There were a million questions Lowell wanted to ask, but all of those could wait. What was important now was finding Ryan, and none of Jim’s talk of history was bringing them any closer to locating the boy. Lowell’s head was filled with horrible scenarios in which Ryan was murdered in various gruesome ways by the wild mob outside, by ghosts and hellish creatures, by The Reata itself, and the longer they stayed here, the longer they waited, the more likely it was that such a thing would come to pass.
“It protects itself,” the concierge went on. “I’m sure you’ve noticed that. Or at least it does until it doesn’t have to anymore. If people see things or hear things, it makes them forget, it makes them not care, it kind of . . .” He paused, trying to think of the right word. “It casts a spell on them. Of course, now everything’s almost over. And everyone’s trapped here; you can’t escape. So it doesn’t need to waste the energy.”
“We need to find our son,” Lowell reminded him.
“I’ll tell you something weird,” the old man confided, shining his light. “See that picture there? See that cloud? The one that looks like kind of a sideways mushroom? Well, I saw that cloud two days ago, drifting overhead while I was taking a nap outside.”
“A lot of clouds look the same.”
“No,” he insisted. “It’s the cloud. I’ve looked at that picture enough times to know.”
Lowell didn’t argue.
“And do you know when that picture was taken?”
He shook his head.
“July 14. Two days before the first Reata was destroyed.” He met Lowell’s eyes. “That’s today.”
They had not yet killed him.
Ryan lay in the silent darkness of . . . wherever he was . . . thinking. He had no doubt that he would be killed. He had been stripped of his clothes and rubbed with some kind of grease that smelled like bad meat before being redressed in a white sheet and bound so thoroughly with harsh twine that he could not even wiggle his hands or feet, let alone try to escape. But the fact that the Owner was drawing it out, turning it into such an elaborate ritual, made Ryan think that there was something special about him, that he was needed in some way to complete the transfer between the two resorts.
Maybe that’s why his ESP had kicked in, why he’d been granted those glimpses into The Reata’s past and future.
What could he do with that information, though?
It stood to reason that if he was needed for a specific purpose, if there was something special about him that the Owner required, that he also had the potential to stop this climactic event from occurring. But how? There was no way he was going to escape. But if there was truly something special about him, maybe he could change that aspect of himself so that he would no longer be a catalyst, so the Owner’s plans would be thwarted and go unrealized. What made him special, though? Was it his age? He could not modify that. Was it his lack of sexual experience? No hope for that now. Whatever it might be, he was gagged and tied tightly and had no opportunity to alter anything.
He was willing to sacrifice himself for his family but he was not willing to sacrifice himself for The Reata. Ryan was surprised by how calm he was, by how rationally he’d thought that through. The prospect of imminent death did that to a person, he supposed.
And if he was going to die, he wanted to die for a good cause.
There was sound in the darkness, rhythmic noise from another part of the house getting louder, drawing closer.
Bootsteps on wooden floor.
He held his breath, shut his eyes tightly.
The Owner was coming.
A light was switched on, its incandescence so bright after the complete blackness that it burned even through his eyelids.
The bootsteps stopped.
The Owner was here.
Thirty-eight
The concierge refused to go with them, and they didn’t have time to sit around and try to persuade him, so they took off on their own, making their way through the darkened minefield The Reata had become, listening for any sounds of the mobs, going to the place they all knew they had to go.
The old resort.
They clutched their primitive weapons, as well as the concierge’s flashlight, and hurried up the trail through the open desert into the canyon, speaking only when necessary, staying quiet, keeping low. Rachel’s feet hurt, her head was pounding with an excruciating headache unlike any she had ever experienced, and her bowels felt as though they were about to explode at any second, but she kept her body under control and kept her mind focused on her son, on Ryan.
