The Resort

by Bentley Little

  “For The Reata!” the activities coordinator shouted.

  “For The Reata!” the Roadrunners responded.

  The servers said nothing, kept walking.

  This was not the way she wanted to die, Gloria thought through the fog in her brain. She scanned the crescent ring of faces for Ralph, did not see him and tried to call out his name. This time no sound came out, only a dry croak that instigated a coughing spasm.

  Standing in front of her, the activities coordinator was no longer the activities coordinator but her mother, her mother as she’d looked on her deathbed, all deep-seated staring eyes and pulled wrinkled skin. “It’s time to join your sister,” the old woman said with a creaky whine, and there was a spreading stain of blood on the crotch of her flowered dress.

  Gloria slid out of the plastic chair onto the floor, closing her eyes so tightly that tears squeezed out of them. She opened her eyes, and her mother was gone, replaced once again by the cowboy-garbed activities coordinator. Next to him, in a queue, the servers waited, hatchets raised at identical levels, blades forward, their chains stretched at angles that made them look like marionettes.

  “Prepare the offering!” the activities coordinator cried.

  “Prepare the offering!” the crowd echoed.

  The servers started forward one by one, chains clanking.

  “No!” Gloria tried to scream, but again there was only the croak and cough. She looked wildly around, and the last thing she saw, before the first hatchet sliced off a section of her upper arm and the agony began, was Ralph in the center of the crowd, pressed between two topless women, smiling.

  Twenty-two

  The film festival was nothing to write home about—although it was Patrick’s job to do exactly that. Neither as commercial as Toronto nor as indie as Sundance, it fell through the cracks, with so-called “premieres” of pictures that had not yet hit Tucson or Tulsa but for which critics in New York, LA and Chicago had already received review screenings, and several sophomore follow-ups to debut features that had not made a dent in the marketplace last year. He attended a morning showing of a moderately interesting, sexually graphic thriller, then afterward interviewed the Polish director and the American lead actress with whom the director was now romantically involved. After a lunch of a dry turkey sandwich and Sprite, he watched an interminable coming-of-age story with absolutely zero sense of structure or pacing made by a young African-American woman from Atlanta, but he liked the director for facing off against an overwhelmingly hostile audience for a Q&A session and ended up giving her a moderate rating on his festival scorecard.

  He was supposed to see two HBO-financed documentaries this evening, but he found himself thinking of Vicki and her friends, realized how much he’d rather be sitting by the pool, sipping margaritas with them and skipped out on the night’s festivities. Townsend would never know and, besides, he had more than enough info for two articles, maybe three.

  Familiarity had not made the drive through the desert any shorter or less grueling, and the sun was setting by the time he pulled up to The Reata’s guardhouse, creating long strange shadows on the desert floor, reflecting orange fire from the windows of the terraced resort. His parking spot was gone, stolen by a Cadillac SUV—indeed all of the spaces in his lot were taken, forcing him to drive to the next lot down. Here, too, there were no empty spots, and after cruising the small parking area in front of the next building, he decided to head back to the main lot in front of the lobby.

  He pulled up next to a light pole, removed his briefcase, locked the car and turned on the alarm. It was a long walk back to his room if he followed the outer sidewalk next to the road, so he took a shortcut through the lobby, hiking down the long steps to the pool area. He opened the gate and heard a familiar voice call out.

  “Yoo ho! Mr. Schlaegel!”

  It was Vicki. She was where he hoped she’d be—by the pool—and wearing what he hoped she’d be wearing—a thong bikini. The sky was now almost completely dark, but strong halogens in the palm trees bathed the pool area in an artificial daylight, and the desert heat had not yet dissipated, making it perfect for swimming. He walked over to where she lay on a lounge chair between two other equally attractive women in equally skimpy bathing outfits.

  “I was hoping you’d come by,” she said. “Oh, these are my friends. April and Madison.”

  The other two women nodded, smiled.

  “Hello.”

  “Hi.”

  Madison, he thought. There was a whole generation of Madisons out there named after the mermaid in Splash. That made her about twenty or so. A fine age. He glanced toward the pool which seemed unusually crowded for this hour. “What’s going on here? Some kind of party?”

  “They’re going to be showing a kiddie flick,” April said.

  “What’s the movie?” he asked.

  Vicki groaned at her friend. “You shouldn’t have said that. Now he’s going to want to stay and watch.”

  Patrick laughed. “No. No, I won’t. I was just curious. I’ve been watching movies all day. A little quiet time right now actually sounds pretty good to me.”

  “Some Disney movie,” the friend said. “It doesn’t start for an hour or two, but I think people want to get good seats.”

  “There is another pool,” Vicki suggested. “It’s in the gym or the fitness center or whatever they’re calling it.” She smiled slyly. “It’s nice and private.”

  “I, uh, need to go back to my room and drop all this stuff off.” He held up his briefcase. “And get my swim trunks.”

  Vicki stood, still smiling. “No you don’t.”

  If this was heading where he thought it was heading, he was more than happy to follow.

  She casually took his hand while her friends picked up their sunglasses and lotion from the small tables between the lounge chairs.

