The Resort

by Bentley Little

  Reata.

  There had been no construction or improvements made, no one had come here overnight to work on the place. Indeed, the replaced walls and roof looked as old as the rest of the structures, faded and weathered by time and temperature. No, the old resort looked like it had simply gone back in time to a point where it was a little less dilapidated than it had been yesterday. That was impossible, though, and the four of them looked at each other without saying a word. Dazedly, they moved forward, going past the restaurant and walking in and out of the individual rooms, no longer able to pass through them due to the regenerated walls. David even saw a bed in one of the rooms. It was only a rusted metal frame with no mattress, but yesterday there had been no furniture whatsoever.

  They walked around the first block of rooms. The pool looked the same, and for that David was grateful. He’d had a sneaky feeling that they’d find it full of water, the hot springs flowing once again and, like the fountain of youth, refreshing everything around, and he was thankful that was not the case.

  But what had happened here? Something. He didn’t know what, but he knew he wanted to leave, did not want to be in the presence of a power that could do something like this. He broke his reserve of cool. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, looking across the pool at the row of wooden crosses.

  “Yeah,” Curtis said quickly. Owen was already starting back the way they’d come.

  But Ryan said, “Wait a minute. I want to check something out.” There was fear in his voice but a focused determination as well, and David did not like that. Owen stopped walking, and the three older boys remained in place as Ryan headed alone down the stairs into that viewing room by the side of the pool. Neither of his brothers made a move to follow him, but David couldn’t let the boy go down there alone, so he held tight to what was left of his courage and started down the steps after him.

  It seemed cool down here, and darker than last time, but there was still that sick funky smell—

  death

  —and that huge open space where a window had once been, looking out onto the bottom of the pool. The window had seemed kind of neat last time, the idea of sitting in here looking up at chicks while they swam kind of sexy, but now it just seemed creepy, and he imagined a row of dirty old men hiding down here and checking out hot young babes while their unsuspecting boyfriends sat on lounge chairs up above.

  Owen came down the steps, followed by Curtis. “What are you looking for?” Curtis asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ryan admitted. “But I just thought I should check this place out again.”

  “Did you see that picture?” Owen asked, pointing at the wall opposite the window.

  The rest of them turned around, and David’s heart began thumping wildly in his chest. It was a life-sized crayon drawing of a skeletal man with long scraggly hair: the man from his dreams. Next to him, he heard Ryan’s sharp intake of breath. He recognizes him too, David thought, and that frightened him even more.

  The drawing was skillfully done, drafted by someone with obvious artistic talent, but it was graffiti, not a formal portrait, and that linked it in David’s mind to those makeshift crosses above ground. For some reason, the image that came to him was of worshippers, raggedy people traipsing across the desert to erect crosses to memorialize their loved ones before heading down here to bow before the picture on the wall in some dark ritual.

  Only the crosses didn’t seem to him like memorials to the dead. They were more like warnings, like the symbols erected in the Planet of the Apes to keep everyone out of the Forbidden Zone, and he wondered if they had been put up by the followers of that ancient man wanting to keep people away from their secret spot, or by his victims, trying to save others from their fate.

  “Who is that?” Curtis asked, and though it was clear he had never seen the figure before, it was also obvious that the form retained its power even through the medium of crayon, that the skeletal face made just as big an impact on him as it had on David in his dream.

  And on Ryan.

  “Have you seen that before?” David asked him.

  Ryan thought for a moment. “Yeah,” he said finally.

  “Where?”

  “I . . . don’t want to say,” he said carefully. “I need to think about it.”

  “Do you have any idea who that is?”

  “No. That’s why I want to think about it.”

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Curtis said. “I’m getting claustrophobia.”

  “Yeah,” Owen said. “Let’s talk at the top.”

  It felt liberating to get out of the dark, get away from the stench, and they all breathed deeply when they reached the surface. Curtis and Owen immediately turned on their brother. “So where did you see it before?” Curtis demanded.

  “I—”>

  “Don’t give us that crap about how you need to think about it.”

  “In that restaurant building,” Ryan said meekly, pointing. “That guy was in a broken mirror. I saw something moving in the mirror, and it wasn’t me. It was him. And he wasn’t in the restaurant but some mansion with animal heads on the wall. He looked like an old-time millionaire cowboy, kind of. And he was real scary.”

  “I had a nightmare about him,” David admitted.

  “Oh shit,” Owen moaned. He turned in a circle, stomped his feet. “So what the fuck do we do?” he asked.

  “We tell Mom and Dad,” Curtis said.

  “Yeah,” Ryan agreed.

  They were freer here, David thought. The mental and emotional restraints that seemed to be placed on them back at The Reata didn’t apply, and that was a new development from last time.

  “We need to pack up and go,” Owen said. “Get our asses back to California. And tell Brenda and her family to get out while they can, too.” He looked over at David. “You think you can convince your parents to leave?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Not after I saw that golf game.” He looked away from his friends, not wanting to face them, absurdly feeling that because of his parents, he was somehow part of all this. His gaze landed on a new building behind the second row of rooms. Well, not a new building, an old building—but one David was sure had not been there a few minutes earlier. It was wood rather than cement and looked like a barn. He licked his lips, pointing. “Where did that come from?”

