A/N: And we're back! Get your theories and predictions ready, because the story goes even crazier from here, ladies and gents.
Also, any opinions on the codes and riddles so far? Too obscure, too easy, too silly, too serious? Let me know :)
Anyway, without further ado: read, review, and above all, enjoy!
Disclaimer: Gravity Falls and The Park are still not mine.
The soundtrack for this chapter is The Sandy Badlands, by Nobuo Uematsu.
Innsmouth Academy was everything Daniel Bach had described and more… and also, horrifyingly less.
Ford had followed the journalist's directions as best as he could, making his way down from the motel and through the zombie-haunted outer reaches of the island's suburbia until Solomon Road finally forked off into Illumination Way, a lonely country lane that ended at the unforgiving bluffs and clifftops overlooking the monster-infested oceans. Halfway along the lane, however, the path branched again… and there, heading westward towards the gentler shores of Solomon Island, a handsome tree-lined path stretched off into the distance… and even though it was still several hours before daylight would provide any real illumination to this place, there was no mistaking the solid bulk of a perimeter wall in the distance.
All things considered, Ford would have preferred it if he could have just walked straight down the path, admiring the surrounding farmlands as he went, but after the last few run-ins with hungry zombies on the road, he'd learned to avoid open spaces as often as possible. So, he was forced to slink from tree to tree, ducking behind cover before darting along to the next tree in line; every now and again, a foul-smelling blur would gallop across the grasslands not too far from his hiding place, as if to remind Ford not to stray too far from his hiding place.
The gates of Innsmouth Academy had been torn open and now lay in a mangled heap of wrought iron on the path ahead. Beyond, past the well-manicured lawns and perpetually autumnal trees, the bulk of the school towered high over the grounds; a stolid slab of red brick and dark-tiled roof, it stood defiantly against the Fog-shrouded skies, an unyielding monument to an institution that had been on the island since 1798.
Other than the marble arch above the front door, there was almost nothing elegant about the building, for despite the Ivy League trappings of the academy and the obsessively maintained gardens that bordered it, this place had clearly been built with practicality in mind. It looked as solid as a bomb shelter, and from what Ford had heard from Bach, the academy had been built to survive much worse than nuclear fallout. Indeed, the school had supposedly been destroyed and rebuilt on several occasions, including during the earthquake of 1904, and on every occasion, Innsmouth Academy had been rebuilt stronger and more unyielding than ever before.
However, as he made his way towards the door, he couldn't help but notice the symbol engraved in the marble high above it… and then, just in case he'd missed in the first time, it stood directly above the front door on the academy crest.
A blue triangle… with a single all-seeing eye.
Relax, Ford told himself. The eye of providence is a very well-known symbol; it's on the Great Seal of the United States, it's on the one-dollar bill… I mean, just because it's here in this dimension doesn't mean that this school has anything to do with Bill Cipher. I mean, you're just being paranoid, Ford. You're panicking over nothing. Just take a deep breath, and-
A low, gurgling screech tore him out of his reverie. Too late, Ford noticed the creature that had been skulking in the bushes to his right, for now it had noticed him: it was roughly six feet tall, and roughly humanoid – in that it had two arms, two legs and something roughly akin to a head… but there, the similarity to human beings ended quite abruptly. It was naked, ghastly pale, eerily misshapen, and without genitals of any kind; scrawny limbs awkwardly supported a bony torso like a squeezed lump of dough; its mouth was a toothless, lipless gash in its sunken face, a wound complete with surgical scars; if it had eyes, they were hidden deep in its blackened sockets.
Also, it was clutching a severed limb in one hand.
Letting out a shriek of animalistic fury, the thing threw itself at him. Fortunately, Ford was once again quicker on the draw: a single shot from his blaster tore the charging creature to shreds.
No sooner had the creature's mortal remains finished splattering the ground, two more lurched out of hiding, letting out their own bloodcurdling warcries as they loped towards him. Another two shots brought both down, but it seemed he'd shaken the hornet's nest, for all of a sudden, the damn things were everywhere: crawling out from the bushes, darting out from behind corners, hurtling out through the academy doors and charging down the path towards him. There had to be at least thirty of them, and judging by the angry roar from the distance, more were already on the way.
