The Resort (38 page)

“The picture of him's on the wall behind that bench,” Ryan said, letting his dad go down first.

But Lowell did not look at the wall, and as Rachel walked down the steps, bringing up the rear, and gazed out the observation window to the pool beyond, she saw why.

People were swimming in the pool. Five or six of them at least. Men with handlebar mustaches and full-body bathing suits, women in flapper swimwear. They splashed and played in water that was light blue and perfectly clear, and every so often one would swim up to the glass, tap on it and wave at them.

Curtis dashed behind her and ran up to the top of the steps. “It's still the same up here!” he shouted. “All dirty and no one's in it!” He rushed back down just as a plump woman planted her lips on the glass and then, smiling, swam for the surface.

“The graffiti's gone,” Owen said, pointing at the wall.

Indeed it was, and in place of a crayon caricature of a spooky old man there was only The Reata's logo, the same brightly colored modern version they'd seen in the restaurant.

“The smell's gone, too,” Ryan said.

David grinned. “Maybe they're connected,” he responded, and even that small joke was welcome, helped cut some of the tension in the air.

They remained in the viewing room for several more minutes, watching the swimmers, Lowell or one of the boys occasionally darting to the top of the stairs to verify that nothing had changed, bandying about ideas on how this could be happening, all of them instantly and unanimously rejecting the logical, hopeful theory that they were watching images on a large television screen.

Finally, they went back up.

“Where next?” Ryan asked. “The barn?”

“No,” Lowell said, walking.

“The throne's there. We saw it.”

But Lowell had seen something else, a sight that meant something to
him,
and Rachel caught up to him, took his hand. “What is it?” she asked quietly. Then she saw it, too.

A gallows.

David had said he'd seen that last time, but none of them had noticed it on the way in, not even David, and she chose to believe that was because it had been hidden behind other restored buildings, though she doubted that was the reason.

They all saw it now, though.

There were bodies hanging from two of its three ropes.

“Stay here,” Lowell ordered.

“No,” David said, and she expected him to add,
You're not my father,
but instead he repeated Lowell's mantra. “We need to stay together.”

No one argued with that, and as gruesome as the sight before them was, as much as she wanted to protect her babies from seeing something like this, she knew that those days of innocence were long gone. They were all in this together, and they would likely see a lot worse before it was all over.

Once again, she was unable to push the thought away, unable to put even a slightly positive spin on their situation. They moved slowly forward, as though treading over ground that had been planted with land mines. Ryan had been following his father up in front, but now he fell back, slowing his pace until he was next to her. She felt his soft hand creep into her own, and she held it tightly, reassuringly. Curtis and Owen, too, seemed worried, scared, tentative, and they dropped their pace to be nearer to her. If she'd had three arms, she would have used all three to hug each of them close.

They shouldn't be here, she thought. They shouldn't be seeing this.

“Oh my God!” Curtis exclaimed as they drew close enough to see the bodies. “That's the woman who checked us in!”

Indeed it was. Her name tag still pinned to the torn and blood-stained remnants of her blouse, Tammy—

—was swinging from a heavy rope, eyes white and staring in her dirty purple face, her mouth open almost impossibly wide. A fly crawled over her bottom teeth, then onto her cheek and into her ear. A trio of wasps lazily buzzed out from beneath her torn skirt.

Next to her was the waiter Rachel had seen being dragged down the lobby hallway when she'd been hiding with Laurie behind the totem pole pillar, the beaten man who had been pushed screaming and fighting into that manager's office. He had clearly been subjected to even more abuse behind closed doors. One arm hung at an awkward angle, and the young man's face was swollen so hideously that his eyes were not visible and his mouth was pulled up by his cheek.

The queasiness in her stomach was like nothing she had ever experienced. Only part of it was due to the actual physical grotesqueness before her. Most of it was from being in the presence of death, from looking at two people she had seen alive who were now corpses, hanging murdered in front of her.

