What Stalks Among Us
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Synopsis
From Sarah Hollowell, author of A Dark and Starless Forest, comes a spine-tingling, deliriously creepy YA speculative thriller about two best friends trapped in a corn maze with corpses that look just like them.
Best friends and high school seniors Sadie and Logan make their first mistake when they ditch their end-of-year field trip to the amusement park in favor of exploring some old, forgotten backroads. The last thing they expect to come across is a giant, abandoned corn maze.
But with a whole day of playing hooking unspooling before them, they make their second mistake. Or perhaps their third? Maybe even their fourth. Because Sadie and Logan have definitely entered this maze before. And again before that.
When they stumble on the corpses in the maze, identical to them in every way (if you can ignore the stab and gunshot wounds)--from their clothes to their hidden scars to their dyed hair, to that one missing tooth--they quickly realize they’ve not only entered this maze before, they’ve died in it too. A lot. And no matter what they try, they can’t figure out what—or who—is hunting them.
Deeply unnerving, clever, and atmospheric, this time-bending, mind-bending speculative horror is a poignant meditation on the lasting effects of trauma and the healing powers of connection and forgiveness—all while delivering more surprise twists and turns than a haunted corn maze.
Release date: September 12, 2023
Publisher: HarperCollins
Print pages: 400
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What Stalks Among Us
Sarah Hollowell
1
The corn is the vibrant green of midsummer. The stalks tower above us, too high to see over, even if we jump. The entrance to the maze is marked by hay bales that make my legs itch just looking at them.
I sip from my water bottle just for something to do with myself other than stare at the maze. It barely dilutes the taste of the Pixy Stix–flavored crushed ice I ate on the drive.
Logan, pacing the edge of the field, says, “This shouldn’t be here.”
“I know,” I say.
“Like, really shouldn’t. Like, I’d sooner believe it’s a hologram.” He reaches out one hand but stops short of touching the corn.
I’m not a farm kid or anything, but growing up in Indiana tends to mean absorbing some knowledge through osmosis. I know that corn mazes are for fall, when the corn is full-grown.
It’s only May 2. Far as I know, this maze is impossible.
It was a mark of true friendship that when Logan picked me up that morning, he took one look at my face and said, “You wanna skip the field trip?”
It wasn’t just any field trip. It was the Kings Island trip. It was the theme park–shaped prize we all got for surviving AP Physics. Everyone looked forward to it all year.
Everyone except me.
I’m the only one in the class fat enough to have to worry about if I’d fit on the rides. I’ve been to a theme park all of once, and it included slinking back through the line of a roller coaster after the bar wouldn’t close over my stomach.
I can know it’s not my fault that the ride wasn’t built with people like me in mind, or that the walk back through the line shouldn’t be embarrassing because I didn’t do anything wrong. I existed while fat—that’s it. I can know all of that and still not want to do it again. I can still worry about being perceived as Logan’s fat friend who holds him back.
Ever since my parents signed the permission slip, I’d been imagining that terrible walk back through the line. Would Logan avert his eyes and pretend not to know me? Bri and Gracie were in our class, so they’d be there. Would they stare at me and think, Thank god we got out of that friendship?
“We can’t,” I responded, gripping the straps of my messenger bag a little too tight. “Miss it, I mean. We can’t miss the trip.”
“Sadie. Do you really want to go?”
I kept my eyes on the dashboard, unblinking, but I could feel Logan watching me. I thought, Tell him! Be open! Show him you trust him! If I did that, our friendship, only as old as the school year, could grow and solidify.
As usual, the words just wouldn’t come out.
Logan tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, then stated, “Okay, executive decision. I say we ditch.”
Maybe it was selfish of me, but I didn’t argue.
I’m good at mazes. Like, really good. Every fall, my dad and I go to any corn maze we can find within a hundred miles—which, in Indiana, is quite a few.
Sure, there’s some differences with this one. The mazes I’m used to are family-friendly, even the haunted ones. Dad’s not here to keep me grounded, there’s no apple cider for me to sip on as I walk. We don’t even know how big the maze is. It could be acres and acres.
Trying to peer through the dense corn, I think about how in the deepest parts of the ocean, there’s no sunlight. Artificial light will only reach so far. There’s no way of knowing what’s waiting in the darkness. The ocean is simply too big, too remote, and if you dive too deep . . .
Right now, this maze doesn’t seem that different. With the stalks so tall and so tightly packed—who plants corn that close together?—we’ll have no hope of knowing what’s around a corner until we make the turn.
Don’t be so goddamn dramatic, I admonish myself. You’re not in a horror movie.
Besides. I’m good at mazes. I’ve gotten lost in plenty of ten-acre corn mazes with no guide, no map, and way more mud, but always found the path back out.
So I say, “Let’s go in,” and when Logan says, “Are you sure?” I say, “Absolutely yes.” I grab my school bag out of the car because you never know what you’ll need on an adventure and, more importantly, I really don’t feel like carrying my water bottle in my hands.
