Up All Nite sandwiches are basically garbage. Donuts are passing decent when you have the munchies. Coffee, though... Coffee is legit. Better than Bean Hip, probably. Definitely better on your wallet.

As she drives, Chloe observes the warmth, taste and sweetness of the coffee separately, in a way a scientist might observe molecules in the microscope. She imagines she can feel the caffeine hitting the bloodstream and racing out to the capillaries in her fingers and toes. Also, at the same time somehow, like it's a stage backdrop, she sees a screenshot of the Arcadia Bay Police Department webpage, with its badge logo, the all-seeing lighthouse along the right side, and an incident report of a naked man with a sword being apprehended at Up All Nite.

She nods like it all make sense, exhaling the smoke.

She is pretty high. Nathan's weed is quality.

Weirdly, she's also happy to be back in town. Arcadia Bay may be a hellhole, but fuck, it's better that those woods, infested with cave spirits, corpses, half-memories, Prescotts and who knows what else. She used to love the woods as a kid. Running, hiding, exploring, building forts and pirate hideouts with Max. Now this fucked up universe took that away from her, too.

Across from her, Steph is also contemplative, though she's straight. Well, not high, anyway.

They drive slow, with the windows down, feeling the warm breeze on their faces. The streets of the working slash unemployed quarter of Arcadia Bay look even shabbier than usual in the dark: empty lots, rusted cars, patchy lawns, the cinder-block Bloch Hotel. When they hit Blackwell campus, with its bright street lights, fresh asphalt and flower beds, it's like emerging out of the dark woods all over again. About half the windows in the dorms are lit as they pass. Breaking in might get tricky.

"Hopefully, by the time we get back most of those kids are going to be asleep," Chloe says. "Fucking school night."

"Get back from…?" Steph asks.

"Borrowing the step-asshole's keys."

"Is that a good idea? After you already 'borrowed' the gun? What if you get caught? Maybe we should call Warren again."

"I think I've had enough of the "ape" guy for one life."

"Ape guy?"

"Oh, yeah. Never mind. Long story. Anyway, this is the girls' dorm we're talking about. He won't have access to that."

"Well, then let me see if I can dig up a number for someone we might know from the old days," Steph says. "Juliet, maybe, or Dana, or even Victoria."

Rachel's missing person poster flashes by, with Rachel's eyes crossed out and the word BITCH scrawled across the face in red pen.

"Pfft. Yeah, right. Victoria Chase. I'm sure she'll jump at the chance to help us out. Keep it very secret, too."

"Not Victoria, then."

"None of them, Steph. I would rather not involve any of them. Unless the step-fuck stashed the keys inside his small intestine and I absolutely have no other choice. Usually, though, he keeps all of his keys on the counter in the garage."

"Didn't you say he would be in the living room?"

"Oh, he woulda been then, but not at this unholy hour. His mustache needs its pomade and beauty sleep."

With that, they descend back into the darkness of the non-privileged.

Case in point: no light in the windows at 44 Cedar. Chloe parallel parks and leaves the door ajar like she's SWAT, though the truck's wheezing engine is hardly stealthy. She hesitates in the headlights, locking eyes with Steph, then gestures dismissively and cuts across the lawn towards the front door. It feels weird sneaking in through the front, since the play is usually climbing directly up into her room window. She spends a good minute fumbling with the keys, before eventually overcoming the lock. Inside, everything is quiet, except as she tiptoes along the hallway to the living room, the floor is creaky as fuck.

Since when?

She feels like an earthquake. Like the windows and the plates in the cupboard are about to start rattling.

Chloe the Thunderbird.

"Go Thunderbirds," Max Caulfield says, looking at a pennant on the wall in her dorm.

The living room is basked weakly in a slanted light from a streetlamp somewhere outside the border of the window. Beer bottle on the magazine table casts a long, pennant-shaped shadow pointing at the garage door.

"I know," Chloe mutters under her breath. She tries to turn the knob, but it won't budge. Locked. Sighing, she fumbles with the keys in the dark some more. The trouble is, this time fumbling does nothing. None of her keys work. She flashes her light at the keys, then at the knob. It's a shiny new lock. The motherfucker changed the lock on her. In her own fucking house!

She curses silently.

Retracing her steps, she checks the other garage door, but it's the same deal there, of course. Sergeant Assmunch is nothing if not thorough.

She curses again.

