Page 10 of My Halloween Keeper

She considers this with great seriousness, then nods, as though it's a perfectly reasonable thing for a grown man to be afraid of, and runs off shrieking after her brother.

The last of the kids come out of the maze. A pirate with a sword made of a stick, a little ghost dragging her sheet in the frost, two boys in cardboard robot suits arguing about who got more candy. Edna herds them all down the road with her lantern and doesn't look back at me once, which is how I know she knows.

Then the field goes quiet, and I turn around, and Sloane's standing at the entrance to the maze.

She's buttoned her coat right. Her hair's loose. The pumpkin at the gap in the stalks throws its orange up across her face, and she's pale and determined, the way I imagine she looks walking into a room where somebody's crashing.

"You've watched me sleep for ten nights," she says. "Come find me awake."

She bends down and blows out the pumpkin.

Then she turns and goes into the corn.

I stand there in the dark with my heart going like it's trying to break my ribs.

I planted this maze in May. I walked every turn of it all summer, weeding, watching it rise over my head. I know it better than I know my own house. She's in there with no light and a dozen dead ends, and every step she takes, I can hear.

I go in after her.

At the first turn there's a lantern burning. I lift the lid and pinch out the candle between my finger and thumb, and the dark closes over the place where it was.

Then the next one.

And the next.

I don't hurry. I don't need to. The maze is mine, every row of it, and she's in there somewhere ahead of me in the dark with the corn hissing on either side of her, and I can hear her. Not her feet. Her breath. Fast and high in her chest, the way it was in her car at the turnoff, the way it was on the ladder the first night she lay there faking sleep. Fourteen a minute at least. Probably more.

I've counted that woman's breathing on the worst nights of her life. Tonight I'm going to count it on the best one.

I put out another light. Somewhere to my left, through two walls of corn, I hear her stop and turn and see it go, and I hear her breath catch.

Good. Let her know I'm coming.

7

Sloane

The lights are going out behind me.

I don't understand it at first. I'm moving fast between the high dry walls of corn, left, right, left again, following the glow of the pumpkins at the turns, and when I look back over my shoulder the one I passed a minute ago is dark. Then the one before it. The orange is going out of the maze from the entrance inward, one lantern at a time, like something eating the light.

He's putting them out.

My mouth goes dry. The corn rattles around me, a sound like whispering, and the stalks are so tall and so close that I can't see anything but the next bend and a strip of stars overhead. I turn right. Dead end. I turn back, and the lantern at the corner I came in by is already black, and I didn't hear him do it.

I can't hear him at all.

"Eli?"

Nothing. The dry leaves hiss in the wind.

I run. Left, and left again, into a long straight run with a lit pumpkin at the far end, and I'm halfway down it when his voice comes through the wall of corn beside me, low and calm and right at my ear, close enough that I feel it.

"You're breathing too fast."

I scream — a short sharp sound I can't stop, and I lurch away from the stalks and stumble, and on the other side of that wall of corn something big moves with me, pacing me, keeping level while I run.

"Slow down," he says. "You'll twist your ankle."