Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds (18 page)

She looked back over her shoulder at me and
smiled a “dancing smile” as her dress vanished, leaving her totally
naked and me totally speechless.

Introduction to “Shadow Side”

Hugo-winning editor and writer Kristine
Kathryn Rusch also has a World Fantasy Award on her shelf and many
readers’ choice awards in both mystery and science fiction. She
writes light paranormal romance novels under the name Kristine
Grayson to escape the darkness of her nearly noir Smokey Dalton
series, which she writes as Kris Nelscott.

Kris writes a lot of dark fantasy set in
Oregon, usually on the Oregon Coast. But “Shadow Side” takes place
in Southern Oregon. “When we attempt to take vacations,” she
writes, “Dean and I often go to historic hotels. One of the most
frightening and spectacular trips we took was in the mountains near
the Oregon Caves. Bats at twilight, a narrow windy road, and a
locked hotel remain the most memorable part of that trip for me. So
far, that terrifying experience has inspired three novels, and two
short stories, including this one.”

Shadow Side

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Halfway up the mountain, Dan Retsler
regretted returning to Oregon. He had a perfectly good job in
Montana. The small town at the base of the Bitterroots had its own
charm, and everyone now knew his name. He’d investigated his share
of crime too—real crime, from shoplifting to domestic abuse
allegations to more than the usual (to his mind anyway) number of
shootings.

Yet, when he’d seen the advertisement for a
police chief to handle a small town around the Oregon Caves, he’d
jumped at the chance.

The Oregon Caves, he told himself, weren’t
the Oregon Coast. He wouldn’t find selkies or ghosts or ugly
mermaids or any other kind of fantastic creature that he failed to
understand.

Instead, he’d be in the mountains, far from
the ocean. Tourists would flock here, sure, but he had grown up in
a tourist town. He understood how tourists fit into the local
economy, and he knew how Oregon worked.

But as he turned west and south out of
Grant’s Pass, heading into the Coastal Mountain Range where the
spectacular Oregon Caves threaded for miles, his stomach flipped,
his shoulders tightened, and he nearly turned around.

He forced himself to continue by reminding
himself that the committee expected him. He’d headed these hiring
committees. He knew how much of a problem it caused when an
applicant didn’t show, particularly one good enough to warrant an
interview.

He owed them that much. Besides, he was
nearly there.

The committee set the morning meeting at the
Marble Chalet, a place he’d never been to. He’d been to the Lodge
at the Oregon Caves dozens of times. The Lodge was part of the
National Park Service, and had actually been featured on PBS. His
family loved to vacation there when he was a kid.

But everyone ignored the equally historic
Marble Chalet. It had been in ruins for decades. In the flush
1990s, an enterprising private company restored it, and applied for
a permit from the National Park Service to have a second public
opening into the miles-long Oregon Caves complex, the opening
easily accessible from the Chalet’s parking area.

The Park Service decided a second opening was
a bad idea. Retsler never found out why, but it made the Chalet a
second-tier hotel by default.

If he took this job, he wouldn’t work at the
Chalet. He’d work in Marble Village, which the enterprising private
company had originally built to house its workers, but which had
grown like crazy. In the flush years before the century turned, a
lot of Californians bought land and built homes here, so the
village had more amenities than it deserved—from cell phone towers
to high-speed internet. It had also lost a lot of amenities to the
Great Recession, like the three-plex movie theater, although the
faux vaudeville theater, which played old movies and second (or
third)-run films did enough business to stay alive.

Retsler had found out some of this from a
quick internet search. He remembered parts of it from his years
living in Oregon, and the rest the town fathers had told him as
they tried to entice him up here for the job.

They wanted an Oregonian; they made that
clear. They were even happier that he was a native Oregonian, since
such creatures were rare. They also wanted someone with experience
in tourist areas.

He fit that bill.

He just wasn’t sure about the rest of it.

