The bark reignited her control over body, filling her with an urgency to get away from this tree to get to the dog, wherever he might be hiding.

The moon took over the sky, half covered by dirty grey clouds and dulled the light that Evie so desperately needed to see where she was going. The flickering flashlight just wasn't enough anymore and it instilled the fear that the thing from the pier would show up in front of her, that it would stop her in her tracks. She could sense it breathing down her spine, down the back of her neck, its pungent odor of damp moss and sulfur hovered around her like a bubble of stench. It turned her stomach, made her queasy and dizzy, distracting her as she narrowly missed the outstretched roots of the willow tree that she ran away from.

She didn't know why she'd automatically assumed it would look like Meister. She was beginning to wish that it had, because it was easy to tell that he had once been human. An awful one but still, human nonetheless. That thing was not. No matter how hard rationality pushed that it couldn't have been anything other than a human being, nothing could change her mind.

The Shadowman of Willowcreek Estate had never been human.

Ludo continued to bark, once, twice, three times, and following the noise, Evie found herself at the opening archway of the maze. Ten feet, that's how tall the archway had to be. It was made of some kind of stone, maybe granite? And it gave off a sense of impending doom, looming like the gates to the Underworld, like going through it would lead the girl to Elysium or the Fields of Asphodel. Or worse...the Fields of Punishment.

To either side of it, though slightly shorter but absolutely by no means less daunting, walls of green raced she couldn't even tell how far. The flowers that poked through the green, pretty colors that she thought were out of place, were a small comfort to the girl as she prepared herself for the leap.

Beyond this archway, somewhere deep in this maze was her dog and quite possibly the three headed guard dog of Hades, Cerberus, with an array of other mythical and fantastical creatures from mythology, books and movies. Of course, all of that stuff wasn't real, however, Evie well believed if there was even a slight chance of it, this maze could prove those naysayers wrong.

Herself included.

She'd been warned to keep Ludo out of here, to stay out of here herself, but she'd also been instructed to keep eyes on Ludo all of the time. The dog was in there, which meant she had to go in. She'd have to break the rules. Her uncle's only rules. An immediate heavy guilt bloomed in her chest as she stood there, thinking to herself that Eamon's were the only rules she didn't want to break but there was no getting around the fact that she had to.

After this, Evie knew she'd have so many more restrictions she'd have to adhere to. But only if she wasn't sent home for breaking these two first. Rustling behind her and the stench from before getting stronger forced Evie to take a step beyond the boundary. There was no going back now that she was over the line that distinguished inside the maze from outside of it.

She was officially a rule breaker.

Inside the maze was more daunting than the outside.

Those walls of green that had spanned the perimeter of its structure looked twice as large inside. Her mind made her believe they were growing in height as she walked to the first bend, ignoring the rustling that followed her inside. It is just the wind, it is just the wind, she told herself as she took note of a marker stuck in the hedge wall, trying to ignore the stench that also followed.

The marker provided Evie with some relief, however. She wouldn't be forced to navigate this thing on her own, not like the main character from her favorite movie. There would be wooden markers at each turn, with a pretty number and little flower carved into it. It was comforting to know that as she turned the first corner and found herself staring down a long, dark, hallway of vegetation.

She repeated multiple times that the leaves from the tall hedges were not reaching out and trying to grab her every time she accidentally skimmed them. She told herself repeatedly that the noises she was hearing were not moaning and wailing mythical beasts beckoning her to her death, but just the wind dancing through the structure. And every movement that she thought she saw was just a trick of the low light and shadows, most definitely not shadow people growing out of the unlit spaces with the sole purpose of leading her astray and making sure she never finds her way out of here.

Ludo had gone quiet, which was either a really good sign or a really bad one. Being quiet meant one of two things; he'd broken something and hidden further into the maze with the hopes that he wouldn't be caught or...he wasn't in here anymore. Evie got a bad feeling about his quietness. It made her stomach hurt more than the grotty stench, thinking he was no longer in here, that somehow the dog had found his way out and was in the house, with her dad and Eamon. Warm, comfortable and, most importantly, safe.

The deeper into the maze she walked, Evie abandoned the relief she felt and resigned herself to paranoid overthinking. There were creatures in here trying to kill her, there were shadow people who were going to lead her astray, probably to the creatures trying to make a meal out of her, and the walls were growing arms and hands and they were grabbing at her sweater. And as this started to spin in her head, Evie spotted another marker but something about the marker didn't make sense. The number wasn't right. She wasn't sure how many there were supposed to be, but the number wasn't -couldn't be- right.

There was no way that Evie had somehow taken four turns already. That didn't make sense, it made no sense. She'd turned two corners, or maybe three? No, she hadn't even taken the second yet...had she?

Now she officially regretted coming into the maze.

Presenting herself with two options, the girl told herself that the latter was smarter: keep going and find the dog or turn around and head into the house. It was going to start raining really soon, she'd already felt little spittles of rain drip on her forehead. Going back into the house and just admitting she lost track of the dog would be fine. They'd find him in the morning, he'd be a little cold, probably wet and definitely dirty, but he'd be fine... Wouldn't he? He had a thick coat, he wouldn't freeze and he could stand to skip a couple of meals because Evie fed him too many as well as Mrs. Garroway with the sneaky bacon strips that she thought no one noticed being passed under the table. He would totally be fine spending one night outside.