Ford managed to get off at least thirteen shots before the pack reached him, most of them direct hits – though with the creatures gathering so close together, he barely needed to take aim. If the oncoming horde was in any way concerned by the loss of life, they didn't show it; they just charged on, trampling the corpses beneath their misshapen feet. At the last moment, Ford drew a stun baton from his coat and waded into the fray as best as he could, threshing at the creatures with wide, vicious swings. Creatures fell left and right, convulsing wildly as they tumbled to the ground, giving Ford enough time to get off a few extra shots at the next ones in line… but there were just too many of them. Already they were beginning to push him back, and with his knee in the condition it was, he wouldn't be able to run far.
And behind them, Ford could clearly see something else approaching. Whatever it was, it floated nearly seven feet off the ground, its neatly-laced shoes dangling high above the path, its turn-of-the-century gentlemen's attire billowing in some invisible wind. Its face looked like it had been borrowed from a shopfront mannequin, but Ford could clearly see that its vestigial features were contorted with hate... and that, as it hovered towards him, its legs passed clean through the ranks of the monsters beneath it.
Looks like the ghosts are a little different on Solomon Island, Ford mused silently.
Then, just as he was thinking that this would be the end, a distant voice shouted, "get down!"
On instinct, Ford threw himself flat on his face; the next thing he knew, a red-hot wave of heat shot overhead, close enough to singe his hair as it billowed past him. A moment later, the entire horde of monsters began to scream in agony as they burned in perfect unison. For the next few seconds or so, all Ford knew were the dying screams of his attackers and the smell of roasting meat.
Eventually, the heat faded, and Ford looked up to see that only three of his attackers remained: the ghost and two of the pallid bipeds; the latter had either ducked or only just arrived on the scene, while the former was presumably immune to the fire.
As for his rescuers, two figures now stood on the front steps of the academy. It was hard to get a good look at them from here, but one of them looked to be a nervous-looking teenage girl in an oversized sweater and the remains of a Halloween costume; judging by the way her arms were still smoking, Ford had to assume this petite middle-schooler was directly responsible for saving his life.
And as for the other one, he was striding across the grounds now, a gaunt figure in a drab grey suit and blue surgical gloves; dark-haired, cold-eyed, unsmiling, and seemingly unafraid of the monsters in his path, he didn't look like much to Ford, up until he saw the spade in his hands.
The ghost let out a roar of fury and pointed a long finger at the two rescuers. Instantly, the two remaining monsters flanking it charged towards the gloved figure, only to be brought up short with a single brutal swing of the spade. Both monsters went sprawling, giving the defender adequate opportunity to zero in on one of them and bring the edge of the spade slicing down on the creature's neck like the blade of a guillotine. The other monster lurched upright, but the man in the gloves made a complicated looking gesture in the air, sending the creature into a fit of convulsions, every vein in its malformed body erupting open at once as the magic tore it open from the inside out. And as the blood fountained from the dying creature's trunk, the man made another magical gesture, shaping the blood into a sequence of arcane glyphs that sent the ghost fleeing across the ground with a screech of disbelieving pain.
Ford was left staring incredulously as the girl in the oversized hoody helped him to his feet.
"Welcome to Innsmouth Academy," the man with the spade intoned dolefully. "Headmaster Hayden Montag, at your service. No handshakes, please, body temperature makes my skin crawl."
The journey to Kingsmouth took a lot longer than Stan had expected.
Lorraine had told him not to get out of his car until he reached the Sheriff's office, and of course he had none, but it hadn't occurred to him why. At the time, he'd thought that it had just been a matter of protecting himself from dangers on the road, some of which he'd already met in person; fortunately, the weirdly dressed riders had cleared out a good chunk of them on their way downhill from the tunnel, so he hadn't thought too much of it at the time.
Plus, the Sheriff's office was on the very edge of the town, bordered by forest on the south side and immediately accessible from the roadway, so at least Stan wouldn't end up getting bogged down in trying to find the building in a town infested with zombies. As far as he could tell, he'd hit the most spectacular stroke of luck in this entire trip.
