Richard made another entry in his mental diary. Dear Diary, he thought. Today I’ve survived walking the plank, the kiss of death, and a lecture on kicking. Right now, I’m on my way through a labyrinth with a mad bastard who came back from the dead, and a bodyguard who turned out to be a . . . whatever the opposite of a bodyguard is. I am so far out of my depth that . . . Metaphors failed him, then. He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile, into the place of things that are, and it was changing him.
