9. Cheating the Labyrinth
His watch no longer worked (the minute and second hands were now flopping about like fleas), daylight was nearly always the dreamy amber just before sunset and night, apparently, only came along when it felt like it, so David no longer had any idea how long he had been within The Labyrinth, or for how long he walked each day. He noted—with no small sense of pride—that he was getting quite good at finding dry, relatively safe places to sleep. He would walk for what he judged to be a good five hours, rest, then move on. The soles of his boots had developed one or two holes, and this was none too pleasing when pebbles wedged in or his socks (now nearly toeless and heelless) got wet and muddy and squishy, but at least the boots were still holding together.
Food, for the most part, remained an issue. But he often did not notice its absence. For the most part. His conscience had gnawed and worried at him for a whole day after he pinched a roasting something with six spindly legs from someone's (something's) campfire, but morals stood no chance when up against the prospect of starvation. David pinched and nicked his way through The Labyrinth, lifting stored nuts, scrumping fruit from orchards clearly marked KEEP OUT OR ELSE, robbing anything left alone on a spit, and even snatching one cooling pie. The cooling pie incident drove Ölek the Hard Helmeted to disown his son, Glapin the Leather Armoured, but David had no way of knowing, and had long since digested the pie anyway.
David's thoughts would find themselves on Kent every now and then. He spared a few fleeting thoughts to George and Sandra and Baby Blob and his rented room (had he switched off the kettle the day he left?), but found that the names had become more words and sketches of what people should look like than real memories. He could recall the shape of George's nose perfectly (straight, with a knobby bit at the end), or one of Sandra's eyes (light brown, with orange flecks), but could not put their faces together properly without a great deal of blurriness.
He could not even remember David Jones properly, the David Jones who worked at that pub with the artist's name and carried trays and walked down alleys. That David wore his same leather jacket and had—for the most part—his same face, but that David had been a sleepwalker. He could see it clearly now. He had sleepwalked all the way into his thirtieth birthday, a shambling, pathetic, soft-spoken joke of a man.
He felt as if he should send himself a postcard.
"Dear David, having a great time, how have you been, send George my love, gotta run, David."
Lacking any real way of checking what he looked like now, David could only guess at how matted or wild his hair looked. His scalp itched something fierce, he knew that much. He also knew his clothes were in near tatters, and there was dirt under his fingernails that had now become one with his skin. When he rubbed at his chin, he could feel considerably more than a light stubble.
But it was his face that felt the most changed. There was something in the way he looked out at the world now, he knew that his eyes were brighter, harder, that everything that had once been skinny and frail about him now seemed lean and tense, like the air crackling with coiled energy before a storm. He was basically a homeless bum in a strange land, but he felt stronger than he ever had.
David was even beginning to enjoy The Labyrinth, from its overgrown hedges and its crumbling, geometric legions of wall to its Greco-Roman vagaries, to its dense, shadowed forests and its cool and dank caves.
Which made it terribly frustrating to realize that the castle at the summit of Goblin City never got any closer.
"Not fair, Labyrinth," David said. He sat under a tree, shaving with a (nicked) razor in front of a (filched) mirror propped up against a boulder. "Now you're just being spiteful. But I will reach Goblin City. Just you wait."
The minute and second hands on his watch graduated from jumping fleas to jiggling masses of molten copper and the castle was still somewhere behind David. He walked straight toward it only to find it even further away and to the right. He tried taking only left turns; the castle kept a steady place someplace beyond his left shoulder. He asked directions from a pair of somewhat befuddled hairy caterpillars. He got himself cussed at and kicked by six inch, orange haired women that lived within a dried up well just for trying to ask them for directions. Any pointers he got led either in circles or nowhere or both, as David found himself at the bottom of a nearly perfectly round foxhole. He clambered out plotting bloody murder, but determined. The castle was mocking him, and he would not be made a fool of.
"I will reach you!" He shook his fist at the far-off city. "Don't think I won't!"
But, try as he might, the castle and the city always remained to the right or the left or miles ahead or just a few feet behind or so tantalizingly close he would run towards it in triumph, only to discover he had overshot it by a good ten miles.