Lowell turned away from the gallows, grabbing Curtis's and Owen's heads and forcibly pointing them in the opposite direction. “There's nothing here for us,” he said grimly. “Let's go back.”

“There is!” Ryan insisted. “We just have to find it!”

“Find what?” Lowell said.

“This whole place is changing, fixing itself up!”

“And how does that help us?” Lowell shook his head. “I don't want you to be here. I don't think any of us should be here. It's dangerous.”

“But—” Ryan said.

Lowell held up a hand. “I'll tell the others back at The Reata what we found. Maybe together we can figure something out. But for now we need to leave.” Unconsciously, he gestured toward the two hanging bodies. “We're risking our lives by even being here.”

But there was no one around when they returned. Even the noise from the driving range had been silenced, and they walked down empty pathways searching for someone, anyone. From the open door of the Saguaro Room, a bird flew out, followed almost immediately afterward by a small bobcat that dashed through the door then sped around the side of the building heading for the rocks.

“Maybe everyone left,” Curtis said. “Maybe a bus came and got them all.”

“Maybe they disappeared into thin air,” David said, and though Rachel didn't say anything, that seemed far more likely. She met Lowell's gaze and saw the same awareness there.

She thought of that hanging waiter on the gallows, a sight she would never forget, a sight she would carry with her to her dying day, and that made her think of the corridor where she'd seen him last. “Maybe they're in one of the banquet rooms,” she suggested, “having a meeting.”

“I haven't checked those rooms,” Lowell said, and his tone of voice made her realize that he was thinking about what he might find in there. It was not their missing fellow guests. She shuddered, wishing she'd kept her mouth shut. “Come on.”

The lobby was just as Lowell had described it, and the spooky thing was how eerily similar it was to the lobby they had explored back in the canyon. This was the natural evolution of that smaller room, its more sophisticated descendant. They walked across the worn carpet and down the hallway. The totem pole pillars were no longer high class kitsch, had lost their sophisticated politically correct sheen. They were instead just like the totem pole at the old resort, covered with intricate carvings of malevolent faces: monster mouths and demon eyes.

They walked past the door to the manager's office, and Lowell tried the knob but it was locked. On the opposite side of the corridor were the closed double doors to the first banquet room. The Santa Fe Room, according to the plaque on the wall. These were unlocked, and the six of them stepped inside.

It was a torture chamber.

Rachel had never seen anything like it, had never read or heard of anything so completely and totally devoted to the infliction of death and pain.
Stay outside,
she wanted to tell the boys.
Don't come in here, don't look at this.
And she knew Lowell was thinking the same thing. But they had to stay close together. She knew that if the kids were in the hall while she and Lowell toured the torture chamber, the doors would suddenly swing shut and by the time the two of them got the doors opened again the boys would be gone.

Rachel walked slowly forward. Everything here was old and well-used. To her right was some sort of iron maiden, but one with a distinctly American bent, the outside of the device resembling a cigar store Indian, the spikes' spear-ends tipped with arrowheads. In a wood-and-glass display case were dozens of straight razors with elaborate exotic handles, nearly all of them tarnished with dried blood.

But that was just the beginning.

There was a primitive treadmill onto which was affixed sharp stones, shards of broken glass, spurs of metal and spiny pieces of densely needled cactus. Rusted meat hooks alternated with heavy metal balls on chains hanging from a frame roughly the shape and size of a garage door. An enclosed bench that resembled a church pew with dark discolored pegs of various lengths and diameters protruding from its seat was next to a human-shaped cage with a wicked-tipped tightening screw at the top. Other mechanisms of torture, featuring ever more Byzantine architecture and design, continued on throughout the large room.

“Is this for us?” Owen asked in a hushed voice.

“No,” Rachel rushed to assure him. “These are for . . . uh . . .” She trailed off, unable to come up with an alternative.

