13. King Jareth

Hoggle sat at an outdoor bench at an ale house across from the castle. What they demanded in payment—just because they had a spectacular view of the castle—was enough to make a dwarf want to swing a pickaxe at someone, preferably the owner. But their swill was undeniably the best in the city, and Hoggle did not feel like some piss poor brew at the cheaper spots. He handed the barmaid a medium sized ruby, and weaved his way outside with his first mug.

David was still inside the castle. Hoggle took a long drink of ale. "Hope you found what you were looking for, kid." He gulped down more of his drink. "And not whatever was looking for you." Hoggle scowled at his words. He finished off his ale in one sour go, and motioned for a third one. "Had my orders," he muttered at the froth of his new drink. "The Labyrinth wanted him. I'll be damned if I know why. But I had my orders, see? And I followed my orders. I stayed. I stayed…" His shoulders slumped.

"I should have stayed by his side."

The tallest castle tower loomed over Hoggle, like a huge finger, pointed at him as the other towers tut-tutted, the whole building seeming to shake its head in disappointment. Maybe it was just the ale. Hoggle scowled at the tower, until it stood still once more. "What did you want me to do, huh?" he growled at it over his drink. "You said lead him to the right maze, the good maze, and I did." His eyes dropped to the table. "And I knew I was doing something wrong. I just knew it. Blast me for a dunderheaded dwarf."

He drained his ale. The table rattled as he slammed his mug down, rising to his feet. "Right, then. Hang on, David, kid. Hoggle's going in there, whether this place likes it or not."

Getting in was a breeze. Pŭnsch was a nice guy, very proper and hard working and all that, but he had only been at the job for the last forty-five years. There were doors and cracks and fissures only the oldies knew about anymore. And, granted, Hoggle was pretty young by Labyrinth standards, but he hadn't spent three hundred years at his job for nothing. He knew a thing or two about the castle.

He paused before he wriggled in through a lopsided hole on the back wall facing a courtyard. "I'm sorry, boss. I know you want me to obey this place without question, but I ain't leaving that kid. He's a good kid. Don't be too angry, boss, if you ever come back." Then he shoved himself inside.

The castle was a dump. Last time he had seen it, it had been so clean and white that it had nearly given him a headache. Now it was just dust and filth as far as Hoggle cared to look. Some no-good cretins had stolen all the furniture too. A lot of it had been really valuable, and Hoggle hated to think of the boss's armchairs in some goblin hovel, probably shoved out into the street in pieces by now.

Hoggle's face closely resembled a tornado about to swallow an entire town by the time he had stomped his fist-clenched way up to the throne room.

"Disgrace," he grumbled, deep within his throat. "Owls take their eyes."

His brain had been just about to take him from eye-pecking owls to the realization that he really had no way of knowing whether David was in the throne room, when the room itself solved the problem for him.

David was sitting on the throne.

"Stew my mam's knickers," Hoggle murmured. "You're alive."

David cocked his head to the side, cheek resting against the curled fingers of his hand. He ran the tip of his pinkie over his lower lip in a distracted manner. His eyes moved from the tip of Hoggle's battered, red leather cap to the dusty overalls of The Labyrinth Maintenance Detail and down to his cracked and warped work shoes. Hoggle felt as filthy and as derelict as the castle.

And there was something wrong. There was something devastatingly wrong.

"David…?"

The man sitting on the throne, the man who had David's body and David's clothes and David's face, raised his eyebrows at that name. His voice was soft and incredulous in a way that made it seem as if the very act of talking bored him. "Oh," he said. "Was that his name? I did try to remember, but so many other memories were vying for attention that it simply didn't seem important." He curled up his pinkie and switched to tapping one high cheekbone with his index finger. "Hello, Hoggle, by the by."

Hoggle's lungs felt heavy. "David?"

"No," the man said with a lazy smile. "Try again."

"B-boss…?"

The man crossed one leg. "Your highness, Hoggle. Or your majesty. Either one is fine."

"What have you done to David?"

"I haven't done anything to David. There was nothing for me to do with David. He was, in a way, little more than a suit of armour." He looked down at his pathetic excuse for a leather jacket. "Well, a rather shabby coat, if anything. I've cast him aside. The bothersome parts, anyway. I rather like his shape. Don't you?"

"But… but you…" Hoggle clenched and unclenched his fists. "Jareth," he said at last, as if the name were too heavy to hold in his mouth for much longer. "You were the kid? David was a good kid."

"David was a rather nice overcoat," Jareth said. He stood up and walked over to a window, hands clasped behind his back. He rubbed the bottom edge of his palm against the glass pane and pretended to peer out at the scenery below. His eyes, Hoggle could see, were watching the reflection of the room behind him. He was gauging Hoggle's reaction. "And I was not David. I was within David, waiting. The Labyrinth recognized me even outside, in the human world. And, since it is its duty to protect the goblins and the city and to protect me, it did just that, in its own fashion."

