Darkheart

The Past: Rock & Roll

A deer was standing right there, right by the back door, and Crystal was afraid to move at first, afraid that if she startled it, the animal would freak out and hurt itself amidst the chicken wire and trash cans. She briefly considered calling for someone in the house, seeing if they could somehow help, but that idea dissipated the moment she realized no one would be there. Tom had left the week before; who knew when he'd be back? And her mother was surely at work. Jess's bike wasn't propped against the fence where it always was, so her younger sister was most likely out with her friends. Crystal herself had just returned from her first day of work at the resort. She'd had the lunch shift; it was four o'clock, and Jeremiah was supposed to be over in about an hour. He was bringing some movies.

The girl finished what she'd gone into the backyard to do--put her bike up--and slowly, not taking her gaze off the suspicious, globe-eyed creature, left the yard and returned to the front door.

Sighing as she entered the house, Crystal plopped her tote bag on the couch and headed upstairs to change out of her uniform, opting for a tee and some jean shorts. Her first day hadn't been bad at all. The schedules were arranged in shifts: breakfast and dinner was one shift (with the expectation they'd go home in between meals), and lunch was the other shift (shorter overall but entailing more before-and-after cleanup). It was the second day of the resort's official opening, and Crystal had been scheduled to work before Jeremiah had. He'd surely be eager to hear all about it.

Her own initial thoughts about the job were . . . fine. From the moment she'd stepped foot onto the property for the training, she'd been glad she'd let her friend talk her into it. Her morbid fascination with the place, one that probably everyone in town shared at that point, had been tempered by the utter normalcy of everything. Sure, it was nice--the big houses she'd grown up glimpsing from the public beach and pier, the pristine quiet of the surrounding forest, the dining hall itself--but it was also completely predictable, as were her first encounters with the resorters themselves.

Lunch was a buffet set-up, and it started at noon. She and the other employees arrived early to make sure tables were properly set and cleaned after the breakfast hustle. They filled water pitchers and checked the lazy susans on each table, made sure the proper condiments were available and filled. Then they were asked to stand by.

People began to wander in shortly after noon. The children came first, those who were independent enough to wander but young enough to be more hungry than concerned about appearances. Most meandered in without parents, and then young adults with smaller children arrived next. After them were older, child-free grown people, and last of all, too indifferent toward existence to act as if they cared, sauntered in the teenagers. Crystal would soon learn that for the first two meals of the day, this represented a predictable pattern. She'd been grateful that the little kids had come first; they'd offered a sort of test-run before the adults. Crystal had poured them drinks and helped them with spills and answered questions, and for the older teens and adults, she'd helped them order their dinners. When all was said and done, she'd kept busy and carried out every task with little difficulty. The only thing that concerned her was that the dining hall itself had only been about a quarter full. The resort was far from total capacity; it'd fill up considerably over the next couple of weeks to the point where, according to the managers, no seat at any one of the fifty or so tables would be empty.

Crystal's bedroom was on the second floor, which itself was something more like an attic. There were two bedrooms, one on either side of a bathroom, and with the roof sloping at such an angle as to slice each of the spaces in half, her and Jess's rooms were little more than glorified closets. But Crystal didn't mind the lack of commodiousness; she had her own room, and small or not, it had a door she could shut. The place was a mess: perpetually unmade bed, clothes piled wherever she dropped them, CD's stacked on the floor around an old boom box. A squat two-layer bookshelf contained the only books Cris had ever enjoyed reading--R.L. Stine and anthologies of weird and spooky tales, even a Stephen King novel or two. Horror stories didn't scare her, usually, except for one her mother had read to her as a child.