The Resort

by Bentley Little

  The scraggly-haired man—the Owner, as Ryan had come to think of him—had left the sidewalk and was walking purposefully across the gravel toward him, eyes trained directly on his own. Ryan wanted to run and get away, but his mom and brothers were here, and before his brain had time to do more than acknowledge that conflict, the man was here and reaching down. He grabbed Ryan, and with one hand as strong as a vice and just as cold, jerked him to his feet and dragged him away from the tree, toward the sidewalk. Ryan was too scared to even scream. His heart seemed to be beating somewhere up near his throat, and before he knew it they were down the desert trail on their way to Antelope Canyon.

  He was going to die, he realized as he was dragged across the gravel, his feet stumbling over themselves to keep up. He didn’t want to die. There were things he wanted to do, places he wanted to go. He wanted to be with his parents and brothers. He wanted to see his friends again back in California. He wanted . . . so much. He started crying, though no sound came out. Between the darkness and his tears, he couldn’t see where they were going, but he didn’t need to see. That vicelike grip held him fast and guided him surely, and he knew exactly where they were headed.

  They reached it far faster than he would have thought possible, and he could see it even from the trail, so bright were its lights. The old resort had been fully restored, and when he wiped his eyes with his free right hand, he saw entire buildings that had not been there before. It looked different than he would have expected, more modern in some ways and more antique in others. It was a mixture of a lot of different eras, and Ryan had the impression that it had taken bits and pieces of other Reatas over the years, combining them all in one.

  They passed by the buckboard wagon, fully restored and standing on four perfect hub wheels. In its driver’s seat, staring forward with reins in her hand as though waiting for a team of horses to arrive, was a white figure, a lithe, nearly naked girl whose pale form looked ghostly in the moonlight.

  Brenda?

  It looked almost like her but not quite. She said nothing, did not even look in their direction as they passed, but he saw her, and he saw the load she was planning to drive as well: the dead bodies of children, all stacked like cordwood in the back. On top of this ordered arrangement was David, naked and bloody and crumpled into a ball like a used piece of scratch paper.

  Then they were at the bottom of the rise and at the resort. Ryan saw lights in rooms, and though some of them looked electric, others looked like candles. The man—the Owner—dragged him to one of the buildings he had not seen before, one that looked like a haunted mansion and stood at the northernmost end of the resort, the focal point of all other structures. The two of them passed through a creaky old front door into a dark room of wood and red velvet, with trophy heads of both animals and humans on the walls. In the center of the room was a throne that was also cushioned with red velvet but was framed with bones. It was his chair, and Ryan expected the old man to sit down and make him do some freaky sex stuff to him, but the Owner pulled him past the chair, into another room, this one all black from floor to ceiling. There was a bed in the center of the room. Or kind of a bed. It was made out of wood, but to Ryan it looked more like an altar, like a Wild West version of those old stone tables where humans were sacrificed.

  “Prepare him,” the Owner said, and from the blackness another figure emerged.

  “No,” Ryan said. It was the first word he’d spoken since his abduction and it came out small and terrified, exactly the way he felt. “No,” he said again, whimpering.

  Silence greeted his plea, and he knew then that he was doomed.

  Thirty-seven

  The lobby was open.

  It was the first thing Lowell noticed as they approached the pool. He saw the uncovered doorway at the top of the steps, the wide square entrance black and yawning like an open maw, and though he’d been planning to first comb the pool area and check the bodies in the water to make sure none of them were Ryan, he decided instead to go straight to the lobby, hoping against hope to find his son or some evidence that he was alive.

  Walking up the steps and across the flagstone patio, his family right behind him, Lowell felt like a primitive tribesman visiting the home of his god. There was about this mission the same kamikaze sense of daring and foolishness, the same feeling of being in the presence of a great cosmic power.

  “Stay close,” were the only words he spoke before they walked in.

  He did not recognize the room. Everything that had made it so initially impressive upon arrival was gone, leaving only an open space that looked like it had been gutted and abandoned decades ago. The only evidence that the Roadrunners and their converts had recently used this room for their headquarters was a single burning torch crammed into a hole in the floor.

  Lowell heard crying from off to the right, the forlorn weeping of an old man, a sound that seemed particularly eerie in this setting under these circumstances.

  It was the concierge.

  He was at his desk to the side of the doorway, almost the only thing left standing in the ruined lobby, and the floor around him was littered with broken bottles of whiskey.

  Lowell looked back at Rachel and the twins, as much for support as anything else, and stepped up to the desk. The old man had obviously been here through the Roadrunner occupation, but that petty rivalry seemed more inconsequential than it ever had before, and the first question out of Lowell’s mouth was: “Where did everyone go? What happened to the people who worked here?”

  “Gone,” he cried. “All gone.” He looked up in anguish, sniffled. Lowell could smell his breath from here. “They were supposed to take me with them.”

  “Where did they go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you knew they were going.”

  “Oh yes.” More sniffles.

  “And you wanted to go with them.”

  He wiped his eyes. “Of course.”

