THE
THICKET
Noelle W. Ihli

CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Published 2021 by Dynamite Books
www.dynamitebookspublishing.com
© Noelle West Ihli
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of Dynamite Books, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at [email protected]
ISBN: 978-0-000000-0 (Paperback)
ISBN: 978-0-000000-0 (ePub)
Library of Congress Control Number: 00000000000
Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, and places are products of the author’s imagination.
Book design by Dynamite Books.
First printing, 2021.
Dynamite Books, LLC
For Nate, my high-school sweetheart twice removed.
September 17th
The blond news anchor reveals hardly anything about the two victims except their ages.
But that’s all it takes to keep Taylor’s phone chirping out text notifications from Maren and Jamie, who are sure that one of the victims went to Minico Middle School. Braden. Or possibly Brandon. Nobody can remember his name.
His sister, Norah, was briefly part of their friend group in middle school. According to Maren, Norah deleted her Facebook profile an hour ago when someone tagged her in the comments section of the breaking story on KQRZ.
Already, 605 people in Rupert, Idaho, have marked themselves “safe” from the incident at the Thicket. The news story has 1,000 shares and nearly as many comments. There are the kids who almost went to the Thicket tonight but had too much homework. There are the frantic parents whose teenager was supposed to be at the Thicket tonight and now isn’t responding to texts. There are the wanna-be sleuths posting close-ups of still-frame news footage. There are the creeps who are already insisting that the tragedy is fake news. And there are several people who insist they saw the bodies on the floor of the cabin before anyone realized the blood was real.
Taylor sets her phone to silent and turns on the TV in her room. The news is replaying the same grainy footage of a body bag being loaded into an ambulance. At one point as the camera pans, the flashing lights from the ambulance collide with the strobing light show of the DJ booth at the center of the plaza. For a moment, Taylor’s bedroom is bathed in a spray of rainbow beams.
As the blond news anchor—Caroline—repeats the same information about the “horrific tragedy” and “no new information yet,” the camera cuts to the facade of a dark cabin. The open door yawns like a mouth. First responders duck beneath the crime scene tape then disappear inside.
Caroline reassures viewers that the glinting blood on the exterior walls of the cabin isn't real, but rather part of the decor at the Thicket.
Taylor wonders how Caroline can tell the difference.
Her stomach clenches a little tighter as she pulls her bedspread closer around her shoulders and imagines what the real blood—on the inside of the cabin—must look like. She glances at the lock screen of her phone and reads the latest text from Jamie. Does this mean they’re gonna close the whole thing down? It’s followed by a frowny emoji.
Taylor frowns too and reaches for the remote to turn off the TV. She’ll text Maren and Jamie back in the morning. But before she climbs into bed, she logs into Facebook and marks herself safe — then double-checks the lock on her bedroom window. She’s being silly, she chides herself. The person who brought a knife into the Thicket is almost certainly not outside her bedroom window right now. She’s just feeling anxious after watching the news.
But then again, he’s somewhere.
CHAPTER 1
5 hours earlier
“Whatcha been sneaking down to the boiler room, Freddy?” Norah’s brother Brandon points a finger in the direction of the short and slightly overweight Freddy Krueger who is standing directly in his path with an unreadable expression.
Brandon puffs out his stomach and pats it. “Love those Twinkies, huh?”
Norah puts her head down in embarrassment and keeps walking, hoping Brandon will follow. “He’s not really Freddy Krueger,” she hisses in Brandon’s ear as she passes. “Stop being a jerk.”
A group of kids just ahead of them have stopped to watch the standoff. One boy snickers as Norah trips over a crack in the floor, and one of the girls sends a withering glance at Norah, then shifts her glare to Brandon. “Asshole,” she mutters to the two girls beside her, zipping her pink bomber jacket tighter and smacking her thickly glossed lips. “Come on, let’s walk faster.”
A blast of steam shoots out of the wall beside Norah with a high-pitched whistle, and she screams, feeling her face burn red. She hears another ripple of laughter from the group ahead.
For the hundredth time, Norah regrets agreeing to take her brother to the Thicket tonight. Not that she’d had much of a choice. Brandon somehow knew that Norah had not only skipped last period on Friday but that she’d also spent the stolen hour smoking weed with a couple of juniors from Raft River.
So basically he’s blackmailing her.
“Bitch,” Brandon calls after the group ahead of them as he finally gives up on getting a reaction out of Freddy. He says it quiet enough that the girl and her friends probably won’t hear the insult above the other screams and a new blast of steam from the wall.
Norah turns around and tries to set a faster pace, leading the way through the big, red-lit cabin that has been modeled after a boiler room.