"It drew David here," Hoggle said, the words hushed as the truth began to solidify within his mind. "And it ordered me to take him to the first, true maze…"

"Not David, Hoggle. Me. The Labyrinth knew I needed to return, that I wanted to return, even if that cheap suit David was too feeble minded to figure it out." He snorted out a quiet laugh. "That's not entirely fair, though. How could he know? I didn't want to know. I had been having rather a nice time outside, above ground, before his little band started to fizzle."

"David was—"

"Oh, cut it out, Hoggle," Jareth snapped. "This is unworthy of you, and it's tiresome." The sleepy look was gone from his face, replaced by an impatient haughtiness Hoggle could no longer pretend he did not recognize. He spoke with David's voice and through David's face, but this was Jareth.

He had returned, just as Hoggle had been telling everyone for the last thirty years. Proud, loyal Hoggle, steadfast and true as he waited for the king to return. His boss.

His boss had been a goblin somewhat taller than the rest, with blue eyes and grey hair pulled back into a simple ponytail. He had a flat nose, as if someone had broken it in a childhood fight, set in a square and homely face. He was beginning to get on in years, and the youthful, rounded planes of his face were aging into sharper edges and networks of wrinkles. They suited the boss. He had been an eccentric goblin, dreamy and given to bouts of melancholy, when he would gaze out at The Labyrinth from this very throne room with a sad, distant look upon his face, but he had been the boss. When he said, "Hoggle, that fence near The Giggling Side Alley needs mending, don't you think?" Hoggle was on it before a goblin child could burp. And the boss could be impatient, yes, and infuriating sometimes (he kept proposing projects he forgot about, among other things), and he did not take kindly to insubordination, but he was still the boss. And Hoggle would have walked into the outside world and gotten himself run over by some mad human contraption for him.

The man wearing David's body and calling himself Jareth was not the boss.

He wiped clean a wider spot in the window and stood looking at his reflection, studying it from every angle. He held down his lower eyelid and peered at his dilated left pupil and tutted. Then he drew back his lips, eyebrows shooting up in alarm as he took in the sorry state of David's crooked, yellowed English choppers. He reached out to touch his hair and shuddered at the traces of mud and slime, goop, cobwebs and twigs jammed into it.

"What's happened to you?" Hoggle said, keeping several weary feet away from Jareth.

Jareth turned, fingers hovering over his hair. "What's happened to me? Isn't it obvious? I've been dragged through the mud all the way to Goblin City. I'm disgusting." He began to comb his fingers through his hair, starting out with his palms flat against the crown of his head and down to the tips. He repeated the motion three times, and with each successive stroke dirt sprinkled to the ground as sand, a few twigs and pebbles here and there. Jareth's hair lightened as well, passing from David's mousy brown to a warm blond. He tugged at the tips and they lengthened out, until they came to rest at his shoulders. He turned to the window and admired his handiwork. His hair was now blond and straight and longer and very, very clean.

"This will do nicely." He flicked one lock of hair behind his ear. "Hoggle, walk with me."

"I won't."

"Hoggle, you are bound to me. I am your king. And you will walk with me."

"I came here looking for David," Hoggle said, strangely calm. "And you're not David. You're not even him."

"You have been loyal to me, Hoggle. When everybody else abandoned this castle, and their posts, you remained. Therefore, I shall forgive you your insolence." Jareth snapped his fingers. "Now. Walk with me."

Hoggle had no choice. His legs began moving without his say-so. Grumbling, he followed after Jareth. They descended from the throne room tower, Jareth with purposeful, autocratic steps, Hoggle with the jerking, put-upon drag of those with bewitched feet.

As they moved from room to room, Jareth tutted and sighed and murmured, "Good Lord." Hoggle caught a thickly accented, "Bloody blazes," and it hurt his heart.

"Where are we going?" he said.

"I have some minor things to tidy up before I resume my reign," Jareth said.

He strode up to the main gates and placed the palm of his right hand on the wood. "Here we are," he said. "This is number one." He took a deep breath, drew back his arm, and then brought it down with resounding slap upon the door.

"You are a sorry excuse for a gate! Groaning and gasping. I could hear you all the way within that wretched David. Shape up! Right this minute. I want you clean and oiled and burnished and…" He pursed his lips in consideration. "And a good ten feet taller, five feet wider. Grander. You are the door to the goblin king's castle. Behave like it."

With a sheepish rasp of wood, the gates obliged. Jareth nodded, then moved to snap at the windows. They burst upwards and sideways and replaced the thin, dirty glass of before with heavy, quality glass decorated here and there by whorls within its body. Stained glass tinkled out above, before it tinkled right back into nothingness.

"Too twee," Jareth said. He waved his hand dismissively at the windows' attempt to become pointed, Gothic monstrosities, and they warped back into sensible rectangles, though considerably taller than before. "May just go for a more Romanesque feel later on," Jareth said, moving on.