The road forked outside of Marble Village,
with the steeper, more difficult part heading toward the Marble
Chalet. The initial signs heading to the Chalet were modern, with
lettering that would reflect a car’s headlights. But the closer he
got, the signs changed, becoming rustic. Eventually, he realized
these were the original signs, built in the 1930s, as the hotel
itself got built as a WPA project.

For the first time, he actually felt a thread
of excitement at seeing the Chalet.

He parked near the entrance to the lodge. A
wide sidewalk led him around the rocks. He stopped, his breath
gone.

Flower baskets hung from cut and polished Old
Growth logs, harvested before anyone realized the old trees had to
be protected. The logs formed the brace for a gigantic canopy that
covered the walkway leading into the lodge itself. The rock way,
made of cut marble, had to have come out of the Caves—again, before
anyone knew this stuff had to be preserved.

The front of the lodge looked Swiss as
interpreted by a group of provincial West Coasters who’d never
really seen anything outside of the United States. The
brown-and-white slats, along with the decorated shutters, seemed
authentic enough, but the big logs that formed the foundation of
the gigantic building ruined any tiny Swiss intimacy.

The word “Chalet” was wrong too. This wasn’t
a tiny house with a steep roof; this was a large resort with
hundreds of rooms, surprising in its audacity. He wondered if there
had ever been a time when all of these rooms had been occupied.

He doubted it.

The big wooden doors stood open, and he
stepped into a large lobby. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust
to the dimness. More flowers stood on tabletops and along both
edges of the reception desk. A single dark-haired woman stood
behind it. She smiled when she saw him.

He introduced himself so that he could check
in. She handed him an old-fashioned metal key with a beautifully
carved wooden fob attached. The fob declared his room number in
large font.

He had no idea that ancient keys like this
still existed in working hotels.

“They’re waiting for you in the River Room,”
she said.

He pocketed the key when her sentence
registered.

“River?” he repeated, not liking the word. He
knew there had to be water up here, but he had come to associate
water with trouble—at least in Oregon.

“Well,” she said, her smile widening, “we
couldn’t very well call it the River Styx Room, now could we?”

His heart rate sped up. Why the hell would
anyone name a room after the river that in Greek mythology divided
the living world from the world of the dead?

He hoped it was some interior designer’s
twisted imagination.

“Up the stairs and to your right,” she said,
as if she believed he hesitated because he was lost, not because
his stomach had knotted to the point he felt queasy.

He gave her an insincere smile, then went up
the flat wooden stairs and turned left. The hallway opened into a
maze of rooms, but he could see the River Room at the very end, not
because of the large sign above the door (he had initially missed
that) but because people milled inside.

He probably should have ducked into his room
first, brushed his hair, and checked his shirt for lint. But he had
decided somewhere between River and River Styx that this job wasn’t
for him. So it didn’t matter how he looked.

As he walked in the door, six people turned
in his direction, including four women. Not the town fathers then,
but the town parents. A woman walked over to him. She had her
magnificent blonde hair gathered on top of her head in some kind of
elaborate coiffure that he hadn’t seen outside of a photo spread in
a magazine.

“Chief Retsler,” she said. “I’m Ron Bronly.
Welcome to Marble Village.”

Okay. He tried not to let his surprise show.
One of the drawbacks of e-mail, apparently, were the assumptions.
Retsler had imagined Ron Bronly as a comfortable middle-aged,
middle-income man with a slightly round belly and a lack of
hair.

He hadn’t expected a woman as attractive as
this one. In addition to her careful hairstyle, she wore just
enough make-up to jazz up her Oregon-casual outfit of tan slacks
and tailored blouse. The hand she extended to him was
manicured.

He took her hand, shook, and repeated that
insincere smile. Everyone else looked more like what he expected.
Three somewhat tired-looking women in jeans and jackets, two
middle-aged men whom he would have taken for Ron Bronly if Ron
Bronly hadn’t introduced herself.

“Thank you for coming all this way,” Bronly
said. Her voice was smooth, buttery, but it had a bit of an accent.
Bryn Mawr, unless he missed his guess. Very Katharine Hepburn.

