The Thicket

by Noelle West Ihli

  Taylor slides closer to him, running her tongue over her front teeth again and hoping he can’t see it in the dark. She holds up the sleeve of her thick gray hoodie. “I’m sort of a mess … I don’t want to get blood on you.”

  He grins, and she’s relieved to see that his teeth look decently clean and white. “I’m not worried about it.”

  She grins back but glances away, listening to the wind whip through the corn around them. They’re in a wider corridor of the maze. But every few feet, smaller paths straggle off like arteries, most of them dead-ending in a wall of cornstalks. Taylor wonders if Ryan has managed to find his way out of the maze by now.

  They make their way down one of the artery paths, stopping when they hit a wall of corn.

  Gathering her courage, channeling Maren, and praying that her lips don’t taste like French fries, Taylor runs a hand down the front of Ben’s jacket. She doesn’t pull away when he reaches for her waist and gently brushes his lips to hers.

  Somewhere from within the maze, or maybe the sound is coming from the distant trails and cabins, she hears more screams as the wind dips and swells. But all she can focus on is trying to tilt her head just right and move her mouth to match his.

  CHAPTER 34

  “Make sure you don’t let her get too close to your brain,” Ryan mumbles, trying to keep one eye on the damp ground to avoid mud puddles.

  He smiles, impressed with his own wit. Then he says it a little louder, in the voice he wishes he would have used as he walked away from Ben and Zombie Girl. “Don’t let her get too close to your brain.”

  Ryan stops as a sudden dead-end of thick stalks appears in front of him. This part of the maze doesn’t look familiar. But then it wouldn’t. The bitch with the skeleton costume and the smokin’ boobs wanted to get them lost. If they had taken every left turn like he’d said in the first place, he wouldn’t be stuck in this godforsaken maze by himself, in the dark.

  He tries to visualize the candy corn shape the maze is supposed to be this year, calling up the image he saw on a poster at the ticket booth. He knows it won’t help, but he does it anyway. The tip of the candy corn was at the beginning of the maze where they’d passed the security guard. Then the maze widened. Thirty acres at its widest point, the flier had said. Sixty acres total. How big was that?

  A few yards to his right, along a different branch of the maze, he thinks he hears crunching footsteps. Since he left the group—or what remained of it—he hasn’t seen anyone else. And it’s pretty obvious why. After the cabins, the maze is about as fun as a wet rag. Unless you had the opportunity to get to second base with a sexy skeleton or devil. Which he didn’t.

  The wind picks up, obscuring the sound of footsteps. Ryan sighs, standing on his toes while he tries to see through the dark stalks. All he can make out from here is the shuddering, shifting haze of light to the west from the strobe lights in the plaza.

  They’d gone further into the maze than he’d realized, and he feels a tiny bubble of fear that he might still be finding his way out of here by the time everyone else is finished making out.

  A chorus of screams carries in the wind from further away, and he turns back in the direction he just came. He walks quickly toward the screams before they’re swallowed up.

  To his right, there is another scream. This one is close, shrill, staccato. He stops again, realizing he is breathing harder than necessary. It’s just dark, he tells himself. Then he listens again for signs that anyone else is nearby—so he can follow them back out to the plaza.

  There is nobody.

  Ryan digs his hands deeper into his jacket pockets, wishing he had listened when his dad suggested a coat instead of a hoodie. He hadn’t anticipated staying for the corn maze after the cabins. He hates the corn maze. It’s boring. Corn and more corn. And in the dark, you can’t even see the corn. Or anything else.

  A muffled crunching sound comes from nearby. Was it a footstep? Something else? He squints through the stalks, but he still can’t see anything or anybody.

  He briefly considers yelling Ben’s name. Or Tyson’s. And he feels his face get hot even considering it. Not only is he the only one here without a girl now, but he can’t find his way out of the stupid maze.

  He’s a complete loser.

