Once they're out of Seaside, it's pitch black. The only things Chloe can see are the two solid yellow lines inside the amorphous, dim light buffer her truck headlights manage to conjure up. The lines are maybe a hundred feet long, and she follows them, as they weave and sway. Beyond that, the darkness is a solid wall, pierced only occasionally by a light bulb hanging from a pole above a railroad crossing, or a random yellow glow of a window somewhere above them and to the left, raising a mountain out of the black void and prompting questions about who might be living up there, on its dark silent slope, and what they do in the middle of the night.
Tommy is in the bed of the truck, quiet, probably asleep.
"It's gotta be the drugs," Chloe is saying, karate-chopping the air with one hand. "Rachel acting crazy, like I was missing, then Tommy losing it. That's if he told the truth at all."
She says this without thinking too much about what it could mean if it really was the drugs. What it could mean if Tommy lied. And what they are going to find when they get there, if either of those things are true. Not too much, but just enough to force herself to stop thinking about it.
"The story was… unbelievable, yes," Steph replies, "but wouldn't you say, though, that some of the other things that happened over the last few days also can't be easily explained?"
"Vanishing is a few levels above all that other shit, I think."
"Maybe so, but it's not exactly unheard of."
"People disappear, Steph, but normally they either run away, or some whacko kidnaps and kills them. They don't get swallowed by the earth."
"I was told if Rachel arrived only a few minutes later," James Amber says, "she might not have, um… Thank you, Chloe. You saved my world. It will be some time before Rachel wakes up. I promise I'll let you know when she does."
"Okay, thanks," Chloe says.
The DA departs, his gray suit looking baggy, wrinkled, and two sizes too big. At the entrance of the corridor leading to patient rooms, Steph is talking to Rose Amber. Rose is crying. James touches his wife's shoulder, and they continue down the hallway together. Steph turns and walks over.
On the counter to the right, she remembers before she even gets there in the flashback, there is a letter from Sean Prescott and a book with a Latin title: Ignis Corvusque. The book looks familiar and at the same time weirdly out of place. The letter just out of place.
When she phases back in, she's itching to ask Steph who it was that got hurt that day three years ago, Drew or Mikey. Because somehow, she doesn't know.
"If they're never seen or heard from again," Steph says. "How do we know if what happened to them was normal?"
"Because what's his name… Occam's Razor! The simplest explanation is usually the right one."
"OK, so what's the simplest explanation here?"
She gives Steph a look and focuses on the two yellow lines.
No fucking way.
"If he lied," Steph continues in a softer voice after a pause, "why would he come along?"
To try and do the same to us.
"Just… let's keep an eye on him," she says out loud. And a hand on the gun.
Steph nods.
The thought occurs about a minute later. Chloe pulls out her phone. With one hand on the wheel, she checks the call records.
Steph sees and nods again.
There's the explosion of missed calls from Joyce, David, and two numbers she doesn't know between the 6th and the 9th of May. There are calls to and from Frank before that, on the 4th and the 5th. Then there's a steady backward barrage of Rachel-Rachel-Rachel-Rachel: April 30th, 29th, 28th, 27th and so on, all the way to 4/22. There are also a couple of calls to and from a number she can't place in between, but she's not looking at those right now, because on 4/22, instead of the green up-arrow of the rest of the calls with Rachel's name on them, the arrow is pointing down and is crossed out with a big red X.
(x8)
She looks at Steph and hands her the phone.
"What?" Steph asks, not understanding. "What is it?"
"Eight missed calls from Rachel on the 22nd, of which I have no memory."
"Wow. So does that mean Tommy…?"
"She called," Chloe says, cutting her off. She takes the phone back and puts it away. "And I didn't pick up. That's what that means."
She turns on the music, and they don't speak for a song or two, until there is a knock on the rear window.
"Left towards Culmination coming up," Tommy shouts over Daughter's "Burn it down" on the radio. "Take it, then in about two miles, slow down and look for a dirt road on the right. There's no sign or anything, so it's easy to miss. If you hit the river, you've gone too far."
He looks soberer. More awake. Less sweaty. Is that a good thing?
Chloe takes the familiar exit towards Culmination, drives two miles or so, then begins to look. A few minutes later the town's lights swing into view, silhouetting the bridge and reflecting off the water. At about the same time there is another knock.
"Stop and back up about two hundred yards. You missed it."
The road is even less visible than the one from Culmination junkyard to Hamlet. She has no idea how Tommy managed to spot it riding backwards. The dark doesn't help, and it gets darker, as they leave the paved road and enter the woods.
Where the old dirt road may have been barely visible from the highway, here in the woods it basically doesn't exist at all. There's just a vaguely linear space between the firs, wide enough for a truck but barely, completely overgrown with moss and blanketed by fallen needles.