What had happened to him? Where had he gone? How had he disappeared? One minute all four of them had been huddling together, hiding behind the tree, and the next she and the twins were waking from a nap they didn’t know they were taking, to find that Ryan was gone. David they had lost somewhere along the way, running that gauntlet from one parking lot to another as the hordes descended, but she and the boys had made it safely to this upper area of the resort. She chose to tell herself that Ryan had left of his own accord, that he had seen something and decided to check it out, that he was following someone. But that fiction became harder to sustain after Lowell arrived and they started searching, and whether or not it had started out with Ryan inquisitively searching out information, it had doubtlessly ended with him being captured.
Or killed.
She pushed that thought away, though it refused to leave.
One thing she had always admired about her youngest son was his inquisitiveness. Curtis and Owen weren’t like that. They did well in school, got good grades, but they lacked Ryan’s spark. The twins would no doubt be successful in whatever endeavor they eventually chose, but Ryan was special. He would do what she’d always wanted to do. He wouldn’t have just a job, he’d have a career, and it would be something interesting and offbeat, something that he would come up with on his own and pursue tenaciously. He was shy but focused, and while that combination did not serve him so well as a child, as an adult it would lead him into places his brothers could not go. Her eyes teared up as she thought about him, and she tried to concentrate on the task immediately before them, on finding Ryan.
They heard the noise before they saw the lights: screams and laughter, the festive sounds of a wild party. As they’d known, the old Reata was fully restored and repopulated. Even standing on the rise by the now-new buckboard with its filigreed sign, they could see scores of men and women enjoying the high life, strolling about with drinks in hand, engaging in randy pursuits about the grounds. Between two buildings they could even see people swimming in the well-lighted pool.
“What do we do?” Rachel asked. “Try and sneak up?”
Lowell held tight to his tomahawk. “Walk over there, I guess. Try to blend in.”
They moved across the darkened desert toward the lights and activity of the resort.
Four totem poles stood in a semicircle in front of the lobby, the tall posts carved with demonic faces, terrible visages filled with rage and hate. At the top of each, smiling not-so-beneficently down was the skeletal countenance of Jedediah Harrison. Rachel looked up at him once, then quickly looked away, afraid in a primal, instinctive way of his terrible ancient face.
A couple strode past them, the woman in petticoat with parasol, the man in waistcoat with watch fob. They would have looked like extras in an old western, or historical society volunteers peopling a pioneer village museum, were it not for the mottled green of their rotting skin and the sickening stench of death that lingered around them.
Still, the couple took no notice of either Lowell, herself or the twins, and that gave them confidence. They stepped past the lobby, peeking in the windows just in case, then walked purposefully toward the pool area. They’d agreed that they would start at the pool—they all instinctively felt that it was the focal point of the resort, though that feeling had no basis in fact. Heading between two rows of rooms, they passed a man in a 1950s-style business suit slapping a dirty woman in rags and face paint, and a crowd
of obnoxious guffawing hoodlums dressed in cowboy garb and kicking a dead dog.
Outside a room that looked like a playhouse or theater stood a small man with an oversized child’s head, a grinning idiot aberration that stared at her with such complete lack of comprehension that it frightened her. Next to the bigheaded creature, slumped in a chair to the right side of the door like a guard or a ticket taker, was a dead man who looked awfully familiar. Rachel thought she’d seen him before on TV.
They reached the pool, and here they stopped. Gaslight and torches aided old-style electric lights in illuminating the area, and they could see men and women in full-body striped bathing suits cavorting in the water. But that was not what made them pause. No, it was the flayed bodies lying on the antique lounge chairs, the nude woman writhing against a saguaro cactus past the deep end, the well-built man copulating with a skull-headed scarecrow next to her, the myriad examples of unfathomable horror scattered throughout this surrealistic scene.
Three women, their pale bodies marked with red whip-lashes that made them look like living candy canes, dashed out of a nearby room screaming and giggling, and jumped into the pool. “I’m on my period!” one of them shouted to the delighted cries of the others, and Rachel’s blood ran cold as she remembered the karaoke crowd at the Grille.
