Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds

by Fiction River

  He introduced himself so that he could check in. She handed him an old-fashioned metal key with a beautifully carved wooden fob attached. The fob declared his room number in large font.

  He had no idea that ancient keys like this still existed in working hotels.

  “They’re waiting for you in the River Room,” she said.

  He pocketed the key when her sentence registered.

  “River?” he repeated, not liking the word. He knew there had to be water up here, but he had come to associate water with trouble—at least in Oregon.

  “Well,” she said, her smile widening, “we couldn’t very well call it the River Styx Room, now could we?”

  His heart rate sped up. Why the hell would anyone name a room after the river that in Greek mythology divided the living world from the world of the dead?

  He hoped it was some interior designer’s twisted imagination.

  “Up the stairs and to your right,” she said, as if she believed he hesitated because he was lost, not because his stomach had knotted to the point he felt queasy.

  He gave her an insincere smile, then went up the flat wooden stairs and turned left. The hallway opened into a maze of rooms, but he could see the River Room at the very end, not because of the large sign above the door (he had initially missed that) but because people milled inside.

  He probably should have ducked into his room first, brushed his hair, and checked his shirt for lint. But he had decided somewhere between River and River Styx that this job wasn’t for him. So it didn’t matter how he looked.

  As he walked in the door, six people turned in his direction, including four women. Not the town fathers then, but the town parents. A woman walked over to him. She had her magnificent blonde hair gathered on top of her head in some kind of elaborate coiffure that he hadn’t seen outside of a photo spread in a magazine.

  “Chief Retsler,” she said. “I’m Ron Bronly. Welcome to Marble Village.”

  Okay. He tried not to let his surprise show. One of the drawbacks of e-mail, apparently, were the assumptions. Retsler had imagined Ron Bronly as a comfortable middle-aged, middle-income man with a slightly round belly and a lack of hair.

  He hadn’t expected a woman as attractive as this one. In addition to her careful hairstyle, she wore just enough make-up to jazz up her Oregon-casual outfit of tan slacks and tailored blouse. The hand she extended to him was manicured.

  He took her hand, shook, and repeated that insincere smile. Everyone else looked more like what he expected. Three somewhat tired-looking women in jeans and jackets, two middle-aged men whom he would have taken for Ron Bronly if Ron Bronly hadn’t introduced herself.

  “Thank you for coming all this way,” Bronly said. Her voice was smooth, buttery, but it had a bit of an accent. Bryn Mawr, unless he missed his guess. Very Katharine Hepburn.

  “I was curious,” he said. “I hadn’t been to the Chalet before. I’ve only been here a few minutes, but it looks like the restore was lovingly done.”

  He could afford to be nice. It didn’t hurt that, in this case, nice was also honest.

  “We’re proud of it,” she said. “It’s the jewel of our little community.”

  “Have you had a chance to drive around?” one of the men asked. He wore one of those stick-on name badges that read “Martin.” Everyone else had a name badge as well, including Bronly. Hers read “Rhonda.”

  No one offered Retsler a name badge. Of course, he was the only stranger here. Apparently, they were trying to make him feel at home.

  The spread on the back table also should have made him feel at home. Pastries, coffee, all kinds of non-alcoholic beverages. He glanced at them, saw that the group had already partaken of some of it. He wasn’t really hungry, more tired. And he wanted to get this over with.

  “I came directly here,” Retsler said.

  “Pity,” Martin said. “You’d be surprised at Marble Village. Most Oregonians expect some place like Sisters, when really, it’s a lot more like Monterey, California.”

  “Without the ocean,” said the other man whose nametag read “Stanley.”

  Retsler trotted out his insincere smile for the third time. “I’ve done my stint around oceans.”

  “Yes,” said one of the women. Her name tag read “Anna,” which somehow suited her serious mien. “We spoke to the folks at Whale Rock. They would love you back.”

  “I’m sure the new chief is doing just fine,” he said.