Unfortunately, it wasn't until he finally made it onto the main stretch of Solomon Road and caught a brief glimpse of the town itself that he belatedly realized why the route to Kingsmouth was so dangerous: because the island was undergoing its own private zombie apocalypse, along with an infestation of all the other weird monsters loose in the region, the survivors were now sheltering at the Sherriff's office, having hastily barricaded the surrounding area into a makeshift fort. And because the majority of the population had congregated in one place, it seemed like every single zombie within a mile of the place was making a beeline for the jerry-rigged compound; some charged up the hill from the beach, some galloped in from Arkham Avenue, but the lion's share of the walking dead attacked from the south – from Solomon Road.
The Sheriff's office was now surrounded by a huge horde of zombies, some of them fast and vicious like the one he'd met on the embankment, others almost as shambling and clumsy as the zombies he'd fought back in Gravity Falls. Worst of all, though it was clear that the defenders were heavily armed enough to kill any zombies who got too close to the gates, the zombies wouldn't stay down forever. It took quite a while, but eventually the zombies just got right back up again.
And some of them seemed to be developing some very odd habits, too: as Stan watched from his safe vantage point, the horde's numbers would fluctuate as several zombies grew distracted and wandered off into the forests bordering Kingsmouth to dig randomly at the ground, dropping to the hands and knees and burrowing furiously into the soil. There was no rhyme or reason to these sudden fits of digging; the moment they lost interest in their prey, they either went on patrol or went straight to shovelling their way into the spongy earth.
What were they after? Was there some kind of mass grave of fellow zombies they were trying to free? Had they caught a whiff of some lucky bastard who'd managed to escape the carnage in a basement or a fallout shelter of some kind, and were now trying to dig him out just so they could eat him alive? Or was there something else down there that they were hunting down?
There's always been something wrong with this island, Lorraine had said, something deep beneath the soil, corrupting everything it touches…
Whatever the case, they were between Stan and the only possible source of information he could find on Lorraine. There were too many to fight, even with the guns and the grenade still on hand. So, Stan fell back on the one thing he could do well when his charm and fists failed him: his feet. Having slunk across the zombie-infested roadway, avoiding the patrolling zombies by creeping from tree to tree, he was now roughly two hundred feet or so from the gateway to the compound now surrounding the Sheriff's office… and he'd have to hoof it.
Stan took a deep breath, crept out from behind the tree he'd been hiding behind for the last few minutes… and immediately heard the patrolling zombies groaning eagerly at the sight of him. Without even pausing to glance over his shoulder, he catapulted himself off the low hillside and down towards Kingsmouth, sprinting with the desperation of a hungover cop racing for the last stash of coffee and donuts in the breakroom.
In that moment, with at least two dozen hungry zombies hot on his tail and the dim prospect of finding Dipper on the horizon, he almost topped his own record for panic-fuelled sprinting, a record he'd only set when he'd been struggling to reach the Mystery Shack during the final countdown to the opening of the portal. After the battering he'd taken over the last week or two – the showdown at the Fearamid, the plunge into this new dimension, getting kicked about by monsters up at the Overlook – he knew all too well that he was in no fit state to be running like this, but he had to. The alternative was to miss out on his one opportunity to save Dipper, find Mabel and maybe find a way home.
Oh, and probably get eaten as well, but that was beside the point: numb with fear as he was, Stan probably wouldn't even notice the zombies chowing down on him.
Less than twenty feet from the compound entrance, he caught a brief glimpse of a terrified-looking human face peering out from the other side of it, right before the improvised sliding door began to creak open. Immediately, several zombies began charging towards it, only to be brought down by a hail of bullets from the sentries on the roof of the office. A few feet ahead of Stan, a zombie dressed in the tattered remains of a bathrobe lunged towards the open gate, but once again, Stan was faster: putting his head down, he put on an extra burst of speed and flung himself down the road, his mind empty except for the distant memory of a high school football game, a desperate, screaming charge towards the endzone with five of the biggest guys in the school ready to crush him into a compacted ball of shame and agony if he didn't pick up the pace.
He hit the bathrobed zombie square in the shoulder, sending it tumbling helplessly down the road, and from there, everything became terrifyingly simple. He ducked past the clawing arms of the horde, chicaned around a gaggle of ancient zombies that looked as if they'd been buried for decades, vaulted nimbly over the snapping jaws of the bathrobed zombie with an agility he hadn't known since his thirties, and catapulted himself through the gate.