She can maybe pick it, but she's gonna need to find something to pick it with first, which, with the garage being the only other place in the house she could find something to pick it with, would include going up to her room and making a ruckus. Her other choice is to find David's new key and use that, but that would involve going into their bedroom and chancing waking somebody up. Fuck, the third choice is to get the fuck out and let Steph contact one of the Blackwell clowns.

Wait a minute.

Joyce keeps her keys in the old, Chloe-made ashtray on the mantelpiece. She would need a new key, right? Brilliant!

She tiptoes to the living again, stepping around the creaky middle of the hallway, which makes her look like a bow-legged pirate walking across the deck of a ship. The ashtray is actually in the middle of the table, which reminds her that her impromptu getaway to The Three Seals "resort" caused her mother to start smoking again, so the keys won't be inside it. She checks the shadows of the mantelpiece and the keys are there, in the spot where the unused ashtray used to be kept. She grabs them triumphantly and lays them out on her palm, scanning them in the light from the window. None of the keys look new. She takes them to the door and tries, but it's no use. There is no new key.

Should the servant woman need access to the garage, she must ask the lord of the castle.

"Motherfucker."

She checks around for paper clips, but there's nothing there. Nothing on her, either, since she didn't expect to be locked out. She's pretty sure she has clips in her room, but if she's going upstairs, it might be easier to just get the keys. Well, easier. There's pros and cons. If she goes to her room and gets a pair of clips for a lockpick, it's going to take a while and there's no guarantee she will actually succeed. A brief and unpleasant flashback of her future failure to pick the door of the Blackwell Principal's office and the dishonor this will bring on Master Bowers confirms the notion.

On the other hand, If she goes into the master bedroom and finds David new key, getting the Blackwell keys from the garage will be a breeze, but there's a much higher chance of waking up the dipshit from planet mustache, and the scene that would cause would be an epic shitshow. She shudders, imagining the meltdown, mother waking, the screams, the chaos, but she also low-key finds it amusing. Tempting, even.

I could probably just say I'm there to steal the money from his wallet, she thinks to herself, grinning.

"Your own damn fault," she adds under her breath, beginning to climb the stairs.

The stairs are as creaky as everything else in the house. She gets to the top and stops, listening. Nothing but her heart, beating like the drum solo from Ultra Death.

Creaking her way to the bedroom door, she stops again, listens again. Nothing.

She twists the knob slowly, like they do in the horror movies, until the bar clears the slot and releases with the loudest click since the Big Bang. Her breath catches and she lets go of the handle, watching, paralyzed, as the door swings, creaking, inward, revealing the window, the nightstand, and the bed with the blanketed bodies that look like graves.

The dead don't rise, yet, though she does get a random flashback of Frank sitting with a box next to a fire in the woods that she can't place.

She waits a few seconds, then steps inside. Her gaze is glued to the nightstand drawer, to which David's sleeping face is turned. The mustache guarding the vault is so close to it, that a hand reaching for the little knob would have to pass through the river of Madsen breath.

That must be where it is, she thinks.

She moves closer, freezing after every silent step, before moving on again.

Finally she stands above it. There's the lamp, the phone, the book: "Act, React or Die."

There's the mustache.

She takes a hold of the handle and pulls slowly.

The drawer opens with a hiss and a soft thud. She sees condoms, VHS tapes and dog tags inside, but no keys. Overcoming the gag reflex, she moves things around in vain, then realizes the sound she was hearing in the background, the slow rhythmic breathing, has stopped. Glancing over, she finds herself staring into the wide open eyes of David Madsen.

The last silent moment before the fuse reaches TNT ticks away.

Then…

She phases back in.

She's by the door. David is sleeping.

She almost falls over, wipes her suddenly sweaty face with a sleeve, glances at the nightstand and at David, then looks at the desk on the right. She sees her mother's purse, papers that look like bills and on top of one of those, a key chain with an army thing on it.

She takes it and leaves without waking anyone up, closing the door and sliding the bar back into the slot without a click. She leans with her back against the door for a second, to breathe and ponder what the fuck that was. Finally, with a shrug she moves on.

Back downstairs, she turns the light on, because fuck it, and examines her prize. Sure enough, one of the keys is shiny brand new. It slides easily into the lock and, more importantly, turns.

Achievement Earned: Garage Entry.

The Blackwell keys are on the work table, just where she thought they would be.

Achievement earned: Thank you for your service.

