Margot Kauffman had been the first one to go looking for him in the maze, followed by Nathaniel Kauffman, then Father Barr, then Herbert Gilman, then Fiona Delino, and soon most people were back in the tall, sulking corn, looking and calling for Rob. Everyone else searched around the area to see if he'd snuck off to somewhere.
Erich went back into the maze. He declared loudly, "Hey, Rob, you can come out now. I'll show you where the exit is, I found it!" The only response was a grim nod from the swaying corn stalks. He traveled deeper into the labyrinth.
Somewhere, a crow cawed.
Erich was now in an unfamiliar part of the maze. The place was huge, but even then he was surprised that he could no longer hear the footsteps or cries of the others. He shivered a bit, and froze still in realization.
It was cold here. It was the middle of the summer, and it was cold here. It wasn't just a brief gale of cool wind either, the air was beginning to grow winter cold, except that instead of thinking about Santa and Christmas presents, he was thinking of blizzards and lonely muted forests. "Rob?" he called, but it was thin and weak.
He turned the corner and saw that the corn stalks were starting to turn brown. The putrid scent of something ancient wafted through the air, and now it was really starting to get quiet. Before, he could still atleast hear the crows cawing, but now there was no sign of life. The corn crop itself was black and grotesque, seeming more like a fungus than an actual corn cob. He briefly wondered if this is where Rob had gone before continuing on. His nerves were frayed, though. If anything else out of the ordinary happened, he might just turn and run.
Then he noticed that it wasn't just the maze itself that had changed, everything had changed. The ground was black and soft. He looked up and saw the sky was all wrong. Clouds (shadows?) were not meant to look like that at all.
It didn't take much longer before Erich made another turn and saw it. At the end of the path was the silhouette of someone tall and dark. The world seemed to take a dive and go hazy, (was he hearing the crows again? No, crows didn't sound like that, right?) before suddenly clearing up again. The dark man was now standing less than a yard away.
"Are you lost?" it said, its voice coarse, yet morbidly alluring. Erich could see that its skin was moving, as if masses of tiny tendrils underneath were pulsating and squirming. He could not move. The ground stuck him in place.
"He's lost, too. Do you hear him? He says he wants me to let him out." And Erich COULD hear a distant wail, but he refused to think it was human.
"Come, Erich. I think he'll be very relieved to see you. Come now...yes, walk forward, into here, right here..."
Erich thought it strange how its face could just change like that. Now it was the face of an old senile man, and he could see it's eyes were yellow.
"Hey! Leave him alone, you creep!" He recognized that voice. It was Ace. He emerged from behind the brown, dying cornstalks and scooped up Erich. "Where's Rob!?" he barked, "What did you do to the other kid!?"
The thing did something Erich didn't expect. It mewled, came forward with its hands outstretched, and grabbed him. Ace let out a panicked yelp, jerked Erich away, and ran. Whatever the thing was, it was following them, no longer under the facade of a human. He could hear it crawling. Ace was the only one who dared to glance back, and when the two somehow, someway, emerged from the maze, he never truthfully told anyone what it was he saw back there.
Nobody ever found the place or person Ace described (Erich had been too traumatized to speak at that time). A police search was held for Robert Kauffman. Days passed, then weeks, then months... Erich hadn't spoken a word during the ordeal, and whenever his parents drove him back home, he went to his room and cried. His parents came in and said to be strong now, Rob had been a good kid, so he was in a better place now. Middle school began, and Erich's behavior, permanently altered by the incident in the maze, did not earn him any friends, nor good grades. He would just barely scrape by in middle school.
Meanwhile, Ace would occasionally wake up screaming at the dead of night, and when his parents and his little brother came in through the door, they would find a sobbing teen curled up into a fetal position, murmuring in a guttural voice something about 'Nyarlathotep' and the 'stalker among the stars'. They would take him to church everyday of the week after that. He graduated high school and attended college.
Erich graduated and attended high school. His mute behavior continued, and no amount of therapy or praying would pry open his mind. At the same time, Ace began studying obscure bits of mythology and lore at the college library, searching for anything leading to a book called the 'Necronomicon'. He would come back home with strange tomes and charms, lock himself in his room and began his odd studies. In most cases his parents would make him throw away or return the eldritch paraphernalia he brought, but in the most extreme case, which only happened once, they made him burn it. After that, he was more careful.
Careful to not get caught.
Ace had two reasons to find the Necronomicon. One, an obsession to understand this 'Nyarlathotep', a name which didn't turn up anywhere in any common record of mythological creatures. Two, to use that information to find out what happened to Robert. He hoped that by completing these two objectives, the nightmares would stop.
Erich graduated from high school and started working odd jobs to make ends meet. Day after day, he attended church less and less, his faith now finally beginning to wither and die. Eventually he did not come to church at all. When he was old enough, he drowned his sorrows at pubs and bars.
One thanksgiving, the family came together to celebrate. The celebration was stiff and uneasy. Ace had left before the turkey had even finished, saying that he needed to go get some 'work finished', despite protests from his brother and parents.
What they didn't know was that he had finally found a copy of the Necronomicon just a month before. The true reason he had left the house was because he was well aware he knew too much now, not just too much about Nyarlathotep and what had really happened to Robert Kauffman, but also too much about what was underneath the oceans (...Cthulhu...), above the cosmos... (...Yog-Sothoth...)
He didn't want to be around his family. Didn't want to put them in danger. So he left, and...
And that was the last anyone ever saw of him. Ever. A police search was held, nothing was found in his apartment except for strange notes and journals written in gibberish, and some symbols carved into the bathroom walls. The Necronomicon was nowhere to be found. Ace had taken care of that. And then nightmares of the thing (...Nyarlathotep...) in the corn maze from years ago began to haunt Erich.
At this point, Erich was a depressed alcoholic who held no faith, no will to live. With nothing to lose, he set out on the same path as Ace to find the Necronomicon, find out what had happened to his brother, and possibly also what happened to his long-lost friend Robert Kauffman.
This happened years ago.
Now, a black tome sits in Erich's bedroom. He turns to the first page and reads it. He pays no mind to the crow perched on the skeletal branch outside.