More rapid-fire blasts of warm steam shoot through the cool air that smells like pavement after a storm. More bogeymen from Freddy’s Nightmare—these ones robotic—pop out from dark corners. Norah bites back a scream each time, and she finally looks behind her to see what’s taking Brandon so long.
He’s meandering slower than ever.
“Can you please hurry up?” she shouts back to him, exasperated and on edge. Haunted houses have
never been her cup of tea, but Brandon is obsessed. She stands where she is in the dark room, gritting her teeth at the chaos, waiting until Brandon is finally within earshot.
“Wasn’t Jace’s mom supposed to drive you here tonight? What happened to your actual friends?” she explodes when he is a few steps away.
She feels the sting of the words before they are even out of her mouth. She knows they will dig at her obnoxious but sensitive little brother. Part of her wants to apologize. To ruffle his hair like she used to and try to enjoy their time together. And the other part—the bigger part—just feels mean and annoyed.
Brandon’s jaw tightens, but he doesn’t look at her. Instead, he studies the metal pipes that snake up the concrete walls, dripping tiny rivulets of water onto the floor below. Just ahead, there is a glowing furnace. It belches out what looks like hot coals—and bone fragments.
Norah clenches her jaw. “Can we at least move faster? It’s gross in here.”
If anything, Brandon just walks slower. “How long do you think Mom and Dad would ground you for if I told them about your friends?” he says.
Someone wearing a black coat and mask brushes past Norah in the dark, and she involuntarily yelps yet again. She’s had enough. “I said I would bring you here. I didn’t say I’d walk through this freak show all night.”
She points to a dimly glowing exit sign a few yards to their right. “I’m waiting in the plaza.”
Norah stomps toward the exit sign without looking back at him, so she won’t see whether he has a sneer or a wounded look on his baby face.
She can already feel the anger evaporating as she pushes her way through a wooden exit door and proceeds along the wooded trail that promises to lead her back to the plaza.
Ten minutes later, the volume of the thumping music from the DJ booth tells her she’s almost there. It’s still mostly light out. The monsters roaming through the plaza aren’t nearly as scary as they are in the wooded trails and cabins. The smell of mini donuts makes her mouth water.
Norah decides she will get the largest pack of donuts they have. The kind with cinnamon and sugar. She’ll save some for Brandon.
CHAPTER 2
Brandon pretends to study the pipes, the furnace, anything until he’s sure Norah is gone. For the hundredth time, he wishes he hadn’t come here at all.
Andrew had sent out a group text fifteen minutes before Brandon was supposed to leave for the Thicket.
Sorry, bros. 2 much homework.
Five minutes later, Brandon’s phone had pinged again. Cole. Then Jace, whose mom was supposed to chauffer.
So he’d blackmailed Norah into taking him. If his mom knew that Jace and the others had ditched him, she’d make him go to that stupid “Buddies” workshop during lunch again. The one he’d been forced to attend last year when he cried like a dumb baby after some kids wrote “skidmark” in permanent marker on his locker two days into the school year.
Screw Andrew and Jace and Cole. Tomorrow at school he’d tell everyone in first period how he’d walked through the Thicket alone and wasn’t even scared. He’d leave out the fact that it was still mostly light out and that he’d conned his sister into taking him. The Thicket made the list of “10 Scariest Haunted Houses in the United States” on SocialBuzz every year. People would be impressed.
As Brandon reaches the exit to Cabin Nine, the boiler room, he hears a piercing chorus of screams coming from somewhere down the trail. The sun has dipped down a little more, and the shadows from the thick trees are getting longer. He hadn’t anticipated how massive the Thicket would be, despite his classmates’ assertions. The marked trail connecting the network of haunted cabins cuts a path through thick underbrush, pine trees, and dense stands of aspens. In the summer, when the elaborate props are dismantled and the generators are gone, the Thicket is a popular hiking spot.
A few feet off the trail, a branch snaps with a quiet pop.
Brandon stops walking but keeps his face neutral in case it’s Norah returning with a change of heart.
When he doesn’t hear anything else—except a cacophony of screams coming from somewhere in the distance—he feels his stomach clench. Why couldn’t Andrew have texted earlier? Why was everyone else suddenly busy at the last minute too?
The knot in his stomach clenches harder. Did any of them actually like him? Was this year different? He had homeroom with all three boys. They’d laughed last week when Brandon stuck the peanut-butter-and-jam side of his sandwich to the whiteboard while Ms. Leavitt had her back turned. And the day after that, Cole had dared him to take down a few of the magnetic letters on the classroom door to turn “Welcome to Our Class” to “Welcome to ur ass.” He’d done it.
