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***
The screech and slam of the gate frightened a nearby crow, and as it took off into the night with an offended caw, Minho allowed himself to feel a single moment of regret.
Or several.
Minho turned, shoe scuffing against the gravel, to face the upperclassman who giggled an ancient-looking key into an equally ancient lock with a frown, like it often sticks, and wondered aloud how many times he’d locked innocent, naive freshmen like Minho inside the maze.
(Hours before, Minho had leaned forward on the foldout table in the University courtyard and asked, “All night?”
“Yes,” the boy replied, pen clutched tight in his left hand, fist waving over Minho’s name scratched hastily on the notepad in front of him, and spoke in slow, measured words, “All night.”
“But—”
“All night,” he said, cutting Minho off. Newt, his name card read, “In the maze,” Newt said.)
Now, Newt sighed as he finally managed to turn the key (skeleton key, Minho’s mind supplied, unhelpfully) succeeding in locking Minho inside the centuries-old hedge maze. It’s a labyrinth of a thing, really, actually quick stunning to look at from above—like in the safety of a dorm room, for example—and when Minho was given the option to either strip naked and be hunted for sport in the woods by upperclassmen with paintball guns or spend a night inside an old maze, naturally he chose the latter.
It was a rare thing for a freshman to be allowed to choose his initiation torment, so rare Minho had never heard of anything like it before, and, the thought of nursing golf ball size welts and washing a spectrum of paint from his skin and hair for a whole day, Minho hadn’t hesitated a second to scribble his name under the Maze Campout column of the signup sheet.
His name being the only one on the list should have been the first red flag, but Minho has never claimed to be good at spotting any of those. From the last quick curl of the o to when he settled in the library, hunched over his laptop and did a quick Google search to the moment, right then, of Newt shutting Minho inside an overgrown bonsai garden, Minho realised he made a very big mistake.
Gladestown University, Colorado, was as beautiful as it was infamous. An archipelago of history, culture and architecture nestled on the bank of a quaint little town at the base of The Rockies harboured a dark past. One that Minho hadn’t been privy to.
The maze was, naturally, at the centre of the conspiracy.
The story went that over a hundred years ago the University used to be one of the largest hospitals in the country, which he had been aware of. The maze sat at the base of what has been turned into the language and ancient studies building, but what used to be the children’s ward, home to hundreds of under-eighteens getting treated for a plethora of issues kids nowadays received a bottle of prescribed something-or-other and a there there for.
It was said that the head doctor at the time ran experiments on the teenagers, tossing them inside the maze for hours or even days while they set their lap experiments loose to hunt the kids down. Sometimes the kids themselves were the lab experiments.
But anyway—TLDR—the maze was haunted as fuck.
Minho stopped Newt before he could leave. “I think I made a mistake,” he said.
Newt raised an eyebrow. “That’s one way to put it, mate.”
“What did you do?” Minho asked. “At your initiation, I mean.”
Newt blinked at him for just a moment, and said, “I ran through twigs and deer shit with my balls out until dawn like a fuckin’ man.” He grinned. “But you have fun in there.”
Newt winked—actually winked—and strolled back up the path toward the Science building, whistling all the way.
***
Minho was in the maze for a solid twenty minutes before coming to the simple conclusion that he was being stalked by a bat. The small thing flapped its leathery wings and screeched like it was making a business out of it, following Minho from branch to branch as he, against his better judgment, moved further into the maze. The warm early autumn night felt chilly inside the leafy walls that stretched two or three Minhos high. The wind whistled through the manicured hedges and gently caressed Minho’s bare arms as he walked further inward, serenated by a haunting breeze-song, and his new little flying friend.
The game plan of the night was to find the centre and camp out until morning. The centre, from what he saw from the library window hours before, housed a little gazebo and nothing much else. But a gazebo meant the possibility of benches, hopefully wooden rather than stone and Minho held hope of maybe not having to curl up against the gravel and stone and snuggle a bush to get some sleep.
Clearly, his mind was in the bargaining stage of its grief, allowing him the blissful delusion of thinking he may manage a few hours of sleep tonight.
The little bat screeched right above his head. Minho nearly jumped out of his skin, feeling goose pimples spread along the back of his neck. He turned, angry and frustrated and cold, and swore at the night bird, “Fuck off!”