  The next scream he hears—coming from within the maze, he thinks anyway—is long and low-pitched. The sound takes a few seconds to fade away as the wind momentarily dies to a breeze.

  He can’t help but think about the murdered kid. Brandon. What did his screams sound like that night? Were different from these screams, or about the same?

  Ryan shudders involuntarily and zips his hoodie all the way up to his neck.

  Some of the kids who went through the trails that night—the night Brandon and the staffer died—went to Raft River High, in Albion. One kid in his math class claims he actually saw Brandon, facedown in the cabin.

  Some people speculated that Brandon was still alive at that point. Barely, but still. It was hard to say.

  There are more crunching noises, so close that Ryan is sure he should be able to see somebody by now. He clears his throat. “Hey?” he calls, narrowly avoiding a puddle of muck in front of him as he retraces his steps to a fork in the path then peers to the right.

  Ryan feels more than sees that he is looking in the wrong direction for the source of the noise. The air feels suddenly heavier behind him.

  It takes a moment for him to see the person standing in the middle of the path, even though he’s just a few feet away. And it takes another moment for the reason to register.

  There’s no pale skin glowing faintly in the dark. No facial features materialize. There is only deep black.

  The person is wearing a mask.

  Ryan can feel his heart beat harder as the details of the mask take shape, slowly at first, then more quickly as the adrenaline kicks in.

  The mask curves outward, into a smooth beak. It’s one of the plague doctor masks.

  The person hasn’t moved at all.

  It’s a joke. Ryan runs the words slowly through his mind as if that will make them true. Some loser got past the security table and is playing a sick prank. Or maybe it’s Ben, he thinks suddenly, wondering if Aaron and Tyson are in on the prank. Who managed to get the mask inside the Thicket?

  But even as he tells himself why he shouldn’t be afraid, the fear sends roots from the pit of his stomach down to his feet, holding him where he stands. He is aware of a loud, pulsing hum coming from within his own head, filling his ears with a rising roar.

  The frame of the shoulders on the person wearing the mask is wrong for a kid. The build is too tall, too stout. It’s not a high schooler inside the dark coat or behind the thick, black beak. If this a prank, it’s not funny.

  Ryan tells himself to move his feet. To run. But his legs feel leaden. He is rooted in the mud like the dead corn stalks.

  His mouth moves, but all that comes out is a hoarse whisper in the back of his throat. Even if he runs, where will he go?

  In circles.

  Toward endless dead-ends.

  In the dark.

  The person wearing the mask moves for the first time, and Ryan’s eyes follow the black hand as it reaches inside the coat.

  The knife isn’t extremely long. He can just barely see the glint of the blade as the man holds it upright in one hand then beckons with the other.

  The gesture isn’t threatening. Not yet.

  The voice rises above the wind, but just barely. It’s soft. Lilting, almost.“You can scream if you want. Maybe just once, for fun?”

  And so he does, as if permission was all he needed. Ragged. And loud. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he thinks, It sounds just like the other screams.

  The man wearing the beak mask takes a step forward. “That’s enough. If you do it again, I’ll stick this in your eye.”

  CHAPTER 35

  If the boy had known how close they were to the gravel road just beyond the five-foot wall of c
orn, he might have run.

  He wouldn’t have made it far. Not with the mud and the dark and the uneven ground.

  But he might have tried.

  Instead, the skinny kid with the stark brown freckles in his sallow face follows him through the thin outer maze—an access pathway made every year for employees.

  The outer maze is a throwback to the Thicket’s early days, when the maze was haunted and easy access to the labyrinth of twisting paths and causeways was necessary for the employees to do their jobs. The outer maze made it possible to pop out of blind alleys and dead-ends draped in duck blinds and blood.

  The creators of the maze still built it into the design every year, for convenience. Kids inevitably got lost. There were always four hidden “entrances” to the depths of the maze, one at each corner of the enormous cornfield. The outer maze was the first thing they built when the mini backhoes and graders arrived each fall.

