She can't help it. As he comes closer, she checks the "perimeter," as her step-ass would say. It's pretty bleak, the perimeter, golden hour or not. The mill shadow stretches all the way to the edge of the clearing now, and as he comes closer, Nathan is slowly swallowed by it.
She should have no reason to be afraid of the punk-ass rich kid - he is 17, for fuck's sake, and the last time she had any real contact with him he was a freshie getting slapped around by the jocks - but she's shaking. Damn pills. She shifts from one foot to the other to hide it and slides her hands into the back pockets of her jeans, her right fondling the knife's handle again.
The two skeevy henchmen don't help.
How did they even know? Were they following them? Why, though?
"If it isn't the prince of Arcadia Bay," she says, steadily.
"Don't talk to me like you know me," Nathan replies, with a sneer.
"We do know you," Steph says. "We went to school with you."
"That means fuck all," he says. "To me."
Chloe rolls her eyes.
"Wow, you're such a cold rich kid. You should be in a book about inbreeding."
"Inbreeding? Is that like when your new daddy Madsen visits after Joyce falls asleep?"
"Fuck you, Prescott!" Chloe shouts, taking a step forward. The knife is somehow in her hand already.
"No, fuck you, dyke. You think you're a badass?"
And just like that here it comes, the gun. It looks her in the eye and doesn't blink.
"How about now? Huh?"
"Get this gun away from me, psycho!" Chloe Price shouts in the Blackwell bathroom.
Her back against the wall, she grabs Nathan's hand and pushes, and the gun goes off.
She falls.
"Drop it, Nathan!"
Steph's voice makes everyone turn.
Everyone but Nathan.
Steph is holding Chloe's gun with both hands.
Chloe resists the urge to check for bullet holes. Not that anything is over.
"You think you can come on my property and tell me what to do?" Nathan growls. His eyes glaze over. The hand with a gun does not move.
Chloe cannot tear her gaze away from the bottomless barrel.
Hole to another universe.
In the blurry background, the two skeevy dudes are receding, apparently not interested in being in a shootout.
"I just don't want this to get worse, and for no reason," Steph's voice says somewhere nearby.
"No reason?" Prescott chuckles. "Yeah, right. Tell you what. Your friend here can tell me who's trying to fuck with me, and maybe I'll have a reason not shoot her punk ass."
"Why would I know who's trying to fuck with you? We came here, because we thought the mill had been abandoned since the fire. I had no idea your daddy must own every trash heap on the map."
"And I guess you had no idea about the barn, too?"
"About the… what barn?"
"The barn where you shot the lock off and dropped your marker."
"My marker? Seriously? You lost it, Prescott."
"Whatthefuckever. Everyone knows you walk around tagging shit cos you think you're some rebel artist. You were actually seen with a marker right before the break-in!"
"Seen by who?"
"So you better start talking, bitch!"
Voice rising into a yell, Nathan steps closer.
Here it comes, and there's nothing she can do to stop it.
Maybe she can at least stab him. Take him with her. Make sure he doesn't hurt Steph.
Chloe stabs Frank. Chloe stabs...
"Nathan, stop!" Steph yells. "She was looking for Rachel!"
There's a stunned silent moment, where everything seems frozen in time. Only the guilded treetops continue to sway, reminding her of the forest fire.
Nathan's eyes slowly lose the glassy sheen.
The world fades back into them like a polaroid pic.
"Rachel?" Nathan Prescott jumps in his booth at the Two Whales, realizing his mistake quickly. "Whateverthefuck."
Here in the real world, he scoffs.
"Rachel? That doesn't make sense."
"Yeah?" Chloe breathes, lowering the knife. "Well, it's fucking true, still."
Nathan lowers his gun, too, studies it in his hands, shakes his head.
"Why would you look for her there? Or here?"
"I… uh… had a crazy dream about it."
He looks up sharply and peers into her face for a moment, then turns away.
"Get the fuck outta here," he says.
"Do you… know anything?"
Motioning for the skeevy dudes to follow, Nathan begins to walk towards the cars.
"Stay out of my business, Price," he says without looking back. "Or next time I will shoot you."
They all get in their trucks. Once inside, Chloe takes the gun from Steph, who looks like that Annie Lennox song. Instead of leaving the way they came, Prescott and his posse drive around the edge of the clearing and through the half-collapsed archway once made for the train cars. After they're out of sight, Chloe backs up enough for a u-turn.
They say nothing until they're back on the highway.
"So…" Chloe speaks then, with a nervous chuckle. "Non-stop to Portland?"
Steph closes her eyes and shakes her head.
"No," she says, adding after a long pause, "Bathroom would be amazing, though."
Chloe wants to laugh, but can't quite manage.
"You hella saved my life," she says instead.
"Now for the big question. Did you tell anybody?"
"I wanted to," Max Caulfield says. "What if he goes on some rampage?"