I won’t let us get lost.
Logan grins, all doubt erased by my confidence. He takes the first step into the maze. For one dizzying moment, I see him as if through a lens flare. He looks over his shoulder, and a strange trick of the light makes it appear as if there are a dozen Logans copy-pasted behind him. All of them grinning.
Then the light is gone, and it’s just my one and only Logan, holding his hand out to me.
Whenever either of us need an emotional boost, we seek empty roads and wilderness. The closest and best place for that is Brown County, where there are no population centers large enough to be called a town, and the trees rule over everything.We love speeding down the winding roads of the county-wide forest and hunting secrets.
Although Brown County is our favorite, it wasn’t what I needed that morning. Suffocated by thoughts of the bus we could have been trapped in and the rides I could have humiliated myself attempting to squeeze into, all I wanted was wide, open spaces. I wanted the sky to stretch out above me into eternity. That meant farmland. Luckily, that was everywhere. Drive any direction out of town, and we’d find miles of corn and soybeans.
I knew most of my classmates were eager to get out of Indiana for exactly that reason—the endless crops. Well, that and our often-shitty conservative political environment. I understood them, especially the ones running to escape a red state.
And yet . . . I couldn’t imagine giving up the view. There was nothing like speeding down country roads flanked by oceans of green soybeans or golden, late-fall corn gently swaying in the wind.
Even better, I thought, when it stormed. I could picture us, pulled over on the side of the road, thunder booming overhead as we told ghost stories and kept an ear out for tornado sirens. I’d get my sky, and the rest of the world would wash away.
I figured there was a chance my wish could come true. The early morning sky was clear, but I knew that when the afternoon heat rolls into Indiana, anything can happen. The clouds can descend to earth.
In the maze, Logan and I stick close together. I have this persistent itch in the back of my brain, that someone-is-behind-you itch, but every time I look back, there’s nothing. Logan, meanwhile, can’t stop looking up.
“Sky’s going gray,” he says.
“We’ll be out before it rains,” I promise.
“We could have just gone to my house and watched movies.” He sighs. “I miss Captain and Milo.”
I could point out that he just saw his cats all of four hours ago, but I don’t. I pat his arm reassuringly. “You’ll be back with those good, good boys soon enough.”
On my next step, my foot hits something. A phone.
“Not a totally abandoned maze, then,” Logan says as I pick it up.
“Look at this.” I dig my phone out of my bag and hold them up next to each other. Both the same model of black iPhone, and both have shattered screens with fine broken lines radiating out from the upper left corner.
“You really need to get a phone case or, god, at least a screen protector,” Logan says. “Gives me anxiety just to look at that naked phone.”
“Shush. They’re cracked the same way!” Like, identically cracked. I would swear that even the tiny branching fissures go the same directions.
Logan shrugs, clearly unbothered by this revelation. “If we find the owner, we should buy them a phone case, too.”
I roll my eyes. I hold down the button on the side of the phone, but it doesn’t turn on. “So much for finding the owner.”Still, I slip it into my bag. You never know.
“Which way?” I ask when the path splits.
Logan looks down both potential paths, but they’re identical.
“Left,” he says. “Got a good feeling about left.”
So we go left.
“Which way?” Logan asked as we approached a T in the road. There weren’t any other cars around, so I took my own sweet time checking out both directions. To the left, trees cropped up on either side of the road, making a tiny forest in the middle of farmland. To the right, open fields as far as the eye could see.
I almost said right because we came here for that big sky, but some feeling kept pulling me back to the left. I wanted to say right. When I opened my mouth, what came out was, “Left.”
He turned without question. In moments, the trees swallowed us up, blocking out the sunlight. Logan, as if sharing my sudden anxiety to see the other side, sped up.
I don’t know if he saw the graveyard. I didn’t ask, and I didn’t point it out. It was a little thing. Five or six stones, maybe. Normally we’d stop for such a strange place, read the names, theorize about the family laid to rest in the ground.
That time, driving through a seemingly endless grove, I held my breath until we passed the graves. Restless spirits prowling graveyards can’t get into your body if you hold your breath.
As suddenly as the trees devoured us, we were released back into the sun. Once again, the land stretched out flat in front of us.
Except for that unusually high cornfield.
The leftward path takes us down a few more turns, and then into a clearing in the maze. It’s maybe the size of a classroom, which is kind of weird to see in a maze. Sometimes you might see a larger open area at a crossroads, but that’s just the nature of making an intersection in a field of corn. This looks more like someone purposely hollowed a room out of the corn, with perfectly straight walls. There are hay bales scattered around, as if offering places to rest.
Slumped over one of them, having apparently taken them up on the offer, is a body.
“Halloween decoration,” I say automatically.
“It’s May.”
