Slash, p.12
Slash, page 12
“Here, let me try,” Jerry said. He savagely tore the back off the clock. Patience and precision had never been his strong suits. He handed the broken clock back to Todd.
And there it was. Nestled within the gears was an SD card.
Todd felt like crying.
He extracted it carefully, holding it as if it would disintegrate at any second. “I need Ash’s video camera.”
“Where is it?” Vince asked.
“My backpack.”
“I’ll get it.” Bill hustled to get the pack.
Everyone stared at the tiny SD card as if it were a holy relic. Everyone but Sharon.
Bill unzipped the bag and held the camera out to Todd. He handed the SD card to Heather. “Hold this, please. Don’t drop it.”
“I promise, I won’t.”
It was better off in her hands, because his were shaking too much, he had a difficult time turning the camera on and finding the port to insert the SD card.
“Why would she hide a memory card in a clock in the first place?” Sharon asked.
Todd couldn’t respond. Not now.
He turned the viewing screen around so they all could see, took a deep, tremulous breath, and hit Play.
Chapter Sixteen
Sharon Viola gasped behind Todd. “Oh my God, it’s Sheri.”
Ash must have balanced the camera on some bricks, the sharp camera light making her appear ghostly, smudging the finer features of her face. She was carefully sitting on the arm of a chair, stuffing poking out from torn fabric.
Behind her, Sheri was talking to Jamal but the microphone didn’t capture what they were saying. They looked excited.
Ash tucked her hair behind her ears and squinted at something beyond the camera.
Todd couldn’t breathe.
Just hours from this moment, her friends would be dead and she would escape wounded and mute, her brain burying the events to follow into the depths.
Ash turned to her friends and said, “That has to be it.”
Sheri replied, “It does. Right?”
“What else could it be?”
“I’m not going any deeper,” Jamal said. His belly hung a bit over his belt and his jeans were covered in dirt.
“No, don’t. I think that’s enough. We’ll put it back after this.” She held out her hand and Jamal passed something to her. Ash tucked it in her pocket before anyone could see.
Addie’s head popped onto the screen. She waved at the camera, the light glinting off her perfectly white teeth. “Hi future person.”
Ash laughed and nudged her friend out of the frame. “You guys go hit the pool. I’ll do my thing and join you in a few.”
“You sure?” Fred said, off camera. “This place gives me the creeps. I can stay with you.”
“I’ll be perfectly fine. Go.” She shooed him away, smiling.
No, you won’t be perfectly fine, Todd thought. She would fare better than her friends but she would never, ever again be fine.
Sheri twirled a lock of Ash’s hair between her fingers and said, “Don’t be long.”
“I won’t.”
Sheri and Jamal shuffled out of view. Ash seemed to wait until they were gone before speaking again.
“Okay. My name is Ashley King and I’m at the abandoned Hayden Resort. I can’t be sure where you found this, if you found it. I might just be talking to myself, which I’ve been known to do in places like this. But maybe there’s a chance this recording survived and you came across it in a big open field filled with wild flowers and tall grass. Or maybe you bought the clock I’m going to hide this in at a flea market miles and miles from Topperville and you’re wondering why I’m recording in the middle of what looks like a bombed-out building in the dead of night.”
Heather sniffled. Todd saw Vince draw her closer to him. Bill chewed on a fingernail while Jerry watched with his hands on his hips, studying the video as if he were trying to evaluate a crime scene. Sharon’s demeanor had softened considerably. She leaned forward with her hands on her knees, bringing her face close to the screen.
“What did you find, Ash?” Todd said, barely above a whisper.
Ash continued. “My friends and I do this thing called urban exploring. Not sure if it’s still a thing by the time you come across this. If not, I’ll bet Google is around and you can look it up. In a nutshell, we like to poke around abandoned places and try to absorb some of the past. I’m a little different in that I like to add my present to the past, kind of become a part of the location. I know it sounds weird, but I’m weird. Urban exploring is dangerous and most times, illegal. Not sure if that makes me a criminal or not. Anyway, we came to the Hayden Resort because it was once a very popular getaway in the Catskills. It’s been left to rot for over thirty years now and it’s in real bad shape. You can see that nature is winning the battle. If no one ever touched it again, this place would disappear in another twenty or more years.