  “Why did you leave?” Bronly asked.

  He looked at her. Direct. To the point. Usually he liked that in a person. Here, though, it made him uncomfortable. How could he explain that the world he thought existed didn’t? Whale Rock wasn’t so much a place he disliked as a place that confused him and made him question everything about himself.

  “I was ready to move on,” he said, and it sounded true. It was true on some level, but not quite true in the way he wanted it to be.

  She nodded, as if the answer didn’t satisfy her. “And what’s wrong with Montana?”

  He smiled—and this time the smile was real. “Nothing really. In fact, as I drove up here, I realized I was probably wasting your time—”

  “Excuse me.” The woman from the front desk peered into the room. Her eyes were wide, and her tone seemed a bit panicked. “I’m sorry, but it’s back.”

  “Dammit,” Martin said and took off at a run. The others followed, leaving Retsler behind.

  He hadn’t thought such conservative people could run like that, especially Bronly who wore heels too high for anyone but an actress to move quickly in. Yet she had managed.

  With just a few words, the entire group seemed to have forgotten him, and just as he was getting to the important stuff. Maybe he shouldn’t feel so guilty.

  But he couldn’t help it. Nor could he help himself. He had to know what “it” was.

  He walked quickly into the hallway, half expecting someone to stop him. But no one did. One of the side doors stood wide open, and he heard loud, panicked voices coming from that direction.

  He looked in, saw a flight of stairs that had probably been designed for employees but now modern regulations made it a mandatory exit from this floor.

  He took the steps down—wooden also, and not as well reinforced as those in the lobby—and found himself on the ground level on the far side, with a door that opened toward the Caves (or so the hand-lettered sign said).

  It felt like he had entered the 1930s. More Old Growth wood, expertly carved and polished to a sheen, and through an interior door made of a single pane of glass, a diner the likes of which he hadn’t seen since he was a kid.

  No one manned the counters made of that same Old Growth wood, but voices echoed from the back. Voices he recognized on such short acquaintance.

  “…should do.”

  “…not like it sees us.”

  “…the mess, though.”

  He followed the sound to a swinging door, and pushed it open.

  The six town parents, a man in a chef’s uniform, and two waitresses stood in front of a back door. Beside them, steel tables had fallen on their sides, and the floor was covered in flour.

  They all peered out the back door, and it wasn’t until Retsler got close that he saw why. Prints from a pair of bare feet led down the path toward a rock outcropping.

  “Problem?” he asked.

  Everyone jumped. Everyone. He’d never seen that before.

  Bronly turned around, and it was her turn to give him an insincere smile. “Nothing we can’t handle,” she said.

  “Tourists? Vandals? Is this the kind of crime I’d be handling if I came here?” he asked. Not that he was planning to come here, but he hated it when people deliberately hid information from him. Perhaps that was one of the reasons he became a cop.

  “It’s not really a crime,” Martin started to say as the chef said, “It’s my fault. If I hadn’t moved the table…”

  “But you like the table there,” one of the waitresses said. �
��It makes for a more efficient kitchen.”

  “A more efficient kitchen is one you can cook in,” the chef said, and sighed. He was older—that indeterminate age some men got, where it was impossible to say if they were 35 or 75. If Retsler had to guess, he’d say the chef was closer to the upper limit than the lower one, but only because of the man’s calm. “I just shouldn’t mess with it.”

  “We’re going to have to mess with it,” Stanley said. “That grill has to come out. We can’t keep repairing it. And then what’ll happen? Will the new one get trashed?”

  “Someone want to tell me what’s going on?” Retsler asked.

  “Nothing important,” Martin said, giving him an insincere smile.

  “It was important enough to interrupt our meeting at a run,” Retsler said.

  They all looked uncomfortable, the kind of uncomfortable that people often got with outsiders whom they felt would not understand. Retsler’s heart sank. He didn’t like the feeling he had, but he was a cop and a damned good one, and it looked like they needed something, so he pushed, even though his instincts warned him against it.