“They like me,” he mutters quietly under his breath and forces himself to keep walking along the trail littered with fallen leaves. But he can’t help but wonder if Jace, Andrew, and Cole are together right now. Playing video games at Andrew’s house while they eat pizza. Laughing at the fact that Brandon is at the Thicket alone.
Brandon pushes the thoughts away and peers through the thick trees lining the trail to his right. He decides he’ll be nicer to Norah when he finally reaches the exit to the plaza. Do the corn maze with her like she wanted. Stop being a jerk. He suddenly remembers the $20 his mom gave him—to buy treats for himself and the other boys. He feels around in his pocket for the wrinkled bill and decides he will buy one of everything in the plaza. Then find Norah.
As Brandon comes around the next bend in the trail, he finally sees the next looming structure—a decrepit barn with one side nearly caved in. The planks of wood holding the structure together are bowing and splintering under the strain.
When Brandon pushes aside the rickety door, the acrid smell makes his nostrils flare. He covers his nose with his jacket. Does fake blood smell that way?
The room is suspiciously quiet. And dark.
As he takes another step forward, the lights suddenly flash on, and the room erupts into motion.
Half of a cow carcass, spotted skin still attached to its body, is jerking violently against the side of the inner wall, making a wet thumping sound. Hanging from the ceiling from enormous meat hooks are more carcasses, glistening red, swinging as they’re pulled back and forth by a series of metal wires.
Brandon jumps and swears under his breath, then he quickly looks behind him.
When nothing else leaps out at him, he walks past the swinging carcasses and leans forward to study the half-butchered cow hanging against the wall. The detail is pretty awesome. Gnarled, black-and-white whorls of hair are streaked with smears of manure. And there are actual flies swarming across the jagged, bloody slashes near the head. He can hear them buzzing.
He squints closer, wondering how they get the flies to stay. He’s maybe a foot away when he realizes that the “flies” are coming from a tiny projector in the corner of the room, its beam of light masked by the strobing of the spotlights on the carcasses.
In the distance, Brandon hears a long, rattling scream, followed by a loud thumping noise.
He looks behind him, then ahead. Still nobody.
Pulling his phone out of his pocket, he snaps a photo of the cow’s half-closed, swollen eye covered in flies. Then he sends it to Jace without a caption. There.
Pocketing the phone, Brandon moves toward a swath of dirty sheets hanging from the ceiling of the barn, midway through the slaughterhouse. When he pushes the sheets aside, he sees that the strobing lights are gone, replaced by a dim, flickering bulb in the center of the dark room. Lining the walls and the cement pathway are cages full of twitching chickens. Some are missing beaks. Some legs. Some, their entire heads. The floor is covered in a thick layer of white feathers and stained red with blood.
A big guy wearing overalls and a burlap sack covering his face is standing in the corner of the room. He’s positioned just behind the furthest row of cages, and he is holding a glinting ax.
The guy takes a step toward Brandon. The front of his overalls is
covered with more of the white feathers—and dark splotches of blood. Two eyeholes and a ragged mouth have been cut into the burlap sack.
He smiles, revealing jagged, haphazard teeth. Then he bellows like an ox and rushes toward Brandon, holding the ax over his head.
Brandon exhales hard and forces himself to stay where he is. “You can’t touch me,” he scoffs loudly, relieved when his voice doesn’t crack.
The guy stops just short of where Brandon is standing, the bellowing scream tapering into a wheedling moan. With one gloved hand, soaked through with red liquid, he points to the twitching chickens on the floor then back at Brandon. He waves the ax back and forth with his free hand.
Brandon lifts both middle fingers and stares back at the actor, adrenaline prickling its way down his back. It’s all fake. All he has to do is remember that. A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth as the guy slowly lowers the ax then turns and walks back to the corner of the room, pointing to the exit.
“That’s right,” Brandon calls behind him and walks through another swath of sheets into the next room.
This room is smaller and more brightly lit. In front of him is a sawhorse dining table set with tin cups and plates as well as a red-checked tablecloth. Facing away from him, a woman sits slumped in her chair, face down. There is an ax handle buried between the loose apron strings on her back.
Brandon takes a wary step forward.
When the woman doesn’t jump up, he takes a quick photo of the ax head wedged into her spine. He sends this photo to Cole. Then, pocketing the phone again, he walks through the exit door and back into the gathering twilight.
This night hasn’t been so bad after all.
CHAPTER 3
The body in the grimy bathtub lurches, sending a ripple through the brackish water. The man’s protruding intestines slap lazily against the filthy porcelain.
Plap, plap, plap.
Spencer sighs and resists the urge to pick at a new rash of acne on his chin.
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