It had to be Harrison’s, and Lowell increased his speed, heading straight for it. Yes, he thought. The man would build his home directly over the spring that brought forth the water that kept him alive. And if the spring needed to be rejuvenated with some sort of ritualistic sacrifice, this is where it would occur.
Ryan was in that house.
He glanced up as he ran at the black façade.
They know things about you.
Lowell thought of what the concierge had told him and was grateful for the knowledge. Forewarned is forearmed, as the old saying went, and he knew that he was ready for anything they were planning to throw at him. Old girlfriends, bullies from his school days, his parents . . . Whatever Harrison and his minions conjured in order to throw him off track, he would ignore. He would remain focused.
They reached the house and stormed up the porch steps, but the front door was locked. Lowell threw his weight against it, motioned for the twins to do the same, and all three of them slammed sideways into the wood at the same time. The door did not budge.
“Lowell?”
They were about to take another run at the door when he heard Rachel’s voice, heard the fear in it and the confusion. He turned. She was looking back toward the lighted buildings, and when she saw that she had his attention, she pointed to one he hadn’t noticed before, one situated between the chapel and a series of stand-alone bungalows, one that didn’t match at all with the others, one not in the primitive style of the original Reata or the hodgepodge of ersatz western structures that had been incorporated into the restored resort around it.
The exercise center.
Lowell stared at the low squat building. That was the first place he’d experienced the supernatural at The Reata, and from the beginning he’d had a bad feeling about the facility. But why was it here? How had it gotten here? What made it so important that it, out of everything from the new resort, had been saved?
The waters.
He put an ear next to the door of the house, listening. There was no noise inside. It could have been soundproofed, but he thought not. The house was empty.
Ryan was in the exercise center.
Again, they were wasting valuable time. “Come on!” he yelled. They could see a gravel pathway now, and the four of them ran quickly, no longer having to negotiate the unstable sand. The fight was still raging, and though there were bodies on the ground, most of them appeared to be old and decrepit.
The good guys were winning.
Lowell was surprised. A ragtag group of hotel guests and low-level employees wielding homemade weapons made from sticks and stones and broken tools would seem to be no match for supernatural creatures a hundred years old, but perhaps the recuperative powers of the waters were waning even now, leaving the recipients of their magic in weakened states with fading health. He would not have guessed that to be the case after seeing the Reatans frolicking in the pool and massed before him in front of the chapel, but something had to account for their surprising in-effectiveness before their attackers.
Still, he cut a broad swath around the combatants as he led his family to the exercise center. He had mixed feelings about this. He had no doubt that it was dangerous, and he worried about exposing Rachel and the twins to unnecessary peril, but at the same time he was wary of leaving them by themselves.
Besides, they wanted to get Ryan back as much as he did.
So they approached the building together. And at the last minute, they were joined by the concierge. The old man appeared out of the darkness to their left, breathing raggedly and sweating profusely. “I saw you,” he managed to get out between gasps of breath. “I came to help.”
Lowell wasn’t sure how much help he would be, but the concierge was carrying a new weapon, obviously something he had taken from someone else: a rusty sword. That might be some help.
“Where’d you get it?” Lowell asked, nodding at the weapon.
“Took it off a dead man,” he panted. “It’s one of theirs.”
One of theirs.
Lowell was not sure if that was good or bad, if it would help them or hinder them. But a steel blade, no matter how old and rusted, was bound to be more effective than their own pitiful sticks. “Let me have it,” he said.
Jim shook his head, drawing back. “It’s mine.”
“That’s my son in there!”
The concierge looked at him. “Then let’s go get him.”
There was no time to argue, so Lowell let out a frustrated “Shit!” and opened the smoked glass door, leading the way into the building.
It smelled differently than it had before. That was the first thing he noticed. Before, there’d been the strong modern odor of rubber mats and newly unpacked equipment overlayed by the scent of pine disinfectant, a subtle whiff of chlorine beneath it all. Now there was a musty smell as of old attic trunks, combined with the aroma of . . . some type of food. Stew, maybe? Wafting about was another fragrance nowhere near as pleasant, a gaseous rotting odor that could come only from something dead. Not something recently killed or something that had been dead a long time, but something intermediate, when decay had started to set in and the flies were buzzing.
The fat man was in the weight room once again. Had he come with the building? Lowell saw him instantly, on the same machine as before, and he gave a small start as he entered the exercise area, thinking for a moment that there was an army of obese men waiting for him as he saw the multiplied images in the mirrored wall. But there was only the one man, and he grunted and grinned as he lifted an amazing amount of weights. Behind him, the twins gasped.
They recognized him, too.
He didn’t know how or why but he didn’t have time to find out.
“Guard him,” Lowell ordered Curtis and Owen. He didn’t want the fat man following him into the pool room, cutting off his only avenue of escape. “Yell if he moves. Stab him if you have to.” He met his sons’ eyes, saw them nod, noted the look of grim determination on each.
“I’ll stay with them,” Rachel offered, and for that he was grateful. She motioned toward the doorway and the corridor beyond. “You two go.”
Lowell and Jim moved forward quickly without another word.