Behind him, he heard gunshots rattling across the bitumen as the sentries opened fire on the pursuing zombies, and then the rumble of the gates being slammed shut, but Stan was barely conscious of anything except the hammering of his heart. Somehow, he managed to slow down just in time to avoid crashing into a parked car, threw down his fez, and in a frenzy of excitement, shouted "And the crowd goes wild!"
He took a deep breath, savouring his victory, and realized that several dozen confused locals were now staring at him in bewilderment.
"Uh… sorry," he muttered, hastily retrieving his fez. "Got a little carried away. Uh, does anyone know where I can find Sheriff Bannerman?"
There was a cough from the door of the office. Standing there, flanked by two wide-eyed deputies, was one of the most haggard-looking cops that Stan had ever seen: tall, bony, sporting dark blue rings around her eyes and a mop of greying brown hair that looked as if it had been combed with a thornbush, Sheriff Helen Bannerman somehow still wore a genuine-looking smile.
"Alright guys," she called out. "Show's over: back to work."
As the assembled locals went back to manning the sentry posts and shoring up the barricades, she turned to Stan and remarked, "Gotta say, I wasn't expectin' to see one of you guys back here so soon. Seems like all of you've got business someplace else these last couple'a days. Somethin' special goin' on?"
She'd noticed the fez and the eyepatch; once again, it seemed he'd been mistaken for one of the weirdly dressed strangers wandering the island.
"Your guess is as good as mine," he said with a shrug. "I'm just an ordinary guy from out of town: no magic up my sleeve."
The Sheriff's eyebrows rose. "That's new. Haven't seen an ordinary tourist down here since the Fog rolled in. I mean, don't get me wrong, we've seen plenty of odd guys around the island, but up until now it's always been someone with the old honey perfume if you get my drift. Sooner or later, they always stop by the Sheriff's office to get the lay of the land. Not so much these last few days, though: most of the newbies have moved on, and the only guys who wanna come back here are out hunting for anything they couldn't deal with the first time. Way too experienced to make do with my help, real salty dogs by the sounds of things. But I guess you're not interested in what the veterans are up to, eh?"
"Pretty much. I'm actually on specific business here, um, very important. Uh…"
Stan quickly realized there was no way he could possibly sound formal, not while he was wearing a fez. So, he decided to just ask as many questions as he could, if only because he had no idea how else to approach the situation. Besides, he'd never been any good at charming real cops unless they were stupid, and this one didn't look as if she'd been within a mile of stupid.
"You say none of the out-of-towners have stopped by in the last couple of days?"
"No newbies, anyway. Some of the white uniforms have been sneaking around outside, but they haven't got that Bee or whatever it is."
"White uniforms?" Stan asked, remembering Lorraine's bizarre costume.
"Yeah: they're all in white except for the blue berets. By the sounds of things, they're some kinda UN for the magic folk, meant to keep the peace between the Reds, Blues, and Greens. They're called the C of V or somethin' like that. Word has it that there's a huge gang of 'em north of here, but I'll be damned if I can figure out why; even Madame Roget can't turn up much in that crystal ball of hers."
Stan's head was swimming. He had to get back on point, or he really was going to have a stroke. "These white uniforms… did you see one of them pass this way in the last hour or so? You would've recognized this one real easy, too: she wasn't wearing a beret, she was covered in blood, and she was carrying a twelve-year-old boy with her: brown-haired, short for his age, wears a baseball cap with a pine tree on it."
"You think it's a kidnappin' case?"
"I know it's a kidnapping case. I was there when it happened: the victim's my grand-nephew."
Bannerman's brow furrowed with concern, but alas, she shook her head. "No, sorry. I'd have remembered seeing somethin' like that."
Goddammit. I've gotta start asking after names, now: Lorraine sounded like she knew the island well, so maybe she used to live here or something like that.
"Does the name Lorraine Maillard mean anything to you?" Stan asked.
The expression on Bannerman's face suddenly froze. "Lorraine Maillard?" she echoed.
"That's right."
"You're sure? Absolutely positively sure?"
"Yes, I'm sure: she told me her name, then she shot herself in the head, came back to life and kidnapped a twelve-year-old."
The smile on the Sheriff's face, already dimmed by exhaustion and concern, vanished entirely. "I haven't heard that name in these parts for thirty years," she said quietly. "As far as I knew, she left the island back in late 1982 and wasn't coming back."