She pockets both sets of keys and retreats, locking doors and shutting off the lights behind her.

Later, house.

The night air is fresh and cool. Steph is standing under a street light away from the truck, her head bowed. She's not moving, and for a second, Chloe is terrified that she's been possessed again or something.

"Steph!" she hisses, rushing over across the lawn. "What's wrong?"

Steph looks up at her.

"Finally! It's been like an hour, Chloe!"

Relieved, Chloe rolls her eyes.

"It has not. The mission turned out more dangerous than I thought. But no match for Captain Bluebeard. Let's go. What are you doing over here?"

"I got tired of sitting in the car and went to stretch my legs and saw this. Sad."

'This' is a dead blue jay on the pavement under the light. As Chloe comes closer and gets a better look, she sees an army of ants circling the bird in a vortex formation.

"Great," she says. "Just the fucking sign I wanted to see. Let's go, Steph."

"What does it mean?"

"Means the world is ending."

Or maybe that Rachel is dead and we're the ants circling around her in a death spiral.

No. No fucking way.

Let the world end.

By the time they get back to Blackwell, the number of illuminated windows has gone down, but it's not zero. At least nobody's around outside, or at least nobody visible. Maybe it's because the quad is barely lit and surrounded by the same dark woods they so recently escaped, or just because of some static electricity in the air, but the small hairs on Chloe's neck rise, as if she's being watched, and she gives the woods a wary scan. Nobody there - nobody visible - except Tobanga's pale face on top of the hillock, which, after the cave, isn't exactly reassuring.

Keep eyeballing me, Chloe thinks, and you might end up like your cousin.

Too bad she didn't bring any Molotovs with her.

They don't speak as they cross the courtyard and ascend the steps to the entrance. Steph turns her light on, as Chloe tries the keys until one of them turns in the lock. They enter the dark stairwell and climb to the second floor. The hallway is silent and empty. The glowing EXIT signs seem to command rather than provide information.

Chloe Price never did well with commands, though.

Rachel's room is the first one on the left. The slate on the wall next to her door is blank. Which feels… wrong. No "Where are you, Rachel?" No "Thinking about you?" No "Come back soon?" "Missing you?" "Hoping you are OK?" What the fuck, people? It's not like she's been gone 6 months. Does anyone care?

She sees a slate in her mind, sees Max seeing a slate in her mind, more like, which reads "Wherever you go, there I am."

She phases back in, shaking her head.

Or just shaking.

A few juicy ideas of her own spring up as she reaches for her marker, but they immediately wilt and fade away when she remembers that the marker is gone. She looks over to Steph.

"Got anything I can tag this with? A marker, or… lipstick?" she asks in a low voice.

Steph shakes her head.

Chloe grumbles and tries the handle.

Locked, of course.

She checks the keychain for a master key and eventually finds one. Imagine knowing Corporal Douchebag has access to your room at any time of day or night. Feels real safe.

On the other hand, thanks to the creep, she doesn't have to pick this lock.

Pros and cons.

She reaches out and turns the knob of yet another door, which gives her a flashback without sending her anywhere, just a half-baked deja vu, causing her to half-expect the door to open on the sleeping Madsen unit again, while half-expecting to find a room with only bare walls and floor at the same time. She's honestly not sure which would be worse.

But it's neither.

It's Rachel's room, empty and dark, and only Rachel's since last September, but still unmistakably Rachel's.

The masks and stars missing from her room at the Amber house are on the wall above her bed, underlined with a string of mini Chinese-lantern lights. A pair of Rachel's Converses is on the rug next to the futon. A pile of her makeup on top of the dresser. Posters.

It's weird entering a Rachel's room she's never been to. Chloe feels a bit like she did that first time in Rachel's room at the Amber house, on the day Rachel found out about her real mother. At the same time, though, the room seems familiar.

They close the door and turn on the light, and the first thing Chloe sees is the poster on the wall between the two windows. It's the cover of Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, with its prancing horse, which makes her realize why the room looks familiar. It's like a weird, warped, mirror image of Max's room from her hallucination. There are no Polaroids on the wall, but there are lanterns, and the furniture is not where it's supposed to be, but everything is on the exactly opposite side of the room, and the poster in Max's room was in the same spot, but had a cow instead of the horse and the title on it was for some fucking reason the Winger and the Cow instead.

Is that supposed to tell her something?

