The Resort (27 page)

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 always 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.

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.

Like alien abductees.

He thought of that old demolished resort hidden in the canyon. What had happened to it? Why was it there? It was connected somehow to The Reata, but he didn't know how or why, and he had the feeling that if he could solve that riddle, he would be able to figure out what they needed to do to escape.

There was noise from within the bathroom, a low babble, and when he twisted on the couch to look in that direction, he saw a bluish flickering light emanating from around the corner.

The television had switched on in there.

Ryan's heart was pounding, and his first instinct was to wake up his brothers, call for his dad. But he resisted the impulse and slipped carefully out from under the covers, off the couch, creeping stealthily through the darkness toward the bathroom. He wasn't sure why he was being so secretive, what he was trying to prove. There was no one here to impress, and logic said that this was a trap set for him, a way to lure him around that corner into the bathroom so that whatever was there could pounce on him. He
should
go in with his dad and brothers, loud and combative, guns blazing, instead of sneaking in alone.

But his gut said exactly the opposite, told him that was exactly what The Reata wanted him to do, that one quiet kid on his own could slip in under the radar and see things that weren't meant to be seen, things that would wink off and disappear the moment a big group approached.

Maybe the goal was even as simple as wanting him to wake everyone up so that none of them could get a decent night's sleep.

So he kept on, moving slowly and quietly past Owen's bed toward that glowing corner with its low indistinguishable babble. If he had gone first to the other side of the room by Curtis's bed, he could have seen into the bathroom and known what was there. But whatever was in the bathroom would have seen him, too, from far off, and he thought a better approach was to simply peek around the corner and surprise it.

The bluish light fluttered, and from the mumbling chatter he made out the words “mine” or “mind” and “sin.” He poked his head around the corner.

And saw on the small television screen that same terrible man he'd encountered in the mirror back at the abandoned resort.

It was a close-up of the man's face, framed by that long thin hair: cadaverous sunken cheeks, protruding forehead, cold dead eyes. His toothless mouth was not smiling this time but talking, a continuous rant directed at God knew who. Every so often, he would shift in his position, wobble slightly, and Ryan could see the dark wall of that mirrored room behind him, the red velvet of the thronelike chair. He had the disconcerting feeling that this was live, that a camera was filming something that was happening even as he stood here.

He'd expected to see a scene from a movie—a weird movie, perhaps. A horror film or a porno flick, something that was supposed to have a hidden meaning aimed at him—but he had not expected this.

As he'd half-anticipated, though, the bathroom was empty. There was no person or monster or ghost or shadow here. The TV had turned itself on.

And he was going to turn it off.

Ignoring the face and its jabbering, he strode purposefully across the bathroom and flipped off the television's power switch. The face disappeared with an anguished cry and the room was thrown into darkness. For a brief second on the screen there was a glowing afterimage, a white-on-black outline of the face that looked like a Halloween mask. Then it, too, faded, and Ryan was alone.

Behind him, Owen muttered something in his sleep.

Ryan turned, walking back toward his bed on the couch, feeling his way around the barriers of the dark room like a blind man. He should be waking up his brothers, he knew. He should be running into his parents' room screaming about what he'd seen.

But somehow he didn't feel like it.

He reached the couch, crawled under the covers and stretched out. And though it was a long, long time before he was finally able to nod off, he remained unmoving, thinking of nothing, as he waited for sleep to arrive.

The wake-up call came before dawn.

Lowell heard the ringing of the phone in his sleep and for a brief second incorporated it into a dream before its outside insistence shattered that illusion and made itself recognized. Three rings later, he had opened his eyes and pushed off the covers. Another two and he was padding over to the phone. “Hello?” he said groggily.

“Who is it?” Rachel called from the bed, and there was a hint of fear in her voice.

“Mr. Thurman!” said the voice on the other end of the line, and he immediately recognized the forced jocklike jocularity of the activities coordinator.

“Hey, Rockne,” he said, and was gratified to hear a displeased silence greet his greeting.

“It's time to get up,” the activities coordinator said shortly. “The Reata's sunrise service will be conducted in the amphitheater at five thirty. That is precisely one hour from now. So I suggest you shit, shower, shave and do whatever it is you have to do in order to make it there on time.”

“I'll think about it,” Lowell told him, and hung up the phone.

It made him feel good to hang up on the activities coordinator like that, and he had decided not to attend the service at all, but Rachel had heard his half of the conversation and from those few unrevealing words had somehow been able to deduce what the call was about. Already she was getting out of bed to go to the bathroom. “What time does it start?” she asked, glancing over at the clock.