The sound of a branch snapping to his left turned his blood cold.
“What the fuck?” Minho whispered aloud, turning this way and that, and found nothing but the empty hall of the maze. Three minutes passed as Minho soldiered on, pads of his fingers tracing the right side of the maze, having heard this particular piece of advice from a movie once when a rustle of leaves behind him made him stop dead in his tracks.
Absolutely not, Minho thought. Not me. Not tonight. Some of the upperclassmen must have snuck in after Minho ventured inward to torment him, make him shit his pants. He noticed them earlier in the day, grinning at Minho when they thought he wasn’t looking. It was probably Newt at that dark-haired, gangly boyfriend if his Minho met briefly after signups. At any moment they would appear around the corner with flashlights and Halloween masks, push Minho into a potato sack and drag him into the centre of the maze. Probably waterboard him with piss or sewer water or whatever the fuck else demented college kids did.
Well. Minho took wrestling and track in high school. Not only could he outrun them, but he’d be able to lay Newt and his boyfriend flat on the ground. Come at me, fuckers, he thought.
More rustling, another snap of a twig, and the bat screeches just as the flash of a camera went off and succeeded in blinding Minho temporarily. Minho shouted, stumbled backwards and landed flat on his ass in the gravel and dirt. A shutter rang out again.
Great. He was going to end up trending on Twitter. Greenie loser shits himself in haunted maze. He’d have to lock himself in his dorm for the rest of the school year.
Two more flashes went off. Minho grit his teeth and crawled back up on his feet moments before a figure appeared out from behind a hedge.
“Oh,” Minho heard in the darkness, stars swimming in his vision, rapidly blinking to clear the temporary blindness. The word, barely a huff of breath, was low and disappointed. Maybe Newt was upset Minho hadn’t pissed himself. Then the voice said, “You’re not a ghost.”
“Ex-fucking-cuse me?”
Minho’s eyes re-adjusted to the darkness quickly, and he was blinking up at someone who was not Newt, camera hovering inches from his nose, looking annoyed.
“Well,” he said, “you don’t look like a ghost.”
“I’m not a ghost, dipshit,” Minho spat.
“Okay, chill out.” The newcomer dropped the camera completely, letting it dangle around his neck. Minho squinted at him in the darkness. Dark hair. Tall and skinny, T-rex-like posture, where if he straightened up it would’ve probably added two extra inches of height on him. He pressed buttons on his camera with casual indifference, as Minho sat in the dirt listening to the lens zoom and unzoom.
“I thought I was the only one in here,” he muttered, finally pushing himself to his feet, and blinked the remaining stars out of his eyes.
The boy glanced up at Minho for a moment—dark eyes, probably lighter in the sunlight. Green or hazel. It was too dark to tell. “Yeah, ditto, bro,” he said, sighing and putting the camera down. “Why are you in here? It’s spooky as shit.”
“For …” Minho glanced around at the building's high hedges and the ancient stone artworks and thought for a moment that, perhaps, he’d wandered out of his maze and into a different maze entirely. “For the freshman? Initiation?”
“Ah,” Minho’s new companion said, a smirk tugging at his lips that instantly made Minho dislike him. “You pussied out of the hunt, huh?”
“Um? You’re in here, too, asshole!”
“Yeah, to capture photographic evidence of the supernatural.” He wiggled the camera at Minho. A patch sewn into the strap read GALLY in green stitching. Minho had never heard of that brand before, and he had a friend in high school obsessed with cameras, so he took an educated guess that Gally was this weirdo’s name. “Obviously.”
Minho blinked. “You seriously believe the maze is haunted?”
“Yeah,” Gally replied, “Haven’t you heard about the fucked history of this school?”
Yeah, five hours ago, Minho thought. Out loud, he said, “Obviously."
“So have you, like, seen anything since you’ve been in here?”
“Yeah, a bat’s been on my ass the last half hour,” Minho said, “Pretty sure it wants to suck on my neck.”
Gally frowned. “There aren’t any vampire bats in Colorado.”
“Well, tell that to my new little friend.”