“Ryan’s not here,” Curtis said next to her, and Rachel turned to look at him, impressed with the levelheadedness of his tone. She hadn’t been sure what type of reaction a teenage boy would have to such a spectacle, but he had clearly ignored the unnatural goings-on, scanning the area for any sign of his brother before concluding that he was not there. She grabbed his hand and squeezed it with the sort of tender fondness she had not exhibited since he was in preschool.
“Join us,” a squat man with a handlebar mustache said, walking up to Lowell. He was wearing a Reata T-shirt but no pants, and his erection pointed out obscenely. “We would have your woman.”
Lowell kicked him in the crotch, and Rachel felt a small thrill of satisfaction as he fell to the ground, clutching himself and wailing. She expected to be set upon after that, expected his cries to alert the others of intruders in their midst and to have a swarm of Reatans attacking them, but they moved forward without incident or notice, Lowell leading them past the shallow end of the pool and around the edge of a block of rooms.
The gallows were empty this time, the bodies of the punished employees taken down and . . . what? . . . buried? . . . eaten? She didn’t want to know. They walked past the unpainted scaffolding toward a building that had not been here last time. A chapel. She had no idea why Ryan would be there, but it was as good a place to look as any, and silently following Lowell’s lead, they walked up the steps and through the open doorway. It was packed with parishioners, all of whom turned to look as they entered. They were all ancient, closer to living corpses than human beings, and the air was suffused with a sweet, overripe flowery smell that nearly made her gag.
The chapel was lit by candles placed in wrought iron holders along the walls. At the head of the church, in front of an altar of bones, stood a preacher. It was the same minister from the sunrise service, only he was not wearing an elk’s head this time, he had an elk’s head. He was neither animal nor human but some ungodly combination of the two, and his voice when he spoke had a disturbingly guttural beastly sound, as though words did not flow naturally off his tongue.
“It will be reborn anew after the sacrifice!” the minister intoned. “The Founder will create from him a new Reata impervious to the ravages of time—”
“What sacrifice?” Lowell demanded, and though Rachel would not have spoken up, would not have said a word, she realized that time was getting short and they needed to take concrete action if they were ever to find and save Ryan.
“What sacrifice? Why, your son, Mr. Thurman! Please . . .” The minister gestured toward an empty pew, his head wobbling. “Sit down and join us. You have earned a place of honor, in this the house of our Founder.”
Lowell ran up the aisle, tomahawk upraised. “Where is he?” he bellowed. “Where’s my son?” He jumped onto the dais. “Goddamn it, you tell me now or I’ll bash your fucking head in!” The boys had run after him, their own spears outthrust, but Rachel remained where she was in case the parishioners came after them and they needed rearguard support from this area.
The corpselike men and women remained seated, passive, and if she hadn’t seen their heads turn to follow the action, she would have assumed they were dead.
The minister raised his hands as though he were being robbed by a bandit, but she had the feeling that the pose had some sort of religious significance to him and his flock. “The boy is consecrating the waters, the waters of life, the waters of The Reata that bring forth such bounty and such pleasure . . .”
“Where?” Lowell demanded, thrusting the tomahawk forward and catching the minister at the base of his elk-haired neck. The sharpened edge of the weapon drew blood, and a red trickle passed over the thick brown hide before dripping down the white skin of his human chest.
But the minister did not stop in his oration. “. . . He whose heart is pure will be revered by The Founder and will reside within him for all eternity . . .”
“Where is my son?” Rachel screeched, and she was shocked at how loud her voice was, but she kept screaming anyway. None of the parishioners even looked at her. “Ryan!” she called. “Ryan!”
Lowell knocked the minister down and turned on the seated flock. “Where?” he demanded, but they stared up at him blankly, and he grabbed Owen’s arm, running back down the aisle, both boys in tow.
