It made no sense. The Reata had been around since its dude ranch days in the 1920s. He’d seen the photos of old cowboys in the lobby. So why would there be another hotel on the grounds? An abandoned one? Unless . . .
Unless it had been the original resort.
It was the only answer, and for a brief moment he was satisfied, his mind set at ease by the explanation. But then he started wondering, if that was the case, why The Reata was no longer at this location, why the resort had moved out of the canyon instead of rebuilding on the same spot. And why the existence of this deserted hotel had been so effectively hushed up. There was a story here, though he was not sure he wanted to hear it.
Please stay on the path.
The words on the sign now seemed more like an order, an attempt to keep people away and make sure that the existence of this place remained a secret.
They walked slowly through the rubble, stepping over rusted scraps of ancient metal and half-buried pieces of dull purple glass, using broken chunks of concrete like stepping stones. David picked up a sheared length of rebar and flung it against a section of standing wall where it bounced off with an echoing metallic pling that sounded far too loud.
Brenda was still back at the edge of the site, but the boys traipsed through four of the circumscribed squares that had been rooms, reaching the empty pool at almost exactly the same time.
Where they stopped.
Around the pool were makeshift crosses, the kind people put up on the sides of highways to mark the spot of a loved one’s fatal accident. But these bore no flowers, and the wood was bare and peeling as though the crosses had not been touched for decades. The effect was not one of respect for the departed but a warning to any who might come across this site.
On the cracked faded cement were the rusted skeletons of lounge chairs.
None of them spoke for a moment. The atmosphere of this place was one of overwhelming solemnity, as though it was the location of some great past tragedy. A massacre, perhaps. Or a natural disaster that had killed scores of innocent people.
There was something else, as well. A sense that everything was off-kilter and slightly strange, like one of those amusement park haunted houses where tilted sidewalks and skewed perspectives created a creepy atmosphere that made even ordinary objects seem weird and unreliable.
He looked at David. David looked at Curtis. Curtis looked at Ryan.
“What is it?” Brenda called from behind them, and that broke the spell.
“Swimming pool!” David said simply, which was true enough but not the half of it.
Owen turned around. “Why don’t you—”
“I’m coming!” she announced, leaping over rocks and debris, running around the side of the ruined buildings to meet them.
Owen turned his attention back to the pool. At one time, he supposed, rich carefree people from the East had swum here happily, but that was hard to imagine now. He had never encountered someplace that gave off such an aura of malignity, and he found it difficult to believe that the character of this spot had ever been any different. A new image appeared to him: rich, debauched people engaging in orgies and bloody rituals out here in the desert, far away from the prying eyes of civilized society.
That seemed more believable.
They walked around, exploring, but there was a tentativeness to their investigation, as though they were all looking for something but afraid of finding it.
“Check this out!” Curtis said.
Owen walked over to where his brother was standing. On the right side of the empty pool was a narrow trench with stairs leading to the bottom. They could see from here that it housed a large picture window through which viewers could watch swimmers. The glass was gone, of course, only a few tiny dirty shards remaining in the frame, but like the pool, the trench was surprisingly free of dirt or sand or leaves or windblown rubbish. David started down the concrete steps, and the rest of them followed, one by one.
“I’ll stay up here,” Brenda said. “Just in case.”
Owen looked around. It was slightly wider here at the bottom, and at one time he supposed there had been chairs.
David peeked through the glassless window at the empty pool. “What was this for? To check out babes?”
Curtis shrugged. “I guess.”
“It smells like piss down here,” David said.
But it didn’t smell like piss. It smelled like something else, something none of them wanted to acknowledge.
Death.
There was a crayon drawing on the wall opposite the window, graffiti but remarkably well executed. It was a life-sized rendering of a very old man with long scraggly hair and a skeletal face that seemed at once sad and scary, the portrait of a man so old that he had outlived his humanity. The drawing frightened Owen, and he quickly looked away. If Brenda hadn’t been here, he would have mentioned the drawing, brought it up and shown it to the others, talked about how scary it was, but he didn’t want to look like a pussy in front of her and didn’t want her to think he was any more of an idiot than she already did.
They shouldn’t have come here, he thought. They should have obeyed the signs. They should have stayed on the path.
David was already leading the way back up the steps, and with one last fearful look at the crayon portrait, Owen followed.
His ESP wasn’t working today, but Ryan was not worried. He’d read enough about psychic phenomena to know that it wasn’t as constant or reliable as the traditional five senses, that it had its own timetable and could not be hurried or forced or conjured at will.
Besides, a person didn’t need ESP to pick up the vibes off this place.
It was haunted.
They all knew it, though the word itself remained unspoken. They’d had no problem debating ghosts a few moments ago when talking about The Reata, but there’d been physical distance between themselves and the resort, and of course those opinions were subject to interpretation. There could be no doubt while standing amid the ruins of this old hotel, however, that here was a place that was truly and genuinely haunted. Malevolence fairly oozed from the rubble of the old buildings, seeped upward from the ground they walked on, and though the temperature had to be over a hundred, he had goose bumps—and he hadn’t noticed anybody else sweating either.
