Chapter 12: Through Portals Unseen

Chloe and Max spent the first half of their trip (whose end point Max still wouldn't divulge) in a silence that was equal parts stunned and stony.

Chloe could at least somewhat imagine that Max made up her time travel story on the spot after she told her about her nightmare. She could at least somewhat imagine that Max had called Samuel ahead of time to set up their little freak-out session in the tiny room off the Blackwell girls' dorm.

But Chloe could not, in any manner, imagine that Max had conjured a single drop of rain to fall on the missing person's flyer of Jennifer Healy exactly when it did.

That one raindrop dispelled from Chloe any doubts she had about Max's story. Time was not rigid and linear, but malleable, and controllable by human hands. The only nits to be picked were the tiny logical inconsistencies that she couldn't wrap her head around.

"I have a question," Chloe said.

"Well," said Max, "let's see if I have an answer."

"I'm having nightmares about my life in another timeline. But… why isn't anyone else?"

Max thought for a moment. "Who's to say they aren't? I mean, you thought you were just having a nightmare. Maybe everyone else is treating it as such. And who's gonna tell anyone else about a nightmare unless someone asks?"

Chloe nodded. "Are you having nightmares about other timelines?"

Max didn't say anything.

"Well?"

"Chloe," Max said. "I was having those nightmares anyway."

Chloe took this as her cue to shut up. A few more moments of silence.

"What's bugging me," Max finally said, "is that if someone is screwing around with the timeline… why are things in Arcadia Bay relatively normal?"

"Define 'normal.'"

"I mean, when I rewound, it caused a storm, but a bunch of other weird weather shit happened too."

"What kind of weird weather shit?" Chloe asked.

"Snow falling on eighty degree days, eclipses when there aren't supposed to be any, whales beaching themselves, two moons in the sky…"

"Fuck," Chloe said. "That must have been terrifying."

"We got through it."

Another lull.

"You don't like that, do you?" Max asked.

"I don't like what?"

"When I bring up how you were in the other timelines."

Chloe scratched her head beneath her beanie. "I'm not gonna say I enjoy it. There's another me somewhere in the past…"

"Chloe…"

"I know, I know, they're all me. But the girl you knew did shit I didn't know about and couldn't… I dunno…"

Chloe took her glasses off and rubbed her nose, thinking of what to say next.

"Back when we first started dating, you had this look sometimes."

"What look?" Max asked.

"That… that look. That look you get when you see a movie they made off of a book you read, and you know something the characters don't. That little smirk. When you got shot in that bathroom, I hadn't seen you in five years, but you'd met me and fell in love with me for five days somewhere, somewhen else. You knew me before I let you know me. I mean, if the roles were reversed, could you tell me in all honesty that you wouldn't feel a little taken advantage of?"

"Chloe, I didn't…"

"I know," Chloe said. "I know you didn't mean for any of this to happen. But it did. It happened. And that's how I feel."

Chloe felt her eyes burning. She couldn't deny that it felt cathartic to vent to Max about Max-related problems… even though they weren't the specific Max-related problems that had been hanging over both of them since Max had returned to Arcadia Bay days before.

"But hey," Chloe said. "It's over. It's fine. I'm not your girlfriend anymore. We're The Hardy Girls now. Doing the detective thing. Let's keep it that way."

Silence.

"You still haven't told me why you left me."

Chloe glared at Max. "You can't be serious."

"I shouldn't be?"

Chloe rubbed her face. "You sat on the fact that you could travel through fucking time for five years! And if I hadn't told you about that nightmare… memory, whatever, you'd have sat on it for even longer! And now I'm supposed to spill my secrets now?"

"I'm not saying you can't lord it over me," Max said with a tremble in her voice. "I'm just curious about how long you plan to do it."

"For the rest of my fucking life, Max! Who are you to tell me what I would have believed or not? It's like you thought I was too stupid to get it. Or you didn't have the faith in me that I would have had in you!"

Chloe put her glasses back on. Max wiped a tear out of her eye, then put that hand back on the steering wheel.

"Alright," Max said. "I won't ask again."

Chloe and Max were silent for the rest of the car ride…


…Until they got to their destination, anyway.

