Just to be on the safe side, he checked every corner of the room, looked under every piece of furniture and inside every cupboard and drawer before finally putting his briefcase down and setting up his laptop to write.
Twenty-three
He was in love.
Owen knew how that would sound if he said it aloud to anyone. Hell, he knew how he would have reacted if anyone before today had told him such a thing. But it was true. Through some chain reaction of fate and circumstances, he and Brenda had ended up in the same place at the same time, and if one thing had gone wrong, if his family had taken their vacation a week earlier or her family had decided to stay at another hotel, even though they lived in the same county of the same state they never would have met.
But they had.
It was meant to be.
He cringed inwardly even as he had the thought. Mush like that was for romance novels and women’s TV movies, not real life. But it was what he felt, and there was an electric excitement associated with it, a feeling that he’d experienced in flashes prior to this but that he’d never savored in its entirety.
Love.
He and his brothers had gotten to the pool well before the movie was supposed to start, but the place was already filling up. As soon as their parents left to go back to the room, Owen set about searching for Brenda while Curtis and Ryan took the two chairs that David had been able to save for them amid all of the families jostling for position by moving and scraping the pool furniture across the cement. He finally found Brenda in the water, seated on the steps in the shallow end. There was a light behind her, far away in the deep end, but it was so faint by the time it reached her that it was impossible to tell whether she was wearing a bathing suit or was naked.
She looked naked, though he knew she wasn’t.
He wished she was.
He got into the water next to her, surprised by its warmth. It must have absorbed the heat of the afternoon sun and retained it. “Do you have a raft?” he asked.
“No. You?”
He shook his head. “I guess we could just sit on the edge.”
“Or stay here in the water.” The lights in the palm trees above had dimmed, in preparation for the movie, he supposed, and it was impossible to see her face. The effect was strange, and he found that he was unable to read her emotions from her voice alone. He waded out a bit and turned around so the light from the deep end would make her less of a silhouette and easier to see. She reached for him, took his hand, and the touch of her fingers made him tingle. “Come on. Let’s swim out a bit and get away from this crowd.”
The steps had been invaded by several fathers with their small children, and Owen allowed himself to be led into deeper waters. In the back of his mind, always, was the location of the body he and Curtis had seen, but he would make sure to steer Brenda away from that area if they got too close.
He needn’t have worried. She stopped somewhere around where the water was up to his stomach and her chest. The lights were still dimmed—maybe they were going to stay this way—and out here no one could see what they were doing. They stood close, talking low and tentatively touching, accidental contacts with feet and thighs and arms and elbows that were not really accidental, brushes up against each other that were played off as casual but meant far more, boundary tests that lasted a beat too long, until they were finally and fully kissing. It was the most wonderful thing he’d ever felt, the closest feeling to perfection he had ever experienced. Her lips were soft, her tongue inquisitive, and he wondered how he had gotten so lucky that this should be happening to him.
Owen had no idea where his brothers were at the moment and didn’t care. All he knew was that he wanted this night to last forever.
They stopped kissing, pulled away from each other, looked into each other’s eyes, afraid to speak, afraid to say anything that would ruin the moment. Feeling brave, he reached out to touch her, then moved his hand down her stomach until his fingers touched the elastic of her bikini bottom. He paused there for a moment, giving her time to object, to move away, to push his hand aside, but she did nothing, and his penis was fully erect as his fingers slid gently beneath the waistband and encountered the downy fibrous texture of her pubic hair. She smiled at him, her lips barely visible in the dark, and then he felt her fingers slipping inside his own suit, delicately closing around his stiff shaft.
He pulled away, not wanting to, but knowing that if he didn’t he would explode. She seemed to understand and, rather than taking offense, took his hands in hers and giggled nervously. “Wow,” she said.
“Yeah,” he breathed, not trusting himself to say more until the physical sensation died down, until his erection subsided and his fingers no longer tingled from the delicious hairiness of her wet crotch.
A kid swam by them, a dark seal-like figure speeding past their legs under the water and splashing noisily to the surface a few feet away. His friend was yelling after him, paddling forward on a raft.
“It’s getting too crowded here,” Brenda said, and ducked into the water, swimming toward the deep end.
Toward the body.
Owen remained where he was, rooted in place, watching the even rhythmic strokes of her long slender arms. No, he thought, don’t let it happen. But she stopped exactly over the spot, then swiveled in the water looking for him, suddenly realizing that he had not come along with her. “Hey!” she called out.
He could only see the top half of her, but with her hair plastered down, her arms at her sides, she appeared almost bound, mummy-wrapped. She looked like the body, and, his skin a field of gooseflesh, he wondered if what he’d seen had not been something that had already happened but had been a premonition of things to come.
Then she was swimming back toward him and the spell was broken. She dived underneath the water as she approached, playfully bumping her elbow against his still stiff erection, and then burst to the surface right in front of him. “Where were you?” she asked, wiping the water out of her eyes. “Why didn’t you come with me?”
He didn’t have a ready answer and couldn’t come up with anything plausible on the spur of the moment, so he remained silent, shook his head.