"So, she lived here?"
"If living's the word you wanna use, then sure. Lorraine, she…" Bannerman shook her head. "That woman's been one of the biggest damn mysteries on the island: half the island thinks she was behind whatever was going on up at Atlantic Island Park, the rest think she was just crazy. Along with Ellie Franklin and Carrie Killian, she was one of the biggest suspects for witchcraft during that weird craze in the 80s. Well, Carrie's dead now and Ellie's just a harmless old gal who wants to be left alone, but Lorraine… ah, there's no telling what the hell was up with her. Any case, nobody in town's forgotten what happened on her last visit to that old amusement park."
"What do you mean? What happened?"
"She lost her mind," said the Sheriff, flatly. "I still don't know what the hell was wrong with her apart from that; her doctor never gave us a straight answer, but we knew enough about her life to worry a bit. Her mom ran away when she was a kid, left her alone with her dad, and by the sounds of things, Lorraine picked up some bad habits from him: when they finally cleared out her old house, the place was loaded down with cheap wine and pills. All above board, though; 'parently, she was hospitalized for depression a few years before she went off the deep end, got electroshock therapy, came back with a bucketload of Zoloft, the whole nine yards."
Stan grimly folded his arms. All told, this wasn't sounding promising.
"Did you ever find out why she ended up in the hospital?" he asked. "I mean, was this the kind of depression you're born with, or did something bad happen to her?"
"Oh, her boyfriend died: he was one of the workers Nathaniel Winter hired to build Atlantic Island Park, and that place was an accident hotspot even before it opened. Story goes that he was up on the Ferris Wheel when his harness failed. Poor bastard fell a hundred feet, died instantly."
"Failed?" echoed Stan. "It didn't snap or anything?"
"Yeah, weirdest thing. Supposedly, the buckle just… popped free."
Stan hummed thoughtfully, quietly filing this little nugget of information under "suspicious details."
"So, Lorraine went to hospital for depression, kept to herself for a few years, and then what? What was it that got the whole town talking about her?"
"That damn park again, believe it or not. Course, the place had been shut down by then, and once that was over, the problems seemed to stop for a while. I mean, there were plenty of ghost stories, and some of the local kids swore they could see people moving about in there every now and again. By the sounds of things, one of 'em was Lorraine. People think things got too much for her, because…"
Bannerman took a deep breath. "I wasn't there to see it happen," she admitted. "But… well, people talk. And people take pictures, and a few of those pictures ended up going all the way to the local newspapers."
"What happened?"
"Well, the story goes that Lorraine was caught walking out of the park at six in the morning, covered in dirt and cobwebs and blood, and I mean lots of blood. She was slimed in it up to her elbows, it was splattered all over her clothes, there were even drops of it in her hair. Anyway, she flagged down my dad's patrol car and she asked to be taken into custody; whatever she did, she wanted to go to jail for it."
"But what did she do?"
"I don't know. Nobody knows. Forensic reports say the blood on her clothes was human, but my dad never found any bodies in the park. He even called in cops from the mainland to go over that place with a fine-toothed comb – in the middle of the day, too, just to be safe – but they didn't find anything other than creepy old rides. But by then, Lorraine was already jailed."
"But for what? I mean, if they didn't find a body, then what could they charge her with?"
"Assaulting a police officer."
"What?"
"Yeah, really. I don't know what my dad said to set her off, and he never told me. Whatever happened between him and her in that car, it was so bad he never wanted to talk about it ever again. All I know is that, 'bout halfway to the sheriff's office, Lorraine just lost it: she tried to punch her way through the security grille, tore holes in the upholstery, cracked two of the windows... Sounds of things, she was trying to hurt herself too, clawin' at her throat and bitin' her wrists. Bad scene – and that was before dad finally stopped outside the office."
Bannerman pointed to a parking space at the foot of the office stairs. "Right there, Lorraine broke two of my dad's fingers and busted his lower lip while he was trying to get her out of the car; he didn't handcuff her when he first got her into the car, see? Even when he finally slapped the cuffs on her, she kept going at it too; he had to mace her once or twice, but that barely slowed her down. She was just… rabid. Kicking, biting, screaming, crying, begging for someone to tell her the truth about 'Callum,' whoever he was… and everyone on Main Street saw it happen."
