Labyrinth Read Online Free PDF Page B

show me the way in?”
    His mouth frozen in the formation of a W, he blinked at her once or twice. Then his eyes darted to one side. He rushed a few steps toward a bluebell, at the same time pulling a spray can from under his jacket. As he aimed the spray, Sarah saw that a diaphanous little fairy was emerging from the bluebell.
    He sprayed it, with a couple of quick bursts. The fairy at once wilted, like a shriveling petal.
    “Fifty-seven,” he said with some satisfaction.
    Sarah was shocked. “Oh, how could you?”
    He answered with a grunt.
    She ran to where the fairy was lying on the ground, wings quivering and shriveling. “Poor thing!” she exclaimed. She picked it up gently in her fingertips and turned accusingly to the fairy-slayer. “You monster.”
    She felt a sharp pain, as from broken glass. The fairy had bitten her finger.
    “Oh!” Sarah dropped the fairy and stuck her finger in her mouth. “It bit me,” she muttered around her finger.
    “‘Course she did,” the little man chuckled. “What do you expect fairies to do?”
    “I …” Sarah was frowning, perplexed. “I thought they did — well, nice things. Like granting wishes.”
    “Ha!” His eyebrows went up, and he chortled. “Shows what you know then, don’t it?” He raised his spray can and casually hit another bluebell with it. A second shimmering fairy fell down, turning brown like a leaf in autumn. “Fifty-eight,” he said, and shook his head. “They breed as fast as I spray.”
    Sarah was still wincing as she sucked her finger. “Ooh,” she complained. “It hurts.” She took her finger from her mouth and shook it.
    He walked to a plant nearly as tall as he was, tore off one of its broad, grayish leaves, and handed it to her. “Here,” he told her. “Rub that on it.”
    She gratefully did what he told her. No sooner had she started rubbing than she dropped the leaf, clasped her finger with the other hand and hopped around in pain. “Ow!” she shouted. “That makes it worse. Much worse. OWWW!”
    He was holding his sides with his pudgy little hands and roaring with laughter. “‘Course it do. Fancy rubbing one of them on a fairy bite. You don’t know nothing, do you?”
    Her face screwed up with pain, Sarah answered indignantly, “I thought you were giving it to me to make it better. Oh! Ooh!”
    “You thought that too, did you? You’ve got a lot of opinions.” He chuckled. “All of them wrong. And you’ve got grass all over the seat of your trousers!”
    In spite of the pain in her finger, she had to glance over her shoulder, and she saw that he was right. It was from sliding down that hillside. Brushing off what she could, she realized that he was paying her back for having caught him unawares. “You’re horrible,” she told him.
    “No, I’m not.” He sounded surprised. “I’m Hoggle. Who are you?”
    “Sarah.”
    He nodded. “That’s what I thought.” Spotting another fairy, he squirted her. To make sure, he stepped on this one and ground his foot around. The fairy squealed. “Fifty-nine,” Hoggle said.
    Sarah was thinking, still sucking her finger. He seemed to know about her. So he must have something to do with Jareth, mustn’t he? Some kind of spy, maybe. Well, maybe. Yet he was not her idea of a spy. Spies weren’t grumpy. They didn’t play mean tricks on you. Did they? If all her opinions were wrong, as he’d said, then this one might be wrong, too. But in that case, she thought, supposing he is a spy, then it might be his job to persuade me that all my opinions are wrong when really they are all correct. And if they are all correct, he is not a spy. But that would mean he had no motive for persuading me that I’m wrong about everything, and so probably I am wrong about this, too, and so … “Oh!” she exclaimed in exasperation. It was like one of those drawings she had seen in a book at home, where the water seems to be flowing uphill, and yet you can never put your finger on just