“And?” Gloria prodded.
“The doctor says it was a fetus. A dog fetus.”
A dog fetus? Somehow that was even more disturbing, and she tried to figure out by what strange confluence of circumstances an unborn animal could end up in the toilet of their hotel bathroom. She recalled the scene in her mind, and what troubled her most was all of the blood on the side of the bowl. It looked as though the miscarriage had taken place by someone sitting on the toilet, not by a person tossing the dog fetus into the commode. The only scenarios she could come up with were someone holding the dog above the toilet as it miscarried; a large dog such as a Saint Bernard actually sitting on the pot; or a pregnant woman expelling the dog fetus from her womb.
It was the latter that seemed to her most likely.
What in God’s name was she thinking? Her mind was concocting wild impossibilities, and the fact that she was seriously entertaining the idea that a woman could have been carrying a dog fetus—
and that the resort’s manager was a Sebastian Cabot impersonator
—spoke to her state of mind. This entire trip had been nothing but an unmitigated disaster, and she seemed to be reacting to it by going off on gruesome flights of fancy. The girl from the front desk was still prattling on, but Gloria wasn’t paying attention, and she said a short “Thank you” and hung up the phone.
Like the rest of this hellish vacation, their stay at The Reata was not working out as planned, and she turned toward Ralph. “I—” think we should go home, was what she had intended to say. But her husband was dead asleep on top of the covers, mouth open, and after the long trip from the Grand Canyon and all they’d been through since, she didn’t have the heart to wake him and tell him that they were going to pack and drive all the way to Tucson in order to find another hotel to spend the night. No, they’d stay here tonight and tomorrow they’d talk about cutting their stay short and heading back east.
She looked out the window.
She’d had enough of this damn desert to last her a lifetime.
Ten
Ryan didn’t like the indoor pool.
The outdoor pool was fine. In fact, it was great. Bigger than any pool he’d ever seen, with a fast slide and cool waterfall that looked like something from Disneyland, it had a huge shallow end big enough for him to swim across and not worry about drowning. He loved it. But the indoor pool, the lap pool, the pool reserved for health freaks and athletes was . . . well, creepy.
Their dad had told them to stay away from it, which he supposed was why his brothers had made him come, but now that they were here, Ryan wished he had stayed with his parents. There’d been something weird, something off, about their dad’s warning, as though he was concealing information from them, and they’d all picked up on it. Curtis and Owen, of course, had been intrigued, but Ryan had not liked it from the start, and if his brothers hadn’t threatened to cut him off for the rest of the vacation and not play with him, he would not have come with them.
But he had come and he was here, and he didn’t like it one bit. The weight room had been eerie enough with its rows of unused exercise equipment and fun house mirror walls, but the pool room beyond was even worse. The ceiling lights were dull and dim, the deep end of the water murky. There was about the chamber the aura of a tomb or temple, and even the twins’ usually loud voices were quiet and subdued.
He wished David had come with them. It wouldn’t seem so creepy with someone else here.
The cleaner was the spookiest thing. It slid slowly over the floor of the pool, ticking strangely, an odd-shaped blue object several shades darker than the pool bottom. It was tethered by hose to a machine hidden behind a low wall in the room’s southwest corner, the machine emitting a low buzzing hum. He imagined trying to swim in that pool with the ticking cleaner methodically gliding past him, and just the thought of it gave him goose bumps.
“How come dad didn’t want us to come here?” Curtis wondered aloud, although he must have had some idea because his voice was nowhere near as loud as usual.
“Maybe it’s deep and he thought we’d drown,” Owen said doubtfully. “There’s no lifeguard or any other people.”
“Maybe,” Curtis said. “Come on, let’s go.”
He’s scared, Ryan thought, and the realization left him feeling strangely energized; frightened but at the same time excited.
His brothers turned and started out of the pool room but Ryan remained behind for a moment, taking everything in, trying to understand exactly what it was that scared him about this place, that scared his brothers, and, possibly, their dad. Then he, too, turned away.
