth paused among the piles of trash outside the window looking about him for some sign of which way he should go. Arten'barad had flown out of the window and away into the darkness without a sign. Somewhere in the near distance he heard dogs barking. Unable to see the castle beyond the piles of junk, he picked a direction at random and started walking.
He chose the wrong direction and soon came running back the same way, pursued by two shaggy sheepdogs in full voice. They cornered him in a dead end and stood guard in front of him.
"Wonderful. They have a whole junkyard to patrol and they have to be in the aisle I take a wrong turn down," he muttered as he plastered himself against a pile of little red wagons with their paint peeling off and tried to think of a way to deal with two dogs at once.
"There you are! We've been looking for you!"
Jareth looked up and saw Alia and Cara standing beyond the dogs. He opened his mouth to warn them when the two sheepdogs ran to Alia and danced in front of her.
"Aren't you good dogs? You found him for us. Yes, that's good boys," Alia fussed over them.
Jareth closed his mouth, a slightly puzzled frown on his face as he approached them.
"She made friends," Cara explained. "Now they won't leave us alone. We've walked all over this maze of junk and they keep wandering off and then finding us again."
"Any idea which way is out?" he asked.
"No, but this better be it, because I don't want to walk all the way back to the other end," Cara said.
"We have to run out of piles soon," Alia said, looking up from the dogs. "Haven't you noticed? They're alphabetized and we're running out of alphabet. How many things can you think of beginning with x, y, or z?"
.….
They stopped at the edge of the junk piles, hiding behind a hill of stuffed zebras to scout out the clearing between them and the gates to the Goblin City. There were no guards at the gate, not even sleeping ones.
"All right. Let's go through here fast. If it works like the movie, we'll have time to slip through the second gate before it closes," Cara said and ran for the first gate. Merlin and Ambrosius ran after her with a chorus of barks making them all wince, certain the dogs would alert the city.
They pushed open the first gate and ran for the second one as it started to close. Jareth made it through just as it slammed closed.
"Come on. Let's run through the City, too," Alia suggested. "I don't want to be delayed by the goblin guards and we don't have Ludo to call the rocks for us. If we hurry maybe we'll get through before they do."
They heard a loud metallic grinding and clanking behind them as they ran for the castle they saw over the rooftops of the goblin houses. They hit the first goblins when they reached the square in front of the castle. The goblins poured down the castle steps and, judging by the noise behind them, had them surrounded as well.
"Go on. Just keep running," Alia said when the other two paused. "Ignore them and maybe they'll ignore us." A loud crash sounded behind them. "What are they doing back there?"
"Let's not stay to find out," Jareth suggested.
They ran across the square. The goblins cheered at the sight of their quarry and rushed toward them. Then after another loud crash close behind them, the goblins suddenly turned and ran back up the steps. The two dogs chased up the steps after them, barking madly, convinced that they had the goblins on the run.
The goblins fell over themselves trying to jam through the little goblin door set in the large castle doors all at once, dogs snapping at their heels. They slammed the door shut behind them, barely missing the last one's tail.
Cara reached the door first and yanked at the chains, trying to open it. The dogs scratched madly at the door.
"No you push them to open them," Jareth said as he and Alia joined her moments later. The three of them managed to push it open far enough for them to slip through. Alia squeezed through first and Cara followed her. Cara looked back down into the square as they turned to shut the doors behind them against the following goblins.
"Look! That must be why they ran." She pointed down at the large metal robot crossing the square.
"What? Yes, hurry up. Unless you want to wait to meet him personally?" Jareth asked.
They pushed the doors shut after them, hoping that they would hold if Humongous attacked the castle itself to come after them.
They turned to enter the castle and look for Tieran and found their way up more stairs blocked by Hadrian instead. Merlin and Ambrosius ducked behind the three of them to hide.
"Now what?" Cara said.
Hadrian said nothing. A thud sounded at the door behind them and they turned to see if it held against Humongous. It had been barred against him, or them, for that matter since the three of them would never have been able to move the huge beam across the door. When they turned back to Hadrian to see what he wanted from them this time, he had gone.
"I hate it when he does that," Cara muttered as they started up the stairs.
They came to the throne room fairly quickly and the three of them moved to take the stairs in the alcove off to the left. The dogs pattered around the room, nose to floor, following fascinating smells.
"Where are you going?" Jareth demanded.
"To the confrontation," Cara answered matter-of-factly.
"Yeah," Alia agreed.
"But that's not how it was done in the movie."
"I don't care how it was done," Cara rebelled. "I'm not getting separated again. Besides how do we know who has to do the confrontation and whether everyone not there will get transferred, too? We're coming." She ran up the stairs without waiting for Jareth to respond and Alia followed.
