It was Doug.
Ready for you at the Monk Block.
Liv stomped the gas and shouted to the pain of her broken toe.
Many years had passed since she’d been to the Monk Block. Prior to Mr. Monk’s renting the fifteen acres to farmers, he’d occasionally truck the two kids there to play amid the expanse of cool, green, uninterrupted grass. The memories were crackling live wires, severed like their friendship but popping and hot. Liv followed the soot smell, the station wagon’s steering wheel nudging her into every correct turn, the headlights switching on by themselves as darkness fell. These supernaturalities had to be real; she had no more control of her body.
She turned onto a measly dirt path. Corn encroached from fields on either side, long, dry leaf tongues lapping the car windows. Thirty yards down, a padlocked gate bolted to two posts impeded further progress. The gate hadn’t been there when Liv and Doug were kids. Had gates even existed back then, before so many of the world’s dangers had thickened? Liv’s throbbing foot held the brake to the floor. She could hit the gas, try to bust through. She could put the station wagon into reverse, creep out of there, get on with her life.
Instead, she turned off the engine, turned on the red hazard lights, and took out her phone. There were so many people she could call for help: Mom, the police, Principal Gamble, anyone. What she saw, however, was a message from Bruno from earlier, a patient red dot waiting to be noticed. Yes, it was Bruno she wanted to speak to, no one else. She didn’t listen to his message; she tapped his number. His voice mail picked up.
“It’s me.” Her voice was brittle in the quiet car. “I … I wanted to tell someone … to tell you that I’m … I’ve gone to find Doug. There’s this farm, this land his dad owns, and I think he’s … I have to leave the car. I don’t want to do it alone, but … Bruno, I don’t know what’s going to happen. After this, I mean. Maybe nothing. Maybe I’ll be there tomorrow. If I am, I want to talk to you. I want to kiss you. But if I’m not … I just want … The time I had with you … I’ll miss you. I guess that’s what I want to say. If things go … if you don’t get to talk to me again … I’ll miss you.”
She gasped, the sound startling her, and stabbed at the phone until the call ended and she could snuff the screen’s hopeful light inside her coat pocket. Bruno, her mom, her own future—none of it could be allowed to matter right now. Her father’s suffering was all she could allow herself to think about.
Getting out of the car was like slipping into cold water. With the headlights killed, velvet blackness met the blinking red lights, and she had to stand with her hands on the gate until her night eyes awoke. Liv peered over the gate, listening for the pulse of her own heart like her father listened for the pulse of an electric fence.
“Doug?” she called. “It’s Dad! It’s Lee! A is Lee! Doug?”
Nothing. She limped along the path for a minute before seeing, rising through the mud of night, a long-held vision turned real: the Monk Block Corn Maze. Whereas the corn glowed with a coat of moonlight, the maze entry dove to black. Liv squinted and made out the first left turn. Her stomach cooked in its acids. The opening left turn had always been a part of Doug’s Trick. To kick off the labyrinth with compulsory turns was to make clear to walkers that they were being led, and had, in fact, little choice in how their journey would end.
Liv stood on her toes, the injured one flaring, and stretched her neck. There was no telling how far Doug had gone. He’d had four whole days, enough time to do all the things he’d long talked about doing, provided he could scrounge up the money: scan his best design into a web program, acquire a GPS device, rent a zero-turn mower. Liv felt a wave of awe, followed by a shiver of doubt about everything she believed. Lee Fleming had encouraged Doug’s creativity, lauded his designs when everyone else had scoffed. Doug had finally paid back that confidence. Was it one life saved for one lost?
“Doug?” Her throat was a clogged rasp. She cleared it. “Doug.”
She stepped close enough to the maze entrance that a corn leaf lazed outward and traced her throat, sharp as a knife. She didn’t want to enter. She looked about, hoping for a reason to delay, and found one. Twenty yards to her left stood a modest aluminum outbuilding, probably erected by a farmer to house gear he didn’t want pinched. Call it whatever the farmer liked; it was a shed, and Liv wondered if it might be that simple, that Doug had transferred her father from one shed to another.
She worked her way around the outbuilding’s side, found the door, and noted both its lack of lock and the dented jamb that suggested the lock had been clobbered. The door squeaked open. The contents were pedestrian. A wheelbarrow piled with work gloves, hand cultivators, and seed bags. A tractor tire cradling a carton of dust masks. A twiggy tangle of hoes, rakes, shovels, spades, and picks. There was no space for hiding anything. Liv was both crestfallen and relieved; she felt cornered and wanted out.
One step backward was as far as she got. There was something in here: a scent. She inhaled. Under the peaty odor of dirt and the sneezy tickle of pesticide squirmed sourer smells. Doug’s unwashed hair, sweaty clothes, stale gorp. Much stronger, A’s smell. Liv took her phone from her pocket and turned on the flashlight.
Liv swung the light from side to side. Shadows lurched, and details particularized. Over the wheelbarrow ran a shelf stretching wall to wall. Like the shelf in Faddon’s kitchen, this too was covered with small items. It was the neatness of these items that leaped out. Jars and bottles, clean and free of dust, each placed an equal space from the last like teeth in a jaw.
Liv came closer. The white light gleamed from glass too brightly for her to see anything, so she moved it to a more oblique angle. With a trembling hand, she picked up a mason jar. She brought it close, rotating it for the best angle. The contents looked limp and soft. For a moment she held out hope that the jars contained nothing worse than canned foods.
It was an eyeball. A’s eyeball, her dad’s eyeball. It was bloated, double its usual size. Liv recalled the eye’s perpetual nervous twitch, the strongest sign of Lee Fleming’s stubborn life. More than revulsion, Liv felt a bruising grief. The bottom of the eyeball was flat, having conformed to the jar’s shape. The sky-blue iris had gone a coin gray. It stared at nothing.
Somehow Liv put it back without dropping it. She swung the light over the shelf, and now that she knew the morbid context, a glance was all that was required to identify other artifacts. A bottle containing one of her father’s fingers in some kind of oil. A section of plywood upon which had been tacked dozens of multicolored tumors. A padded case that had once held an engraved pen but now held Lee’s short, bony tail.
The other jars, who knew? It all blacked out as Liv staggered away. Like Lee Fleming’s Armory, this was no mere shed. This was a sideshow to the main attraction, an in-progress museum waiting for description cards. Even after degradation in front of classmates, Doug still insisted on being a showman. Ages ago he’d angered her by saying that if she didn’t want to work the maze, she could run the adjacent barn. Usually owners sold cider and corndogs, he’d said.
Sometimes they turned it into a haunted house, he’d said.
From outside the building came a roar, loud as a passing jet. The world lit up. Liv threw herself against a wall, cowering, suddenly knowing that, one way or the other, this was the end, the end of all of it. She opened her eyes a slit and found that she’d collapsed into the cluster of farm tools. She took hold of the pointiest thing she saw—a pitchfork—and exited, grimacing against deafening concussion blasts and squinting into blinding starbursts of lights.