What the hell were they for? These instruments had obviously been used in the past, but were they now here as a warning, as part of some museum, or because they
were
intended for use in the near future? Despite her words to the contrary, she suspected the latter.

David reached out and put a hand on the iron maiden. “Don't touch that!” Lowell ordered him, and the boy yanked his hand back as though jolted by an electrical shock. “We don't know what these can do,” he explained. “We have to be careful.”

They all stood close to each other, unsure of what to do next.

“Well, the people aren't here—” Curtis began and was interrupted by a noise from behind them.

The activities coordinator poked his head around the corner. His face was covered with dirt. Black and green lines had been painted onto his cheeks and forehead, making him look savage. “Get ready, boys and girls.” He grinned. “It's game time.”

Lowell stood beneath the awning with the rest of his team, staring across the driving range at the Coyotes. The bushes that had ringed the green had been cut down, and to the left and right, outside of the fence, scores of people were pressed against the iron bars—all of the guests who were not playing in the tournament as well as maids and maintenance men who seemed to have been left behind by the mysterious exodus. Rachel and the kids were in that crowd somewhere, and while he didn't want them to be here, on balance they were probably safer in public in the company of others than they would be alone in their suite.

Rockne the activities coordinator stood before them at the center of the driving range in all his savage glory. He was still wearing his coach's whistle and name tag, but other than that, the man bore no resemblance to anyone who could ever be gainfully employed. His shirt was a ripped polar bear pajama top, he wore a black skirt instead of pants, and around his neck, like Superman's cape, was safety-pinned a white towel sporting the monogrammed “R” of The Reata dyed with a red that could have been paint, could have been blood. All of his exposed skin had been smeared with dirt and emphasized with camouflage makeup.

The activities coordinator was attempting to explain the rules of the upcoming game, which was apparently a cross between golf, polo, soccer and dodge ball, but his words were hard to follow because the man kept facing east then west, addressing every other sentence to each opposing team. Lowell had a sneaking suspicion that the confusion was intentional. He got the gist of it, though. The Cactus Wrens and the Coyotes were to square off, each side supplied with a bucket of balls, and use the nine irons provided to hit the balls at each other, the intent to incapacitate their opponents. The team with the most men and women standing at the end of the game would be declared the winner.

There was a lengthy pause as two old men recruited from the audience carried out buckets of golf balls, placing one by each member of both teams. The Coyotes had a numerical advantage, Lowell noticed, counting. There were only fifteen Cactus Wrens as opposed to eighteen Coyotes. Glancing toward the onlookers on the other side of the fence, he saw women, children and quite a few men. How had they gotten out of this? he wondered. Hadn't the activities coordinator said that all male guests were required to participate? He was about to speak up and say something, when Rockne suddenly ran off the green to the side, standing in front of the closed gate.

The activities coordinator raised his hands, blew his whistle. “Go!” he yelled.

Balls began flying.

Lowell placed two on the tees before him and hit them randomly, haphazardly, unsure if they found a target and not really caring. He started to put down another ball, when one of the Coyotes' balls slammed into his side, nearly knocking the wind out of him. He fell to the ground, clutching his midsection, and another ball smashed into his shoe so hard that it stung his heel through the rubber sole.

Though he knew it was wrong, though he knew he shouldn't, though he knew he was behaving exactly as the activities coordinator wanted him to behave, he was filled with anger, hate and a sharp desire for revenge. Despite the pain in his side, he stood amid the hail of golf balls, placed two of his own balls on the tees in front of him and let fly. He did it again. And again. Repeating like clockwork, not watching where the balls went but aiming for the densest group of Coyotes, hoping by virtue of volume to hit one of them. He remembered what David had said about seeing his parents on the driving range and wondered if they were here somewhere among the players. Had they and the others David saw been given advance warning and a chance to practice? If so, it was an unfair advantage, and the thought of that made Lowell swing all the harder, the metal edge of his club striking the dimpled balls with a strength born of rage.