47 pages • 1 hour read
Katherine ArdenSmall Spaces
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 12-17Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary
Easton thinks the driver is making a joke, so he ignores the warning and goes outside to check the engine. The overhead lights in the bus start to flicker, and no one can get a cell phone connection. Ollie checks her watch for the time. It’s also an altimeter and a compass, but those functions don’t work. The watch belonged to her mother, who was wearing it during the single-engine plane crash when she died. Ollie refuses to part with it, but the watch is behaving strangely: “Now there was a countdown where the time should have been (45:02), and just below that, the digital readout said RUN in gray letters, flickering like the lights” (99).
Ollie goes forward to question the driver. She wants to know what will happen at nightfall. At first, Jones refuses to answer, but Ollie offers him part of a sandwich from the lunch box her father packed for her that morning. He agrees to the deal and says that the smiling man’s servants are coming to take all the children to complete a bargain. Jones advises her to run into the woods on the other side of the mist and to hide in small spaces where the scarecrows can’t reach. He also says that the scarecrows don’t have any power until after nightfall:
They have to stand in the sunshine world too, see, to keep the door open, and that makes them weaker. More rules in the sunshine world, after all. But on this side of the mist—at night—there’s only his rules. They’ll grab you if they can (103).
By now, Easton has returned from examining the engine. He announces that he’s going to walk back to the farm to get help and that the children should stay on the bus. Ollie decides to flee. She returns to the front of the bus to tell everyone they need to leave, but all the sixth graders ignore her, except for Coco and Brian. The mist is gathering around the bus, and Ollie realizes that her watch is counting down to sunset. It's digital display now reads “RUN.”
Chapter 13 Summary
Ollie isn’t sure which way to go, but she sees a narrow gap in the mist and heads through it. Coco is frightened, while Brian claims he’s only coming along to keep the other two safe. He doesn’t believe Ollie’s claim that they are in danger. The countdown to sunset is now eight minutes. As the three struggle blindly through the woods, a phantom message appears. After the message, “Coco screamed. Brian and Ollie spun. Coco stood with her hand over her mouth, pointing up at the tree trunks. WE SEE YOU was written on a tree overhead in ragged, dripping white letters” (119).
The trio begins to hear the sound of cracking twigs behind them. Then, they glimpse the figures of scarecrows among the trees. Ollie’s watch now says, “HIDE.” Remembering the need to find a small space, Ollie spots a tiny cave. She and Coco duck inside, but Brian is knocked to the ground by a scarecrow. Thinking quickly, Ollie throws a rock at the straw figure until it releases its hold on Brian. He scrambles into the cave, but the opening is too tiny for the scarecrow to get a grip on the children, and it wanders away. By now, Brian is nearly hysterical, but he believes Ollie’s warnings about danger.
Chapter 14 Summary
The three children wait in tense silence until the rustling outside subsides. Off in the distance, they hear the screams of their classmates: “The scarecrows were marching. […] Hooked onto their curving garden-rake hands, stumbling in a silent, straggling line, came the sixth graders of Ben Withers Middle School” (126). The students all seem to be in some kind of trance. Brian wants to rush out and help them, but Coco says they need to wait. Ollie advises hiding until the sun returns when they can make a plan.
Chapter 15 Summary
That night, Ollie’s sleep is disturbed by a nightmare in which she sees her mother’s plane crash, but she is being dragged away by scarecrows. When she awakens, daylight has returned, and the scarecrows are gone. Coco climbs a tall rock and sees the farm and the river in the distance: “Ollie glanced at her watch. RIVER, it said, and a new countdown had started. 06:37:41” (131-32).
Ollie finally shares the whole story of Small Spaces with her two classmates. She speculates that they might no longer be in the real world: “Can we assume that this place is—somewhere else? Like a horrible sort of Narnia? Not our world at all? And when the mist rises, you fall through the door? Maybe the scarecrows sort of exist in both worlds?” (134).
Brian says they need to get moving and find food, but Ollie shares the ample contents of her lunch box from the day before. Coco adds some trail mix to the communal supplies. After consuming most of their remaining water, Ollie suggests heading to the creek to get more. She still hasn’t told the others about the mysterious prompts appearing on her watch.
Chapter 16 Summary
As the trio emerges from the woods, they come to a cozy cabin in a clearing. A woman is outside hanging laundry, and she ushers the children inside for food and shelter. Ollie is wary. Her watch now displays the word “FOOD” with the letters crossed out. As the woman strikes up a conversation, she talks about her two sons, who will be arriving home soon. She has baked some gingerbread especially for them that the children might share too.
