The Resort (22 page)

It did seem kind of stupid when you looked at it, and Owen felt embarrassed by his own gullibility and willingness to leap to conclusions. He glanced over at Curtis, who was staring at his shoes, red-faced.

“I know what I saw,” David said quietly, but even his voice didn't have the same level of conviction.

Only Ryan held firm. “There
are
ghosts,” he insisted. “And they're here.”

Brenda smiled at him as though he were a baby. “There's no such thing as ghosts. I'll be honest, I wouldn't come walking down this trail in the middle of the night. But I sure don't think bodies are floating in a pool that dozens of people swim in every day and that's cleaned and inspected each morning. And I don't think golfers are going postal and attacking people for no reason whatsoever.”

“The body wasn't floating,” Owen felt obligated to point out. “It was lying at the bottom.”

She looked at him, and he felt like the world's biggest dummy.

“Just drop it,” Curtis suggested. “Everyone's hot and cranky, and we sure as hell aren't going to settle this here. Let's just keep walking.”

“Why don't we just head back,” David said, desultorily pulling on his earring.

They glanced up ahead to see if it was worth continuing on. Owen saw only more mountains, more trees and brush, more hot sun. He was about to suggest that they turn around when Curtis pointed. “Check it out.” Off the trail to the right, atop a small rise, was what appeared to be an old buckboard wagon, half-buried in the sand.

Curtis stepped unhesitatingly over the line of rocks that marked the border of the trail and started across the open ground. David and Ryan followed eagerly. Owen and Brenda remained behind for a few extra seconds, then hand in hand the two of them trudged along after. Brenda obviously did not want to go, there was resistance in the tension of her muscles, but she said nothing.

The five of them stood before the downed wagon, its wood cracked and splintered from exposure to the elements, its yoke and a corner of the driver's seat buried in the sand, broken wheels lying flattened and spoke-shattered nearby. The back of the buckboard was filled with old animal bones and the rotted remnants of burlap bags. Owen wasn't a nature boy or an animal expert by any means, but he thought he recognized among the yellowed bones a cow skull, a horse skull, and the skull of the canyon's namesake, an antelope.

The sight was odd and disconcerting, but it was what lay just beyond the small rise that had suddenly captured their attention.

“Look,” Ryan said. “Indian ruins.”

Only they weren't Indian ruins. Owen could see that immediately. They were ruins all right: extant sections of wall not more than a foot high that clearly delineated the floor plan of a rather large building, with a smaller roofless but otherwise intact structure built at an angle to its counterpart. But they were cement, not adobe, had traces of light blue paint on their exteriors, and resembled nothing so much as those abandoned commercial buildings they'd seen in dying towns like Wenden and Dry River that they'd passed through on their way over from California.

“It's a ghost town,” Ryan said, and Owen could hear the excitement in his voice.

But that didn't seem right, either. The site before them was too small to be a town, and what it reminded Owen of more than anything else was a hotel.

Yes, he realized, that was exactly what it was.

He let go of Brenda's hand and, with his brothers, walked around the downed wagon, feeling chilled but not knowing why. They walked over the barren sand. Sure enough, he was able to make out the walls and doorways of individual sleeping quarters as they approached. The structure still standing appeared to be the hotel's restaurant.

They reached the ruins.

There were more buildings than he'd originally thought. Or at least there
had
been more buildings. To the right, Owen saw the remnants of a wooden structure that had probably been a barn, and a forsaken pile of wreckage that had clearly been furniture before the sun and wind and rain had gotten hold of it. A second set of ruined rooms ran parallel to the first, and between the two blocks was an empty cement pool remarkably devoid of debris.

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.

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.

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 Brenda 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.