The going is slow. The truck shakes like a Pentecostal settler during a sermon. Shadows are jumping all over the place. She's turned off the radio, and there are crackling noises and weird echoes resounding throughout the woods. It's dark as hell. Branches are moving without wind, and it feels like eyes are watching them from behind every tree.
If Tommy offered her a ride here, she would have said fuck no, but since it was her idea, she grinds her teeth and pushes on, slowly. Getting a wheel stuck in a hidden hole, or worse, broken off, would absolutely fucking suck.
The woods go on forever. It's an improbably long time, considering the sense of distance she has from her experience with the area earlier that day. The ground slopes right, which also seems wrong. Eventually, an idea begins to creep up in her mind that they got lost. That the road veered off somewhere and they didn't notice, driving down some other random path between the trees, deeper into the forest, somewhere no one's ever been before.
Just as she's about to knock on Tommy's window, possibly with the gun barrel, something glints up ahead, which is spooky as shit, until she realizes that it's the rails. Soon, she can make out the raised earth of the railroad embankment across the opening. It's almost a relief. Almost.
They roll out from under the canopy of evergreens about halfway between the cabin and the first bridge. Turning right, the pseudo-road runs alongside the rails, between the track and the wall of trees. As they get nearer the abandoned farmstead, the river gets closer and the trees fall away, giving way to the swampy clearing.
A bolt of thunder makes her slam on the brakes. Actually, it's Tommy hammering on the roof with his palm.
"It was over there," Tommy says, pointing towards the points.
It sure fucking was, Chloe thinks.
They sit and listen for a while. It's quiet, but not silent. Chloe can hear the river. Something is rustling somewhere.
She touches the gun handle and gets out of the truck. After a moment, Steph's door slams shut as well. Tommy stays in the truck bed. He's on his elbows on top of the roof, watching. Crow's nest on a pirate ship. She wants to say something snarky to him, but somehow doesn't manage to come up with it. It's not like she wants him creeping behind her as she finds... something, anyway.
Steph turns on her phone flashlight, and Chloe does the same. She sweeps the ground around the points, while Steph walks towards the tree line.
There's nothing there. At least nothing Rachel-related. She can see the disturbed gravel between the ties where she was struggling to get her foot out.
Earlier today, fuck.
She can see the remains of her cigarette, even. But there is no trace of Rachel.
Steph comes over and reports in a soft voice that there was no sign of struggle or "anything" being dragged, which there probably would be with how soft and marshy the ground is, except it's been three weeks, so… She goes to check the river bank next.
Chloe glances at the truck. Tommy is no longer on top of the roof. After a split second panic, she sees the glow of his cigarette through the glass.
Cursing, she stomps over to the hut, directing the beam of her light to the doorway and window in turn. Stopping about ten feet away, she pulls out her gun and shouts, "Hey! You fucking thing! Spirit, forest god, or whatever bullshit you are! Where the fuck are you? Show yourself! Scare me! Disappear me! Huh? What? Come on! I thought you were some big shit!"
She listens for a minute. Nothing, of course. Just the wind in the trees and the river sloshing in the dark behind her. Looking back, she sees Steph with her little light. Tommy is leaning on the roof of the truck again. She can't see their faces but knows they are both watching her stupid gun show. Chloe the ghost hunter.
Turning back to the cabin, she waits another minute, then spits and says bitterly, "Eat a bag of dicks. You ain't shit."
Stuffing the gun back into her jeans, she walks around to the backyard, checks the tent again, where everything is the same as earlier that day, except it's darker and more irritating now. She walks to the bushes and trees at the edge of the clearing, thinking how she did all that already, but doing it anyway, stubbornly. The beam of her flashlight is sweeping the grass for footprints, or signs of "anything" being dragged, but again there's nothing, nothing, nothing.
Her swings become sharper, angrier, as though the beam is a weapon, a lightsaber or Callamastia's axe or some shit, and she's cutting down an army of stupid fucking forest spirits with it. Or maybe just Tommy.
She's about to head back to the truck, when a thought freezes her that she saw something blue flash through the beam. She doesn't believe it. Her broken mind is just making fun of her dumb ass. But of course, she's already sweeping her beam of light over the same brambles and the fucking grass again and again and…
It's Rachel's bracelet.
In the grass, under the bush, it's Rachel's blue bracelet. It lies splayed out like a tiny dead person, its string torn.
She can't believe it still. Can't understand what it means. Why it's there.
Why is it there?
She bends down and picks it up.
"Chloe and Rachel," Max Caulfield says. "You killed both of them!"
She's tied to a chair. Mark Jefferson is focused on his search for a perfect shot.
"They're fucking together in heaven now," he replies. "Is that what you wanna hear?"