To her horror, Ollie realizes that the woman is the ghost of Cathy, the mother of Jonathan and Caleb. Two scarecrows peek in at the windows, and Cathy says these are her sons. She invites them in, but they won’t enter. When Brian and Coco take a bite of Cathy’s gingerbread, it turns to some rotting substance in their mouths, and they spit it out. Cathy herself transforms into a shriveled skeleton, and the cabin turns into a ruin. All three children dash out the door, but the scarecrows don’t pursue them.
Chapter 17 Summary
Ollie reassures the others that the scarecrows can’t catch them during daylight hours. The trio hurries forward to find the river: “Written on a tree trunk a few paces away, in sloppy white letters, were two words. STILL WATCHING” (151). Ollie’s watch now reads “RIVER” again. The children eventually reach Lethe Creek and refill their water bottles. Ollie tells them about her encounter by the stream with Linda Webster. She speculates that Linda made a deal with the smiling man: “Not her own soul. Ours. That’s why we ended up here. One busload of kids, signed, sealed, delivered, for—whatever he gave her” (156).
Ollie finally tells the others about the strange messages appearing on her watch. Coco thinks that if Cathy Webster still exists in this strange dimension, then maybe Ollie’s mother is also there watching over them. The thought gives Ollie some comfort. She notices that there is only an hour left before sunset, so they’ll need to find a place to hide for the night.
Chapters 12-17 Analysis
This segment continues to examine the theme of Clinging to the Past and its symbolic association with scarecrows. A further association is made between the scarecrows and darkness. Metaphorically speaking, becoming lost in the past is a period of psychological darkness for the sufferer. It is also in the darkness that the scarecrows are at the height of their power. This is equally true of the smiling man. He is best able to make deals with his victims during the dark night of the soul. The bus driver tells Ollie:
They can move in the daytime […] Just not while anyone’s looking. They have to stand in the sunshine world too, see, to keep the door open, and that makes them weaker. More rules in the sunshine world, after all. But on this side of the mist—at night—there’s only his rules. They’ll grab you if they can (103).
The image of hands as a means of clinging and capturing is also pointed out by the driver when he says, “They are strong at night, remember? They have clever, grabbing hands, but stiff, and they can’t grab you if they can’t reach you. At night!” (108). The entire reason for the title, Small Spaces, is revealed in this comment. This is how one can elude capture by the clumsy hands of the scarecrows because a trowel or rake doesn’t function well in tight spots.
As Ollie and her friends continue to flee the scarecrows, they have an even more frightening encounter with Cathy’s ghost. Initially, they are fooled by her friendly appearance and her cozy cottage. This is analogous to the victims who are put at ease by the smiling man’s approachability. In both cases, appearances are deceiving. More to the point, Cathy’s pathetic plight and that of her sons offer a warning to Ollie of what she might become if she clings too tightly to her own past loss. Cathy says, “They come to the door, and I can hear them crying in the night. But they never come in. Tell them I’ve been waiting in this place—how long? I don’t remember anymore. Long and long and long and...” (148).
Ollie has been waiting too, but her mother doesn’t return. In an important passage, she reveals the reason why she immerses herself in books: “Maybe, she kept thinking, when she came back from one of those other worlds, when she woke up from book dreaming, she would come back to a world where her mother wasn’t dead. She hadn’t” (109). Ironically, Ollie seeks to escape her sorrow by immersing herself in Small Spaces. This book holds greater danger than anything else she has ever read. While one might think that the book offers a way out of Ollie’s dilemma, it doesn’t give her any real insight into how to fight the powers of the smiling man.
Part of Ollie’s problem is that she always looked to her mother for guidance. Now that that source of comfort has been removed, she stubbornly wants to return to the past to restore it: “That’s what her mom had always said on hiking trips. If you’re ever lost, think of your basic needs first. Are you hungry, are you thirsty, are you hurt? Ollie wished for the millionth time that her mother were there” (136).
This segment marks a literal turning point in Ollie’s orientation. All her focus has been trained on past events. Now that she has entered the world of the dead, she is forced to find a means to deal with the problem in the present. Her mother’s watch offers that opportunity:
The watch gave wildly varying altitudes and completely inaccurate times; the compass did not point north. Now there was a countdown where the time should have been (45:02), and just below that, the digital readout said RUN in gray letters, flickering like the lights (99).
While the smiling man’s realm puts the living at a disadvantage, it is the one place where Ollie’s mother can easily reach out to her daughter and give her the direction she craves: “All the while she was making reasonable arguments, a thought was creeping in around the edges of her awareness. Was her mother’s broken watch helping them?” (138-39).
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