He curled up within a hollowed tree trunk one night and thought his dilemma over. The elk had promised nothing, and just the thought of the owl made David cringe with an unnamed shame. Hoggle was gone. Gritta and Pum had been no help. Everyone and everything else seemed to be either potty, oblivious, undeniably insane or incredibly rude. David suspected these were all internal defence mechanisms. He very much doubted The Labyrinth's inhabitants were aware of doing it, but there it was nonetheless. "It may lead to the centre," the elk had said. May. As in, it was looking likelier and likelier that The Labyrinth purposefully kept intruders away from Goblin City.
Not a comforting thought, that.
David peered out of his sleeping spot at the one tower he could see of the castle. Lights came and went at windows and doorways and down alleys along Goblin City, but no lights ever shone from the castle. It looked abandoned and toothless, as if only a few sticks were holding it together. They had no king, Hoggle said. That was fine by David, who could not even imagine what the scattered, somewhat confused denizens of The Labyrinth would do with a king, even if they had one.
But something about the castle drew David to it. It was the centre of The Labyrinth, he was certain of it. And whatever life he would carve out for himself there, it had become imperative that he outwit The Labyrinth and reach the centre. He wanted to thumb his nose at it and flash the birdie at it or maybe spit at it or maybe even something ruder than that. He would laugh at it and win and then he would settle down for good and no one would be able to say that David Jones had been hoodwinked by several hundred miles of maze.
Tired. Hungry. Nothing to filch. Sleeping in fits and starts. His boots were falling apart and his leather coat was nearly in shreds along the ends and he stank. He well and truly stank. He would crawl, if his pride had no kept him on his feet. The Labyrinth was mocking him, and it galled and infuriated and frightened him. He was close to tears.
George. He missed George. He missed Kent and damp, chilly, misty, crap English weather. He would kill for a bus stop and a pub with the BBC on the tellie, primly informing disinterested patrons about the alarming cost of petrol and the near disintegration of English society at large. Punks and queers and sorely pissed off miners were going to detonate London. Those were the days. Good ole, unemployed Kent. David would give his one good eye to see a glen or a sheep or a suburban bungalow or the post or some random old biddy on a bike.
David put his hand up to his cheek. It came away wet. He sniffled and let it be. A good cry would tire him out, let him sleep. He dropped to the ground right then and there, fat tears streaming down his face. God, he even missed his Mum and Dad. Dad was dead, but Mum still lived in Kent, in his old, childhood home. The thought of her, sitting by herself and staring into empty lonesomeness, made David sob with a force he had not felt since he was a teenager.
"You win," he said. "Keep your stinking Goblin City. I want to go home. You hear me?! He wishes to go home!" Not having expected anything, David clambered to his feet. He scrubbed away his tears and shot one last, deeply reproachful look at the castle. "You win, you bastard."
And he turned his back on the castle and began to walk. It hardly mattered where he went. He turned his thoughts fervently towards Kent, summoning and holding onto every detail he could remember: the peeling, yellow block letters of the wooden butcher shoppe sign, the bus stop with the dark green and red Chivas Regal advert, the brass doorbell, round, with scalloped leaves, to George's apartment building, the swirls and whorls (like an owl) (forget about the owl) on the Pig Snout's Pub's corner booth. And he kept walking, and the castle stayed far behind.
The Labyrinth felt him walking, and, on the surface, it lay perfectly still. Below ground everything from the smallest pebble to the most wizened root and opinionated speck of dirt churned with activity. Something was wrong, and it had to do something about it. Hums grew into shivers and shivers into ripples until the ripples had grown into full-blown tremors every creature could feel.
All save David Jones. He continued walking on, thoughts firmly on the raising loaf at the bakers two blocks from his flat.
He would start a new band. He could. He would.
He would walk until The Labyrinth would take notice and send that elk thing and he would wish himself right back to Kent. Just like that.
With one final tremor, like the lumbering footsteps of a giant, The Labyrinth made its decision. The earth stretched and shifted itself, groaning with the sudden, desperate strain, and then lay still once more, firm in its adopted course, if a little bit resentful.
David's footsteps slowed. He folded his arms across his chest and came to a full stop. The look on his face was one of cunning triumph and perverse satisfaction.
"There now," he said, "that wasn't so hard, was it?"
Before him loomed the gates of Goblin City.