Then a face popped around the edge of the doorframe. A gasp came strangling out of Ollie’s throat. It was a woman. Or had been. Her skin was sunken in beneath the cheekbones, and when she smiled, her lips stretched too wide, the way a skull smiles. She stood in the doorway, blocking Ollie’s escape.
“Who are you?” Ollie whispered. Her voice came out thin and scared.
A dry whisper murmured back, “My name is Beth Webster.”
Ollie’s spine was pressing up against the bookcase. “Beth Webster is dead.”
The woman in the doorway said nothing. But her smile grew and grew, humorlessly, until it took up her entire lower face. Ollie had to bite back a scream. “I died in this room,” whispered the woman. The rustle of her clothes sounded like dead leaves. “On the other side of the mist.”
“How did you get to—this side?” Ollie managed to ask around her dry throat.
“Jonathan is here,” Beth said. She clasped her hands together, long-fingered and bony. “The dead go where they will, and I wouldn’t leave him. Wouldn’t leave the farm when I was alive and won’t leave him now. Even the smiling man can’t make me. He’d like it, though. Oh yes he would.”
“Why?” Ollie asked. Her lungs felt squeezed with fright.
“Because he doesn’t have any power over the dead,” said Beth. “And I’m not forgetting myself like Cathy did. Poor Cathy Webster, there’s not much left of her now.”
“Forgetting yourself?” asked Ollie. “Is Cathy forgetting herself? But—why is she here? Because her sons are?”
“Yes,” said Beth. “Cathy wouldn’t leave her children, not for anything. But that’s what happens to ghosts. Their minds go, and then you are only memory, doing the same things over and over.”
“Then why aren’t you like that?” asked Ollie. She had begun to recover from her fright. Beth was scary, but she just stood in the doorway andlooked.
“I wrote a book,” said Beth thoughtfully. “I think that’swhy. I put myself into it, all my days and nights and hopes and dreams. My whole life. I think my book is the reason I still remember. Although maybe it would have been easier to forget.”
Maybe that’s why the smiling man wanted Linda Webster to get rid of the book, Ollie thought.To stop Beth from hanging around.Ollie thought of the watch’s instruction:UP. Maybe Beth Webster knew something important.
“Do you know how my friends and I can get home?” she asked. “Do you know how to turn the scarecrows back into people? Do you know how to beat the smiling man?”
The ghost laughed a long, shrill burst. “The smiling man is older than old,” said Beth, still grinning. “You can’t beat him. You might be happier in the corn with him. At least scarecrows feel nothing.”
“Shut up!” snapped Ollie. “We aren’t going to be scarecrows. I’m going home to my dad. How do we get home?”
“The cornfield is the doorway,” said the ghost. “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. They are his servants in this world and his gatekeepers in the other.” Big tears, as horrible as her laughter, ran down her bony nose. “AndIam only a ghost, and my love is a scarecrow, and the servant of that horrible man.” Her sad mouth seemed to droop down her face, as though the skin was rotten.
“How do we change the scarecrows back?” Ollie asked, torn between pity and horror.
“I do not know. ‘Until the mist becomes rain,’” Jonathan told me once. But I don’t know what that means. I am sorry,” she said with a new note in her voice. “You have to go now.”
That was when Ollie heard her watch beeping. Insistently. She realized how thick the shadows had grown. She looked down at her watch.
05:00.
Five minutes.
“I should have told you sooner,” whispered Beth Webster. She was crying dusty, waterless tears. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. But what was the use? You’re never leaving this place. Nevernevernever...”
20
OLLIE HURRIED TOthe window, heart thudding. The house was surrounded. The scarecrows’ blind eyes stared up.
Ollie ran for the door, burst past the ghost, and then she was racing down the stairs. “Brian! Coco!” Behind her, the ghost screamed out a long wail of despair.
The kitchen smelled of burning. Ollie ran in, found herself coughing. The oven was billowing smoke, and Brian and Coco sat at the table, dazed. Ollie ran forward furiously to shake them by the shoulders. Brian stared up at her, red-eyed.
“This is why you don’t make fires in strange stoves,” Ollie growled. “They smoke and youdie.” Brian was getting clumsily to his feet, shaking his head, coughing. Coco, much smaller, was mostly unconscious. “Help me!” Ollie cried. She grabbed Coco’s shoes and socks, still drying on the stove, and heaved them and her lunch box back into her backpack.
Brian, stumbling, propped Coco under his shoulder. They all staggered out of the kitchen. “It’s almost dark,” said Ollie as they went. “The scarecrows are outside.”