Right on cue, the little bat screeched from an undetermined height, and Gally glanced up with all the caution of a man worried he was about to be shit on. “Okay,” he said, “Maybe we keep moving.”
“We?” Minho echoed.
“Two pairs of eyes are better than one,” Gally replied, already turning away and walking off down a random corridor like he knew exactly where he was going, and for a moment Minho wondered if this wasn’t his first soiree inside the hedge maze. “Look out for any ectoplasm, and let me know if you hear any wailing. That’ll be super helpful.”
The only pitiful wailing they’d hear would be coming from Minho if he didn’t get out of this leafy penitentiary soon. Regardless, two pairs of eyes are better than one, whether it be for ghost hunting (someone definitely spent his summer watching too many episodes of Ghost Adventures) or to just keep an eye out for Newt and his lackeys throwing dye bombs on them from the rafters, so Minho followed on closely behind Gally.
If anything, at least he had someone to talk to now.
***
Gally, Minho learnt very, very quickly, was the most miserable mother fucker on the planet. Not only was he clearly allergic to small talk, but his aversion to giving Minho (who introduced himself after Gally didn’t ask) anything other than one-worded answers was unmatched. He hummed down at his camera, pressing buttons that beeped annoyingly and would scare off any unsuspecting ghosts just trying to linger on this miserable plain of existence in peace, but set Minho’s teeth on edge.
“What’s your major?”
“Art,” Gally replied.
“Like art history?”
“No.”
“Oh … Well, mine’s geography. Spatial science.”
“Cool.”
“I actually, um,” Minho stuttered. His mouth moved on its own, words flowing down from his brain to his lips, bouncing off Gally’s back without restraint. “I want to be a cartographer. It’s silly, I know, and everyone always kinda laughs at me when I say that, but. I don’t know. It’s always been something I’ve been interested in since I was a kid. Not sure what kind of work’s out there for map makers, but hey—I’d rather be broke and doing something I love than stuck behind a desk running stock numbers like my old man—”
Gally stopped so abruptly that Minho ran into him. He held his breath as Gally straightened up, shoulders rolling back and stretching the thin cotton of his black shirt. Minho was right: an extra two inches of height when he didn’t slouch.
Gally turned back and said, “My dad was in the military, and I was expected to follow. Architecture. That’s what I want to do.” He gave a small smile. “Your dreams aren’t silly.”
Minho felt oddly touched, validated by this complete stranger.
So much that he almost missed the shadow move, quick as lightning, just to the left of them. Minho startled and grabbed hold of Gally’s sleeve just as Gally stiffened and clutched his camera. It beeped (which Minho now recognised as the On beep) and levelled it at his nose, the viewfinder shining bright in Minho’s face.
“Did you see that?” Minho whispered. Gally shushed him, and he bit down on the annoyance in favour of allowing himself to be manoeuvred in a circle on Gally’s right as he very carefully panned the camera around the three hedge corridors that surround them. They must be nearing the centre, Minho thought, or they’ve been walking around in circles for over an hour. Gally stopped finally, and Minho heard the sound of the lens slowly zooming in for a heartbreaking total of five seconds before he visibly relaxed.
Shoulders dropping, Gally laughed to himself and motioned for Minho to come look at the viewfinder.
“It’s just a fox,” Gally said.
Minho squinted at the screen and, sure enough, there was the outline of a red fox in night vision, from its snoot to its long fuzzy tail. The animal sat there watching them back, occasionally sniffing into the night, and Minho worried it could smell his fear.
“Yeah, so. Somehow that doesn’t comfort me all that much.”
“You’d rather be attacked by a ghost than a fox?”
Minho hoped it was too dark for Gally to see him rolling his eyes. “I haven’t had my rabies shot this year. I’ll take my chances with Casper.”
“Famous last words,” Gally said.
Together they watched the little fox sneeze, give a yip in their direction, and run off into the maze.
***
“What was that noise?”
“Probably a Griever,” Gally said. Minho did groan out loud this time.
“Bro,” Minho said, “There’s no ghosts in here.”
Gally barely looks away from his camera. “You need to stop saying that.”
“Why, am I gonna scare them away? Will I get possessed?”
“You need to stop saying that even more. Fucking Christ.”