Why, though? What was the cause?
Ryan thought about what David had said about his parents, how there was something wrong with them. He’d been scared by David’s golf course story but excited at the same time, and he thought now that it might hold the key. He remembered reading about the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine and how it was located in mountains with high magnetic content and how that affected the brains of all those treasure hunters seeking the gold, making them crazy. They ended up shooting each other and seeing mirages and behaving in all sorts of bizarre ways. The Lost Dutchman was in Arizona, too. Maybe there were a whole bunch of spots like that throughout the state. That would explain David’s parents’ behavior, and a lot of other odd things he’d seen people do since they came here.
He wished he’d brought his notebook so he could write all this down before he forgot.
Who was he kidding? He wouldn’t forget.
On the other hand . . . maybe he would. If his brain was being bombarded by those magnetic rays, too, it was only logical to think that his memory would be tainted.
Excitement once again took over from fear. He wished he’d brought a compass so he could check out the existence of those magnetic fields for himself and see if that’s indeed what was happening. He would have to do some more investigating. Recalling the spooky scenes he’d experienced at the exercise pool, he realized that those could have been either hallucinations caused by exposure to magnetic fields or a legitimate psychic experience. He wasn’t ruling anything out at this point.
Ryan grinned to himself as he looked down at the empty pool. His book was going to be so good.
They had all split up and were exploring the ruins separately. Well, Owen and Brend
a were together, but the rest of them had branched out on their own. That was weird, Ryan thought. Owen had never exactly been a lady-killer, and Brenda was definitely a hottie. What did she see in him? Why wasn’t she interested in David, who was older and considerably cooler? Why wasn’t she hanging out with those other jocks on the tennis courts?
Something seemed off about that.
Ryan walked slowly around the pool, past the weathered crosses and broken lawn furniture. His brothers were poking through the remnants of individual rooms while David checked out the vestiges of what had been a barn or stable. Ryan’s eye was caught by that one standing roofless building, the restaurant, and he made his way through the wreckage to its rubble-strewn entrance. The first thing he noticed when he walked inside was The Reata’s logo—a setting sun behind a geometric saguaro cactus—painted onto the side of a counter, the paint faded and peeling but still visible.
The next thing he saw was the mirror.
It was on the wall to his left, or at least a part of it was; the rest lay shattered on the floor beneath. He wasn’t sure why his eye was drawn to the silvery object, but it was, and even before he looked into the glass, he knew there was something wrong with it. The shape and angle of the remaining section of mirror was oddly disturbing, but it was what was in the mirror that frightened him. For the scene reflected back was not the empty shell of a building in which he stood, was not even the restaurant in its heyday. The room in the broken glass was a dark, expensive-looking chamber with deep red carpet and trophy heads on the wall. In the center of the room, on a thronelike chair, was an old, old man, so skinny that he looked like a skeleton, dressed in fancy clothes that made Ryan think of a cowboy tuxedo. Long, thinning gray hair hung down to the man’s shoulders, and his cold dead eyes belied the inappropriately wide smile on his toothless mouth.
The freaky thing was that, despite all this, the mirror still worked; Ryan could see himself in it, superimposed over that ghoulish scene. It looked like he was in that dark room himself, standing in front of the cadaverous man.
He wanted to call his brothers or David, have them check it out and see if they saw the same thing, but at that moment the last segment of mirror wobbled and fell, crashing to the floor. There was no reason for it, no vibration or wind or movement in the room, and he couldn’t help thinking that the destruction was somehow intentional.
In several shards on the floor, he thought he saw dark flickering movement.
Quickly, he backtracked and got out of the building.
The others were close by, their individual efforts having led them here to what had been the front of the old hotel. “Find anything?” he asked, and his voice sounded loud even to himself. He realized that it was the first time in quite a while that any of them had spoken. The atmosphere of this place was not exactly conducive to conversation.
“No,” David said. “You?”
He wanted to tell them about the mirror, but it didn’t seem right to do so here. No, that wasn’t the truth. It didn’t seem safe to do so here. He shook his head. “No.”
There was a shadow on the far opposite side of the canyon, a silhouette of the western mountain superimposed imperfectly on the eastern cliffs. They all seemed to notice it at the same time, as though it had suddenly appeared full-blown rather than grown incrementally.
“Anybody have a watch?” Curtis asked, and Ryan thought he heard a trace of fear in his older brother’s voice.
A watch! Why hadn’t he thought of that? He looked from face to face, hoping that someone had a timepiece and that it had stopped as a result of the magnetic energy, but no one did have a watch, so not only didn’t they know what time it was, but he could not test his theory.
“We’d better get back,” Curtis said. “We’re supposed to be at Dad’s volleyball game.” He glanced over at David. “Is your dad playing?”
David smiled wryly. “Yeah. He’s going to be whaling it at my mom.”
Curtis laughed uneasily.
“What about you?” Owen asked Brenda.