But she couldn't do that to him.

Evie hurried around the next bend in the maze and nearly screamed when she saw the marker numbered 'nine'.

Don't pay attention to the markers, she told herself as she pressed on, turning another bend and finding another misnumbered marker, and then another, the same. Another, same.

Four, nine, two, seven, twelve? How many turns were in this maze?

Growing frustrated with it, Evie stopped walking and shook the flashlight in her hand, close to giving up with it. It flickered more than once, completely shutting off before she hit it with the heel of her hand, hurting herself, but it just continued to flicker on and off, dimming then brightening.

"Come on!" she screamed at the flashlight as it sputtered like an old candle and went out one last time. It didn't turn on again. But that scream was met with her resurfacing paranoia of her not being alone in here. She raised her head as the shadows in front of her, the shadow cast by the little light of the moon, half full and bleeding its dim greyish light over the tips of the hedges, began to move.

All of a sudden, she was taken back to the conversation with Doug and Mari, his insistence that the maze was filled with ghosts, lost souls, and... The Shadowman.

She'd just told it where she was.

Her hands shook as she made herself slow down and take multiple deep breaths. If she had an asthma attack out here, or worse, she was screwed. She had to manage her breathing, like a deep diver. Usually, she'd close her eyes, but that would only make her more anxious.

She continued her walk, hearing grass slide against the side of her shoe, squeaking against the rubber. Before long, the sound went from squeaking to squelching, and she didn't need a flashlight to know that even that nice weather earlier in the day couldn't dry up the large puddles that had formed here. Her feet made uncomfortable slapping sounds on the wet mud, it splashed up and hit the side of her legs, seeping through her jeans.

She was sure she couldn't have been that far away from the center of the maze. Evie hadn't taken count of the turns she'd made, she'd been too focused on keeping her breathing and heart rate at a normal pace, but she knew she hadn't taken more than...at least ten? She was hoping that in one or two more turns, she'd find Ludo, lying in a bed of flowers, and looking miserably depressed because he knew he'd be getting a telling off the second they found him.

"Ludo?" she whispered, her voice almost silent as she uttered the dog's name, questioning the noise just up ahead of her. Calling his name in this place reminded her of another scene from a movie. She'd named him after a character from that same movie, it was a favorite and the character was one of her favorites. Scared and confused, alone, not knowing where the beast had disappeared to, the main character called his name, just like she was doing now. She prayed she wasn't met with the creatures from that movie around the next bend.

Evie had once thought it was fun to reenact the scenes from her favorite movies. She used to do it with Charlie and her friends from home. But here, this wasn't the place to do so. As perfect as the setting was, as much as she'd have loved this as a child. Something was off about the maze and Evie assured her younger self that their imagination was safer than the reality.

Turning yet another corner, her eyes almost having fully adjusted to the low light of the moon, Evie heard more rustling behind her and a whistle, like she'd heard by the willow. However, from the quick glance over her shoulder, she didn't see anyone or anything. It should have filled her with comfort.

It did quite the opposite.

Before long, the whistling became clearer and she could make out a tune. She hummed it lightly to herself, making sure she was hearing it properly. "Eamon?" she questioned, hoping her uncle was trying to pull a prank on her, trying to teach her a lesson for breaking the rules.

The whistling continued and it grew in volume. The moon shone its rays on her locks of raven hair, and she swore she'd be my love forever, she hummed along as the words played in her head. Her dad and her uncle whistled that song when they were working, her Gramps sang that song to her whenever she visited them as a child.

It had to be Eamon or her dad, right?

Another shape formed in the shadows and Evie nearly fell as she hurried away from it, telling herself that she was just seeing things. But the whistling turned to humming, not her own hum, as she backed herself around the next corner, coming at the perfect time as the moon lit up the area. The girl scurried around the stone center piece and hid for a moment, hands clasped over her mouth as she told herself to stay calm, stay quiet, and to picture herself absolutely anywhere else.

She was finally at the center of the maze and was hiding at the foot of a tall marble statue, wings obscuring her line of sight. It looked like there were only two points of entry into this section, where she'd come from and the opening behind her that probably led to the exit.

As the humming started to get quieter and quieter, the thing that had amassed from the shadows heading down another bend in the maze, Evie breathed a sigh of relief as she took a step around the statue and fully took in what she'd hidden behind. Who, really. An angel.

Nothing in this maze had given her any sense of relief and the angel was just one more on the list of things in this structure that scared her.

Relief should have washed over Evie when she made it to the center, the growing tightness in her chest should have started to lift. However, her heart almost outright stopped when she came eye to eye with the angel. The unsettling statue just made it worse.

A fog started to grow in her mind as she maintained eye contact with the marble angel, its fractured eyes making the hairs on her arms and neck stand on end. The longer their eyes were locked the more tunneled her vision became, a spell encasing Evie.