Minho sighed. “It isn’t even that spooky in here. The greenies getting paintballs shot up their asses are the real pussies.”
“You’re not scared?” Minho swore he heard a smirk in the smug drawl of Gally’s voice. “Let go of my sleeve then.”
Minho refused to react. “Uh. No? It’s dark as hell in here. I’d rather not twist my ankle or, like, shatter a kneecap on a stone gnome or whatever shit sculptures they’ve got in here. If we trip maybe you’ll soften my fall.”
Whatever cologne Gally was wearing smelt nice, too—spicy, a little earthy—but that’s neither here nor there.
“You’re night vision’s for shit.”
“Did I say otherwise?”
“Hey, man, you’re the one who agreed to camp out overnight in a haunted maze,” Gally said.
Minho groaned again, louder this time. “It is. Not. Haunted.”
“Tell that to the Grievers.”
“You need to stop saying that!” Then, after a minute of more walking, more stopping, more stilled breaths and frozen limbs, tired and defeated, Minho asked, “What’s a Griever?”
Benched were beginning to line the edges of the walls, and Minho surmised they must be getting close to the centre. For his sanity’s sake, anyway, he allowed himself to believe it. Gally stopped walking for the first time in what must have been an hour (Minho checked his phone, squinting at a too-bright screen that read 01:37 AM, his night vision taking the blunder for his troubles) and sat down on one of the benches. Soles of his feet aching, Minho sat down beside him.
His legs made up most of his height. Minho catalogued this knowledge away in the back of his mind and pinched the bridge of his nose, feeling tired.
“You really don’t know a lot about what this place used to be, huh?” Gally said, tapping the top of the lens along to a nonsense beat.
Minho shrugged. “I know the basics.”
“So, like,” Gally began, turning on the stone bench to more completely face Minho. (Hazel? Honey? He wished it was light enough to make out the colour without straight up shining his phone light in Gally’s eyes) “All the kids that lived in that building over there were orphans, right? The ward took them in, and the hospital practically became an orphanage.”
“Easier to hide the shit they were doing when there wasn’t anyone to check up on the patients,” Minho supplied.
Gally nodded enthusiastically. “Exactly. So the story went that when one of the kids popped it in the maze, the chief officer would send one of the lower-level nurses in to get the bodies. A few of those nurses never came back out. No one knows why.”
“Did they run?”
Gally shrugged. “Maybe. A more popular theory is the angry spirits of the patients got to them first and killed them so they wouldn’t have to be alone in here. A lot of the kids got close to these nurses, you know? No family to call or write or visit, the nurses were the only people they knew. Probably the only people who cared about them, too.”
“Grievers,” Minho said, the word tasting like ash on his tongue in the early autumn night. Goosebumps rose on his arms.
“Yup,” Gally said, “the only ones who would cry for them when they were gone.”
“Gally?”
“Yeah?”
Minho hugged himself. “I’m really regretting coming in here. I don’t want to be here anymore.”
Gally’s eyebrows furrowed. “You’d rather be shot with paintballs?”
“Honestly? I’m starting to see the appeal. And I’m getting hungry.”
Gally sighed. Minho felt the puff of breath on the back of his knuckles. Without another word, he reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a nougat bar, only slightly crumpled, and held it out for Minho.
“Eat this,” he said and stood up. “The middle is up ahead, I’m pretty sure. I left some sleeping bags there earlier today. You can get some sleep.”
Minho began to resist, “I’m not sleeping in here—wait. You set up camp? You prepared a camp?”
Gally shoved his hands in his pockets, and for a moment looked mildly sheepish. “I didn’t think there’d be anyone else in here. You can take the sack, it’s okay. I don’t sleep much anyway.”
***
It was well passed 2 AM when they finally burst into the beautifully macabre centre of the death maze, and Minho’s brain was beginning to whisper dangerous sweet nothings at him. His inner demons encouraged of tantalising temptations like, Ask him out, and, Play 20 questions. Find out his favourite colour, if he’s close with his mom and if he likes boys.
Gally opened his arms and turned in a half circle in the clearing, and Minho was reminded of early 2000s MTV shows. Welcome to my crib! A stone gazebo and more stone pots and stone gnomes! Decked out with Walmart sleeping bags and Target pillows!