“What makes this place interesting is how it all ended. By the 1970s, the Catskills was losing its shine. Bigger, better vacation spots were popping up everywhere. Air travel was getting more accessible and island destinations were becoming a thing. The Hayden would have died a slow death as fewer and fewer people came. Instead, it all ended early because of a huge fire that wiped out a good chunk of the resort. The fire took out the main restaurant and theater, along with a separate lounge and some bungalows. Ten people died in the fire, the flames spreading too quickly for everyone to escape. It must have been awful.”
Ash paused. It looked like she was either picturing the night of the fire, or finding the right words to continue. Todd remembered tying her bootlaces when he dropped her off that night. He tried to latch onto the image of her beautiful face, but his memory kept inserting how he’d seen her that final time – her flesh almost purple, swollen tongue pushed from her mouth like a pregnant snake, eyes bulging from their sockets and her neck at an impossible angle. He looked away and blinked back tears, cursing his brain for ruining the moment.
“You okay, buddy?” Vince asked.
“Yeah. I’m fine.”
Just like Ash had thought she was.
Sharon was almost on his shoulder, radiating scents of coconut and sweet perfume. It was at odds with their task and just jarring enough to get his attention back to Ash.
“I do a lot of research before we ever step foot in a location. The Hayden Resort was no exception. Since I don’t live far, I made five trips up here to talk to the locals about the history. There was something about this place that touched me. It’s hard to explain. I wanted to know more about it when it was thriving, just as much as the night of the fire that made it close its doors forever.”
Todd couldn’t help noticing how her delivery had been influenced by the types of shows and videos she voraciously consumed. She was sincere, of that there was no doubt. But she was also trying to be a professional narrator, and all for possibly nobody to see, the recording lost to the wrecking ball and/or time. He thought about how the final girl followers out there would clamor to see this, and vowed they’d never even know it existed.
Ash paused for a moment and looked around, as if she could hear something the microphone couldn’t. Her eyes flicked to the side one last time before she returned to her story.
“I’m not a big believer in fate, but that may change after I literally ran into someone who flipped the entire story of the Hayden on its ass. I stopped at the Gulf station to get some gas a couple of weeks ago. It was so run-down, I wasn’t sure it would even be open, but I was running on fumes. A very old man came out of the station to fill it up and he even washed my windows, like in the old days. He was dressed in the dirtiest overalls you’d ever seen, like a mechanic, except there was no place to work on cars at this Gulf. When he was done, I paid him in cash because he said he couldn’t take cards. When I went to back up a little to make the turn, I kind of clipped him. He was standing in my blind spot and I didn’t see him. I was so freaked out. I ran out to make sure he was all right. He kept telling me to, in his words, ‘stop all my fussing’, but I really thought I was gonna have a heart attack. I helped him inside, sat him down and stayed with him to make sure I didn’t need to rush him to a hospital.
“Once he realized I wasn’t going anywhere, he offered me coffee. The pot was so black I nearly gagged, but I sipped my coffee to be polite. He asked me what I was doing here, since it was obvious I was an interloper. He actually called me an interloper, but in a playful way. The second I mentioned the Hayden Resort, he got kind of stiff and quiet. I won’t go into how I got him to talk again, but it wasn’t easy. His name was Phil Merritt and it turns out he was the undersheriff when the Hayden fire took place. Not sure what an undersheriff does, but he was there when it happened and part of the investigation afterward. He even knew some of the workers that had died there. He said he played cards with two of the cooks, Paul Chess and Sydney Thomas, on a regular basis. He got a little teary eyed when he talked about them, but I learned he wasn’t upset so much over their death as the death of his career.”
