THE WOMAN SELLING TICKETS peered down at me dubiously from behind her thick, black-framed glasses. She looked up at my Grandmother and asked how old I was. Emphasized that children under twelve were not allowed.
Grandmother had told me the plan on the five-hour drive from Edmonton to Grande Prairie: “Now when we get there,” she’d said in a voice soft and chiding, “remember: you’re twelve.”
“But, I’m eight....”
Grandmother flicked the cowboy hat perched atop my dark, curly hair so that it fell off and dangled by the string at my throat. “You’re twelve,” she insisted. “You think eight-year-olds can grow a beard? Besides, there’s no maze if you ain’t.”
I adjusted my cowboy hat and Fisher-Price sheriff’s badge and double-checked my felt-marker stubble in the sun flap mirror. Then I stared straight ahead at the long dark road, anticipation bubbling in my throat.
At dinner a week prior, I’d announced that at long last I could watch the Halloween specials on TV. I was too old to be scared by all that fake stuff, I told her. It was all make-up and fake blood anyway, I explained.
My Grandmother sucked her teeth, clicked her nails against the kitchen table and sized me up like a bottle of homemade wine. “Oh, well, if you’re too old....”
I didn’t sleep the next few nights. But I also didn’t complain, so my Grandmother dutifully didn’t ask about the bags under my eyes—even if she chuckled beneath her breath.
Then, after a week of watching me acclimatize to black-and-white Frankensteins on her old dial television, she jammed a toque on my head and hustled me into her car.
She slapped a flashlight and a canteen of hot chocolate in my arms and shifted the car into gear. “The torch is for the maze,” she said. “The hot chocolate for the drive. We’re off.”
So here we were, in the middle of the countryside, surrounded by darkness and the pervasive scent of manure. I could hear wind whispering through an unseen cornfield and—somewhere close at hand—the terrified shrieks and squeals of the maze’s victims.
The bespectacled woman pursed her lips. “Twelve?” I nodded, pointed at the cowboy stubble my Grandmother had speckled across my chin with a Sharpie.
The woman looked down at me. I looked up at her. She sighed. “Twenty dollars.”
“Ten,” my Grandmother amended. “He’ll be hoofing it alone. I’ll be buying a snow cone.”
“We don’t sell snow cones.” The woman frowned, prioritized her thoughts. “And the maze can be quite scary for children.”
My Grandmother made a sound like pfft, while she peeled off two blue bills for the woman. “Which way to the concession?”
I’d wandered through corn mazes before, but never like this—in the dead of night, my fingers numb from the cold. I could still hear the tittering of those within the maze, and the rustling as they ran through endless corridors of corn. The moon was a pale fingernail in the sky. Even the trees looked skeletal, dusted in white frost.
I held my Grandmother’s hand all the way to the cornfield’s entrance. Creaking in a cold breeze, the stalks sounded like guillotine ropes waiting to fall.
“Scarecrows dressed up like zombies,” my Grandmother said, “and people jumping out to chase you when you turn a corner. Besides—you’re old enough, right?”
I puffed up my chest. Yes, I was old enough. But still, I couldn’t help the whispered question escaping my lips, “And there are no real monsters, right?”
My Grandmother waved her mittened hand. “No such thing. Unless you find corn particularly terrifying. Now, Gran’s going to buy a Cracker Jack.”
I nodded. I’d been instructed to find four checkpoints, and then to find my way back to the beginning. Between one and two hours, they’d said ... unless I got lost. If I was lost, I might spend eternity between the stalks. I smiled at the silliness of that, but was still relieved to see my Grandmother waiting for me by the entrance, when I turned around to look. She waved, so I turned my back on her and marched forward with a liar’s confidence.
I swung my flashlight left and right as I crept slowly forward. The corn was cordoned off of the main passages with strips of yellow tape. The compact dirt beneath my feet was pockmarked with the footprints of those who’d gotten lost before me.
Two minutes into the cornfield, I encountered my first horror: a scarecrow dressed up like a reaper. I jumped as I rounded the bend, but managed not to scream. Then I laughed. A scarecrow. This wasn’t so scary after all.
A minute later a man wearing a Jason Voorhees mask and brandishing a bloody axe leapt from the stalks, roaring incoherently. I fell hard against the corn on the far side of the wall and got tangled in the yellow tape. I screamed myself hoarse as he stalked ever so slowly towards me, running a finger over the jagged axe head. I didn’t have the presence of mind to realize that his slow saunter gave me all the time my numb fingers needed to untangle myself, and the opportunity to run blindly into the night.
I was lost, so I began taking turns at random. I stopped once, hearing screams from my right. I crouched behind the corn and watched as a man and a woman, holding hands and giggling, ran past me, with Freddy Krueger hot on their heels.
When I stopped to catch my breath in the glow of six pumpkins, my nerves were frayed. Now, even scarecrows made me jump. This wasn’t helped by the one time a scarecrow lifted himself off of his cross and moaned as he shambled after me.
The maze was supposed to take between one and two hours to traverse. How long had I been here? I was too proud to cry out for a maze warden, so I groped for the exit with tears streaming from my face. I followed trails that looked familiar, that I half-remembered wandering down. I forgot about the checkpoints and just wanted out.
The last horror I faced before escaping the maze was an enormous shirtless man with a bull’s head and burning eyes. In the gloom, his pants—they must have been pants—looked like unkempt fur with the backwards bend of a bull’s legs.
He chased me faster than any of the others, his breath hot on the back of my neck. I ran and screamed my way around every corner and bend. Finally, as I felt his fingers brushing the back of my clothes, I dove off the marked trail and into the grey corn. I heard the hooves skid to a stop behind me, and then come crashing through the corn in pursuit.
On the path, his long legs easily overtook mine, but here my smaller frame was an advantage. I wove through ears of corn, the fibrous stalks slapping me with their leaves. I could hear the monster behind me, bull rushing through the plants I’d sidestepped.
I ran and I ran and I ran ... until, at last, I stopped running. Only then did I realize that I’d lost my pursuer. For the last few minutes, the sound of pounding hooves had been nothing but blood pulsing in my ears and the cold spittle on the back of my neck was just a trickle of sweat down my spine.
Somewhere behind me I heard a bellow of frustration. There were no words in that roar, nothing human. I heard the clump of heavy hooves resume their stalking—seeking to punish other boys who’d lied about being brave and being twelve years old.
When I emerged from the maze, my hands and arms were scratched and dirty, my vision blurry with tears. I tripped over cornstalks and between trysting couples until at long last I found my Grandmother, sitting on a bench by the entrance, licking her sticky fingers.
She stopped as I ran up to her, said nothing as I buried my head in her shoulder. Instead, she folded me into her arms and let me sob out my terrors until my heartbeat slowed and my adrenaline drained away.
“You were in there for a long time,” she said gently, and stroked my hair. “You’ve lost your hat.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered into her neck, her scent more comforting than her embrace. “I wasted your ten dollars.”
“It’s all right to be afraid,” my Grandmother told me. “It’s smart to be afraid. Because, you see, I forgot to tell you that there is one real monster in any maze. Only one creature that can find its way around. I forgot to warn you about the Minotaur.”