"Why? Why?"
He makes a face, mocking her.
"Why? Why? Start listening to me, you dumb cunt!"
She's in a dark room.
She's not Max anymore. She's not quite Chloe Price, either. Rachel is lying on the ground on her side, not moving. It's very dark. She can't see the walls. There aren't any windows or any light sources at all, but somehow she can see that Rachel's eyes are closed. She can see her hair and her hands and her lips and her feather earring.
She can see that she's breathing.
She tries to reach for her, to wake her, to pick her up, but nothing happens.
She wants to call to her, but she has no mouth.
Rachel, she calls, in her mind. Rachel. Rachel. RACHEL.
Rachel's eyes open and she looks right at her.
Her eyes are on fire.
"CHLOE!"
There's this super-bright light. It hurts her eyes.
"Fuck," she says, trying to shield herself with her arm. "What the fuck?"
"Chloe!" Steph's voice.
The light disappears and all of a sudden it's dark as hell again. For a split second, she feels like she's falling, like she's back in the dark room, then she remembers the dark room and flails with her whole body to get up into a sitting position, because for some reason she's lying flat on her back on the ground. Her ass is wet, she realizes. Steph hugs her, which she doesn't quite understand, either. Behind Steph, Tommy is standing tall against the dark starry sky, hands in pockets, face unreadable. Behind him and to the right is the dark outline of the cabin.
"Steph," she says, "what happened?"
Steph lets her go and helps her up. Yep, her ass is definitely wet. Also, the back of her head, which she wipes with her palm. Unclenching her other hand, she finds Rachel's bracelet.
"You fell," Steph says, staring at the bracelet in Chloe's hand. "Is that…?"
"Rachel's bracelet, yeah. How long was I out?"
"Like five minutes."
"Shit, really?"
"Yes! And it was really freaky. At first, it seemed like you were having a seizure. Then, when we ran over here, you opened your eyes and and moved them like you were looking around, but you weren't awake. Then you started mumbling, then you were taking turns doing all of it in turn. On and on."
"I saw Rachel. In a dark room. It's like I was there. I couldn't speak to her, though. And she didn't see me. What was I saying?"
"All kinds of stuff. A lot of it was gibberish, some of it I could make out: you said 'Burn it down' more than once, 'Rachel,' 'Max,' 'Jefferson,' a lot of 'No' and 'no fucking way,' then you said things that sounded like Latin. It was 'Exorcist' type stuff, Chloe. Don't do that to me again, please."
"Latin?"
She's woozy. She feels like she's not entirely back yet from that flashback or trip, or whatever that was.
"Yeah, ignis, mignis, something."
"Ignis Corvusque?"
"Yeah, maybe. Does that mean anything to you?"
"Always, Chloe Price," Samuel says. "I didn't think you'd be returning to these hallowed halls so soon."
"Yeah," Chloe says. "Neither did I."
"I have a feeling it wasn't the books or bricks of Blackwell that led you back."
"Uh… what?"
"You're here for someone. A special someone, yes?"
Behind Samuel on the left are the keys to the dorms, which she will soon steal. On the right, there is a book shelf, on which there are three books: Chaos Theory by Dr. Tom M., Pharsalia by Lucan, and Ignis Corvusque.
Back in the hospital, one day in the future, the nurse at the front desk raises her eyes at the commotion of Chloe trying to knock a Baby Ruth candy bar off the vending machine shelf. She realizes that the nurse is Claire, the homeless lady.
"Fuck," she phases back into the mother of all headaches. She wouldn't be surprised if her nose started to bleed now. She checks it absently. Her fingers are covered in mud instead of blood, so now her nose is too.
"What happened to you?" Steph asks.
"I found Rachel's bracelet under a bush there. Remember touching it, then waking up to you hugging me."
She holds the bracelet on her open hand.
"You should wear it," Tommy says suddenly.
They turn to him.
"Why?"
"It's a protective charm." He sounds embarrassed when he says it. "It might help you."
"If what you said is true, then it didn't help Rachel."
"She lost it," he points, then turns and goes back to the car.
With Steph's help, Chloe ties the bracelet around her wrist.
"There's nowhere else I'd rather keep it," Rachel says in her room three years earlier.
"My mouth feels funny," Chloe says. "I feel like I need a smoke. Did you mouth to mouth me?"
Steph blushes. "What? No. I mean... you didn't stop breathing or anything."
They laugh, and it's like a weight lifts. Some invisible, oppressive presence shrinks away, disperses. The stars seem to shine a little brighter.
"So now what?" Tommy asks, as they catch up to him by the truck. "Are we done here?"
A dark shape circles above the river and heads off southwards. A raven's caw travels back to them over the water.
"We need to go talk to a couple of people about a book."