All four of them ran out of the chapel. Sacrifice. They were going to kill her boy, her baby, in some stupid primitive ritual in order to keep Jedediah Harrison and his hellish resort alive for another hundred years or so.
But it wasn’t stupid, it wasn’t primitive. The ritual worked, they all knew it, and that gave their quest an even greater urgency.
“Ryan!” she continued to cry at the top of her lungs. “Ryan!”
The twins took up the cry as they hurried down the chapel steps. “Ryan! Ryan!”
“Waters . . .” Lowell said, thinking aloud. “We were just at the pool, so that’s not it. Where—”
They were no longer being ignored. In the time it had taken them to run in and out of the chapel, seemingly every being at the resort had been gathered together and now stood in a crowd before them, filling the open area in front of the church and spilling over into the pathways between the rooms. At the front of the mob was the manager, still fat and bearded but nowhere near as jolly, flanked by five nearly identical men who could have been clones, impersonators. They were glaring at the four of them, and though their faces weren’t rotting or disintegrating, there was something very old about the eyes of the men, something very unnatural in the stillness of their positions. Elsewhere, she saw members of the office staff she recognized, as well as the hostess from the Saguaro Room. The gardener, standing by himself, grinned at her, holding up a pair of pinking shears.
Managers, desk clerks, hostesses, gardeners. She was being tortured by service employees. There seemed something appropriate about that, but she had neither the time nor the inclination to think about the irony. She briefly noted that none of the workers at the bottom of the totem pole, the maids or janitors or laborers, were here. They were all back at the other resort. Like the concierge, they had been left behind. Harrison had used them to take care of the day-today grunt work of The Reata, but they were not part of it. They were not of it.
Behind the managers and the few people she recognized were scores of others, not only the original guests and employees of Harrison’s Reata but the people who had come after, generations of individuals who had worked here, who had stayed here, who had somehow become part of the Founder’s flock.
Where was Harrison himself?
Sacrificing Ryan, she thought, and she looked quickly over at Lowell, met his gaze, and saw in his eyes the same despair she
felt.
They both glanced around, searching for a way out but not finding any. The crowd before them did not move, did not change, and neither did they. Both sides remained frozen. She saw Lowell glance back into the chapel to make sure no one was coming out from there.
All of a sudden there was screaming and shouting from the area in front of the lobby, great war whoops and gratifyingly modern cries of “Let’s roll!”
It was the cavalry. Rand Black and too many others to count, all streamed into the resort, weapons at the ready, led by the concierge. The old man was clutching what looked like a broken bottle on the end of a stick. Anger limned his features, granting him the appearance of an avenging angel. The Reatans turned at the sound of the ruckus, but too late. They were already being hacked and stabbed, attacked from behind and on the right flank, and those capable of doing something about it were in the wrong position, awkward locations.
“Go!” Black yelled at the top of his lungs, and though they had no idea at whom the command was directed, Lowell grabbed Rachel’s hand and they ran.
They left in the thick of it. In the midst of the fighting, in the chaos of battle, Lowell grabbed Rachel and the twins and herded them off to the side, around the edge of the chapel. He had no idea where they were going or what he was doing, but they’d been given a break, granted a reprieve, and if they were ever to find Ryan—
the sacrifice
—he was going to have to act fast and act now.
The desert was dark behind the chapel. The lights stopped here. The moon had temporarily disappeared behind a cloud, but he remembered from the last visit that there was a barn and corral out this way. A slaughterhouse was inside the barn, according to the kids. And the Founder’s throne.
Rachel and the kids moving right with him, Lowell hastened over the shifting sand, using the concierge’s flashlight to avoid the desert pitfalls of cactus and rock. The moon reappeared from behind the clouds, and he saw the barn, saw the corral next to it, holding horses that weren’t quite horses, but there was another building illuminated as well. A house. Not a small cabin or low ranch-style home, but a tall gabled mansion bathed in darkness that not even the moonlight could penetrate.
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