  “Are you really on TV?” Madison asked, adjusting her top and then wrapping a towel around her waist.

  C cups, he thought. “I was,” he told her.

  Madison smiled.

  Vicki held his hand more tightly, drew closer to his side. “Let’s go. It’s getting crowded.”

  The women slipped into sandals and they started walking, passing the snack bar where a line was beginning to form, and maneuvering around the people who were rearranging their chairs in order to better position themselves for the movie. Patrick unlocked the gate at the opposite end of the pool and held it open as a family of five, all carrying rafts and closed plastic drink cups, passed through.

  They headed down the sidewalk. “Vicki’s a huge movie fan,” April said. “She was so excited to meet you. She’s been talking about it all day.”

  “You have the perfect job,” Vicki sighed. “I’d give my eyeteeth to be able to watch movies all day and give my opinion about them. That’s just so great.”

  “What do you do?” Patrick asked politely.

  “We’re fashion models,” Madison declared.

  April snorted.

  “You could be,” Patrick told them.

  “Thank you,” Vicki said. “But we work at the capital in Phoenix. Madison’s an aide, and April and I are administrative assistants.”

  “That sounds like fun.”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  He grinned. “All right. It doesn’t. And I do have a cool job.”

  Vicki elbowed him playfully. “You don’t have to rub it in.”

  He was glad he’d skipped out on those documentaries. He was pretty sure he was going to get lucky tonight.

  “Do you ever get to meet movie stars?” Madison asked.

  They walked through the darkening twilight to the exercise center. Patrick had no idea where it was, but Vicki and her friends seemed to know the way. Which made sense. Judging by their bodies, they probably exercised quite a bit. The three of them kept asking about his job, Madison wanting backstage dish about celebrities, April curious about the perks of the job—like who paid for his trip out here—and Vicki wanting to kno
w his opinion of several recent releases. Although Madison was wrapped in a towel and April had slipped into a pair of shorts and an open shirt, Vicki was just wearing her tiny bathing suit, and he wondered if that was intentional.

  He was enjoying himself, on track for a fun flirtatious evening, but the mood died as soon as they entered the pool room. Patrick was not big on vibes or auras or any of that New Age mumbo jumbo but this place had a feeling to it, a heavy tangible oppressiveness that blanketed them the second they stepped foot through the doorway. He’d had an inkling of it as they passed through the empty weight room, an almost subliminal impression that he was in the antechamber of some dark lair, but nothing could have prepared him for the feeling of dread he experienced immediately upon entering the pool room. He looked around at the shadowed concrete walls dappled with reflected ripples from the water, at the deep end of the pool, murky and unilluminated by the dim ceiling lights above. Everything was sound-tracked by the ticking undertone of the pool sweeper and the humming of its hidden motor.

  Cat People, he thought.

  He was pretty sure that the plan had been to go skinny-dipping, something he was all in favor of, but that idea seemed to have immediately lost its appeal. Madison readjusted the towel around her to make it tighter, April shivered visibly.

  “Let’s go to the bar,” Vicki said, subdued, and turned around without waiting for an answer. They passed back through the empty weight room. There was no argument, no discussion, as though they all knew the reason for the retreat but did not want to speak of it. Which was, Patrick thought, exactly the case.

  This time they did not talk as they walked through the night toward the Grille, whose rowdy reassuring sounds of life as they approached seemed to dispel some of the gloomy silence that had settled over them. Once inside, they felt free to speak again, though tentatively at first, like people who had not spoken for a long time and were not sure they remembered how. Patrick found them a table with three chairs and then borrowed another chair from the table of an oblivious couple drunkenly arguing. By the time the waitress finally came—after Patrick had reached out and grabbed her hand, practically pulling her over—most of the psychic residue from the exercise pool had worn off, and they were once again trying to recapture the light flippant tone of earlier, though he found something desperate and hopeless in the effort. He asked for a beer while all three women ordered margaritas.

  He looked at them after the waitress left. “You’re not old enough to drink, are you?”

  “She is,” Madison said cattily, pointing at Vicki.

  Vicki slapped her hand down. “Thanks. For the record, Madison is almost twenty-one, although no one ever cards her. April is twenty-five. And I am . . . a few years older.”

  “Closer to my age,” Patrick offered.

  “Exactly!”

  They tried to keep it up, tried to get back that easygoing flirtatiousness, but it felt false and fell flat. Insults and annoyances crept into the conversation as the alcohol level increased. He’d been hoping to spend the night with Vicki. Hell, if he played his cards right, he thought maybe her two friends would even come along as well. But he ended up leaving the bar alone and frustrated while the three of them, drunk, giggling and falling all over each other, sang some truly offensive and racist karaoke songs.

  He stepped into the night, the air still and warm and vacuum dry, smelling of sand. He’d been drinking only beer and had kept his alcohol intake down, not wanting to impede his sexual performance, but even though that wasn’t going to happen, Patrick was glad he wasn’t drunk. He wanted to keep his wits about him. He thought of the night before, the snakes and wolves, but the memory was dream-like and unreal, like something he’d seen in a film rather than experienced firsthand.