"Wait!" he called after them. "Don't just go running up there. Why do they never learn?"
When Jareth caught up to Alia and Cara, he found them hugging the wall of a landing overlooking the convoluted room of stairs and arches seen in the movie. This room was a little different though. Caereh, continuing her habit of cleaning the movie up to her liking and making it her own to the point where not many would want it anyway, had replicated it entirely in polished stainless steel.
"Do you see anyone?" he asked them.
"Haven't looked yet," Cara replied.
"Do we really have to do this room?" Alia asked, leaning against the wall with her eyes closed. "I mean was it part of the instructions?"
"All it said was the center of the Labyrinth," Cara said, still clinging to the wall.
"Right. So how do we know this is the center? I vote we go back down and wait in the throne room. Makes sense to me that the throne would be the center of the kingdom," Alia said, turning to go back down the stairs and bumping into Jareth.
He grabbed her and turned her around. "We have to do it this way because this is what happened in the movie. Would Caereh come up with something else? She hasn't yet. And she'd never miss a chance to show off. No, this is where we have to be." He moved past them to the stairs at the edge of the polished landing.
"Not so mouthy now are you?" Caereh's voice asked them.
"Where is she? I don't see her," Cara said.
"Down there." Jareth pointed to a landing almost directly below them.
"Now what do we do?" Alia asked as she peered cautiously over the edge. "Do we have to get to her somehow? All Sarah did was jump."
Chimes rang out through the room.
"No, not more music. Please tell me Caereh is not going to sing again," Tieran groaned.
"Tieran! Where is he?" Alia looked over the edge of the landing for him excitedly, leaning so far that Cara and Jareth had to grab her by her shirt to steady her.
The room rang with Hadrian's amusement at Tieran's comment as Caereh turned in fury.
"Shut up! I've had enough of your comments!" she yelled, stamping a boot scarred with long, vertical, glowing gashes, then threw a crystal viciously at Tieran.
Alia, Cara, and Jareth tried to follow the crystal among its many reflections. The steel mirrors had deceived Caereh as well and it bounced a few times on stairs and arches before reaching its destination where Tieran caught it and threw it unerringly back at her. It barely missed her head as she ducked and flew through the inverted arch behind her to bounce out of sight.
"Missed. You should have aimed lower. You knew she would duck," Hadrian advised him, from his disturbing position reclining upside down in an arch above them all. His face also still bore the scars from his encounter with the kitten.
Caereh stormed toward Hadrian in blind and speechless fury, then suddenly realized where she stood, turned pale and rooted to the spot.
Jareth stepped forward to the edge of the landing and Cara grabbed his arm.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm going down there," he said pointing at Caereh's platform. "She's obviously not going anywhere," he added derisively.
"Are you nuts?"
"No. If Arten'barad's theory holds, I should be able to just walk down there."
"Walk upside down you mean? But you haven't got your magic."
"No, but I'm used to thinking of walking that way when I do." He shrugged. "If it doesn't work, I won't have far to drop."
Meanwhile, during this discussion, Hadrian had been taunting Caereh and Alia was looking for a way to get to Tieran. Jareth noticed her and suggested, "Try turning left at the bottom of the stairs. If the room is as much the same as the movie as it looks it might get you there."
"Thanks," she said and took off down the stairs.
"Fine Goblin Queen you make," Hadrian scoffed. "Can't even walk in your own castle."
Jareth turned and stepped off the landing and swung around before Cara could say anything else. She dropped to her knees to look over the edge. Jareth had vanished. She leaned further over the edge and saw him standing there, upside down. He gestured at her to be quiet and pointed at Caereh, distracted by Hadrian and her battle with vertigo.
Cara sat back to look around for Alia and Tieran. Alia had not managed to find a way to get to Tieran yet, but had not given up either. When Cara looked back for Jareth he had turned himself around and crept up behind Caereh already.
"That figures," she thought. "I missed just the part I wanted to see."
"Not as easy as it looks, is it?" Jareth said over Caereh's shoulder as she looked around for Hadrian, who had abruptly stopped taunting and vanished.
"Annoying isn't he?" Hadrian whispered in Cara's ear, startling her. Cara lost her grip on the edge of the landing and slipped forward into empty space.
Caereh whirled and swung at Jareth to slap, but instead of making contact with his face her hand passed through him. The lack of resistance caused her to stumble toward the edge and teeter there for a moment waving her arms to try to regain her balance. She grabbed wildly at Jareth to save herself, but her hands passed through him again and she fell.