He should have told her he loved her, Lowell thought. He should have told the boys. Just in case. That’s what people did in movies and books when they went someplace from where there was a very real possibility that they might not come back. But real life was messier than fiction, and in it you didn’t always have time to do or say the right things.
There was noise up ahead. And both the stew smell and that disgusting odor grew stronger, competing and combining in a way that made him afraid he’d vomit. Lowell was in the lead by a single step, and he moved sideways to block the concierge, wanting to make sure the old man didn’t just barge in. If they were to have any hope of success here, they would need all of the advantages they could get.
The light in the pool room was even more wan and sickly than it had been before and nowhere near as constant. Candles or torches, he assumed, and as he crept forward he saw the weird way the flickering light reflected the movement of the water, making shadows and shapes on the wall directly in front of the doorway that looked like creatures, monsters, beings that had never existed or had lived so long ago that their forms were not even recorded in genetic memory.
The sounds inside the pool room were louder, clearer than they had been a moment earlier, but they made no sense. He heard mumbling and chuckling that seemed to be coming from a crowd of people, accompanied by liquid gurgling and occasional clicks.
He poked his head carefully around the corner of the doorway.
Well-dressed men and women surrounded the pool in a framing rectangle. The Reata’s elite. Not the people who worked at the resort—no matter how high their station, they would not have been allowed in this company—but the moneyed men and society matrons who’d kept it alive financially, who’d brought Harrison the cash he needed to expand his holdings and sup
plied him with the bodies he needed to satisfy his unnatural cravings.
At the head of the pool, surrounded by these ladies and gentlemen, was The Reata’s chef, dressed in a stereotypical white apron and puffy hat. The water was roiling and heat steamed upward, making the inside of the room almost unbearable. Lowell saw vegetables bubbling up in the pool: carrots, cauliflower, zucchini. He saw, as well, parts of human bodies: fingers, legs, hair. He pressed forward, Jim at his side, still unseen by the gathered Reatans, who were completely focused on the pool in front of them. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do, but he moved ahead with careful steps along the dark edge of the wall, keeping his eye on the chef, who was pinching salt onto something directly in front of him.
A woman with a pearl necklace shifted slightly away from her husband, and it became clear what was being prepared.
Lying at the chef’s feet, ready to be rolled into the water, was Ryan.
Lowell felt as though he’d been kicked in the gut, as though all of the life and air had been instantly sucked out of him. His eyes were watering, but not enough to block the view of his son, bound like a pot roast, apple stuffed in his mouth, waiting to be thrown into that hellish soup. He could no longer see Ryan’s eyes through the onrush of tears, but he would be seeing them in his mind for the rest of his life, wide open and staring, hurt and terrified, filled with the knowledge that his parents had not arrived in time to save him, that he was going to die alone.
He was not going to die alone, though.
He was not going to die.
If Lowell had a machine gun, he would have killed them all at that moment, would have swung the weapon around the room, spraying bullets until every last damn one of those worthless fucks was too dead to ever come back. But he didn’t. He had only a gift shop tomahawk. And the concierge had only a rusty sword. They’d be overpowered before they’d taken out more than three or four of them.
But it would be worth it if they could give Ryan a chance to escape.
Wiping his eyes angrily, he turned back toward Jim, and his blood ran cold. The old man was staring raptly at the water, and Lowell realized that the concierge was where he wanted to be. He’d expected to be taken to this place with the rest of the senior staff in order to stave off his inevitable demise, and had drunk himself into a state of almost complete despair after finding himself abandoned in the lobby. But though he’d been left behind, he’d finally gotten here, he’d finally arrived. By hook or by crook, he’d made it, and now he had the chance to join the rest of them, to partake of the waters and live for a long, long time.
That was why he hadn’t wanted to give up his sword, that was why he’d accompanied Lowell here.
A shudder passed through the room like a wave, a physical tremor that palpitated the air about him and caused the gathering to gasp as one. Lowell swiveled around. Jedidiah Harrison emerged from the darkened area behind the chef as though he’d stepped through some hidden doorway or portal from another place. He looked as terrifying as he had in his various portrayals—only more so. For this was no mere rendering, no two-dimensional drawing or inanimate carving. This was the living, breathing Founder himself, a man more than two hundred years old, an evil entity so powerful and focused that he had singlehandedly created this community out of the desert, attracting America’s wealthiest and most self-absorbed to his sick cabal, offering them lives lengthened immeasurably in exchange for their participation in his sadistic revels. There was a grisly smile on his face, the inexplicably joyous grimace of a skull, but his eyes were dead and cold, satiated with the years of violence and debauchery, jaded beyond measure and incapable of feeling love or joy or even fear, so far beyond the range of ordinary human emotion that it was impossible to fathom the terrible desires in that depraved brain.
Lowell thought about his first experience at the exercise pool, Rachel’s encounters with the psychotic gardener, all of the bizarre incidents they’d experienced at The Reata. He and Rachel had come to think of the resort as an entity unto itself, as a sentient being. But it was not. It was an extension of the Founder. Whatever he was, it was, and while Jedidiah Harrison may have discovered the fountain of youth here two centuries ago, he had corrupted it and it had corrupted him, and the two were now so inexorably intertwined that it was impossible to tell where one left off and the other began.