  Curtis turned. “What?”

  “That building.”

  “I don’t know,” Owen said, his face pale. “But where did that come from?”

  He was looking at a carved wooden statue, like a totem pole, standing in front of what had at one time probably been the lobby. The carving was taller than the surrounding buildings and featured a series of grotesque faces, all vaguely human and all imbued with a spark of pure insanity. At the top, like a malevolent father, that skeletal face from the graffiti looked down at them—and it seemed to be looking right down at them—the long thin hair forming a sort of frame for the faces beneath him.

  “Maybe they were there,” Curtis said hopefully. “Maybe they were there and we just didn’t notice them.”

  They all looked to Ryan for some reason, as though the boy might have an answer.

  “I don’t think they were,” he said. He walked over to the totem pole thing, looked up at it, gingerly put a hand out to touch the wood, but he drew it back instantly. “Feels weird,” he said. “Slimy.”

  “Let’s go,” Owen said. David silently agreed. He was feeling more and more nervous the longer they remained here.

  “Let’s check the new building first.” Ryan started walking.

  Curtis advanced on him. “Listen, you little dickweed . . .”

  Ryan smiled, and the gesture was a welcome sight after the tensions of the last ten minutes. “Too scared, huh? You can wait here with the women and babies, then.” He side-stepped his brother and continued on toward the barn.

  “Asshole,” Curtis growled, but he followed along. So did David and Owen.

  The ruins of the barn had been
here yesterday, along with what looked like an adjacent corral from the days when The Reata had been a dude ranch, but now everything was restored. Used and worn, but workable. They stepped up slowly, making their way through a maze of collected brush and old broken furniture from the hotel rooms, ready to run at the slightest provocation. The barn door, nearly two stories high, was wide open, and carefully they peeked inside the gloomy interior.

  It wasn’t a barn, it was a slaughterhouse.

  Instead of the stalls and hayloft David expected to see housed within one huge communal room, there was a high narrow chamber with blood-stained walls and floor. Down the center of the room ran a single metal table dulled by use and nicked by knives and hatchets. From somewhere in the dimness above, meathooks hung down, some of them with ancient flecks of dried flesh still clinging to them. On the floor were yellowed bones.

  None of them knew what to make of it. They stood there staring, unwilling to go in but unable to turn away. David moved back a step, wondering what lay to either side of the slaughterhouse wall. On each side of the big barn door was a smaller door, also open, though he hadn’t registered that before. He moved over to the one on the left, looked in and saw nothing—only empty space. Wooden walls with hay on the floor.

  He was suddenly filled with the certainty that if one room contained nothing, the other contained something . . . horrible? . . . important? He approached the door with trepidation, not knowing what he’d find but knowing what he didn’t want to see inside that room.

  He saw it.

  The throne from his dream.

  David’s mouth was suddenly dry, so dry that he started coughing and gagging because he couldn’t generate enough saliva to lubricate his throat. Stupidly, none of them had brought drinks this time, so he had to tough it out, and it was all he could do not to puke.

  “That’s what he was sitting on in the mirror,” Ryan said excitedly from behind him. “That was his chair.”

  Still coughing, David nodded. “My . . . nightmare,” he managed to get out.

  Whether Ryan or one of his brothers would have walked in there he never found out, because the door slammed shut on them as though on a spring hinge, banging so loud and hard that it made them jump. Curtis reached out to test the door but it was securely closed and unmovable.

  David didn’t know whether they’d stumbled upon something they weren’t supposed to see or whether they’d been directed to see something specifically aimed at them. Either way, the show was over, and even Ryan realized it was time to go. They walked back through the resort, around the buildings, toward the trail.

  Please stay on the path.

  “We’re telling Mom and Dad,” Curtis repeated. “We have to tell Mom and Dad.”

  “If we can remember,” Owen said quietly.

  “We’ll remember,” Ryan said. “We just might not want to tell them. We might not care.”

  It was an acknowledgment of what all of them knew but had not until this moment articulated.

  “Why does that happen?” Owen wondered.

  “Why does any of it happen?” David said. “Why is that old resort fixing itself up? Why did the rain turn those people old?”

  “But why are we just sitting there like bumps on a log watching it happen, not doing anything?”

  “We are doing something,” Ryan pointed out. “That’s why we’re here.”

  “Not enough,” Owen told him. “Not enough.”

  By the buckboard wagon, now filled exclusively with human skulls from what he could only assume were severed heads, David turned around. From this angle, he could see a square frame looming over the roof of the restaurant, a frame that he would have sworn was not there five minutes before.

  It looked like a gallows.

  They reached The Reata and stopped in front of the tennis courts, trying to decide where to go next. Some of the urgency they’d felt at the abandoned resort had slipped away, but they still wanted to tell their parents what had happened, what they’d seen, and Ryan thought they should do so right away, before that desire faded away completely. All four of them agreed, and they decided to try to find their parents first, then go after David’s, and then try to find Brenda and her family.