“Ryan.”
He stopped.
“Ryan.”
There were a whole host of noises in the room: the snick-click of the pool cleaner, the mechanical hum of its hidden motor, the low lapping of the water, the background vacuum of the air-conditioning system. By themselves, they seemed innocent and ordinary enough, but they masked another sound, a secret sound, a voice, and it seemed to Ryan that that was the reason those noises existed, to throw others off the track, to keep them from hearing what he was hearing.
“Ryan.”
Or perhaps the mechanical sounds themselves were creating the whispered name, each contributing an element, a syllable, to the word that he heard.
“Ryan.”
He looked around the room and saw . . . pictures. Images. Like a movie that was playing over the concrete reality before him. They weren’t transparent like the ghostly figures in movies but they weren’t fully realized and three-dimensional either, and he could definitely tell that they were not part of the physical world.
In the pool were naked men and women, good-looking well-fed individuals who did not look as though they’d ever had a day of adversity in their lives. Against the wall, other men and women, skinny and starved, shivered in terror. He knew it wasn’t real, but he had the feeling that it had been . . . or could be. This was ESP, he thought, and there was no shock or disbelief in the discovery, only an interested sort of bemusement. No one would believe him, he knew. His brothers always made fun of him for reading books about UFOs and psychic phenomena and unexplained oddities of nature. If he told them, they’d just think it was his imagination working overtime.
But it wasn’t his imagination, and he was surprised by how calm he was about the whole thing. Maybe all of those books and comics and magazines had prepared him for this, had opened his mind enough about the paranormal that he wasn’t completely thrown when he finally encountered it.
He turned his head slightly and the scene shifted, like one of those 3-D cards where you moved the card to a different angle and the figure changed to a different position. Now the pool was filled with blood rather than water, and sickly candles lined the walls of the room. He couldn’t smell the candles but he could tell from the dirty glow of the flames and the issuing black smoke that they gave off a foul stench. It looked like something out of the Middle Ages, but the pool cleaner was still moving methodically from one end to the other, looking black beneath the red liquid, its long snaking hose stretching back to the humming machine behind the small wall in the southwest corner.
As a test, he moved his head yet again, and once more the scene shifted. This time, the pool water was black, so black that its surface was shiny, reflective. The walls of the room were moldy and dripping with fungus. Only one light was on above the shallow end of the pool, and the rest of the room was engulfed in an inky darkness. Things were moving in that darkness, although whether they were animal, human or monster he could not tell. Whatever they were, they were scary, and he moved his head in an effort to get rid of them, but the scene held. Quickly, he swiveled his head to the left and to the right, trying to dislodge the view before him and shift to another less threatening picture, but it was of no use.
White figures emerged from the murk in front of him, skinny wraithlike forms with no discernable faces, only blurred blank visages. They were walking—or rather gliding—across t
he top of the shiny black water, and he didn’t know how he knew this but he did: their touch meant death.
He stumbled backward, trying to get away, but there were too many of them and they were moving too quickly.
One of them reached for him.
Grabbed him.
And then he was looking into Owen’s puzzled face. His brother had seized his arm, and was pulling him through the doorway. “Are you all right?” Owen asked, and then, almost as an afterthought, “What were you looking at? Did you see something?”
A certain quality in his brother’s tone of voice made Ryan want to tell him, made him think Owen might understand and believe him, but at the last second he shook his head. “No,” he said. “Nothing.”
“You sure? You looked like . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence.
“No,” Ryan said.
“Come on, then. Let’s go. We’re hungry.”
In the room, Ryan retrieved his notebook from where he’d hidden it beneath his underwear, and brought both it and a pen into the bathroom with him, locking the door. He’d thought of an idea on the walk back. He was going to write his own book: Haunted Hotels of the United States. Maybe someone had written one like it already, but no one had written the book he was going to write. No one had had the experience he had just had, and he quickly jotted down a record of what had happened by the indoor pool.