  The outer maze isn’t shown on the Thicket’s fliers, of course. This year’s candy corn shape with the callout boasting “60 acres!” is just a triangular tangle of arteries. And the outer maze isn’t readily accessible from any of the pathways that snake through the labyrinth of the maze itself.

  You had to know what you were looking for. Where to push aside the thick stalks that appeared to be just another living wall.

  He’d learned about the outer maze during orientation the year he worked here. And the narrow pathway still had its uses.

  The kid with the freckles keeps up a reasonable pace. He doesn’t stop. Or scream again. Not after the knife-in-the-eye comment.

  But he won’t stay docile. The same thing happens with mice when there’s nowhere left to run. They go limp, frozen, heartbeat still frantically pumping beneath a cat’s paw. Playing dead works. You wait for the predator to relax just a little, to ease up, to get bored. To bring the kittens over for a turn. That’s when the mouse erupts in a burst of pent-up adrenaline. One last play for freedom.

  Sometimes it works on the cats. Because cats are stupid.

  He keeps an arm’s length between himself and the boy, eyes moving steadily between the boy’s head and the boy’s hands. He stays close enough to easily grab the boy if he runs but not close enough to be taken by surprise if the boy suddenly whirls around, arms pinwheeling and fingers clawing.

  It’s maybe a ten-minute walk before they reach the right spot in the outer maze.

  He can hear a group of kids walking through the inner maze. And from the slight tilt of his head, the boy hears it too. There are two or three kids, by the sound of it. Laughing. Talking companionably.

  He steps closer to the kid with the freckles and lets him feel the knife at the base of his neck. Hard enough to hurt. Not hard enough to draw blood or elicit a whimper. Then he whispers, “If you scream, I will cut your windpipe out. Slowly. And they’ll just run away.”

  He can see the kid’s heartbeat through the pale skin at his throat, hammering hard.

  The kid stays quiet. And after a few seconds, the group has disappeared back into the rasping stalks of the maze.

  “Push through there, where the stalks are bent,” he instructs calmly, waiting while the kid hesitates in confusion. The boy winces as he makes eye contact, like he’s been burned. “It opens up on the other side.” the plague doctor explains patiently. “Go through the stalks. Now.”

  He waits, while the kid tentatively parts a handful of stalks and steps forward, wedging his body between the thick corn stalks that reluctantly give way then swish back into place with a dry rattle.

  As the boy takes another step through the corn, he follows. And after just a few feet, they’ve breached the outer wall of the maze. A narrow gravel road runs alongside this outer wall. It’s big enough for a tractor or four-wheeler. But not a vehicle.

  A few yards away, on a dirt knoll, are the black outlines of an old riding lawn mower and a mini backhoe. Long, haphazard rows of thick sprinkler piping crisscross the uneven ground. Further down the gravel path are two camper trailers. Judging from the grime and rust on the doors he inspected earlier, neither have been touched in months.

  On the other side of the gravel road are cornfields and more cornfields. These fields, however, aren’t cut into mazes. Most of the cornstalks are broken, some trampled completely by Snake River’s corn harvesters, which have already been through for the season.

  To the right, in a weedy, half-cleared patch of dirt just behind one of the trailers, is a tall wooden building.

  The old mill.

  He prods the kid forward until they are standing even with the first trailer. Silhouetted against the darkness, a long wooden beam juts out from the top of the ancient building. Beneath the beam is a small, dark square opening in the frame of the building.

  He smiles. That’s where the piano wire fed through, attached to the back of Tim’s pants on a hidden harness.

  Or that’s how the trick was intended to work, anyway.

  There’s not even a fence around the tall, dark edifice anymore. Just a halfway unreadable “No Trespassing” sign affixed to the outer door, and another one attached to the rickety hangman’s platform.

  They’d closed off access to the old mill, also after Tim’s “accident” five years ago. That’s when they had rerouted the maze and sold that portion of land back to Snake River. It had all been in the news. And a cursory real estate investigation showed that this portion of the land was no longer part of the lease to the Thicket.