A marble angel in the center of a maze was bizarre, very much out of place. She remembered seeing one similar to it at the cemetery the day they buried her mother, but that one had been well cared for. This one hadn't and the years of neglect showed. The dull grey had patches of mossy tufts here and there, one sitting atop its head like a toupee of emerald green. A fingertip was missing, along with a hunk missing from its shoulder that looked like someone had taken a bite out of it. There were spidering cracks along the wings, down the arms, across its chest, and most disturbingly, a prominent one ran from the tear duct of an eye down the length of its face, dampened and exaggerated by a drop of rain. The eye itself had a sliver of stone gone. It should have been expressionless, there should have been no emotion, its eyes should have been blank.

However, there was a mess of feelings spilling from it, and Evie had an odd ache in her chest as she tried to take her eyes off of it, an ache that resembled primarily sadness and loneliness.

The grey slowly blotted out as rain started and within moments the pair were soaked. The tears that weren't really tears became indistinguishable from raindrops, but Evie still had that ache. It made her want to cry but at the same time, made her heart race with fear. The fear that the angel would begin to wail.

Forlornness hung over the girl, it made her head and chest heavy, it made her nauseous, and made her want to cry out herself.

Her eyes couldn't part from the angel's, it had an eerie hold on her. She was afraid to look away, in case it came to life and ate her up, but guilt crept in at the thought of abandoning it.

Overhead, thunder and lightning broke the sky, the darkening blue almost black, but pale white when lightning cracked. It scared the tears right out of her.

There were no longer any slivers of moonlight to guide her way through the rest of the maze. Spare the flashes of white light that whipped through the black of the night sky, Evie was blind and terror drew more tears from her than she intended to let fall.

Crows cackled off in the trees, finding Evie's little emotional outburst funny. She couldn't see where they were to yell at them. But as they cackled again, another noise joined them, Ludo had started barking, loudly. It sounded close by and it made her feet move on their own, without her mind telling them to. She told herself to get back on track and find the dog, to get out of this god forsaken maze.

Gingerly, the girl moved toward the other exit, trying to convince herself not to look back at the angel, knowing that the hold it had had on her before would reinstate itself and she'd never leave.

Against her better judgement, she used the green walls to guide her toward the dog, his barking becoming increasingly rapid. Evie wasn't sure if the dog was scared or had something cornered, but after two turns, and a flash of white light that she'd thought had come from lightning, she found the dog. But he wasn't alone, someone was with him and was grunting, like they were hurt. That flash of white light hadn't been lightning, it was this person, and he had a flashlight that had been casting its beam into the sky.

"Ludo!" she exclaimed, the dog's barking immediately ceasing and he turned to her. The rain had soaked him, as much as it had soaked her, and on his underbelly, from what she could see, he was caked in dirt. She hadn't noticed anything dug up, so she hoped the mud was from his 'play' with this guy. "Come here, right now," she scolded the dog, but she couldn't hide the relief in her tone as the stinky mass of fur bounced over to her, jumping up on her and his paws leaving dirty prints of mud on her shoulders. He smelled like the water from the lake, putrid and eggy.

"Careful, he's dangerous!" the guy insisted, stepping toward the two, but Ludo dropped from her shoulders and growled a little at him. Whether or not this guy was trying to appear chivalrous, he blew the whole act by backing away from the furry pet. He was a large dog but a baby, still only a puppy and it made Evie laugh that this person had called him dangerous. Ludo was a cuddly ball of fur, he was a gentle giant. No, Evie would go so far as to say the dog was the very definition of the term. "He went for my neck, kid, he's an animal."

"He's a puppy and my dog," Evie threw in retort, taking Ludo by his collar to check him over, "and I don't know how long he's been out, so flash that over here so I can make sure he's not hurt."

"A puppy?" The guy did as she instructed though, the flashlight casting over the dog, showing off more of the mud on his legs and his tail, too. It was on his back, as well. Had he been rolling around in it? "That is a bear," he stated, moving the flashlight's beam to illuminate Evie's face. And he got a full view of her scowl.

"HE is a dog," repeated the girl, stressing his gender and species.

"He attacked me," the guy imitated her and only got the same scowl in return.

"You shouldn't even be in here," she told him, brushing off the fact that he was claiming Ludo had attacked him. Ludo was scared of his own shadow. He was all bark and no bite, literally. If he'd attacked him, if by pure chance he did bite him, it was because the dog mistook him for an overgrown slice of bacon. "You're trespassing, this is private property."

"Same goes for you, shrimp, you and Bozo aren't allowed in here." He had no idea how bad of an idea it was to refer to the dog as a bear, once again.

"I live here, you can't tell me I'm not allowed on my own property, jackass," snapped Evie, Ludo taking up a crouched stance beside her, as if to tell her to yell more at him. Maybe he had attacked him. Evie hadn't seen that side of her dog but if he perceived him as a threat, maybe he would do it to protect himself or to protect others, like her. "You are the one committing a crime and all for some stupid picture of a ghost? You people are pathetic."

"You think I'm one of those loons?" he questioned, a look of utter incredulousness pasted on his features. "Try again, small fry, I work here." 

https://youtu.be/Hl3Ce3XJSD8