  “Let me take a look,” he said, and before anyone could argue, he followed the flour footprints out of the kitchen. They padded beside the newly installed stone path, which he thought odd, considering the owner of those feet had been barefoot. The stone should have felt better against naked skin than the sandy rocks beside the path.

  “Chief Retsler, please.”

  He could hear Bronly behind him, but he also knew that she wouldn’t be able to keep up with him, not in those heels on this incline.

  The path wound into the trees and away from the parking lot, toward the mountain itself.

  The footprints remained visible, even though the flour should have dispersed after a few yards. He felt a tingling he hadn’t experienced since his last years on the Coast.

  He wasn’t going to like this. He really should have heeded their advice and turned around.

  A six-foot-high mesh fence covered the path and disappeared behind boulders that had clearly fallen off the mountainside. Behind the mesh fence, grass grew summer tall, nearly up to Retsler’s chest. The grass blocked part of a well-worn dirt path that led to a boarded off opening into the mountainside.

  That denied entrance into the Oregon Caves. The Park Service had actually boarded it all off.

  There was no easy access through the mesh fence either. A large sign posted to the right stated that the entrance to the Oregon Caves was a half mile away, with a map provided in case the wanderer forgot about all the signs he’d seen coming up to the Chalet.

  The footprints continued on the other side of the mesh. They followed the path all the way to the boarded opening of the Caves. From this distance, it looked like the footprints went into the Caves itself.

  Retsler swallowed hard, that knot in his stomach so twisted that he felt vaguely ill. He forced himself to look at the ground underneath the mesh fence.

  Sure enough, one of the footprints went under the mesh, half inside the fence and half out, as if the fence wasn’t even there.

  He closed his eyes for half a minute. What he saw was impossible. He knew it was impossible, he hated that it was impossible, and yet it was there in front of him, which meant that what he saw was very possible indeed. Retsler just had to figure out what actually happened.

  He opened his eyes. The footprint remained. Dammit. He grabbed the fence with his right hand. The mesh was cool against his palm. He shook the metal and it rattled, but it didn’t give. He’d hoped that it was rusted, broken off somewhere that he couldn’t quite see, and easy to move and replace. But of course, the simplest and most logical explanation wasn’t the one that faced him at the moment.

  “Chief Retsler, really.” Ron’s voice came from behind him, a bit breathless and a little exasperated. “You don’t need to investigate this.”

  He turned without letting go of the fence.

  Her perfectly coiffed hair had slipped its bun, half of it trailing down the side of her now-red face. Beads of sweat had formed on her collarbone, and sweat stained the area around her armpits. Brambles and leaves clung to the hem of her pants. She no longer looked like a society matron, but like a woman who would have been a lot more comfortable in sweats and blue jeans, a glass of water in her left hand.

  “I don’t have to investigate,” he said, “because you know what this is.”

  Her mouth thinned. “I told you. It’s nothing, really. Not what we wanted to talk with you about.”

  “Nothing?” he asked. “Something did about one-hundred dollars damage to that kitchen, maybe more considering the cleanup time. Then there’s the problem of the grill and the fact that your chef doesn’t feel like he can put anything in his kitchen the way he wants it. Now, unless I miss my guess, the Chalet is already operating at a loss. You want to tell me that you can write off an expense, even a small one, that seems to occur on a regular basis?”

  “I didn’t say this had happened before,” she said.

  “No, your receptionist did when she came into our meeting room,” Retsler said. “She said that she was sorry but that ‘it’ was back.”

  Ron’s eyes widened. She glanced over her shoulders, but the remaining town parents hadn’t followed her, or if they had, they were moving at an incredibly glacial pace.

  Since she clearly wasn’t going to say anything else, Retsler continued. “It’s also notable that your receptionist didn’t give the vandal a gender. I thought maybe an animal when I saw the overturned table, before I saw the footprints. After all, we don’t call other people ‘it’ very often, now do we?”