He was going to be a psychic investigator.
Never before had a career seemed so attainable to him—and so right. He’d toyed with the idea of being an archeologist when he grew up (he liked dinosaurs) or a director (he liked movies), but neither of those had been realistic aspirations. This, though . . .
This was real.
He knew about psychic phenomena. Knew a lot about it. And now he had ESP besides. He’d study The Reata while they were here, write a chapter about it, then move in to another haunted hotel. If he could just get his parents to take vacations at resorts and motels and inns that had a history of ghostly disturbances, he could use his own psychic powers to pinpoint the reasons for the disturbances and then write about them. He’d probably be the youngest author ever of one of those books, and he imagined himself going to Borders or Barnes and Noble for a book signing, autographing the hundreds of books that his fans would buy.
And why stop at hotels? He could do haunted restaurants, haunted national parks, a whole series of haunted vacation books.
The fear he had felt by the indoor pool, that overwhelming feeling of dread and mortal danger had disappeared with distance, replaced by an excited anticipation. He still remembered what had happened, though, and he knew that he would have to be careful while he was here. They all would.
That meant that they needed to stay away from the exercise pool. His dad was right about that.
What had his father seen in there?
And there were probably quite a few other places on the resort’s grounds that should be avoided. But he had faith in his ability to pick out those trouble spots. The Reata might be a full-fledged spook house, but he and his family would be safe here.
As long as his ESP worked.
Eleven
This was preposterous. They had made reservations ahead of time and should have been able to walk to an open table immediately upon arriving. Instead, they were stuck in a cramped antechamber waiting for a group of diners to vacate the table that should have been saved for them. If they were not stranded here in this remote corner of the wilderness, Gloria would have taken her business elsewhere and let the management know exactly how she felt about being treated so shabbily. But the Saguaro Room was the only real restaurant for perhaps hundreds of miles, so they were obliged to comply with its chaotic reservation system and put up with its disrespectful conduct.
She shifted in her seat, looked about, and found that she was being stared at by a rather handsome middle-aged man standing to the side of the closed door who was obviously waiting for a table as well. He smiled as he caught her eye. “Did you call ahead, too?”
“This is absurd,” Gloria said loudly, hoping the wait staff could hear. “Apparently they don’t know the meaning of the word ‘reservation’ here.”
The man chuckled as he walked over. “No, they don’t.” He nodded at her, held out a hand to Ralph. “Phillip Emmons,” he said.
“I’m Ralph Pedwin. This is my wife, Gloria.”
“Pleased to meet you.” He remained on his feet next to their bench, his focus on the hostess standing like a sentinel at her podium between the waiting area and the dining room. “I’ve been here for a half hour already.” He made a slight motion to the left. “That family was here before me. They didn’t make reservations, though, and if they get in before I do, I am going to be royally pissed.” He smiled slightly at Gloria. “Pardon my French.”
“Our reservations were for six thirty,” she said. “We got here exactly on time. That was fifteen minutes ago.”
“Mine were for six twenty.”
There was an awkward pause.
“So what do you do?” Ralph asked.
“For a living? I’m a writer.”
A writer? That piqued Gloria’s interest. “What do you write?” she asked. “Maybe I’ve read something of yours.”
“Suspense novels. Thrillers.” He correctly read the reaction on her face and smiled. “Probably not up your alley.”
“I generally read biographies,” she admitted.
Ralph chuckled. “So are you here for a little R and R?”
Emmons continued to smile but suddenly there seemed to be very little amusement in it. “Not rest and relaxation. But if you mean research and review, then yes I am.”
“Research? You mean for one of your books?”
“Not exactly.”
Gloria looked at him. “Well, what are you researching, Mr. Emmons?”
This time he did not smile. “You don’t want to know.”