  He felt like they were the Hardy Boys. Well, maybe not the Hardy Boys because they were kind of boring and lame, but one of those groups of mystery-solving teenagers. It was spooky what was happening. Terrifying. But it was exciting, too, and part of him wanted it to last for a while because he knew that nothing like this would probably ever happen to him again.

  But that was dangerous thinking, and like too many other things the past few days, it made him second-guess himself, made him wonder if that thought was his own or if it had been imposed on him. Either one was possible, and that was part of the seductiveness of this whole thing.

  One thing he wanted to do for sure, after they found their parents, was go back to the exercise pool. Other than his brief encounter with the broken mirror yesterday at the ruined restaurants in Antelope Canyon, it was the only place his ESP had worked, and Ryan needed to find out if that had been a fluke, a rare confluence of circumstances, or if it was a legitimate response that could be counted upon to occur every time, some sort of chemical reaction that happened between himself and the exercise pool. Of course, he could not go back alone. Too dangerous. Besides, he wanted someone else there as a control, to see if it was the pool, himself or a combination of the two that sparked those horrific scenes.

  First things first, though. They hurried down the gravel trail, then down the cement sidewalk to their suite. Curtis had one of the keys with him and used it to open the door. “Mom?” he said. “Dad?” There was no response, and they didn’t see either of their parents on the bed or the couch, but just in case they checked both bathrooms and the other bedroom. Nothing.

  “Where now?” Owen said. “The pool?”

  It was as good a place as any, but they weren’t there either. They also weren’t in the lobby, in the Saguaro Room or the Grille.

  “Let’s check my room, see if my parents are there.”

  “Sure,” Curtis said.

  The maid’s cart was outside David’s room when they arrived, and as soon as he saw it, David stopped and tried to turn them around. “My parents aren’t here if they’re cleaning the room.”

  “We might as well check,” Owen said.

  They walked in, David first, nervously tugging on his earring as he entered the sitting area. They walked past the unmade bed, around the corner to the bathroom.

  There, an overweight maid, her skirt hiked up, was removing a toothbrush from the crack of her ass. She saw them and smoothed down her uniform as she replaced the toothbrush in its holder next to the sink. She should have been embarrassed, but she wasn’t. She was defiant. And she swore at them in Spanish as she shoved her way past them and slammed the door on her way out.

  They couldn’t help it: they all burst out laughing.

  “What the hell was that?” Curtis said.

  David looked embarrassed, but he was laughing as hard as the rest of them. “Luckily, that’s my dad’s toothbrush.”

  “Are you going to tell him?”

  He grinned. “No.”

  Ryan still wanted to check out the exercise pool, though the impulse was much less personal and more rational than it had been a few moments ago, more like wanting to find out the answer to a troubling math problem than anything else. “Maybe our parents, or your parents, are in the fitness center,” he suggested.

  “Let’s check it out,” Curtis agreed easily. The search had become fun.

  Owen giggled. “Don’t use your toothbrush tonight either,” he suggested to David.

  “Or yours,” David responded.

  As before, the weight room was empty. But there was someone swimming in the pool, a lone fat man who was totally naked and looked like Jabba the Hut. He grinned at them in a suggestive way that made Ryan feel dirty, then rolled onto his back.

  “Dude has a b
oner,” Owen whispered.

  David and Curtis turned and walked out of the room. Owen started to follow them, but Ryan grabbed his arm. The scenes were coming to him again, superimposed on the real world just as they had been last time, just as they had in the mirror, and an electric thrill went through him, an excited recognition of the power he possessed, as the pool darkened and a white figure appeared against the far wall. “Do you see that?” he asked.

  “What?” Owen said, still whispering.

  The figure came into focus. It was a man in a chef’s outfit, and he was flanked on both sides by a dozen or so well-dressed men and women. This image definitely took place in the past. The men were all wearing old-time suits, and had thick beards and hats, the women wearing big dresses and elaborate hair styles. They all had the same expression on their faces, an excitement that bore a very close resemblance to insanity. They were watching the chef, who was dropping severed arms and legs—human arms and legs— into the pool, then using a rakelike instrument to press them down and push them out into the water.

  It looked like he was making soup.

  The scene shifted, and now there were candles on the cement around the pool and a flickering shadow on the wall that looked like that skeletal, scraggly-haired old man. This, Ryan knew, was the future. He recognized Mr. Blodgett, that asshole who’d stolen their room, and saw a couple of other familiar faces as well. They seemed to be baptizing themselves in the water, using a hand to press down on their own heads, and then popping up with identically deranged expressions that were an eerie echo of their earlier counterparts’.

  Why was he being shown this? he wondered. To scare him off or to fire him up? To warn him of what might happen if something wasn’t done to stop it?

  What could he do, though? What could anyone do?

  Owen grabbed his arm and the visions disappeared. “Come on,” he said in an annoyed voice, as though he’d said it several times before to no effect. “Let’s go.”

  The fat man grinned at them, his erection quivering.