“It’s not real.” Determined to prove it, I approach the body. The definitely, absolutely fake body. That’s why it’s facedown, and why it’s wearing a sweatshirt with the hood up. Whoever put it here wants to hide that it’s a mannequin. Yeah, the smell of copper gets stronger with every step, but that could be anything. There’s also something dark and red staining the ground under the body, spreading out in a suspicious pool, but again—that could be anything. One time I dyed my hair a very unnatural red, and the dye looked like that. Yeah. An unfortunate hair-coloring incident. In a corn maze. Makes sense.
I crouch next to the body, reaching for the hood.
“Don’t,” Logan says. He sounds nervous. I’m not used to Logan being nervous. “What if it’s a crime scene?”
“It’s not real,” I repeat. I pull back the hood, revealing the face.
The face is like a puzzle, all disparate pieces that I can’t put together. Glassy eyes. An Asian boy, with light brown skin and a long nose, like Logan. Gray clouds part just long enough to allow sunlight to glint off his dark hair. It flashes blue.
Just like Logan’s, because last week I dyed the ends of my hair blue and he used up the spare dye. We didn’t bleach his hair first, so you can’t see it except in the right light. It always shows up best in the sun.
Logan stopped the car, and we both stared at the cornfield.
“Look—there’s a side road up ahead,” Logan said, gesturing with his chin. “Should we . . . ?”
“Should we go check out that mysterious, impossible cornfield?” I asked. “Uh, yes. Obviously, yes.” It was exactly the sort of unusual, spooky thing that we hoped to find on our drives. Of course we had to get closer.
Logan didn’t hesitate for long before rolling forward. I don’t think anyone else would have registered the moment as a hesitation, but I did. I should have said something. I should have asked why he paused, what he was feeling.
But I didn’t mention it.
I squeeze my eyes shut as if that can prevent the puzzle pieces from slotting together. It’s too late, though. I knew it was too late the moment I saw the scar through his eyebrow.
We’d only been friends for a little over a month when it happened. It was maybe our second or third drive. I pointed frantically down a side road marked by a lightning-split tree, he didn’t notice the immediate sharp turn, and we went right off the road into a field.
Logan got a nasty cut on his forehead and I sprained my wrist, but otherwise, we were fine. We would have hidden the whole incident if Logan hadn’t needed stitches. We came up with potential cover stories—he swerved off the road to avoid hitting a group of baby raccoons, or we weren’t even in the car, he was just trying to save a baby raccoon and the mother got pissed. For some reason our lies all involved baby raccoons.
We went with the swerving-off-the-road story. Logan’s mom totally bought it, but I think my parents just pretended to. In another life, the accident would have ruined him in their eyes—their daughter, in a car with an unsafe driver, injured? But they knew I’d been different since the summer. They didn’t know the cause, just knew I seemed less . . . me. With Logan in my life, I was acting more like the normal Sadie, and other than the reckless driving incident, Logan was a Nice Boy. My parents were willing to accept some teenage shenanigans if it meant I was “adjusting.”
The side road that ran alongside the cornfield was bumpy and long, seeming to go on forever. I couldn’t even see where it joined a main road on the other side. Just this road, and the corn.
“Stop!” I cried, pointing.
Logan pulled the car over into a large patch of gravel. He squinted out my window. “Is that . . . ?”
The opening in the corn was wide enough for at least a couple people to go through at once. Hay bales on either side seemed to mark it as an entrance, and there was clearly a path cut through the corn.
I couldn’t stop the grin from spreading over my face. “This is a maze.”
I scramble backward, letting the hood drop. The sweatshirt is gray, I realize, like the one Logan is currently wearing. I turn to him, tears already stinging my eyes. I can tell by the confusion on his face that he didn’t see what I saw.
I can’t let him see.
“We have to go,” I say. “Now.”
I pull him down the path we entered through. We aren’t far in. There was only the one turn. I don’t even need to be good at mazes to get us back to the entrance. Once we’re out and in the car and have the windows up, then we can call the police.
When the path dumps us back in the same clearing, with the hay bales and the body, I assume I made a mistake at the turning. Maybe instead of going to the entrance, I went down the other way, and the choice at the T was a false one. Both ways would have brought us to the clearing.
Okay, back the way we came, then. This time—
“What the fuck?” Logan says, perfectly expressing my own feelings as we once again find ourselves among hay bales and a corpse in a gray hoodie.
My palms are so sweaty that it’s getting harder to cling to Logan’s hand, but I don’t let go as I turn on my heel and take us back into the maze. This time, this time I’m going to get us out.
I nearly collapse when I see the body again. My lungs hurt, my legs hurt from sprinting, and the body of my best friend is only a few feet away, even though he’s also holding my hand, and all I can think is not again.
Wordlessly, Logan drops my hand and approaches the body.
“Don’t,” I say. My voice is hoarse and quiet, and I’m not sure if he hears me. He lifts the hood. Confusion and recognition flicker across his face, then a dawning horror. He looks at me as if I might have answers. I wish I could do more than shake my head.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know.”
The only thing I know is that we’re trapped in a maze that we’ve never stepped foot in before today, and somehow, Logan has already died in it.
A long, long way away, thunder rolls.
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