“What the hell is she talking about?” Sharon said irritably.
“That’s what we’re here to find out,” Heather said, her tone sharp enough to get Sharon to stand down.
Ash leaned closer to the camera, as if she didn’t want the resort itself to listen in on her. “He saw the bodies when they were pulled out of the fire. What he saw rocked him. They weren’t just burned up. In his opinion, they’d been mutilated before they’d been burned. He just assumed everyone would come to the same conclusion, from the sheriff to the coroner. They didn’t. In fact, he was told that if he wanted to keep insisting they had, he’d be out of a job. He knew they were covering something up, but what? That’s when he got to digging.”
She took a moment to flip through the pages of a small notebook. “He said Sydney Thomas was old before his time. He’d been incarcerated in a Nazi death camp when he was a teen along with his family. He was the only one to make it out alive. Sydney came to America alone and scarred for life. Since this was the time before PTSD and the cultural acceptance of therapy, he was urged to simply move on with his life. I can’t imagine how horrible that must have been. Being Jewish from Poland, he found his way to Brooklyn, and then was offered a job as a waiter for the summer season in the Catskills. He worked at the Granit, Grossinger’s and the Nevele before landing a job as a line cook at the Hayden. Sydney never married and had no family or real close friends in America.
“When Phil realized something weird was going on with the fire investigation, he went to Sydney’s apartment to see if his card buddy had been involved in something that would cause a huge cover-up. What he did was illegal, but at that point, he said it felt like his transgression paled in comparison to his boss’s. Plus, he did it to find the truth, and that can’t be wrong. Well, he found it.”
Worry lines etched across Ash’s forehead. Todd wanted to reach through the screen and touch her.
“Now, this is the part I didn’t believe. I’m not sure I believe it now, but we found something that has me shook. Phil said Sydney’s apartment was the neatest he’d ever seen. Nothing was out of place or dirty. One of his dresser drawers was used to store things like envelopes, stamps and neatly arranged folders. In one of those folders, Phil found a sealed envelope that had Forgive Me written across it. He tore it open and found a five-page letter. Basically, it was a written confession.”
Jerry exhaled loudly. “Christ, here it comes.”
“Here what comes?” Bill said.
“The part that makes you realize this place is on bad ground.”
“Like an Indian burial ground?” Vince said.
“No. Like the kind of place that invites trouble. If this dude who survived a concentration camp had to write a confession, it’s bad.”
“Shh,” Todd snapped. He’d paused the video but wanted to get back to it. The answers to what had ultimately killed her could be seconds away.
“Sydney worked for a head cook named Otto Knoop. Otto was a burly, quiet man who said he’d been a German prisoner of war during World War II. His family had immigrated to Italy at the start of the war and he fought for the Italian army. He was a pretty serious guy who mostly kept to himself, but Sydney didn’t mind. In a subtle way, they’d bonded over their mistreatment at the hands of the Germans. It had been a busy summer and although Sydney would never call Otto a great friend, they did work well together.
“That all changed on the last night of the season. To celebrate the final service, champagne had been broken out. Someone brought a bottle of homemade grappa to the party and people got pretty drunk. For the first time that summer, Otto smiled and got along with everyone. He, you know, loosened up. The grappa finally removed the stick from his ass. The more he drank, the more he talked. No one could believe it, but they all thought it was great to see this big man let down his walls. And then he said something that stopped the party instantly.
“He’d suddenly grown somber, his laughter dying in his throat. When they asked him what was wrong, he said he had lied. He hadn’t immigrated to Italy. Sydney told him it was okay, sometimes people lied because they didn’t want to let others in. Then Otto got a strange look on his face. He wiped away his tears and smiled a smile that made Sydney uneasy. He had not been captured by the Germans.”
Here Ashley paused again, casting her eyes around the room. What is she looking for? Todd thought.