“I guess this is a good spot to watch the movie,” she said. “If that’s what you want to do.”
He drew her to him, putting his arm around her shoulder, as an overweight woman floated by on an inner tube. “Yeah,” he said. “Let’s watch the movie. It’ll be fun. Maybe afterward . . .” He left the sentence unfinished.
“Yeah.”
He smiled at her, kissed her, but over her shoulder his eyes were focused on the spot where he’d seen the body.
Even under normal circumstances, Curtis always thought there was something creepy about hotels at night. Last year, they’d stayed at a Holiday Inn in San Diego, and when he had to go out to get some ice, the interior corridor through which he walked seemed never ending, like the endless hallway in the Haunted Mansion. He hurried past door after door, past the same repeating patterns on the wallpaper, the same geometric designs on the carpeting, and it was spooky, as though he were trapped in some Twilight Zone version of hell. He found himself wondering what was going on behind each of the closed doors, in each of the rooms, and the scenes that entered his mind were not of happy families writing postcards and watching television but psychos and sickos carrying out the evil will of unseen presences, committing murders in bathtubs, planning explosive demolitions.
Here at The Reata, all of that was multiplied by ten.
On the screen, Marlin and Dory, two computer-animated fish, were swimming along with a group of surfer dude sea turtles. In the pool, children were laughing. On the chairs, adults were chuckling. But beneath it all flowed a current of dread, a sense that this was ironic icing on a dark and evil cake. He cleared his throat, looking over at David. “There’re people swimming where the body was.”
“What are you talking about, tube steak?”
But David knew exactly what he was talking abo
ut. Curtis could tell from the tight tense expression on his face, from the way the other boy would not look at him.
Neither of them spoke for a moment. Ryan, on the other side of Curtis, pretended to be scanning the pool for Owen and not listening.
“I think something’s going to happen tonight,” David said finally, quietly.
A jolt, like an electric current, both terrifying and exciting, passed through him. Yes, Curtis thought. He stared out at the pool, his gaze stopping on what he believed was the silhouette of Owen and Brenda kissing in midwater. He was jealous of his brother, he could admit that, but there was still something about their relationship that rubbed him the wrong way. He had the same feeling about those two together that he did about The Reata overall: it wasn’t right.
Wind began blowing high in the trees, swinging the palm fronds back and forth like whisk brooms, though it did not reach the ground. A few seconds later, the rain started. A drop landed on his bare leg. Another on his chest. There was nothing else for a moment—then the torrent started. Wind-whipped rain suddenly sheeted sideways, hitting his skin like warm wet pinpricks. Lightning flashed close by, followed immediately by a deafening clap of thunder. He, Ryan, David and all of the people immediately around them jumped up from the chairs and ducked for cover, scurrying under shade umbrellas or the overhanging roof of the snack bar, throwing towels over their heads and shoulders. More lightning flashed, and parents were ordering kids out of the pool so they wouldn’t get electrocuted.
The three of them stopped next to the snack bar, looking for Owen and Brenda among the fleeing guests. On the screen, Disney’s underwater world was fuzzy and wavy behind a curtain of rain. Thunder roared.
Something was wrong. Although Curtis did not know what it was for the first few seconds, he quickly realized that it was the people. Not the guests, not the men, women and children attempting to find shelter in the storm, but the people working for The Reata, the employees. The rain made it difficult to see, gave everything a surreal watery cast, yet with each flash of lightning, Curtis saw shifts in the appearance of the men and women, odd and inexplicable changes that started out subtly but almost immediately grew blatant and noticeable.
“Look at that,” David breathed. “Jesus fuck.”
The Reata employees, the waiters and waitresses, the maintenance men and security guards, all of the people working around the pool area, were . . . transforming. It was as if the rain possessed some sort of magic, and the water hitting their hair and running down their faces washed off the makeup that hid their real selves. A hot babe in tan shorts and a white Reata polo shirt was suddenly an old woman with varicose veins and an angry lined face. A muscular man shrivelled before his eyes, his teeth falling out as though from years of disease, their bloody roots leaving tracks on his chin as he tried to catch them in his hand. Another man’s hair fell out, revealing a red sunburnt head underneath, his cheeks falling into jowls.
“I knew this place was haunted!” Ryan shouted, and there was both fear and excitement in his voice. “I knew it!”
Around them was chaos. People were running and screaming, falling into the water as they attempted to escape from the metamorphosing employees. Owen emerged from the melee soaked and shocked, and Curtis grabbed him, pulling him under the eave of the snack bar. For a brief horrible second as the rain pelted his head and shoulders, Curtis thought it might be the rain that was doing all this, that there was something toxic in the water itself. But he wasn’t affected and Owen was okay, and so were the parents and kids running and screaming toward the exit. Only The Reata workers were altered by the storm, and Curtis half-expected to see them turn into skeletons with each flash of lightning, although at least that didn’t occur.
“Come on!” David shouted. “We have to get out of here!”