"Nathan fronts like a thug, but he's a spoiled punk ass beyotch."
"He would have shot you, Chloe. That's a fact."
"That's a fact," she repeats quietly, speeding through the dead forest.
There is a public restroom at the trail head of the Arcadia Bay Lighthouse trail. As she waits for Steph, Chloe views the carving and graffiti exhibit that's taking place on the restroom walls, the trail map and the picnic table she's sitting at. Mostly, it's crude anatomy, esoteric symbols, self-important time stamps, and bad relationship math (MJ+TK=Heart), though some of the stuff is pretty curious. Poetic, even. It makes her think of the certain graffiti-covered freight train and of the marker she dropped at the barn. That was crazy how that dipshit managed to ID her. Who the hell saw her with a marker right before?
There are two other cars in the parking lot, both lemons with Washington plates. It's getting dark under the cedars.
Park closes at sunset - the nearby sign claims. Bullshit for tourists. Which makes Chloe wonder if she should even believe where it says that the lighthouse has been around over a hundred years. Has anything been around that long? The drawing of a dick on the bottom is not exactly a stamp of approval.
What does CP minus RA equal? a random thought.
Stephs comes out, and they go up the winding trail.
"What is Nathan Prescott doing with an underground drug lab?" Steph asks.
"Beats the hell out of me."
"Maybe it's time you went to the police."
"Steph… the police! The Prescotts own the goddamn police. I keep telling you. And even if we went to the Sheriff instead of Arcadia Bay PD, assuming he's not on the payroll yet, do you really think he'll listen and immediately run to the DA for a search warrant? And Papa Amber will hear that the evidence came from me and be like, 'Of course I'll give you a warrant to search Arcadia Bay's Royal Family based solely on the testimony of Chloe Price, the girl who destroyed my family!' Come on."
"Well, even if it's not enough for them to do anything, at least they will know."
"Yeah, and you know who else will know? Nathan Prescott. Right now he thinks I never got inside. That I shot up the place and couldn't break through the coded door. If I reveal that I know about the lab… Arcadia Bay is a small town, as you just saw. Next time he might actually pull the trigger."
"I'm not saying you should endanger yourself, but we need to tell somebody about this. What about David? He seems to be really against this drugs on campus business. Maybe he could…"
"Gingrich! Honestly? And I don't mean to be rude, but… I don't give a flying shit about the drugs on campus business. Or about Prescott running some kind of a dope operation out of an abandoned Prescott barn. I like drugs, OK? If the little fucker wants to become Arcadia Bay's Pablo Escobar, I'm not gonna be a hero to stop him. All I care about right now is finding Rachel, and the drug thing has nothing to do with that."
"Something told you to go there…"
"Yeah, and I went, and there was nothing there. No Rachel. No Dark Room. Just a drug lab and now a bunch of pissed off losers in my way. You know you don't believe in any of that."
"I just think someone beside us should know," Steph says again, as they make it to the top of the cliffs. "If something happened at the mill today… Nobody would even know where to look for us or who to ask."
The trees drop off behind them. The ground drops off before them. The sun is a fiery red disk, hanging low over the ocean. Steph's face is flushed. It looks a lot better on her than the deathly pale from before. Chloe's hair and their clothes flap like birds wings. Steph pulls her beanie down lower. They can't help but stare out to sea. It's a picture worthy of Max. She could call it The Sinking Hope.
There's the bench and the old map, and the buzzing electrical booth thing, and the lighthouse itself, alight with pink fire, and none of it sheds any light on the dark spaces of Chloe's memory.
"This looks like another dud," she says. "Another day is gone"
She sits down on the bench, sighs. Every muscle in her starts aching at once.
"At least no one is threatening us with guns here," Steph says.
Chloe chuckles. "Yeah."
The sun dips its toes. The lights are winking on down in Arcadia Bay. A lone fishing boat is pushing back into harbor. A logging semi is crawling down Arcadia Bay avenue. A motorcycle is silently making its way in the opposite direction. It's impossible to make out the rider, but Chloe still feels a pang of desire to run down to the parking lot, jump in her truck and intercept it. Except she's so tired. She shakes her head.
"This fucking town."
"We'll find her," Steph says.
"Whether she wants us to or not," Chloe finishes.
"So no bells here, then?"
"Nah. Aside from those that remind me of a thousand times I've been up here with… Uh, nevermind that. Mushy shit."
Chloe lights a cigarette. They watch the sea.
"You know I was jealous there for a while," Steph says.
"Huh?"
"Of you and Rachel. Of you, mostly."
"Oh."
"I was just about to make my move when you showed up kinda out of nowhere. Which, my own fault. I shouldn't have waited that long. Except that was probably for the best. If I managed to actually start something with Rachel and then you came along and stole her from me, I would really hate you."
They giggle together.
"How did you… How did you get over it?" Chloe asks.