“Well,” Gally said, “we made it.”
“We made it,” Minho echoed. Trip and fall. Maybe he’ll catch you with his lips.
“I’m serious about you taking the sleeping bag. I’m planning on taking another lap around this place, anyway.”
Wow. What a gentleman. We should make out.
Maybe ghosts were real, and Minho was currently being possessed by a 14-year-old schoolgirl. Then, his ears finally caught up to what Gally said, and he instantly paled.
“Sorry, what?”
“What what?”
“You’re not leaving me alone in here!”
Gally stared, openly shocked. “But you were alone for nearly two hours before we bumped into each other.”
“Yeah! Well!” Minho stuttered, cheeks heating, feeling like the biggest idiot this side of the Rockies. “This shit’s haunted, man!”
Gally’s very nice mouth stretched into a very nice smile, and the irritation Minho was feeling managed to snuff the flutter of attraction in his belly. “So now you believe the maze is haunted?”
“No, I just …” Think. “I don’t want any spiders crawling over me, is all.”
Gally hummed, and his eyes flicked quickly up and down Minho from his head to his toes and back. Minho laid down on the bench inside the gazebo, in Gally’s sleeping bag, while Gally set his camera aside and checked his phone for the first time that night. He looked like any other nineteen-year-old, staring down at the bright screen and scrolling with a bored, half-lidded stare.
“What made you choose to come here?” Gally asked after what might have been an hour or ten minutes when Minho was starting to feel himself slip into unconsciousness. The sleeping bag was warm and smelt faintly of pine air refresher.
“Hm? Oh. Good science program, and it’s close to my mom and sister. What about you?”
“About the same, except this school is the furthest away from my mom as possible.”
Ouch, Minho thought, That’s something to unpack. Maybe after the third date.
“You’re a good artist,” Gally said, out of the blue, again when Minho was getting too snuggly, dreaming of pine needles and green forests and Gally surrounded in sunbeams and wildflowers, filming a panorama with his camera. It wasn’t at all a question, which gave Minho pause. Confused, he half sat up.
“How do you know that?”
“Oh, he’s not denying it.” Gally tapped a little more at his phone. “I figured. To be a map maker, you’d have to be.”
“I could get A.I. to do it for me.”
“Judging by the way your nose just wrinkled when you said that, I’m going to go out on a limb and say you absolutely do not do that. Plus,” he said, turning the screen of his phone toward Minho to display—to his complete horror—his own Instagram page, “I just found your DND account.”
Minho leapt up off the bench like a spider really did crawl into the sleeping bag to snuggle up with him. “That’s not my account,” he said.
“Oh, this isn’t you?”
Gally enlarged an image of him and his sister from last Christmas, donned in Santa hats and hunched over the dining table at their mother’s house, staring at the campaign board in deep concentration. Minho launched himself at the phone like hell hath no fury. Gally dodged the attack inconveniently well, laughing as he held his phone out of Minho’s reach. Back turned to Minho, he continued to scroll through the rest of the images in the carousel, cooing over the very last one of the two of them asleep at the table, Minho drooling on the mahogany and Sunhwa with a paper cut out of a tree stuck to her cheek.
“Cute,” Gally murmured, and when Minho leant around his shoulder, he saw he had the image zoomed in close to Minho’s shiny face.
Minho refused to give him the satisfaction of commenting on that.
But maybe he leans into Gally a little, and maybe Gally leans back.
“Fine,” he said. “Yeah. I like drawing the campaign maps.”
“You’re good at it,” Gally replied. “Really good. Think you can do me up a mural for my dorm?”
“If you pay me for it,” Minho said, bristling a little.
“Duh.” Gally stopped on a map that was one of Minho’s personal favourites, drawn one summer ago. He zoomed in, oohing and aahing at the finer details, stopping to give short bursts of praise over mountain ranges and small villages, and wow. Minho kind of desperately wanted to kiss him.
Feeling silly, feeling daring, Minho said, “I’m free Friday night,” to which Gally froze as stiff as one of the statues surrounding the gazebo. Minho had begun to backtrack, crawling away where she still knelt on the bench, wincing at the pain in his knees, when Gally spun and grabbed his wrist in a firm grip.