He sounded and looked as scared as Curtis felt, and the three of them followed David as he led them around the edge of the snack bar and along the fence toward the south gate. Only Ryan seemed like he wanted to stay, and although he could see that his little brother was just as frightened as the rest of them, he could also see that Ryan was interested in what was happening, wanted to watch it happen, wanted to know why it happened. Curtis picked on Ryan a lot, made fun of him for the things he said and the way he acted, but in a way he couldn’t help admiring him. There was something different about him, some sort of inner focus that neither he nor Owen possessed, and despite his shyness and whininess and clinginess with their parents, Ryan sometimes seemed like their older rather than younger brother.
A woman came lurching out of the rainy darkness toward them, her face a caved-in mask of wrinkles, her hair streaked gray and black like a monster. She was screaming, although whether in an attempt to scare them or from pain or humiliation, it was impossible to tell.
“Run!” David ordered, and they were speeding along the edge of the fence, squeezing past palm trees, jumping over flower pots. They reached the gate and joined the throng trying to get through. Absurdly, incongruously, Curtis could hear the voices of characters from the movie still issuing from a speaker up above. They had to get away from here as fast as possible, he thought. They had to tell their parents to pack up and leave tonight before—
It happened the second they ran through the gate.
All of his anxiety and fear disappeared instantly. His desperate need to escape washed away like soapsuds with a hose. Suddenly it was not necessary to leave The Reata or even tell their parents. He recognized it as it occurred, even remembered his former passion afterward, but the knowledge was dormant in the back of his mind, there was no urgency to it, all of the emotional and intellectual context having been drained away and leaving only a useless set of facts. A logical disassociated part of his mind reflected that this was like being drugged or brainwashed, and indeed he was suffused with the sort of emotional numbness he’d always assumed came with drug use, but there was no outrage or concern or even curiosity about it.
He could tell from the faces of his brothers and David that the same thing had happened to them, and as a test he stepped back and watched the other guests running through the gate, watched their panic and fear turn to calm acceptance as they passed between the metal fence supports. It was horrible, what was happening. It was unbelievable.
But he didn’t care.
He almost wanted to talk about the sudden shift with his brothers and David. Almost. But not quite. And then there was a light little fingertip of pressure on his mind and he no longer wanted to talk about it at all, no longer wanted to even think about it.
“Well . . .” said David, wiping the rainwater from his face. “I’d better get back before I’m completely soaked. I guess I’ll see you guys tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” Owen said. “See you.”
Curtis nodded his good-bye, and they parted, David running toward the first building on the left, the three of them heading through the storm toward their own suite, as behind them, in back of the fence, the screaming continued.
Ryan lay awake on the made-up couch, listening to his brothers’ snores.
This was not the way it was supposed to be.
Curtis thrashed in his sleep, his brain disturbed no doubt by the events of the day, and Ryan thought of what he’d seen at the abandoned resort, what had happened tonight at the pool. He was afraid. Not just in a general little-kid way, but specifically for his life and the lives of his family. For he had no doubt that this place could and would kill them. Whether they had been lured here intentionally or had stumbled into this spider’s web of their own accord made no difference. They were here now, and whatever dark force lay at the heart of The Reata was going to do everything in its power to make them stay. Forever. He’d thought up numerous reasons why—because the resort was powered by captured souls or fresh blood, because it needed new employees—but he didn’t know for sure and might never know. That was one thing he’d learned from reading all of those paranormal books: there wasn’t always an understandable reason. People alwa
ys wanted a simple cause-and-effect explanation for everything; it made horror easier to take somehow, made it seem more logical. But it wasn’t logical. Just as religious people always said that God works in mysterious ways, that the ways of the Lord were unknowable, so, too, he thought, were the ways of the paranormal.
Of evil.
Yes, he thought. Whatever was here was definitely evil.
For his own part, this was now bigger than any book. He no longer cared about writing a haunted travelogue. That suddenly seemed so trivial and unimportant. Maybe he’d do that after this was all over, but for right now his chief concern was figuring out a way to get out of here and get away before they were engulfed.
Owen flipped over onto his back and moaned, a terrified heart-wrenching sound that made Ryan’s hair stand on end. He looked over at Curtis, snoring in the other bed. Both of his brothers seemed to access emotions in their sleep that remained capped and under wraps while they were awake, and he wondered if the same thing was true of him. He knew that whatever power resided here had been reaching out to them, had managed to keep the horror of the pool at the pool by putting a visibly obvious clamp on the witnesses as they dashed through the gate, and he himself felt the pressure to forget, could not seem to muster the will or the energy to talk about any of this with anyone, although inside he still retained an acute awareness of what was happening and the thoughts in his head were racing a mile a minute.
That was the core of the problem, he thought. Communication. He’d learned in history last year that the first thing dictators usually did when they took power in a country was take over the newspapers. Whoever controlled the means of communication controlled the people. And maybe that’s why The Reata had been able to exist untouched out here for so long, because word had never leaked out, because no one had ever told the police or the press or the government or anyone else who could do anything about it. He had no doubt that this was not something new, that it had happened before to other guests, and he figured the only reason the survivors, the people allowed to leave, didn’t talk about it or tell anyone was because they’d been silenced or brainwashed.
The Resort Page 20