“Otto told them, this entirely Jewish staff, that he’d been a prison guard at the Stutthof concentration camp in this small town in Poland. He told them how they’d killed seventy thousand people there, almost thirty thousand of them Jews. His inhibitions collapsed and he boasted that at Stutthof, they specialized in turning human fat into soap. At some point, Sydney said it was if he’d forgotten they were in the room, and instead he was talking to a fellow Nazi, maybe someone he’d lost in the war.
“The staff flew into a rage. I mean, who would blame them? They grabbed Otto and dragged him from the kitchen. Sydney wrote that the Nazi laughed all the way to his living quarters. Once they got inside, they found all sorts of Nazi stuff, and they knew he was telling the truth for the first time that season. They might have just beaten him and then called the police, but then he said something that, I guess, sealed his fate.”
Ash looked at her notes.
“He said, ‘It’s too bad I can’t wash my hands of you. Dirty hands call for dirty Jews.’ According to Sydney’s confession, all of them, men and women, started punching and kicking him. They beat his face until he was unrecognizable. He fell onto the floor and still laughed. Someone found the blade from a bayonet, something he’d kept from the war. They tied him up and again dragged him out. This time, they took him to the back of the ice rink and dug a hole. He cursed them as they dug, telling them how much fun he had putting shit and piss in the food of the Jews who came to eat at the Hayden.
“By this point, everyone on the kitchen staff was blind with rage. Martin, one of the dishwashers who had lost his parents to the camps, picked up the bayonet and stabbed Otto in the stomach. The Nazi was probably too drunk to feel it, so he kept on laughing and mocking them. Martin handed the blade to the next person and she stabbed him again. They each took turns, Sydney being the last. He said he was pretty sure Otto had been dead by the time he put the bayonet into him, but he wanted to, needed to punish the Nazi.
“When they were done, they pushed him in the hole, dumped his war mementos on top of him and covered him up. Sydney said he never slept better than he did that night. But as the years went on, guilt started to haunt him. In his mind, they were no better than the Nazis, dealing out punishment without a proper trial, even though Otto more than deserved what he’d gotten. But he kept quiet, afraid that he would end up in prison. They’d made a pact the morning after the murder to never speak of that night again and he would honor it until he died. One of the staff members who’d taken part in Otto’s murder, a sous chef, was elected sheriff in 1965. He was the acting sheriff when the Hayden burned down. I asked Phil how Sydney’s story was connected with the fire that destroyed the resort.”
Todd felt sick to his stomach. Why hadn’t she told him all this that day when he’d driven them up to the Catskills? Ashley and her mysteries. She’d uncovered one and was going to set it free into the ether.
She grew very serious, again giving a furtive look over the camera. “Phil was sure his boss was doing more than making sure Otto’s murder was never revealed. Once you start investigating one thing, anything else can follow. But Phil overheard the sheriff talking to his wife on the phone one day. It seems he was more worried that Otto had been the man that murdered the staff before setting their bodies on fire.”
“How the hell would that even be possible?” Bill said. “They not only stabbed the guy, they buried him!”
Todd paused the video.
“Maybe they didn’t kill him. I saw a guy that was stabbed twenty times who lived,” Jerry said.
“What about being buried under all that dirt?” Sharon said.
“They were in a rush. They weren’t thinking clearly. They made the grave too shallow,” Jerry said. “It happens more than you think.”
“That’s a little far-fetched,” Sharon said.
“Maybe not,” Heather said. “Who knows if Otto had family here? It says that he didn’t talk much and hid behind a lie.”
“Let’s let Ash finish,” Todd said. He knew they were coming to the end of the recording but he never wanted it to stop. As terrifying and awful as the story was, it was still Ash talking to him.
Ash continued. “Phil thought that his boss had maybe suffered some mental break because he wasn’t able to process what he’d done that night. But with the resort closed, Phil couldn’t afford to lose his job. He kept his mouth shut and the Hayden was deserted. The only problem was, the strangeness didn’t stop there. It’s kept on going, year after year.”
