The Resort (30 page)

“We never found the hot springs,” Ryan said. “Last time.” His voice doubled back, altered and faint.

Curtis snorted. “What hot springs? If they were there at all, they're dead. That pool hasn't had any water in it since your grandma gave BJs to dinosaurs.”

“She's your grandma, too,” Ryan pointed out.

“It's just an expression.”

None of them seemed to like the strange whispery quality of the echoes, and conversation died out until the canyon opened up before them.
There are ghosts here,
Ryan had said last time, and remembrance of the words made David shiver.

“Why'd you want to come here?” Owen asked Ryan, taking off his T-shirt and using it to wipe the sweat off his face. David had been wondering the same thing.

“Yeah,” Curtis said. “It's hot as a bastard in this damn desert.” But they all knew that wasn't the real reason for his discomfort.

“I thought we might . . . find something.”

Now it was David's turn. “Find something?”

“Remember what happened last night? We're all pretending it didn't happen, and I think something's
making
us pretend it didn't happen, but it did, and we all know it.” He paused, took a deep breath, said it fast, “The rain made the people who work at the resort turn old.”

Chills surfed down David's arms at him hearing those words said aloud.

“I don't know how it happened, but we saw it and so did everyone else there.” He looked at Owen. “Brenda, too.”

Owen's voice was quiet. “What does that have to do with this?” He gestured around them, although mostly toward the ruined hotel up ahead and off to the left.

“I don't know,” Ryan admitted. “But I think it does.”

David did, too. And it was probably why he wanted to turn back around and hide in his room watching television until it was time to go home.

They walked the rest of the way in silence, none of them wanting to either agree with Ryan or challenge him, all of them wanting to just pretend none of it had happened and they were simply on an interesting nature hike.

They reached the mount with the buckboard, left the trail.

David sucked in his breath as they passed over the rise. His heart started pounding. This was impossible. It had only been a day, less than twenty-four hours, yet the abandoned hotel was no longer in ruins. It was still deserted, still in a state of serious disrepair, but the complete destruction that had previously existed had been tempered somewhat and now there were full-sized walls where before there had been only vestiges of the foundation. The formerly roofless restaurant now had a roof, and the faded paint on the cracked chipped cement looked a little brighter, a little less faded. On a broken wall, he could see two letters: R and E.

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—

—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.