Small Spaces

Linda Webster’s farmhouse in the shadow world looks run-down and eerie. Ollie’s watch now reads “UP.” Taking the hint, she goes upstairs while the other two try to light a fire in the kitchen to keep warm. In an upstairs bedroom, Ollie encounters Beth’s ghost. She looks skeletal and frightening but means Ollie no harm. Beth explains, “The cornfield is the doorway […]. It’s a maze, a corn maze. The scarecrows exist here and there. They are neither flesh nor spirit; they hold the door open for him” (171). Ollie asks how to change the scarecrows back, but Beth doesn’t know. She warns that Ollie and her friends must leave. It’s five minutes until sunset. 

Ollie sees scarecrows gathering outside the house. She runs downstairs to collect Brian and Coco. The three make a run for the barn because the house offers no hiding places that are small enough. Inside the huge structure, Ollie proposes that they climb into the hayloft because scarecrows don’t have hands fit for climbing.

Because the ladder is already up in the hayloft, Coco makes the dangerous climb up a post to swing herself into the loft while Brian and Ollie try to brace the door against the horde of scarecrows. Ollie finds a shovel to bar the door as Coco lowers the ladder. Brian and Ollie scramble up just as the scarecrows break through the barricade. Their garden-tool hands prevent them from reaching the children.

From the safety of their perch, Brian tries talking to the scarecrow he identified as his friend Phil. He asks what Phil can remember: “‘He smiled at us,’ breathed the scarecrow. ‘I only remember the smile...’ Then the scarecrow’s limbs jerked in a way that wasn’t at all human. ‘Maze,’ he whispered. ‘In the maze’” (181).

Phil’s words tally with what Beth told Ollie earlier. The maze is the smiling man’s portal between worlds, and the scarecrows hold the door open. The children know they will have to go to the center of the maze, but they can’t do anything until the sun rises. That night, they take turns keeping watch and trying to rest.

When Ollie awakens, her watch reads “MAZE” with a six-hour countdown. The children make their way to the daunting corn maze and pause before entering. Brian points out that they can’t leave this alternate dimension without rescuing the others, and Ollie agrees. They all enter the maze together but are quickly separated. The maze seems to be alive and places walls of corn stalks in their path to divide them.

Ollie is on the point of panicking when she asks her mother for help. The watch’s compass now changes its readout: “The readout showed a compass needle, but instead of the normal NSEW directions, there were only two: There was an I where north should be. There was an O where south should be” (191). Ollie infers that “I” means In and “O” means Out. If she wants to find the center of the maze, she needs to follow the needle pointing “I.”

Ollie continues to follow the compass for hours as the sun sinks lower in the sky. She comes upon a huge creature that looks like a dog or a wolf with a mushroom-colored coat and filmy white eyes. When the creature speaks, Ollie realizes that this is the bus driver, who is a servant of the smiling man. Ollie offers to trade food for information and gives the dog some of the cookies from her lunch box. He confirms that the smiling man is at the center of the maze. Ollie insists that the dog must bring Brian and Coco there before dark. He agrees and leaves.

Ollie continues her trek until sunset. Finally, she comes to a platform in the middle of the maze. A ladder leads from the ground to a hole in the platform. The clearing in front of the platform is full of scarecrows. By their clothing, Ollie recognizes her classmates and also Jonathan and Caleb. The creatures are still immobilized because the sun hasn’t quite disappeared, so Ollie walks through the crowd and climbs the ladder to the platform.

At the center, she finds the farmhand named Seth. He is the smiling man, but he appears gentle and approachable rather than an evil monster: “She’d imagined a skull smile, a pumpkin-head smile. A scarecrow smile. She’d not imagined a kind smile, the sort that would make a scared kid not be scared anymore” (198).

Seth congratulates her on making it to the center and proposes a deal. Ollie hears her mother’s voice calling, and Seth promises to bring the dead woman back. He also says he will allow Ollie to leave with her two friends. Instead, Ollie asks for two of her scarecrow classmates but needs to know how to turn them back. Seth says that mist will capture, but water will free. Ollie still has her water bottle, so she can use this to free her friends.

Ollie turns down Seth’s deal. She says, “My mother is already with me. Helping. Maybe she’s a little easier to hear in this weird ghost world of yours. But I’m pretty sure she never left me” (204). Then, she says that Seth can only take what she willingly gives. This means that Linda Webster never had the right to promise the lives of the schoolchildren to save herself from bankruptcy. Seth has been caught cheating. He knows he has lost and agrees to leave, telling Ollie that his dog will come to her if she calls its name.

After the smiling man leaves, Ollie climbs down the ladder to find her friends. Brian and Coco are safe. Ollie sprinkles water over the rest of their classmates to turn them back to human form. The ghosts of Cathy and Beth arrive to claim Jonathan and Caleb, and all enter the afterlife together. Seth’s dog returns but says he has no name, so Ollie christens him Cerberus. He accompanies the group to the end of the maze, where they arrive at sunrise.

Outside the maze, the group finds the stranded school bus with police and parents gathered around. At the sight of the children, everyone rejoices. Ollie runs to her father in the crowd: “‘I love you, Dad,’ Ollie said. ‘I love you.’ She buried her face in his familiar flannel shoulder. But right before she did, her watch chimed softly. Ollie glanced down. LOVE, it said. ‘Love you too, Mom,’ Ollie whispered” (212). 

A month later, nobody seems to remember what happened on the night of the corn maze except for Ollie, Coco, and Brian. Linda Webster was supposed to go to jail for fraud, but she disappeared. Ollie thinks she must have made a new deal with the smiling man.

Back at school, Ollie and Coco are playing a chess match, surrounded by classmates cheering for one player or the other. After Coco wins, the girls head out to collect Brian from his hockey game. Then, the three friends go to Ollie’s house for a home-cooked dinner and apple pie.