"Well, I led a few adventuring parties to their permadeath… Sang some sad karaoke songs… Stuck a few hot needles into an elf barbarian action figure… No, but seriously. It wasn't too bad, since it was just a crush. We never actually had anything together."
"Yeah…"
"Sorry, Chloe. That was not helpful."
"No. It was a stupid question."
Steph pulls out her notebook.
"OK… So, Dr. Price, the third location. A cave?"
"Yeah, but I doubt anything is there… It's just an old cave in the forest. Rachel has never even been there. Why would anything there help us find her? I feel like we're wasting our time."
"Chloe, I don't think we have any better leads for the rest of the day, so let's just go and quickly check it. We have nothing to lose."
"Unless there's a a drug lab owned by the Prescotts there, too, which, at this point, would not surprise me."
The last of the sun disappears beneath the waves. The sky is like a fogged up window that's slowly becoming clearer as it dries.
"Well, if you sure it won't bother you, we can just go back and regroup at the hotel," Steph says. "Maybe grab some food on the way."
Chloe sighs and forces herself to stand up.
"It will bother me."
They descend the trail in the sudden darkness. The two cars that were in the lot before are gone now. As they make the way out of the parking lot, the truck's headlights slide forever across tree trunks, making them dizzy.
Back in town, Chloe makes a left after the water tower, drives inland past their motel, then makes another left a few blocks later, crossing into the Posh Bay.
It's Rachel's street. There are no cars in the driveway of the Amber house, but literally every light is on. Chloe stops the truck in the middle of the road and idles, until she sees a curtain move in the first floor window. Then she drives off.
"Was that…?" Steph asks.
She nods.
"It's a nice house."
They keep going until they're out of town again, past the new road cut through the middle of the thousand-year-old woods and the huge Pan Estates billboard, and park on the edge of the parking lot belonging to Arcadia Bay Medical Center, which is the last building before the endless hills take over. It's pretty well-lit, the parking lot, but the light seems to bounce off the wall of trees, not penetrating it at all. The few cars that are there are huddling near the building.
"Your phone battery OK?" Chloe asks, turning her flashlight on. "Mine is at about half."
"Three quarters. Maybe two thirds."
"Should be good enough."
They climb over the short concrete wall and stand in front of the forest line.
"Kind of got dark quick," Steph says.
"It's not too far," Chloe replies. "I think. Come on."
It's only about half a mile, but seems much farther in the dark and uphill. At one point they lose their footing and almost tumble into a creek. Afterwards, they continue hand in hand.
The cave yawns out of the hillside with no warning. A deeper darkness in the dark. Chloe squeezes Steph's hand and feels her squeeze back. They stop and listen. Nothing but the wind. Maybe it's the silence or the dark, or a memory creeping up, but Chloe feels the small hairs on the back of her neck stand up.
"This is it," she says.
They inch forward, the beam of Chloe's flashlight weakening.
The smell hits them at the same time.
"Ugh," Steph says. "What's…?"
Chloe wants to run, but she won't. Letting go of Steph's hand, she pushes forward. Was that a sound? Could be an echo of her heartbeat.
The smell is unbearable. The smell of graveyard. Junkyard.
Dream smell.
That smell.
No fucking way.
She wants to scream it, but there's no air.
The cave dances a shadow dance around her. It twists and curves and slopes down and rises. Chloe's feet trudge forward stubbornly, while she's drowning in a sea of flashbacks.
The bag. The rain. The knife. The blood. The dirt. The bag.
Suddenly, the beam of her flashlight falls on a pair of huge eyes, and she does scream then, dropping the phone and falling backwards.
"Chloe!" Steph shouts behind her pleadingly.
She forces herself to pick up the phone and raise the beam again. She has to hold it with both hands.
The eyes are painted in white and black on a carved tree trunk, Tobanga's twin brother.
It's listing heavily to the left, leaning on the rock wall, its long shadow cutting the cave in two.
And under it, the source of the smell: a dead doe.
It's just a doe. A deer. A female deer.
Long dead.
But what killed her?
Or... who?
The ferry man can't have her, I say.
But the dark gods laugh.
"Chloe!" Steph calls again.
"It's a deer," she yells back, realizing too late that she's crying again.
Scrambling up to her feet, she gives the cave one last quick sweep with her flashlight and makes her way back towards Steph and the entrance. As she comes closer, Steph turns her own flashlight on and beams it right into her face.
"Ow. Turn that shit off!"
Shying away from the light, she grabs Steph by the arm and drags her towards fresh air.
"Are you all right?" Steph asks once their out of the stench.
"I'm totally ready for the go back to hotel plan. Maybe not for the food part."
"Did you... remember anything?"
Before Chloe has a chance to respond, something WHOOPS in the pitch dark, seemingly just up the slope. The sound is followed by two distinct, echoing WHACKs of wood against wood.
Breathless, they run.