She shook her head. “Tennis is our game.”
“Well, you can come with us.”
“No, I can’t make it,” she said. “I’m supposed to write postcards with my mom this afternoon.”
“That takes all of ten minutes.”
“You don’t know my mom.” Holding Owen’s hand, she started walking back toward the bone-filled wagon and the trail beyond. The rest of them fell in behind. “So what about the ‘dive-in movie’? Are you guys going to be there tonight?”
“What are they showing?” Curtis asked.
“Does it matter? Some kid’s movie. Finding Nemo or something.”
“I’ll be there,” Owen promised.
“Mom won’t let us out at night,” Ryan said, though the prospect of having access to the nocturnal world of the resort filled him with excitement.
“Where’d you get this ‘us’?” Owen asked.
“If you don’t let me come, I’ll tell.” He didn’t know what exactly he would tell on, the trip to the abandoned resort or the lovey-dovey stuff with Brenda, but the threat obviously carried weight.
“I was just joking,” Owen lied.
They passed the buckboard, finally reached the path. Ryan looked back. He could see the wagon at the top of the small rise, but the ruins of the hotel were hidden from this angle. The whole thing seemed like a dream, not like something that had actually happened, and as they started walking back in silence, none of them mentioning what they had just seen, he found himself wondering if there was some way that he could determine the magnetic content of these mountains.
Twenty
They lost in the first round of tournament play, and it was Lowell’s fault. He was the one who, as point man on defense, failed to stop a series of spikes when crunch time came, and although everyone else had failed to return the balls as well, fumbling around and splashing in the water like spastic Jerry Lewises, they had not been expected to hold the tide. He was the one charged with providing a real defense, and he’d promised that he could do it. They’d been pretty successful with offense, racking up quite a few points despite the Coyotes’ obvious advantage in athletic ability, but they crumbled before the Coyotes’ scoring onslaught, and blame for that rested squarely with him.
They’d spent most of the morning practicing, with only an hour break for lunch, and there was a tinge of desperation in their efforts, a need to succeed far beyond the bounds of what this supposedly easygoing competition warranted. Lowell could recognize it, but he fell prey to it, too, and he found himself getting far angrier at both himself and other players for minor mistakes and inadvertent errors than he otherwise would have. It was as if their very lives depended on the outcome of this game, and while he didn’t know where or how this attitude originated, he succumbed to it just as much as anyone else.
They lost the match 24 to 20, a much closer score than any of them had expected given the drubbing they’d taken during the last half, and though he blamed himself for the loss, it was clear that his teammates did not. They all congratulated him on a game well-played, and he perpetuated the fiction by praising them as well. Separating to sit with their individual families on the plastic chairs that had been temporarily set up around the perimeter of the pool, they remained to watch the matchup of the Coyotes and the Roadrunners, and as Lowell observed the game from the sidelines, he found himself feeling grateful that their team had not survived to play. They would have been eaten alive. The Coyotes were athletic but the Roadrunners were aggressive. They purposely drove the heavy volleyball into faces and stomachs, yelled taunts and curses and threats at their opponents, splashed and pushed those players closest to the net. Blodgett, the captain, was the worst offender. As Rand Black had said, and as he’d already known, Blodgett was a bully, a big man used to throwing his weight around both literally and metaphorically. He did indeed look as though he could have been a linebacker, and even when smiling his face possessed an expression of arrogant int
olerance.
He has a pair of Rachel’s panties, was the only thing Lowell could think of as he watched the man, and more than anything else he hoped that someone nailed that asshole in the face with the ball and gave him a bloody nose.
One Coyote actually did spike the ball past Blodgett’s head—a pleasant-looking middle-aged man with a track team physique whom Lowell had served against—and Blodgett went crazy, lunging at the man, bellowing like a wounded bull. He hit the net, nearly knocking it over, but the activities coordinator, acting as referee, declined to call him on anything. As he had throughout the tournament, the activities coordinator—
Rockne. The Reata. One hundred years.
—sat on a raised lifeguard’s chair in front of the cabana, watching the match with a detached and slightly amused smile, doing absolutely nothing. There was something different about the man this afternoon, Lowell thought. He seemed slightly less jockish than he had initially. But only for brief sections of time. Lowell would watch him, and he’d suddenly seem older, more formal. But then he’d seem younger, more casual, more relaxed. And then he’d be back to his old coachlike self again. It was as if he were a diamond or a hologram, showing different facets and different sides depending upon the angle from which he was viewed.
Blodgett’s teammates and their bullying tactics carried the day, unchecked and tacitly endorsed by The Reata’s representative, and to no one’s surprise, the Roadrunners demolished their competition. Lowell stood with his family on the sidelines next to Rand Black and his wife and watched as the triumphant team cavorted in the water, high-fiving each other. Ironic, he thought. He’d avoided his own reunion only to be thrust into an artificial world with the same hierarchal structure as high school. The Roadrunners were the jocks, the Coyotes were the regular kids and his team, the Cactus Wrens, were the nerds.
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