A shiver passed through her, and in that brief second she reflected on all that had happened since their arrival. He was right. She didn’t want to know. But she had to know. If it was something to do with The Reata, something that might impact their stay here—however short that might be—she needed to find out. “Why?” she asked.
He crouched down next to their bench and looked at them quite seriously, lowering his voice. “Get out,” he suggested. “As soon as you can. Tomorrow morning, check out of The Reata, drive to Tucson and book a room at Westward Look or Ventana Canyon. Anyplace but here.”
Ralph snorted.
“Why?” Gloria asked again, both intrigued and a little frightened. This man was a stranger, and she wasn’t sure she should believe anything he had to say, but he obviously had the same trepidation she had about The Reata.
“Trust me,” Emmons said. “This is a bad place.”
“Bad how?”
“You don’t want to know,” he said again.
“Pedwin,” the hostess announced, picking up two menus and a wine list from the shelf behind her podium. “Party of two?”
“That’s us.” Ralph stood, nodding at Emmons. “Nice to meet you.”
“Maybe we’ll see you tomorrow,” Gloria tried experimentally.
“You won’t see me. I’ll be gone. And I’d advise you to do the same.”
She wanted to talk to him more, wanted to ask him why exactly he was leaving, but the hostess was walking away from them and Ralph was ushering her into the dining room, and Phillip Emmons stepped aside to let another couple take the bench seat they’d vacated.
The Saguaro Room was crowded and they were led to a small table for two in the center of the floor. The décor was nice, the ambience casual, the menu surprisingly eclectic. She wasn’t quite sure it was worth the wait, but being seated and served mollified her a bit, and she ordered shrimp and crab meat enchiladas (when in Rome) while Ralph requested prime rib with potato leek soup.
She wanted to talk about The Reata while they waited for the food to arrive, about what was wrong with this place
, about the dog fetus in the toilet and Sebastian Cabot and the writer’s suggestion that they leave, but Ralph immediately changed the subject when he saw where the conversation was headed, and it occurred to her that Ralph was afraid to talk about The Reata. At least out here, in public. His attitude made her more apprehensive, and when he switched the topic to another, blander, subject she willingly and gratefully went along.
Their meals arrived, beautifully presented and smelling heavenly. Color-coordinated Fiesta plates were placed before them filled with generous helpings of artistically prepared food, and though they hadn’t ordered any drinks, had merely been sipping water with lemon from the crystal goblets provided, Ralph decided to order one of the rare imported lagers from the beer menu on the flip side of the wine list. The waiter left to get Ralph’s drink, and Gloria picked up her fork, preparing to cut into her enchilada.
When she noticed something out of the corner of her eye.
A small puddle of blood between the steak and mashed potatoes on Ralph’s plate.
She froze, her gaze moving quickly over the rest of the dishes, and saw a dark blotch of thick liquid at the bottom of his bowl with a few bubble-like spots floating higher in the translucent soup. She looked down at her enchiladas and saw that her fork had sliced through a pool of liquid that was slightly redder and less viscous than the surrounding sauce. She tried not to gag but she couldn’t help thinking about that clotted horror in the toilet, and, clutching her handkerchief to her mouth, she ran for the ladies’ room. She made it just in time, regurgitating today’s meals and snacks all the way back to her Grand Canyon breakfast, a seemingly endless spew of vomit issuing from her mouth in great retching spurts. Still hunched over, she grabbed a handful of toilet paper from the roll and used it to wipe her lips and chin before flushing the toilet and stumbling over to the sink, where she splashed water on her face and rinsed her mouth.
How on earth did blood get into their food? And why weren’t any of the other patrons complaining? Had the chef accidentally cut his hand while preparing their dishes and then decided to let the plates go out as is instead of remaking the meal? Or had he not noticed that he was bleeding, only discovering it after the fact, after the food had gone out and it was too late to recall it? She thought of what that writer, Phillip Emmons, had told them—
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