It was a pastoral place in the country: a large, regal, and ancient place surrounded on three sides by beautiful Oregon woods. The sign near the front gate said "CYRUS HAVERFORD MEMORIAL MENTAL HEALTH FACILITY."

"Fuck… No," Chloe said. "Him?"

"Yes," Max said. "Him."

"Why do we need to talk to him?"

"There are things five years ago that didn't add up. About Arcadia Bay. About my power… He might shed some light on things."

Chloe leaned back in her seat in a huff.

"I know you don't like it," Max said, "but it needs to be done."

"Max," Chloe said. "He killed Rachel, tried to kill me, and almost killed you. Nothing would make me happier than to kill him."


Chloe had last seen Nathan Prescott in a Portland courtroom in April of 2014, after a protracted series of hearings to determine his mental competency. It was there that Judge David Lin ruled that Nathan Joshua Prescott was unfit to stand trial in the manslaughter of Rachel Dawn Amber, the attempted murder of Maxine Caulfield, the first degree unlawful imprisonment of Kate Beverly Marsh, and the second degree assault of Chloe Elizabeth Price.

The courtroom was showered in gasps and boos, Max hugged Chloe's arm, and Chloe herself felt her vision overcome with the red shimmer of burning eternal hatred. Nathan, however was glassy-eyed, medicated to the gills under doctor's (or lawyer's) orders. But even then, he was eminently youthful. Eminently pretty. Eminently fucking punchable.

The Nathan Prescott of 2018, however, was a twenty-three year old man who didn't look a day under thirty-five. Confinement had not been kind to him. He had bags under his eyes and crow's feet around them. His high school hairstyle (which had reminded Chloe of the extras in Grease) had been replaced by a short style that was little more than a buzz. His face had a corona of blonde stubble. His teeth had visibly yellowed. To Chloe, he looked like the After picture on one of those old Not Even Once posters.

The three of them were in a bare room that held only a table and two chairs. Max sat across from Nathan as Chloe stood in the corner. Nathan was flanked on either side by two burly-as-fuck orderlies.

Nathan spoke first.

"This," he said, "is very awkward."

"Well," Max said. "I'd like to thank you for agreeing to talk to us today."

Nathan looked in the corner and seemed, for the first time, to see Chloe.

"Chloe?" he asked. "I didn't recognize you without the blue hair."

Chloe summoned the steeliest gaze she could muster and softly shook her head. Not today, motherfucker.

"I'm sorry," Nathan said to Max, "but I'd really like to hear what she has to say."

Nathan looked at Chloe again. His face didn't seem to be looking for forgiveness or pity. It held the kind of placidity found on star players in high-stress situations, and Chloe felt a new kind of fury at the man.

"I hurt you," Nathan said to Chloe. "I hurt people close to you. Doctor Partridge may disagree, but I think I need to hear what you have to say to me. I want to get better, and I can't do that if I pretend I didn't do terrible things. As long as you don't come across the room and physically hurt me, I want to hear what you've been dying to say to me for five years."

Now that she'd been given the opportunity, her mind was blank. She looked at Max, who appeared not to know either, before looking at the orderlies. One was checking his phone, and one was looking at… well, nothing, really.

Chloe looked back at Nathan as she cobbled words together in her head.

"You may not think I have any sympathy for you," Chloe said, "but that's not true. I do have sympathy for you, Nathan. It's the same kind I have for rabid dogs. Yeah, your life was terrible, rich or not. Yeah, I should blame your masters like your dad or Jefferson more. But it still doesn't make you any less dangerous. Or any less deserving of being put down. You made a habit of hurting me and the people I love, and one of my goals in life is living long enough to piss on whatever unmarked hole they bury you in."

Chloe let that hang in the air as Nathan waited to see if she was finished.

"Thank you," Nathan said, and the little bastard looked like he meant it.

"I do encores," Chloe said.

"He said 'thank you,' Chloe," Max said, and affixed Chloe with her sweetest and brightest shut-your-cakehole smile before turning back to Nathan.

"I have questions about five years ago," Max said. "There are things I'm not clear on."

"Really?" Nathan asked. "I shot you. It seems cut and dry to me."

The air left the room. Nathan grinned and shook his head.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I forgot how scary sarcasm from a mental patient can be. What are your questions?"