“I was curious,” he said. “I hadn’t been to
the Chalet before. I’ve only been here a few minutes, but it looks
like the restore was lovingly done.”

He could afford to be nice. It didn’t hurt
that, in this case, nice was also honest.

“We’re proud of it,” she said. “It’s the
jewel of our little community.”

“Have you had a chance to drive around?” one
of the men asked. He wore one of those stick-on name badges that
read “Martin.” Everyone else had a name badge as well, including
Bronly. Hers read “Rhonda.”

No one offered Retsler a name badge. Of
course, he was the only stranger here. Apparently, they were trying
to make him feel at home.

The spread on the back table also should have
made him feel at home. Pastries, coffee, all kinds of non-alcoholic
beverages. He glanced at them, saw that the group had already
partaken of some of it. He wasn’t really hungry, more tired. And he
wanted to get this over with.

“I came directly here,” Retsler said.

“Pity,” Martin said. “You’d be surprised at
Marble Village. Most Oregonians expect some place like Sisters,
when really, it’s a lot more like Monterey, California.”

“Without the ocean,” said the other man whose
nametag read “Stanley.”

Retsler trotted out his insincere smile for
the third time. “I’ve done my stint around oceans.”

“Yes,” said one of the women. Her name tag
read “Anna,” which somehow suited her serious mien. “We spoke to
the folks at Whale Rock. They would love you back.”

“I’m sure the new chief is doing just fine,”
he said.

“Why did you leave?” Bronly asked.

He looked at her. Direct. To the point.
Usually he liked that in a person. Here, though, it made him
uncomfortable. How could he explain that the world he thought
existed didn’t? Whale Rock wasn’t so much a place he disliked as a
place that confused him and made him question everything about
himself.

“I was ready to move on,” he said, and it
sounded true. It
was
true on some level, but not quite true
in the way he wanted it to be.

She nodded, as if the answer didn’t satisfy
her. “And what’s wrong with Montana?”

He smiled—and this time the smile was real.
“Nothing really. In fact, as I drove up here, I realized I was
probably wasting your time—”

“Excuse me.” The woman from the front desk
peered into the room. Her eyes were wide, and her tone seemed a bit
panicked. “I’m sorry, but it’s back.”

“Dammit,” Martin said and took off at a run.
The others followed, leaving Retsler behind.

He hadn’t thought such conservative people
could run like that, especially Bronly who wore heels too high for
anyone but an actress to move quickly in. Yet she had managed.

With just a few words, the entire group
seemed to have forgotten him, and just as he was getting to the
important stuff. Maybe he shouldn’t feel so guilty.

But he couldn’t help it. Nor could he help
himself. He had to know what “it” was.

He walked quickly into the hallway, half
expecting someone to stop him. But no one did. One of the side
doors stood wide open, and he heard loud, panicked voices coming
from that direction.

He looked in, saw a flight of stairs that had
probably been designed for employees but now modern regulations
made it a mandatory exit from this floor.

He took the steps down—wooden also, and not
as well reinforced as those in the lobby—and found himself on the
ground level on the far side, with a door that opened toward the
Caves (or so the hand-lettered sign said).

It felt like he had entered the 1930s. More
Old Growth wood, expertly carved and polished to a sheen, and
through an interior door made of a single pane of glass, a diner
the likes of which he hadn’t seen since he was a kid.

No one manned the counters made of that same
Old Growth wood, but voices echoed from the back. Voices he
recognized on such short acquaintance.

“…should do.”

“…not like it sees us.”

“…the mess, though.”

He followed the sound to a swinging door, and
pushed it open.

The six town parents, a man in a chef’s
uniform, and two waitresses stood in front of a back door. Beside
them, steel tables had fallen on their sides, and the floor was
covered in flour.

They all peered out the back door, and it
wasn’t until Retsler got close that he saw why. Prints from a pair
of bare feet led down the path toward a rock outcropping.

“Problem?” he asked.