  Rachel jumped in. “What is this place? What’s happening here? Our son—”

  “Shhh.” The old man put a finger to his lips. “They can still hear you.”

  “Who?”

  “Them.”

  Lowell was growing frustrated, was starting to think that the old man was more than a little touched. “Look—”

  “They know things about you. About everyone. They use it against you.”

  Lowell stopped. They know things about you. He thought about the last few days and all of the subtle and not-so-subtle references to his high school years. Whatever power was here—it or them—knew about his high school reunion, knew that he had taken this trip at this time chiefly to avoid going there, and had used that information to try and break him down.

  “What is this place?” Rachel asked again.

  The concierge stood. He was wobbly but not too wobbly, and though he obviously had been drunk he did not appear to be so any longer. “Have you been to The Reata Museum?”

  “I didn’t even know there was one.”

  “It’s usually part of the tour. The introductory tour when you first arrive? It’s right next to the gift shop.” He paused, frowned. “Or what used to be the gift shop.”

  Lowell’s heart skipped. “What is it now?”

  The concierge did not answer.

  Lowell thought of that torture chamber in the banquet room down the corridor. He glanced in that direction, saw only darkness beyond the perimeter of the torchlight.

  Rachel took a deep breath, and he heard the threat of tears in her voice. “Our son disappeared, our youngest boy. He’s thirteen. We just want to find him. We just want him back.”

  The concierge’s voice softened and he suddenly sounded more lucid. “Let me show you the museum,” he said. He pushed a wisp of hair off his forehead. “My name’s Jim, by the way. Jim Robinson.”

  “What’s in the museum?” Lowell asked.

  “I’ll show you what you’re up against.”

  “I thought they could hear us.”

 
“They can. But it doesn’t matter any more. Not to me, and probably not to you.”

  Rachel seemed to have edged away from the verge of tears. “If it’s so horrible, why did you want them to take you with them?”

  “I have cancer,” he said.

  Lowell frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  “I could live forever.”

  The twins had said nothing through all of this, and they said nothing now. Lowell glanced over at their devastated faces and wanted nothing more than to tell them that everything was going to be all right, but that would have been a lie. None of them had any idea where this was going, and Lowell thought it was quite possible that they’d all end up dead in the desert, their corpses rotting in the heat and sinking into the sand until such time as the authorities figured out something was amiss and made their way out here. It was a gruesome image but one made unavoidable by the events of the past few days. He had never in his life imagined that all of them would die together, certainly not this way. While he’d allowed in his more pessimistic moments for the realities of car crashes and random violence, he had always assumed that he and Rachel would live to a ripe old age, get to see their sons married and maybe have a few grandchildren. But thoughts about how they would all end up here, now, made him realize how fragile and fleeting life really was.

  He only hoped the resort was content with their bodies and didn’t take their souls.

  The concierge withdrew a flashlight from his desk. “I’ve been saving this,” he said, switching it on.

  Lowell raised his eyebrows. “I’m surprised the Roadrunners didn’t take it.”

  Jim smiled wanly. “They were afraid of me. They wouldn’t dare. Come on.” He led the way over the torn-up floor. They passed the spot where the front desk had stood and walked toward the open doorway of the gift shop. The concierge would not shine his light in there, and although Lowell tried to look, he could see nothing. He felt a slight suction in the air as they walked by, though, and heard what sounded like wind whistling through a great distance. It frightened him, that empty blackness, and he moved to the right of Rachel and the twins, blocking them from it as best he could.

  Jim led them into the room next door, shining his light on the walls. It was a small square chamber filled primarily with framed photographs. In one corner was an antique chair and writing desk, along one wall a glass display case housing old documents, but that was it.

  The concierge quickly summarized the history of the resort and its founder, Jedediah Harrison, a scoundrel, con artist and land speculator distantly related to President Harrison, who’d had a small cabin in Antelope Canyon—a “getaway house,” Jim called it—since right after his first fraud conviction in 1801. In the late 1800s, he became obsessed with buying up all of the land around the area, though at the time it was considered all but worthless. He used his political connections to subvert the Homestead Act and, like the villain in an old western, bullied and bought out the farm families and ranchers who had tentatively settled this wild section of what was then New Mexico Territory. His goal was to set up a dude ranch for wealthy Easterners and to pocket both the money they’d pay him to work his ranch and the money he’d earn from the sale of the cattle and crops they’d be tending. He built his dude ranch and ran it with some success for one season but then quietly closed it down, reopening two years later as a luxury resort, The Reata, billed at the time as the West’s most remote and luxurious hotel.

  “Jedediah Harrison was a hedonist and a sadist,” the concierge said, “and he was ecstatic about being able to practice his, uh”—Jim glanced at the twins—“proclivities free from the prying eyes of law enforcement. He also thought he’d found in the waters of The Reata the fountain of youth, and that was the big draw for his victims or partners or whatever you want to call them.”

  “I didn’t know there were waters at The Reata,” Lowell said.