"So, what happened to her after that?"
"Oh, she stayed in lockup for the next day or so. Spent most of it crying and refusing to eat. Then she was given an exclusive interview with some bigshot psychologist from out of town, total media blackout, no records kept. Next thing we know, Lorraine's being helicoptered out of town to a major psychiatric hospital somewhere on the mainland. That's the last anyone heard of her."
"But you say this happened back in 1980; how old was she then?"
"Oh… late twenties, maybe? Thirty at the most. I'd have to double-check the records the next time I'm over at the old city archives."
"But if that's true, then she'd have to be almost as old as I am, maybe even older. I got to see her close-up before she grabbed Dip- before she grabbed the kid, and she didn't look a day over thirty. So, what the hell happened?"
If anything, the Sheriff looked even more dismayed.
"She's one of them," she said grimly. "She's got a Bee in her, just like the other weird folks: that's what makes them do all those crazy things with swords and lightning, and that's what lets 'em come back from the dead. By the sounds of things, they don't age. If you're tracking one of them, you've got your work cut out for you, pal. My advice, you find one of those white-uniformed guys. Last few hours, we've seen more of them north of here than we have in the last few months; right now, they're the only help you're gonna get."
"But is there any place Lorraine might go, though? Where did she use to live when she was still on the island?"
"No luck there, pal: that house was demolished fifteen years ago – nobody wanted to live there after what happened to Lorraine. As far as I know, she didn't have anywhere else on the island she'd care to stay – certainly nowhere safe enough to take a child."
"Well, I've got to find her somehow! She thinks that the boy she kidnapped is… well, she seems to have gotten him mixed up with this Callum; I mean, I don't know for sure, but I'm willing to bet that Callum's her son and she's nabbed this kid as a replacement."
"Well, that's a bit of a pickle," said Bannerman. "Far as I know, Lorraine never had a son."
Innsmouth Academy's library was quite extensive.
As soon as Ford had learned exactly what kind of school the academy really was, he'd all but begged for a chance to access its collection of occult literature. Naturally, Montag and Ms Usher had been reluctant to allow him even a moment's access, but after Ford had made a few suitably extravagant promises of sharing information on his home dimension, they'd reluctantly allowed him an hour in the archives in exchange for an hour of details on the world he'd come from.
Once the room had been cleared of familiars, it had been easy to begin perusing the shelves for anything that might help Ford find a way home, though Montag had insisted on keeping one eye on him – either for the sake of his own safety, or the library's. Either one was possible, but Ford suspected the latter: from what little he knew of the man so far, Montag seemed very much a man obsessed with the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake… and while Ford would normally have approved of such a thing, the headmaster's uniquely cold approach had very rapidly begun to wear on Ford's nerves.
And then there were all the weird little things Montag said:
"No running in the halls, the floors are quite slick with blood."
"The cause of this accident has yet to be determined, but a thorough investigation will follow – as soon as we have appointed new staff and dissolved their predecessors' corpses."
"As I would tell parents at the reparations committee, 'one cannot vivisect a ghoul without breaking a few legs.'"
Somehow, Ford had actually met a human being too creepy even for him.
And I thought Auldman Northwest was bad, he mused, as he went on browsing.
To his delight, the library had a very extensive section on portal magic, and according to Montag, there were rumoured to be even more such texts available in the underground archives beyond the library itself, though he warned Ford that investigating would require a very dangerous expedition across the familiar-infested grounds, and a descent into a building that had already been attacked and invaded before.
This in itself was a fascinating story: apparently, some fishermen had returned from an unplanned journey into the Atlantic with an artifact dredged from the ocean; they'd taken it up to the Academy in the hopes of having the thing dated so they could sell it online, but unfortunately, they'd never gotten a chance to enjoy the spoils. The Fog had arrived around the island the next day, in all the confusion – what with the zombies, the monsters, the familiars going feral, the ghosts of faculty and alumni returning to haunt the building, the scarecrows from nearby pumpkin patches coming to life, and most of the teachers fleeing the school – nobody had noticed someone stealing the artifact.