Hoggle glared at the windows in resentment. "Aren't you going to clean this place as well? Magic up some furniture?"

"That comes later. Gates, open! Slowly. I'm walking out, not running from a flood. Yes, that's good. Nice and stately. There's only one thing missing."

With a snap of his fingers, Jareth released Hoggle's feet. Then, he began to flap and dust off his shabby leather jacket. As his hands patted their way down it, the coat lengthened and mended itself, rippling and billowing from leather to linen and silk. Jareth shook out his legs and David's trusty boots—now nearly sole-less and covered in holes—became real leather, brown and snug up to below his knees. He turned his feet this way and that, pleased, as he smoothed his jeans into black linen pants. He brushed his new coat a few times, pausing to button it nearly up to his chin, and it rippled from the deep blues right after sunset to the polished silver of bicycle handlebars and finally into the bruised red of ripe cherries. Jareth reached into its smart, perfectly tailored sleeves and pulled out starched black cuffs.

"There."

Hoggle stared. "What's happened to you?"

Jareth smiled, then walked out.

The goblin in rusted armour clattered up to him. "Halt! Identify yourself! No one may enter without—" He looked at the castle gates behind Jareth, then at Hoggle and, finally, up at Jareth's face. His swallow echoed within his helmet. "Terribly sorry, your majesty. Force of habit. Been pulling nights this week. Terribly sorry, your highness." He lowered his spear and stood at attention. "Good to see you again, your highness, sir!" He saluted.

"Are you mad?" Hoggle said. "Does that look like King Jareth to you?"

Jareth spoke in a soft, authoritative voice. "I am the king, Hoggle. Please come to terms with that soon."

To Pŭnsch he said, "You nearly blocked me from entering the castle."

"Sir?"

"You came to your senses, near the end, but you nearly stopped me."

"N-no, sir, your majesty. I…" Pŭnsch stood in a nervous rattle of armour. If he confessed to having waved that dirty fellow from Kent through, it would cost him his job. But King Jareth was accusing him of denying him entry. Serious, governmental business, that. Crown affairs. Only Pŭnsch had not seen King Jareth in rather a long time, let alone coming up to the castle gates. He went in and out through other, secret means was the word around the soldier's mess hall. "I would never deny you entry, your highness. I beg—"

"Don't beg," Jareth said. He favoured a random spot in the distance with a thoughtful look. "Pŭnsch," he said at length. The poor guard could barely stutter out a, "Yes, sir?" Jareth looked down at him, as if considering the goblin's size and weight and relative height. "The Security Detail around The Grumbling Wastes has been unproductively thin of late. Not surprising. It's a miserable place. Why don't you go there?"

With a whistle of wind and an echoing, flabbergasted yelp, Pŭnsch banished.

Jareth dusted off perfectly clean hands, brushing himself out some black gloves in the process. "There. That's number two. Now," he snapped his fingers, and Hoggle was forced to trail behind him once more, back into the castle.

"You don't need me," Hoggle protested. "Why are you doing this?"

Jareth said nothing. An odd look crossed his face, something like incomprehension and betrayal, but Hoggle could not be certain. He thought he had seen David in that look, but he knew that was only wishful thinking.

"I want you here," Jareth said. "It's fitting that a king have a loyal ally."

"I'm not—"

Jareth raised a hand to silence him. Hoggle's lips pressed together, quite against his will. He tried to grumble with his mouth closed, but his tongue pressed itself against his front teeth. Hoggle was forced to take deep breaths through his nose.

"Now," Jareth said, "I settle a score."

He walked forward, and the castle walls fell away all around him, sliding down into the ground like mirrors. Some of them shattered, shards and powdered glass drifting upwards like astral bodies suspended within the Milky Way. Hoggle stared down in a panic as his feet continued moving across black nothingness. Jareth walked ahead, his red coat billowing out in silk and linen and russet feathers.

He stopped in front of an old, wooden clock. He took up the orb nestled along its top. It glowed a weak, light blue, like the sky at high noon, inconsequential as a backdrop to the clouds and sun. Jareth closed both hands around the orb, and Hoggle heard it implode and shatter. He drew in a sharp breath as he saw blood drip down from between Jareth's fingers.

Jareth stood, head slightly bent, not looking at anything. His eyes were bright and tense.

"Come out," he said. His voice filled the entire room, even as it never rose above a soft cadence. "Sankrėl."

A white owl screeched and swooped down from above. It shot past Jareth's head, so that his hair and coat snapped and drifted forward in its wake. It landed, talons curled, atop the clock. It regarded Jareth with disdain, then took flight once more. It dove toward Hoggle, but turned at the last minute, coming to rest upon the black emptiness to Jareth's left. There, it shrugged its shoulders, so that its bones seemed to be trying to break through its skin. They bulged and shifted within its body, its head dropping back, until the owl had been shaken off and a bent, ancient creature stood in its place.

Its sightless eyes turned towards Jareth.

"So," Sankrėl said. "The traitor… has returned."