Max shifted in her seat as she assembled herself. "There were… notes and things. Messages. Passed between your father and Mark Jefferson and you that… didn't make any sense. Things about your destiny. The destiny of Arcadia Bay. I was wondering what they meant."

Nathan's eyes narrowed. "How would you know about these?" he asked. "I'd have thought they'd be in evidence."

"Not all of them," Max said. Chloe had been able to tell from Max's voice whenever she told a little white lie. This was one of those times.

Nathan grinned and shook his head again. "The storm never came," he said to himself.

Chloe got goosebumps.

"What… What's this about a storm?" Max asked. Nathan looked at her.

"Have you ever heard of The Myth of the Traveler?"

Max shook her head.

"I don't suppose you would have," Nathan said. "Dad said it was one of the few secrets in a world that couldn't keep them."

Nathan closed his eyes, as though he was trying to remember something.

"By the sea," Nathan said, "a girl will break the world. She will go back when others go forward, and she will pass through portals unseen. She will tear the sky. She will sunder the waves. She will bring the wind to shore beneath a fiery, watchful eye."

Nathan opened his eyes. Chloe couldn't see Max's face from where she was standing, but she was willing to bet Denise Leonard's check that her eyes were as round as saucers.

"Every culture has an end-of-the-world myth, but what they don't tell you is that a lot of mythologies have more than one," Nathan said. "That particular one is found in Inuit oral history… and Hopi. And Slavic. Chinese, Celtic, Maori. Small and obscure enough to only be known by professors and history buffs, and worded differently enough from culture to culture so that it doesn't raise too many red flags. The Myth of the Traveler isn't taught as often as other myths in the same mythologies because it contradicts a whole lot of other things, but… if all those cultures have the same myth, then there has to be something to it, right?"

Nathan crossed his legs under the table. "Every year, the richest families in the Pacific Northwest get together at a resort in Astoria. They drink expensive booze, talk shop, play racquetball, and regale each other with tales of what they would do if they caught The Traveler. They convinced themselves that the part about going back when others go forward meant that The Traveler could control time. You control The Traveler, then, well… you'd control everything, wouldn't you?"

Nathan's expression stiffened. "My dad was different. See, he thought that whatever was going to go down regarding The Traveler was going to go down in Arcadia Bay, because he thought the part about the fiery, watchful eye meant the lighthouse up at Koch's Folly. And he didn't want to control The Traveler at all… He wanted to let the storm come. Because buying buildings and businesses in Arcadia Bay was more expensive than buying the flat plot of land where Arcadia Bay used to be."

"So," Max said. "Where does your destiny come in?"

"Well, my family has known about this myth for generations," Nathan said. "My family didn't go from rich to filthy rich until the fifties, when Prescott Development cut a deal with the federal government to build underground bunkers in Arcadia Bay. We built a ton of them, and said they were for when the Russians bombed us. They never did, of course. They were for the storm that The Traveler would bring. In the eighties, my dad formed The Vortex Club at Blackwell. It started out as a kind of haven for misfits and punks, before it became… well, you saw what it was. It was a fixture at that school for almost thirty years until I…"

"Shot me?" Max asked.

Nathan nodded. "Should the storm have ever come during my time at Blackwell, it was my job to lead the rich and the privileged of The Vortex Club into those bunkers to wait out the storm. That was my destiny. Guide the moneyed into the wasteland."

"How did you plan on finding The Traveler?" Max asked. "I mean, what were you supposed to look for?"

"Well, Dad didn't want to find The Traveler, but I think they were looking for teenage girls with incredibly good luck. I mean, who wouldn't abuse that kind of power to turn everything her way?"

Max looked at Chloe, who had raised her eyebrows.

"The day before I shot you, my dad came to me and said he was convinced that the storm was coming that week. I didn't want to believe him, but I kinda did. I went to jail, the week passed, and the storm didn't come. I… didn't handle it well."

Max stood up. "Thanks for talking to me today."

Nathan shrugged. "In hindsight, it really is the least I could do."

Max and Chloe made for the door.

"Chloe?"

They turned around.

"I know it doesn't mean much," Nathan said, "nor should it. But… I'm sorry for what I did. To you and yours. I… I'm sorry."

"Well, I say this from the bottom of my heart," Chloe said. "Go fuck yourself."