Gally started to say, “There’s going to be a party in the east dorm next week if you want to—” but then Minho heard it, somehow, over the roar of blood pounding in his ears; a soft tone somewhere between a whimper and a song. A girl’s voice, or a young boy's.
“Shhhh,” Minho hissed, gripping onto Gally’s shoulders tight enough to bruise. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“A voice.”
“Uhh.”
“Over there!” Minho pointed at a particularly dark corner of the courtyard.
“Are you messing with me?”
“No! Listen.”
The voice again. A giggle that time, high and whippy and disturbingly transparent. Without asking Minho grabbed Gally’s camera, tugging it from his neck and pulling him part of the journey along to the edge of the gazebo. Minho pointed and pressed the shutter, just as he’d watched Gally do dozens of times that night, and snapped five photos in succession until the voice was gone. Minho lowered the camera. Whatever veil that had fallen over the west corner of the courtyard had been lifted.
Gally stood behind him, confused, when Minho offered the camera back. He took his breath in his check as Gally quickly flicked through the photographs Minho had taken, stopping on the last one with a thin and breathless, “Oh my god.”
***
The camera spent a total of one hour balanced on each of the four benches of the gazebo, snapping photos on a timer at the four entrances to the maze, until dawn.
Minho was reminded of Christmas ornaments and wreathes when the first rays of morning began to creep through the hedge walls of the maze, dipping the tips of the leaves in gold and orange. The maze felt different at dawn. Peaceful, almost. Beautiful. Minho wondered if anyone could see them from their dorm rooms, nestled together on the bench. Minho with his head on Gally’s shoulder. Gally with his head tipped back against the post, jaw slack, fallen asleep.
Minho looked up at him. Acre scars across his cheekbones. A faint dusting of morning shadow along his jaw that wasn’t a bad look for him. Features relaxed. Lest he wake up with a stiff neck, Minho sighed and finally moved out of his comfortable possible to lightly shake Gally awake.
He woke with a sharp intake of air, blinking fast, looking around in a daze.
“Did you see something else?”
Minho shook his head. Not another peep since their momentary visit the night before.
“No. It’s almost dawn.”
Gally scanned the milky shadows of the courtyard for a moment, looking disappointed. Minho stood up to collect the camera and switch the timer off. Wordlessly he scrolled back to their money shot in the camera roll—a blur of movement in the corner of the image, down on the ground, like a child peeking around the corner.
He handed the camera back to Gally who took it thankfully. Their fingers brushed, and he allowed the touch to linger.
Minho stretched, feeling the joints crack pleasantly. He was starving and needed a proper night’s sleep.
“They’re, like, going to come and get us right?” Minho asked.
Gally shrugged, apparently not concerned. “It’s not a popular tradition to come in here, so I wouldn’t put it passed them to forget. Don’t worry too much. I know a way in and out of here.”
“Of course you do.”
“Gotta be prepared for anything.” Gally shrugged, beaming when Minho smiled.
“I need a milkshake,” he announced. “Chocolate. And pancakes with bananas and syrup.”
“Okay,” Gally said. “There’s a breakfast place in town. If you want to go.”
Minho sat down next to him, their knees pressed together. “Have you been?”
“No.”
“Yeah,” Minho said, blasé, “I guess I’ll check it out. You coming too?”
“Dipshit,” Gally said, laughing. It was a soft chuckle of a thing. It lit up Minho’s insides like a Christmas tree. “I’m trying to ask you out on a date.”
Minho dropped his jaw, feigning shock. “Oh, if that what’s happening right now?”
“You know,” Gally said, suddenly, “for a while there I was kind of worried that when the sun rose you’d disappear and then I’d realise you were a ghost the whole time.”
Minho stared. Only for a moment.
“God, you’re nuts. I’m actually into it.”
Gally’s lips were chapped but still soft in the early hours of the morning, and when Minho leaned in to kiss him he responded with his whole body—large, warm hands gripping his jaw and body turned fully to face him, head tilted at a perfect angle so their mouth lined up just right.
Minho gripped broad shoulders, happily, unwilling to let go for the moment. Dark eyelashes ticked his cheek.
Green eyes in the dawn.
***