Apparently, from what Montag and Usher had learned in the meantime, it had been stolen by some demented sorcerer by the name of Freddy Beaumont as part of an attempt at unlocking the power of whatever was lurking under Solomon Island. Alas, though the Bees had stopped Beaumont before he could try anything apocalyptic, the artifact he'd used had been stolen by his second-in-command, and Innsmouth Academy wasn't likely to see it ever again – not after four months, at any rate.
Maybe I should just skip to the archives, Ford mused. After all, the real treasures are likely to be hidden there: if there's anything that'll help us get home, it'll be something too precious for the students to access. Question is, is Montag likely to risk letting me access to the school's most precious artefacts, even if-
From somewhere around his feet, there was a low clatter as his left boot brushed into something heavy and distinctly metallic. Just in front of the lowest shelf, a small metal box had been left on the floor; judging by the fact that a small study table had positioned next door, this was presumably part of some former student's research. However, instead of finding another collection of occult literation or beautifully esoteric spellbooks, Ford found it was filled to the brim with laminated newspaper articles, some of them dating back as far as the 1880s.
"What's all this for?" he asked.
Montag barely favoured the box with a second glance. "Historical records of occult significance," he explained. "The general public holds no knowledge of the Secret World, but if no enlightened observers exist to record what transpired, it is only through the mundane lens of vision that we glimpse the truths to which we strive. By themselves, they have no intrinsic value, but most of these incidents have been forgotten even by fellow Secret Worlders. Thus, we preserve this knowledge as the first step on the road to understanding, however eldritch that understanding may become."
Stifling a shudder, Ford began absently leafing through the box, hoping that he might find something useful – either about Lorraine or about the island's history. In truth, he was exploring mainly out of curiosity by this stage: he wasn't expecting to find anything truly useful in here, not compared to the untold wealth of magical information the archives presumably offered.
And then, just as he was about to give up, a headline suddenly appeared from the pile so swiftly and so mercilessly that all competing trains of thought found themselves instantly derailed:
TRAGEDY IN ROADKILL COUNTY: GRAVITY FALLS DESTROYED!
You've got to be kidding me, Ford thought feverishly.
He checked the date: October 29th, 1909.
In the last few weeks, the article proclaimed, wildfires have wreaked havoc on the logging towns of Oregon, inflicting incalculable devastation on homes and livelihoods alike. Now, the small town of Gravity Falls has become the latest settlement to fall victim to the conflagrations: apparently caused by a lightning strike in one of the town's larger sawmills, the blaze spread rapidly, consuming homes, businesses, and acres of pristine wilderness. The death toll remains uncountable, though enumerators suggest that it may well extend into the thousands.
Most tragically of all, the famed Northwest family are believed to have become casualties of the fire: Northwest Manor was completely consumed by the flames, and the bodies of Minos, Acedia, and Perpetua Northwest have already been positively identified by authorities. Though no sign has been found of the family heirs, witnesses claim to have seen a small group of well-dressed children flinging themselves into the nearby lake in a desperate attempt to escape the flames.
Though these initial reports prompted investors in the family businesses to rally in the hope that the youngest sons of the Northwest clan, Jungman and Auldman, might have survived the cataclysm, new information has already dashed such hopes. Reports from further afield claim to have seen several bodies floating downstream after the blaze was finally extinguished, and it is believed that Jungman and Auldman either drowned in the overwhelming currents of the river or suffocated in the smoke-clogged air.
Authorities state that very little of Gravity Falls can be salvaged, and due to the money already spent in keeping the logging trade afloat in the embattled town, the council may not have funds sufficient to rebuild. Already, the few surviving loggers are migrating to other towns in pursuit of safer working conditions, claiming that attacks by "huge hairy men that live in them forests" had already made logging a dangerous prospect. With several logging companies having already abandoned Gravity Falls in the past seven months, new contenders may not emerge if it means having to rebuild what their competitors left behind, a possibility that may have already signed Gravity Falls' death certificate…
A/N: Any speculation as to what this might mean? Any ideas what might happen next? Don't be shy: your theories and predictions are always welcome.
And now for the code and riddle:
Uork gsv Ulivhg Gldvi.
Gsv Xsrowsllw Givv lu Pmldovwtv, blf nfhg xorny rg gl ovzim gsv gifgs.
Rg'h sviv gszg blf droo urmw dsviv gsv Szmtvw Lmv wzmtovh.
Ivnvnyvi gsv kldvi lu wivznh, hdvvgormt.