A vague notion, a feeling spins around in her brain somewhere, but she can't figure it out, which annoys her, so she looks away, seeing the old Tempest poster on the bend of the wall above the dresser. Rachel as Prospera in the horned mask; Nathan - Caliban - leering from behind her.

05.08.2010

On top of the desk, there is a framed photo, of the two of them. Rachel and Chloe that is. Not Rachel and Nathan. It's the one from Rachel's 18th birthday, showing them standing sideways, showing off the tattoos they just inked, Rachel a lithe swan, arm tossed above her head and the toe pointed, and Chloe, an ogre, behind her, hugging her around the waist with left arm while her other, tattooed arm is stretched along Rachel's side and thigh. She remembers circling under that thigh with her fingers, feeling the silky smooth skin, and getting elbowed in the ribs for it.

"What do you think you're doing, young lady?"

"You're the young lady. I've been 18 forever, waiting for you."

"Why don't you act your age, then, madam?"

"That's what I'm doing!"

They were drunk already. Laughing, laughing.

So much laughter back in those days. Seems so long ago now. The good old days. Before the supernatural garbage and the flashbacks and the weirdos and Tommy fucking Hill and Rachel disappearing and Chloe trying to kill herself in a cheap motel room. Before the world became a spinning vortex of shit and love was in the air.

Love.

Maybe just fun.

Until it wasn't. Until Chloe stopped acting her age and started playing an adult.

It's all a bit overwhelming. She shakes her head and tries looking around the room, looking for something that would help them free Rachel from her magical prison.

Yeah, like what?

The stupid futility of it all hits her suddenly. What can there be in this room that would help them find and unlock an invisible, magical prison that's not even located in the same reality, if it exists at all. These masks, shoes and posters? The Winger and the fucking Cow? Maybe there's a tiny hidden doorway behind that Firewalk bill. She'll just eat an "eat me" donut, shrink, and fit right through!

She crosses the room and rips the Firewalk poster off the wall.

No door behind it.

She goes up to the Catcher in the Rye and rips that one down too.

"Chloe," Steph says, but she doesn't hear. She's too busy tearing down posters for The Shining and Donnie Darko. Finally, she reaches for the Tempest, but stops. Doesn't have the heart to pull it down. She looks back at Steph.

"Sorry, Steph. I just… don't know what we're doing here."

"We're looking for clues."

"What can we find here that would tell us about this crazy magical prison she's locked up in?"

"Maybe… maybe not that," Steph acknowledges. "But maybe there's something that can tell us what she was doing. Which would maybe tell us why what happened to her happened. Which might then tell us…"

"…Who did it," Chloe finishes for her, nodding vigorously. "OK. OK, you're right. I can work with that. Let's check her desk."

Pinned on the wall above the desk, in the space where Max would have been sticking her time travel notes, is a front page of the Great Northwest, dated 5/9/2010, with the article about the forest fire. A single pink sticky note attached to it has the word "How" with the question mark written on it in Rachel's hand. On the desk, there is a UCLA mug and several books and notebooks, spread out about the surface, as if someone moved them just enough to see the covers and front pages, and left them where they ended up. Like that person, Chloe now sees the covers of "Land Use Law," "The October Country," "Arcadia Bay and Environs: A History," "AP Statistics," "Legends of the First People of the Pacific Northwest," and all the way on the right, though Chloe's can't quite believe it, the goddamn "Pharsalia" by Lucan.

"Some of these books seem very… on point," Steph says at her side.

"The fucking Pharsalia," Chloe says, picking it up. "Can you believe this shit?"

"The book you remember seeing in Samuel's shed 3 years ago, which wasn't there," Steph says.

"But it was here in Rachel's dorm, 3 years later," Chloe says.

"Let's see if she left any notes."

Chloe opens the Pharsalia first, obviously, while Steph picks up "Legends."

There is nothing added on the inset or the first few pages, so she thumbs through the rest, scanning the racing paper for any markings. There aren't any, but somewhere in the middle of the book a pink sticky flashes by. She stops and backs up until she's on that page. The sticky reads:

Witches. Vortex Club - Occultism? Discuss with C.

In her mind, a page from the Blackwell Totem unfurl, with an article by one Juliet Watson.

Is the Vortex Club... a Cult?

A techno beat fills her ears. Moist air smelling of chlorine, tiled floor. Flashing colored lights. End of the World posters. It's the rave at the Blackwell pool. There's Max Caulfield, talking to a guy in a baseball cap.