  Bronly brought a hand to her destroyed bun, realized that it was falling apart, and pulled out the pins. She shook her head, letting her hair fall. The hair wasn’t blond like he’d thought, but silver. With her hair at shoulder length, she looked younger than she had a moment ago.

  She still didn’t seem willing to answer him.

  “Why don’t you be up-front with me?” he said, trying to keep his tone even. “When you set up this job, you didn’t want an Oregonian. You didn’t even want an average chief of police. You could have done just fine with some local hire, maybe a disgruntled park service worker or someone who had retired up here and just needed the extra money for a few hours of his time every day. That is, that would be all you needed if things were normal around Marble Village, which they’re not, right, Ron?”

  He couldn’t help himself: he had to emphasize her odd misleading nickname, maybe to keep the other anger in check, the one that rose whenever he felt both embarrassed and betrayed.

  She held up a hand, as if her palm could block his words. “We were doing a legitimate hire.”

  Were. He wondered if she even knew she had used the past tense.

  “No one could understand why we needed someone full-time. And most people, they don’t like how remote it is up here,” she said. “You’re perfect. You’ve been chief of police in two remote towns, one here in Oregon. That’s all we’re looking at.”

  Yet her gaze didn’t meet his.

  “Uh-huh,” he said in the back of his throat, that Oregon acknowledgement that was both dismissive and somewhat rude, something he hadn’t done since he moved to Montana. “You’ve had Hamilton Denne up here, haven’t you?”

  Retsler had worked with Denne in Whale Rock. Denne was the Seavy County Coroner, and a local who first introduced Retsler to the idea of the supernatural. That discovery had strained their friendship. Retsler’s move might have broken it entirely. He hadn’t tried to find out.

  Bronly blinked, then took a deep breath. “We had a mysterious death a few months ago. The Oregon Crime Lab recommended Doctor Denne.”

  Retsler hadn’t heard Hamilton called Doctor, maybe ever. “A mysterious death. What did Hamilton tell you that you had? A fairy? A troll? Maybe some kind of orc?”

  She shook her head. “No, no, the victim was human.”

  “Really?” Retsler asked. “Then wh
y was Hamilton here? He likes things that resemble space aliens.”

  That wasn’t exactly fair. Denne had saved Retsler’s butt those last few years in Whale Rock, and had somehow kept him sane. But Denne did like the stranger things in the world. He found them fascinating.

  Retsler just wanted them to go away.

  “We had a desiccated corpse,” she said softly.

  “Which, given the dry conditions, the caves, and the heat in the summer, shouldn’t be that unusual up here,” Retsler said.

  “Except that he was fine a few hours before. Alive, laughing, and fat as a man can be and still be considered strong and tough.”

  She had known the corpse, and Retsler had been rude. He felt a flush build around his ears. He willed it away.

  “I’m sorry,” he said in his formal voice. “I didn’t realize you had known the deceased.”

  She shrugged, blinked again, and he realized she was fighting tears.

  “We lost a few others like that,” she said, deliberately ignoring his sympathy. “Tourists, it turned out. Hikers, two of them. When we found those bodies, we thought like you just did, that they had mummified because of the heat and the dry conditions, and the alkaline nature of some of the stone up here—God, we had a thousand explanations.”

  “And none of them right,” Retsler said, making it a statement instead of a question. Statements kept people talking; questions made them stop.

  “It was a thing.” She shuddered. Apparently, she’d seen that thing, whatever it was. She held up her hands. “Long story. Not appropriate at the moment.”

  “But Hamilton helped you identify that thing,” Retsler said.

  “Oh, yes, after Chief Davis’s death,” she said.

  Retsler’s fingers tightened on the mesh. The metal cut into his skin but he didn’t let go. “The chief was the desiccated corpse?”

  She nodded. “He was heading up Mount Elijah to investigate a cougar sighting last we heard. Just two hours before someone found him on the road. Like that.”