Free Labyrinth by A. C. H. Smith Page A

you,” she asked, “now that I know you were taking me back to the start of the Labyrinth?”
    “I wasn’t,” Hoggle protested, and stared fiercely at her with those piggy eyes of his. As a liar, he was so bad it was quite touching. “I told him I was taking you to the start of the Labyrinth, to throw him off the scent, d’ya see? Heh-heh. But actually —”
    “Hoggle.” Sarah smiled reproachfully at him. “How can I believe anything you say?”
    “Well,” he replied, screwing up one eye, “let me put it this way. What choice do you have?”
    Sarah thought about it. “There is that.”
    “And now,” Hoggle said, “the main thing is to get back up.” And he started again to try and hop up to the first rung of the rickety ladder.
    Sarah gave him a leg up, watched him start, and followed. At any moment she thought the thing might collapse; but then, as Hoggle had said, what choice did she have?
    Without turning his head, Hoggle called out, “The other main thing is not to look down.”
    “Right,” she called back, and, as though it were a playground dare, she had to snatch a little look past her feet. “Ooooh!” she cried. They had climbed much higher than she would have thought possible in the time. The wobbly ladder seemed to stretch down below her forever. She could not see the bottom of it, nor could she see the top. She felt unable to climb another rung. Clutching the sides of the ladder, she started to shake. The whole ladder shook with her.
    Above, Hoggle clung desperately to the shaking ladder. “I said don’t look down,” he moaned. “Or perhaps don’t means do where you come from?”
    “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize …”
    “Well, when you’ve done all the shaking you want, perhaps we could continue.”
    “I can’t help it,” Sarah wailed.
    Jumping around like a monkey on a stick, Hoggle managed to answer, “Well, we’ll just have to stay here until one of us falls off, or we turns into worm food.”
    “I am sorry,” Sarah told him, still shaking.
    “Oh, good. She’s sorry. In that case, I don’t mind being shaken off to my certain death.”
    Breathing deeply, and looking resolutely upward, Sarah forced herself to think of happy, secure things: Merlin, her room, lovely evenings out with her mother, multiplication tables. It worked. She gained control of her body and started to climb again.
    Hoggle felt her coming, and he went on, too. “See,” he called to her, “you’ve got to understand my position. I’m a coward, and Jareth scares me.”
    “What kind of position is that?”
    “A very humble one. That’s my point. And you wouldn’t be so brave, either, if you’d ever smelled the Bog of Eternal Stench. It’s … it’s …” It was his turn to pause on the ladder, and control his shakes.
    “What is it?”
    “It makes me feel dizzy just to think of it.”
    “Is that all it does?” Sarah asked. “Smell?”
    “Believe me, that’s enough. Oh, dear me. You wait, you just wait, if you get that far.”
    “Can’t you hold your nose?”
    “No.” Hoggle shuddered again, but started to climb. “Not with this smell. It gets into your ears. Up your mouth. Anywhere it can get in.”
    Sarah thought she could see the top at last. There were chinks of daylight above her head.
    “But the worst thing,” Hoggle continued, “is if you so much as get a splash of the mire on your skin you will never, never be able to wash the stench off.”
    He was on the top rung now. He reached up, fiddling with a sliding bolt and pushed open a wooden hatchway.
    Outside was a clear blue sky. Sarah had never seen anything so beautiful

Chapter Seven - The Meaning of Life
    Sarah joined Hoggle on the top rung of the ladder, gratefully clutching the side of the open hatchway. It felt like firm land after a voyage at sea.
    They were looking at a garden, where birds were singing. It was surrounded by well-trimmed hedges — box hedges, she thought, and indeed they ran so straight, with