  As they reach the side of the small building, he watches the boy’s muscles tense. If he puts up a fight, it’ll be here. While he’s free.

  The boy turns to look at him again in the darkness, his eyes black and wide. “I’ll do whatever you want, I don’t care. Just … please don’t hurt me.” The last part comes out thin and squeaky, like a deflating balloon.

  Instead of replying, he tilts his head just a little. After a moment, the boy fully deflates and holds his hands out, quivering palms up, in the universal language of submission.

  He’s taking his chances with good behavior instead of mounting a fight.

  The plague doctor almost laughs. It’s a stupid decision. But it’ll be easier this way. He smiles and points to the latch that is nearly hidden on the wall of the building.

  The kid fumbles with and then opens the broken latch. He doesn’t even have to prod the boy to step into the dark building.

  The inside of the old mill smells of both dust and mold. As he pulls the door shut behind himself, he reaches into his back pocket and retrieves a penlight. The beam casts a thin, dim circle of light onto the floor in front of them.

  The uneven wood floor is still covered in a thick layer of sawdust. It was something management thought up to add an authentic touch to the old mill. And to hide the copious amounts of mice droppings that appeared each morning, distracting customers from the gallows act and resulting in a complaint to the health and welfare department in Rupert.

  He clears a space for a square of plastic sheeting, carefully moving a few broken benches that remain from years ago. Then he points to the sheeting and marvels as the kid walks onto it obediently, allowing his hands and legs to be carefully tied with the thin yellow kevlar rope and wrapped in layer after layer of Gorilla tape.

  The boy’s ludicrous hope—that maybe things aren’t as bad as they seem—flitting just beneath his terrified expression is almost endearing.

  It’s fascinating, that denial. It stays until the very end for most people. If they don’t fight, they freeze. And if they don’t shut down, they hold onto hope. Always so much hope. Even bound hand and foot on a sheet of plastic in a dark building, by a stranger wearing a mask.

  He uses half a roll of Gorilla tape on the boy’s arms and legs. Fear makes people creative. You had to plan for overkill, then a little beyond it. When the rope is secured, he cuts a section from one of the arms of the thick fleece sweatshirt he’s wearing and stuffs a piece into the kid’s mouth. Then he wraps another section of tape around the boy’
s head, starting with the mouth but skipping the nose and eyes.

  “Scream,” he instructs, standing back to inspect his work.

  When the kid squirms around, grunting a little instead, he kneels down and places the knife right above the boy’s ear canal. He presses down just enough to draw a tiny blossom of blood.

  The boy’s eyes roll back into his head, and he screams in earnest, fighting against the tight bindings. But his efforts result in little more than a shuddering twitch that registers as a slight crinkle on the sheet of plastic.

  He thinks of the legless fly. So much bound energy, with nowhere to go.

  He closes his eyes and evaluates the scream. It comes out as a muted, impotent sound through the boy’s nose. The sound is not necessarily quiet. But it’s nothing compared to the wind and the real chaos in the Thicket, just outside the door.

  He watches the boy a few moments longer, until he turns his head to the side and lowers it onto the plastic sheeting.

  Then he walks to the door and shuts it carefully behind him, leaving the boy in darkness.

  He stands motionless on the edge of the outer maze for a few moments, listening to the pale stalks whip in the wind. Feeling the icy pinpricks scattering snow. Breathing in the smoky, too-sweet stench of the corn syrup factory.

  He closes his eyes, imagining himself as an animal.

  A predator.

  He removes the plague doctor mask and tucks it into the inner lining of his coat, keeping the knife in a zippered pocket.

  A few moments later, he parts the barrier of corn concealing the outer maze and makes his way through the dense stalks and into the narrow causeway.

  He waits a moment, focusing on the rhythm of his own steady breathing until he is sure that no one is close by.