Trap Four, Hard Passage, was the only trap featuring bait, a stiff wad of Lee’s unwashed clothing that, when the wind was right, still gave Liv a whiff of her dad’s smell. It was a cage trap, the sort park rangers used to capture live animals, and the enemies of Lee’s imagination would have to crawl inside it. This would disrupt a magnetic field and a guillotine-style door would drop. The only option then would be to move forward through a series of sharp, slanted rods that turned even an inch of retreat into a flesh-rendering nightmare.
Trap Five, Neckbreaker, was the woods’ most elegant killer. It was a standard conibear trap blown up man-sized, two rectangular steel frames that sliced shut like a scissors when an invader passed through them, which anyone choosing this route would do, Lee said, since Neckbreaker was positioned beneath a fallen tree that was easier to duck under than clamber over.
Trap Six, Abyss, was Lee’s tour de force of despair. Constructed beneath a fake “path” he’d created for the sole purpose of duping intruders into taking it—the path led nowhere—it was a seven-foot pit covered with a polyethylene sheet propped up by delicate braces, atop which, in each Sunday’s most laborious task, Doug and Liv styled dirt, pebbles, moss, and sticks to fabricate a natural-looking forest floor. If you stepped on it, you’d fall, and the pit’s floor was covered with dozens of punji spikes, which was why Doug brought the bag of John’s feces. He dumped it over the spikes so that any delivered wounds would become infected.
Lee Fleming was the gentlest man you’d ever meet. Everyone in town said as much. Liv tried to remember that.
The illegality of this line of defense was as flagrant as it was moot. No one had any reason to wend their way through this half-mile arc of trees, though were some lost soul to do so, he might be seriously injured, if not killed. Liv’s whole face was cold now. She thought, as she did every Sunday, that she might never smile again. Each of Lee’s traps screamed insanity. How could Doug not see that?
Doug stepped past Liv, holding out a hand for the screwdriver, which she placed into it like a surgeon’s scalpel. He knelt alongside Amputator and set it off with the screwdriver, just to make sure everything worked. Then he levered the shank of the tool until the steel jaws yowled apart. Loosen the spring neck. Pry the jaws flat. Fix the trigger. Liv hissed. There was always a second when Doug got close to getting maimed. More than a second, really. A full minute, a full day, a year, a lifetime. One of these days he’d be torn apart.
“Check out this rust,” he said. “We need to soak this in oak bark. It needs re-dyed. It needs re-waxed, too.”
It needs removed, Liv thought. Destroyed, junked, smelted.
He was up, smearing dirty hands on his shorts, taking the lead down the trail. Liv was hit by a surge of courage. Quick, before they reached the next trap, say something, break through the facade that everything about this was okay.
“How come you … like this so much?”
There, she said it. To his back, yes, but still. Doug’s gait didn’t change.
“Like? I like kung fu movies and porn. This is just something we gotta do, Liv.”
“But … you know. It’s a project. You like projects.”
“Tell that to my Ds and Fs.”
“But, like, the corn mazes.”
Doug laughed once, bitterly.
“That was a long, long, long time ago.”
It didn’t seem that long ago to Liv. It was no coincidence that it’d been Lee who’d taken Liv and Doug, both ten years old, to Lomax County, where an industrious farmer had carved into his corn a thirty-acre maze in the shape of Abraham Lincoln. Liv thought there had been something sinister about the endless corners, intersections, and roundabouts, all while corn leaves shivered as if the stalks were snickering at her. As the sun began to set, only her dad’s held hand prevented Liv from sprinting a straight line through the corn until she came out somewhere, anywhere.
Doug, though, had fallen in love. His father supplemented trucking and fireworks income by renting out fifteen acres of family-owned land on the other side of town, which he called the Monk Block. Most of it was being farmed for corn and, to Doug, that was proof enough of destiny. Maybe his wouldn’t be the world’s biggest corn maze, but who cared about biggest? The Monk Block Corn Maze would be the best.
On paper as small as napkins and as big as the backs of posters, Doug sketched hundreds of mazes. Early designs came in obvious shapes: skull and crossbones, a snake, the X-Men logo. Year by year, they evolved and refined. Doug became a connoisseur of confusion. Never much of a reader before, he checked out library books about patterns that challenged human perception.
Go slowly, Liv told herself. Build up to it. She raised her voice. “There was some pattern you used? To confuse people?”
“The Ebbinghaus illusion,” Doug said instantly. “Tricks the mind into confusing relative size.” He chuckled. “And then I blended it with the Ponzo illusion and the Hermann grid. Man, I would have had people lost for days.”
He sounded too gleeful about this, but Liv couldn’t blame him. People were shitty to Doug—folks who bought fireworks, kids at school, staff at stores who just didn’t like the look of him. Of course he imagined them all trapped inside some brilliant labyrinth of his own design.
“What did you call it? All the patterns together? The Prank?”
“The Trick.” He sounded irritated that she’d forgotten, even though, seconds ago, he’d been the one to claim that he’d all but forgotten it. “That’s the thing about most mazes. They were such massive suck-ups. ‘Oh, here’s a big Abe Lincoln head.’ ‘Here’s a salute to our stupid military.’ Mazes are ancient. There’s mazes carved on prehistoric bones. You gotta respect that. I used ancient runes and mathematic fractals in mine. That stuff is pure.”
“I remember one of yours shaped like a spider. Real pure, Doug.”
“It was! Humans are hardwired to fear things with long legs. I read that.”
The conversation was as difficult as Liv had feared. She knew Hangman’s Noose was just around the bend, yet wondered if she’d gotten that wrong, for it felt like the trap had slipped behind her and dropped its noose around her throat, slowly stealing her air as she walked.
“I’m just saying,” Liv said, “that you left all that behind. Maybe, you know, maybe now’s the time…”
“I didn’t leave it behind. No one was with me on it. You certainly never liked it.”
Now he was mad. It could happen that quick with Doug, and though she knew she had to stay firm, she heard herself backpedaling.
“That’s not true. I thought it was really—”
“It is true, Liv. I tried to come up with ways for you to be involved.”
This was bullshit, but just what Liv needed. Irritability fired from her brain, and she could almost see it, a cigarette lighter spark.
“Yeah, you told me I could sell tickets to the haunted house off the side. Sell cider and corndogs at the snack bar. Perfect for the little woman. Gee, thanks.”
He stopped with an underbrush crunch and looked back at her. As quick as Doug could be to anger, he was even quicker to be hurt. His startled, wet-eyed look of betrayal made Liv feel awful, all at once, because what she’d said was unfair. Back when he’d made that offer, it’d been because Liv, scared of corn mazes, had been nervous about Doug’s enthusiasm.