"I call it the 'Vortex Cult'" he shouts over the music.

She blinks and stares at the "Discuss with C.", shows it to Steph.

Well, why didn't she? But then, Vortex club? The elitist Blackwell clique is messing with the supernatural? Wait, so the robed freaks, the "others" that weirdo on the phone mentioned… Were they the vortex club fuckers? Nah, what? A bunch of medicated idiot high school kids did... that... to her? And to Rachel? There's no way.

"The Vortex Club," Steph repeats, meanwhile. "Isn't that like, a study group?"

"Once, maybe. Now it's more like a snobbery party group for cool kids."

"Why did Rachel think they were practicing the occult."

"Rachel, she saw right through them," Samuel says to Max Caulfield in front of the dorm 6 months later.

"Beats the hell out of me. Let's see if there's anything else here. Any luck on your end?"

"No notes in this book, but it does have the Raven and the Fire story in it."

"Oh yeah? How does it end?"

She moves books around while Steph flips pages, then picks up "Arcadia Bay and Environs."

"On April 12, 1839, while exploring the area south of Culmination, Ezekiel Blackwell discovered a picturesque bay cut out of sheer cliffs and fell in love with its beauty. Here, the town of Arcadia Bay was founded soon after." Chloe reads.

"And that's how the Raven received Fire and he had it for a long time, until the First People came and took it from him," Steph reads out loud.

"Lame. Check this out, though."

The "History" has several expandable maps folded at the end, of Arcadia Bay and surrounding areas through the years. 1800s, 1900s, 2000s. The town going from a few separate homesteads, to Blackwell - a wooden building at first - and a fishing village along the shore and mining and logging companies in the hills, to the sprawling, festering pile of garbage it is today. The tribal lands, meanwhile, outlined with dotted lines, moving in the opposite direction, shrinking, being pushed away. The most recent map, dated 2010, has no Pan Estates and that land in the eastern hills still showing as tribal.

"The Native Americans?" Max Caulfield asks as a drone buzzes overhead.

"The tribes who were here first," Ms. Grant says. "Who welcomed the settlers. Both cultures found a mutual symbiosis and thrived."

Yeah, not for long, Chloe thinks as she phases back in.

Somebody left a bunch of triangular markings all over the map in red pen.

"What are those markings supposed to mean?" Steph asks.

There's one by where the Pan Estates are currently, one by Blackwell, one by the lighthouse, junkyard, hospital. One up north by the Overlook park.

"Just looks like major Arcadia landmarks: lighthouse, Blackwell, junkyard. Pan Estates?"

"Why mark them on the map, though? Like, there's already a sign for a lighthouse on there."

"Yeah, it's weird. And triangles? Who uses triangles to mark shit up? Pythagoras?"

"Seems like some of them are upside down."

"Huh? Oh yeah, you're right. What the hell?"

"So, the lighthouse, the junkyard, the overlook park? Pointing up. Blackwell, the Pan estates, the hospital, what is that one? The Two Whales? Pointing down."

"And they are on all three maps, even the one from 1800s," Chloe says, flipping the pages. "I know the Two Whales is old news, but I don't think it goes that far back… The ones that point up look kind of like the all seeing eye tag, without the eye. And the ones pointing down look like…"

"These glyphs," says Max, looking at a pyramid of weird runes on the wall of a substation near the lighthouse, "it's weird but they somehow remind me of… wind?"

"What's that?" Steph stops her, pointing. "Latin again?"

In the corner of the map of the 1800s, same red pen wrote in small letters:

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni.

"Yeah, I'm not translating all that," Chloe says, "but that igni there looks a lot like ignis."

"Fire."

"Weird. This one by Overlook is pointing up on this map, but on both of the old ones it's down..."

Chloe turns to Steph as she says this, and catches a glimpse the door moving slowly in the corner of her eye, and a strip of the dark hallway beyond.

Shit, did we leave the door open? She thinks.

Wind?

Suddenly, something else moves, but before she can turn and see it, she feels a prick in her neck and then she's falling through the floor, leaving Steph up there in Rachel's room all by herself against whatever the hell it is, and she keeps falling and spinning, as the low humming noise grows louder and louder around her, until it's deafening, drowning out all other thoughts and things, and she's spinning, getting tossed around in a spiral of roaring darkness, until she sees something flashing by, a glimmer, then again, and again, until she realizes that it's the lighthouse on the cliff, and and that's the last thing she knows.