The steam was suddenly thicker, stronger, the candles lighting the pool room dimmer, more faint. White figures emerged from the murk, skinny wraithlike forms with no discernable faces, only strangely blurred visages where their features should have been. Conjured from the waters, they were gliding across the top of the shiny black liquid, back and forth, forth and back, across the length of the pool, and Lowell knew instinctively that if any of them touched him, he would die.
The men and women began chanting, and, though foreign, the words they recited sounded familiar. He’d heard them before.
At the Grille.
Yes. They’d been part of one of those strange karaoke songs, and even as he thought it, the Founder started singing. He had a horrible voice, harsh and raspy with no hint of rhythm. But that was not what made it so difficult to hear. No, it was the age of his voice, the endless years and the terrible knowledge that that voice held, the aural manifestation of the man’s evil unnatural existence.
The white wraiths in the steam began to move faster, picking up speed, and with the acceleration came increased clarity. For flickering seconds of time, faces appeared on those blank blurry visages.
The chef stepped aside with a small formal bow, and Harrison, still singing, took his place at the head of the gathering, his dusty boots stepping directly in front of the spot where Ryan’s body lay. He raised his hands as if to exhort his followers to chant even louder—
—and Ryan rolled into the pool with a splash.
There’d been no warning, and Lowell had been so distracted by the Founder that he did not see it happen. His gaze snapped quickly down, but he was too late. Ryan was gone. His son was somewhere in that roiling water, which had now turned black.
“Ryan!” he screamed, but his voice was lost in the din and no one heard his anguished cry.
His son had probably been watching him as he rolled his bound body into the pool, hoping for some last contact, some connection or acknowledgement, but Lowell’s eyes had been elsewhere and he’d missed it. Ryan had died alone, and he hated himself for that, knowing that no matter how long he lived, he would always have to live with the knowledge that he had failed his son.
This was clearly unplanned. The chanting faltered, and Harrison stopped singing entirely, his face a mask of incredulous rage.
Ryan had prevented the ritual from being concluded.
His son had known that, Lowell realized. He had intentionally sacrificed himself in order to put an end to the Founder’s hopes of revivifying the waters, knowing that if he did so at the wrong time, the ceremony could not be completed.
Tears stung Lowell’s eyes. The boy was a hero. Ryan had not only been smart enough to figure out what he needed to do in order to throw a wrench in the works, but he’d been brave enough to carry it out. He had sacrificed himself instead of allowing himself to be sacrificed, and in doing so had hopefully put an end to Jedediah Harrison’s centuries-long reign of evil.
The Founder stepped forward, glaring down into the agitated black water, his cowboy boots stepping on the spot where Ryan’s body had lain. Lowell stared at those boots and the section of cement on which they’d stopped. Grief and fear hardened into anger within him.
That old fuck had lived for far too long.
His grip tightened on the tomahawk. He wouldn’t get out of here alive, but if it was the last thing he did, he was going to take that monster down and bash in his head until there was no way he could ever be revived. He felt a brief tinge of sadness and regret, the faces of Rachel and the twins passing before his eyes, and he wished there was some way to tell them how much he loved them, how much they meant to him. Then—
Jim moved in front of him, sword extended. Lowell thought that the concierge was going to try to stop him, and he was filled with a bleakness so complete that his weapon arm dangled limply down in defeat as he prepared to be sliced through. But the old man had not turned on him. Either his desire for revenge was stronger than his desire for life, or he wanted to somehow make up for his previous collaboration with The Reata, because he pushed Lowell back, and it was clear that the concierge knew exactly what Lowell had planned to do.
And was going to do it himself.
“I’m dying anyway,” was the only thing he said as he rushed forward, and next to Ryan’s sacrifice, Lowell thought it was the most heroic act he had ever witnessed. He wanted to object, wanted to tell the concierge that he didn’t have to, that it wasn’t really his battle, that Ryan was his son, but there was no time for that mealy mouthed posturing, and they both knew the truth of the situation: Jim was old and dying of cancer; Lowell was young with a wife and two boys.
They saw him coming, but none of them were prepared for it. And though these people were old enough to have seen it all and nothing really fazed them, their instincts for self-preservation remained intact, and they scattered, breaking their chain, one old dowager falling into the water, her companion toppling backward in the opposite direction. Jim made a beeline for Harrison, and before the Founder could lift a hand to save himself, the concierge was hacking away at those ancient arms, at the sunken chest. The clothes were rent, the sallow skin beneath them sliced, but there was no blood, only a feeble trickle of liquid that looked uncomfortably like the black water in the pool.
With a mighty roar decibels higher than should have been possible, the Founder swatted at the sword. The move cost him his brittle right forearm, which was sliced by the blade and dropped into the water with a loud plop, but he managed to knock the weapon out of Jim’s hand, and the rusted weapon clattered ineffectually onto the cement. The ancient man looked more monster than human as he continued to roar with rage, his features distorted with fury, but before he could act again, the concierge leaped upon him, knocking him to the ground and grabbing his skinny bony neck in a last desperate attempt to finish him off.
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