Village locals never went to the old abandoned corn maze.
It was too spooky.
Even the crows avoided it.
Sam had never seen what was in the corn maze.
Perhaps there wasn’t anything in there at all,
just the corn itself.
But it needed to be fed from time to time.
When he was a boy,
Sam would toss in stray animals,
dogs and cats and whatever he could find,
and when those ran out,
he started stealing pets from backyards.
That didn’t last long;
people thought there was a cougar in the area
and started locking them up.
The drifter was easy to coax into the maze,
and though his screams startled Sam at first,
he soon got used to it,
like one gets used to an annoying neighbour.
He even got used to hearing the children scream.
The pedophile was a real coup.
He was suspicious as hell
and only entered the maze first after
he was able to hold Sam’s little hand.
But once the man stepped over the threshold,
it was over for him.
The maze must have known what was up because
it made that man scream longer than the others.
It took its time,
to please the boy, he suspected.
When Sam became a man and was old enough to visit the taverns,
he discovered that it was easy to lure drunk vacationers
into the local haunted corn maze.
If they hesitated, he mocked them.
What? Are you scared?
It almost always worked.
Afterward, the boy would push the vacationers’
cars and travelling vans through the entrance and
listen to the sound of crunching metal.
The corn maze ate everything.
After Sam’s father died,
his mom moved to the city and married Phil,
a mildly successful real estate agent.
Sam noticed the bruises on his mom’s face,
the missing tooth,
and how the spark in her eyes had disappeared.
She cried when he asked about it,
but she said it was nothing,
just a little spousal disagreement.
Sam didn’t push it and they spent the evening
chatting and drinking tea.
When her husband came home, Sam said,
Phil, want to come down to the village this week?
I want to show you an old cornfield I’m thinking of buying.
There’ll be a commission in it for you.