  “Oh yes. The original resort was built over a natural mineral spring that continuously fed the swimming pool. Harrison was convinced that these waters would not only keep a man looking youthful but would make him immune to all diseases and allow him to live forever.”

  The original resort.

  “In Antelope Canyon?” Lowell asked.

  “Come here.” He led the way over to a picture opposite the door, shining his light on it. “That’s the original Reata.” It was a photograph taken in front of that old wagon, only in the photo it had been in working condition, and in its back was a sign stating: THE REATA. Behind it stood a series of buildings that resembled the abandoned resort in the canyon but looked different somehow, more quaint, more innocent.

  The old resort was the key. That’s what the kids—

  Ryan

  —had tried to tell him two days ago, only he’d been too stubborn and stupid to listen until it was too late. He believed it now, though, believed it utterly, despite the fact that he still had no idea what any of them could possibly do that would put an end to the horrors occurring around them.

  “Guests to the resort were by invitation only, and most of the top politicians and big industrialists were on the invitee list. One or two of them died here, under mysterious circumstances, and quite a few others perished later in accidents or unusual incidents. Rumors grew that the place was cursed, but that did not stop people from coming. Because the waters did appear to have curative powers and aid in longevity. Harrison was well over a hundred and still going strong when The Reata opened in 1890, although his stated age at the time was sixty-five, itself almost unheard of. Supposedly, he’d bought the cabin when he was in his early thirties, which actually made him somewhere around a hundred and twenty. By 1929, when the first Reata was destroyed, he was still the same. He would have been a hundred and fifty-nine.”

  “So how did he die?”

  “He didn’t.”

  Rachel reached for Lowell’s hand. Her fingers were cold. “What do you mean, he didn’t?”

  “He disappeared after this new resort was built, but no one ever found a body, and technically he’s still the owner of The Reata. The people who work here, the people in management, the ones who left and were supposed to take me with them, claim he still comes around. They say they’ve seen him.” Jim shifted his flashlight and the beam landed on another photo. It was a tintype of the founder and was one of the spookiest pictures Lowell had ever seen. It was indeed the scraggly-haired man depicted in the graffiti at the amphitheater.

  Rachel gasped.

  “You’ve seen him before?”

  “I had a dream about him.”

  Jim was suddenly interested. “You dreamed of him?” There was a wistfulness in his voice that Lowell found almost as frightening as the story he’d been telling. “Then he called to you. He only calls to the ones he wants.”

  “No,” Owen said in a scared, small voice.

  “He can’t have me,” Rachel said firmly and grabbed both of her boys’ hands.

  He was a hedonist and a sadist.

  “You said the first Reata was destroyed,” Lowell prompted.

  “I’ll get to that.”

  For Harrison was only the middle chapter in a much longer story. He had cheated the homesteaders out of their property, but the homesteaders had taken the land from the Indians before them, and the Indians no doubt had displaced whatever dominant animal had held sway before that.

  There wasn’t exactly a curse on the land, the concierge said. But all of the killings and betrayals had created a place that was unclean, as the Bible put it. He looked up at Lowell. “It’s like the land absorbed all of those bad feelings and bad deeds and—” He cut himself off. “No, that’s not really it at all.” He sighed. “History just keeps repeating itself here. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened, and I’d be willing to bet that it won’t be the last. I don’t know why, I don’t think anyone does. Or ever has. It just happens, it just is. Like the ocean is just there and the birds just chirp and the wind just blows. It’s a fact of nature
. There really was a fountain of youth here—Ponce de León should have been looking farther to the west—and whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I don’t know. But I do know that the land around it is bad. It attracts bad people and it does bad things to people who are otherwise good.” His voice dropped. “Like me.”

  “Maybe that’s why they didn’t take you,” Curtis suggested. They were the first words he’d spoken, and they were music to Lowell’s ears. The boy was not only paying attention, but thinking. He would be okay.

  “Maybe,” Jim said doubtfully, once again pushing aside that stray wisp of hair.

  “You said there was a fountain of youth,” Lowell reminded him. “And the first Reata was destroyed.”

  “The waters ran out. Or at least that was the story. No one’s ever known if that was true or if Harrison simply diverted the spring through a pipe or something for his own personal use because he didn’t want to share. That’s what a lot of people think. The only thing we know for sure, though, is that one day the waters were gone. And The Reata . . . fell apart. It was like the resort needed the waters to stay fresh and the buildings just deteriorated without them. It happened all at once—two of the boilers exploded, starting a fire. Ten people were trapped and crushed under falling brick and mortar. The survivors were rescued, the victims buried, the place was condemned and Harrison disappeared.” He looked at them. “What do you think happened next?”

  Lowell shrugged. “They built this resort?”

  “Wrong. It appeared. Sprung up overnight. Pool and all. And the pool was full, mind you, though the waters aren’t spring fed and never seemed to have any powers at all. Managers were here and in place, and they immediately started interviewing for the other positions. There’ve been improvements over the years, improvements made the usual way with contractors and plumbers and electricians. But . . .” He shook his head, gestured around him. “It just popped up.”