  He still needed to work on those articles and e-mail them to Townsend before tomorrow’s deadline so they’d make it into the Monday edition, and he hurried back to his room, on the lookout all the way for the odd and unusual, but grateful as he hurried down the homestretch that he had not encountered anything along the way. He took out his keycard, unlocked his door.

  There was something in his room.

  Patrick felt it the second he walked through the doorway and flipped the light switch. His first reaction was to turn tail and run, to get out of that room and head straight for the lobby to ask for help. But he told himself he was being paranoid. He had no proof, only a gut feeling, and not only weren’t those admissible in court, they were pretty well discredited everywhere else as well. And after this morning, no matter how casually he’d handled the spider situation, he didn’t want to seem like a whiny frightened—fairy

  —child.

  The air conditioner was on, had been on all day, but the room still smelled faintly of minty poison, so he knew someone had been by to spray for bugs. Hopefully that had killed the spider—although he could easily imagine the creature escaping through whatever secret hole it had used to get in, remaining outside until the poison dissipated, then returning for revenge.

  Revenge?

  He’d been watching too many movies, spending too much time in darkened theaters staring at screen fictions and not enough time living in the real world.

  There was the sound of crinkling cellophane from the bathroom.

  Patrick held his breath, his heart lurching in his chest. “Who’s there?” he called, and his voice sounded far wimpier than intended. “Get out of my room.” He held his briefcase out in front of him.

  There was movement in the bathroom mirror.

  He was looking toward the closet at the time so he didn’t see what it was, saw only a blur of dark movement from the corner of his eye, but that was enough to make him jump, enough to accelerate the speed of the blood careening through his veins. He did a quick visual swipe of the room, then concentrated on the mirror, but saw nothing.

  Alien.

  The image came unbidden to his mind, though he knew it was childish and not at all realistic. Alien had been one of the seminal moviegoing experiences of his childhood, and while he affected a more blasé sophistication these days, the fact remained that Giger’s monster had scared the living shit out of him, had given him intense nightmares for a month, and even now lurked at the edge of his subconscious whenever he was alone in the dark.

  There was more crinkling cellophane, the shift of heavy movement.

  This was beyond his capacity to handle. He needed to call someone else in here. But still he was loath to cry wolf, and holding the briefcase in front of him for protection, he changed his position, creeping slowly forward and to the left in order to better see around the corner into the other half of the bathroom. There was the second part of the outer vanity and sink, the edge of the inner doorway that led into the shower, tub and toilet area. But that was as far as he could see, and no matter how he adjusted his position, he could not see into the inner room without going closer.

  That he was unwilling to do.

  He imagined himself creeping silently forward, peeking carefully around the corner—and then grabbed by a slimy bullet-headed monster and eaten.

  No thanks.

  He took a step backward, and next door the party suddenly started. Dogs barking and everything. It was just as it had been last night, and the eerie thing was that it arrived full force, not growing in volume as layers were added but starting at its peak, as though it were on tape and the recording had just been turned on.

  That was possible, and he wondered if all of this wasn’t part of some bizarre attempt to drive him crazy, some Let’s Scare Jessica to Death situation. But he thought of the wolves and the snakes and that creepy exercise pool, and rejected that idea immediately. There would be no point to it. And besides, he was sure that whatever was happening at this resort was not the result of human intention.

  Through the wall, someone screamed, and there was once again that muffled gunshot sound.

  The noise of the party gave him cover and gave him confidence, and he took three quick steps forward to l
ook around the corner into the bathroom, ready to bolt instantly if need be. But there was nothing in the tub or on the toilet, and behind the clouded glass, the shower stall looked clear. The only other possibility was that someone or something could be hiding behind the open door, but he could see through the crack next to the hinges that that was not the case.

  Emboldened, he walked into the outer part of the bathroom past the vanity and the sink. “Hey!” he called. There was no answer, no noise but the sounds of the party next door, and he poked his head through the doorway, prepared to jump backward should something leap out at him or the door try to slam shut. Nothing happened, however. The bathroom was empty, and he walked inside, still clutching tightly to his briefcase, which was both his shield and sword right now.

  He saw here what he could not see from farther away: there was a large black bubble at the bottom of the water in the otherwise clean toilet. It was perfectly round and shiny, like blown glass, and it appeared to have emerged from the hole at the bottom. Patrick had no idea what it was, but the flawlessness of its form frightened him for some reason, as did its jet opacity, and he had no doubt that it was connected to that cellophane crinkle and that heavy shifting sound.

  The thing in the mirror had been black.

  Had it? He wasn’t sure because he hadn’t seen it clearly, but it had been dark, and it was only a short leap from that to this. Tensing himself, ready for anything, Patrick leaned over, pressed down on the handle to flush the toilet and jumped back.

  The bubble popped, dissipating into crescent-shaped fragments that looked like pieces of fingernails and were sucked down with the water. A foul stench arose from the toilet, an odor of rot and decay that reminded him of spoiled meat. Then it was over and gone, the water was clear again, the bathroom was empty, and there was no sign that anything unusual had ever occurred here.

  He breathed deeply, allowing the first full complement of air into his lungs since he’d walked into his room.

  The spider had been black, he thought.

  The spider was gone. But he could still smell the poison.