Page 109 of Unwritten Rules

It looked like we weresprintingto the corn maze after all. Without extra people. Getting lost in the dark was bad enough without cutthroat assholes following along with us. I wanted to be far enough away from them so I could breathe.

“Let’s get in there before anyone sees where the hell we went,” Kelly whispered.

The employee handed us two glow sticks and a guide to make it out. How would we make it out with only a couple of glow sticks? He had to be kidding.

“Just glow sticks?” I asked, holding up my pathetic excuse for a light.

He didn’t look entertained, glaring at me. “That’s it. Either go in, or don’t.”

Kelly tugged me along into the entrance. We stepped into the dark, tall cornfield. The leaves and debris crunched under our feet as we slowly moved deeper into the first corridor, away from the noise of the festival goers. It felt colder away from everyone, an eerie silence slowly overtook us with each step away from the grounds. We cracked our shitty glow sticks and held them up to the guide.

"Step one, 'Find your footing with the crows'," Kelly whispered. "Does that mean we have to find something crow related?"

I kept my voice as low as possible as I whispered, “I think it means we should find a scarecrow. I could be wrong, but the first checkpoint has to be close. Does it say anything else?”

She held the glow stick, squinting at the paper. “Yeah, step two,” she giggled.

“Let’s look for a scarecrow first.”

We slowly crunched our way to a fork in the road. The first decision to be made. One would lead us ahead, and the other would bring us to the scarecrow.

The only sounds I could hear were our footsteps, the whisper of the wind, and distantly, the rumblings of the festival. If there were other people in the maze, they were eerily silent.

I didn’t know if that was comforting or scary.

“Which way do we go?” I asked Kelly.

She looked around, pointed left, and we continued to find out if the direction was correct. We only had a flimsy piece of paper, and the faint glow of our cracked glow sticks to get us through.

A gust of wind picked up, shaking the leaves around us. I jumped slightly at the noise and grabbed onto Kelly’s arm. She pulled out her phone in afuckitmoment—the glow sticks didn’t really do anything for visibility.

“I think I see something,” she pulled at my hand to get me to move faster with her. “Is that a scarecrow?”

Looked like one. “I think so. What is step two?”

Kelly fumbled with the paper, shaking it out and holding it under her phone’s light. “Step two says, ‘Follow the lantern.’”

I looked around, not seeing anything around us but cornstalks and the sad, slumped figure of the scarecrow. “What does that mean?”

“Is he pointing anywhere?”

I pointed her flashlight up at him and sure enough there was an extended arm pointing vaguely into the darkness. “That way,” I said, pointing in the same direction.

While we trekked in the direction the scarecrow pointed, I didn’t know whether to ask about what Madame Dina said or not. She clearly had a reaction to the ‘secrets are being held back from one another’ line. We already discussed some secrets on Kelly’s end, but was that the full extent of them?

“That reading sounded like a bunch of hocus pocus,” she whispered as if she was on the same train of thought as me. Her voice sounded on edge as if the thought had been plaguing her more than it did me.

“I told you,” I giggled.

The quiet rustling was interrupted by the sounds of stomping somewhere in the maze. I clapped a hand over my mouth and exchanged a worried look with Kelly. Those footsteps didn't sound like they belonged to someone enjoying a fun night out in a corn maze game.

Time to find the lantern and quickly. She grabbed my hand and clicked off her flashlight bringing us back to the glow stick only approach. It wasn’t my first choice, but keeping low visibility meant we had less chance of being seen.

I brought my voice as low as it could go. “I think I see light shining through over there. We could cut through.”

As quietly as possible, we pushed our way through the corn, taking a shortcut to reach the lantern. When it came into view, we knelt to use its light to read the guide.

"It says 'avoid the...' as step three," Kelly murmured, squinting at the paper under the lantern’s glow.

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