She hears it first.
The cozy crackling of firewood.
She opens her eyes and sees the orange glow from the fire dance across the ceiling.
She's in the back seat of her dad's car. There's a Tempest poster sticking out of the pouch and a lipsticked mannequin head on the seat next to her. There's a shatterred wine bottle that had been glued back together, with her marker in place of the cork.
The front of the car is completely destroyed. The driver's door is smashed in. The steering wheel is twisted sideways. The hood is missing and the space where the engine is supposed to be is on fire.
Frantic, she kicks the door and scrambles out.
It's the middle of the night. The forest covering the hills behind the car is on fire, too. A huge cloud is rising into the sky, trailing off towards the east. The wind howls like voices of distant shipwreck victims. In front of the car there is a log. William Price is sitting on top of it, grilling a marshmallow. Half of his face is in the shadow. On one side of him, perched on a tree stump whose rings make up a vortex, is the raven. On the other, a long stick in her hand, Chloe Price.
Chloe stabs a marshmallow. Twice.
"Fire blinds us, just like darkness," William Price says.
"What? What… is this?"
Only the raven seems to be aware of her. It looks at her and tilts its head and caws.
And then she sees. Behind them, next to her truck.
Rachel.
She's dressed in a black t-shirt, white shorts, and black boots. She looks like wind and fire.
She's knocking on the driver side window.
"Chloe!"
Her voice is muffled. It sounds like it's coming through two feet of water.
"Rachel!"
She runs, past the raven, past herself, past her father, just as William says, "Beauty." Rachel continues to knock on the window, though the truck is empty.
"Chloe!"
"Rachel!"
It feels like the junkyard is stretching, becoming viscous, slowing her, preventing her from getting any closer, but after about a million years Rachel finally turns and sees her. Her eyes light up with recognition and joy, which turn to worry a moment later. At the same time, a beam of light from the lighthouse sweeps in from the right and goes through Rachel casting no shadow.
"Chloe, what is happening?"
The wind dies down and suddenly it's Rachel's normal voice.
No.
No fucking way.
"I'm looking for you. Where are you?" she shouts.
"What? What do you mean? I'm right…" She looks around, then down at her hands. "Here…"
She lifts her right hand up - almost exactly like Max in that bathroom - and looks at Chloe through it.
"This is… a weird dream."
"Tell me where you are. I'm coming to find you. Tell me where… to look!"
"I… I don't know what you... I can't remember."
What sounds like a whale song wafts in from the direction of the sea, and Rachel's voice begins to sound like she's screaming through a pillow again. Then her form, too, becomes blurry, hazy, more transparent, until she disappears completely.
"Rachel wait!" Chloe screams. "Tell me something! Anything!"
"Chloe!"
She wakes up in a motel room. In a momentary grip of terror, her eyes search for the empty bottles, of pills and Jack Daniels. But the bottles aren't there. She's not back at Three Seals. She's at the Harbor Inn, historic downtown Arcadia Bay, and Steph is sleeping with her mouth open on the other bed.
The red digits on the alarm clock read 4:35. Which is a time more suitable for going to bed than waking up, normally, so she falls back on her pillow and gives it an honest try. But there's no way to fall asleep after that. The dream is still there, somewhere between her and the dark ceiling.
Her fucking heart hurts.
Her pack of Rorschachs is empty, also. She confirms this by sticking a finger in it, then tries to just lie on the bed for a while. But now that she's awake, she keeps thinking about Rachel and the dream, keeps searching for nonexistent bullshit clues, keeps wondering if somehow it was the actual Rachel in the dream, and it's impossible to stand thoughts like that without smoke in your mouth. So she gets up and grabs her jacket and goes out.
Outside, it's still almost an hour until sunrise, but it's practically daylight anyway, though nobody in Arcadia Bay knows it, aside from that one semi truck driver painfully switching gears somewhere on the other side of town.
WHERE IS RACHEL AMBER?
She marvels at how loud the tower graffiti seems in the predawn air. A reminder and a fuck you to this shit hole at the same time. It might be her best work to date. Even better than what she did in the Blackwell bathroom that one time.
Her keys jingle as she pulls them out of her pocket. She pauses, weighs them in her hand, then puts them back and walks through the parking lot and down the street towards the sea.
Chloe, the socially-conscious.
Ghost Rachel.
It comes without warning, the thought.
It doesn't mean.
It just can't.
"Space enough have I in such a prison…" Rachel says.
"What?" Chloe asks without opening her eyes.
"Huh? Oh, nothing. It's just crazy."
"What's crazy?" she does open her eyes then. Rachel is sitting with her back against the cabin of the truck. She's got her red t-shirt on, and her slim, freshly-tattooed leg is stretched out on top of the blanket. It's about 10 minutes before dawn.
"We were going to leave that night," she says. "But it's two years later, and we're still here. And I haven't complained about it once."
"Until now…" Chloe mutters, draping her arm across her eyes.
Rachel laughs and pokes her in the tattoo, which is still raw. "No. Not 'until now.' I'm just saying it's crazy how we both wanted to get out of here and somehow never managed to."
"Maybe it's because we gave each other reasons to stay."
"Nah. They weren't reasons to stay. See? It's like a… drug. A spell, or something. It's like Arcadia Bay tricked us into staying here."
"Did you finish off that joint?"
"That, my dear, is entirely beside the point!"
"Uh huh."
"I'm serious. What I'm saying is, Chloe, even though we met here, it's not a reason to stay, you know? We don't need Arcadia Bay to be happy. We don't need this fucking town to exist. We aren't going to just fade away as soon as we cross the town's border. That's a lie."
Arcadia Bay Avenue is a ghost town. Which is kind of how Chloe prefers it. Though like most nice things, it's a lie. An illusion, if you wanna be polite about it. There's a beat-up station wagon parked near the Two Whales, a logging truck suddenly thunders by, and Chad the convenience store clerk is standing by the entrance to his store with a cigarette in one hand and an energy drink in the other, at a respectable distance of about 10 feet from the stack of propane tanks and about 20 from the nearest gas pump. He's got spiky anime hair and slightly protruding front teeth and - shockingly - a goatee. Seeing Chloe, he drops the cigarette and crushes it under his boot. Safety first.
"Up early?"
"I don't sleep," she says. I just trip out into weird ass dreams within dreams or something.
"Who has the time, right?" He raises his can at her. "This kicks ass after gas station coffee. I recommend. In that same order."
"I'll just take some smokes."
He nods and holds the door for her gallantly, probably just so he could check out her ass, then follows. It smells like hotdogs inside, which is not terrible.
"You working hard, Chad?" she asks, to silence the growling beast in her stomach.
"And mustarding big!"
There's nothing you can really say to that. At that point, you either splurge for that hotdog or suffer. She chooses the latter. After all, the food across the street is free, though the downside is she has to speak with Joyce to obtain it. Arcadia Bay for you. Where there are no good choices.
She salutes to Chad and gets out of the smell. The lighter reminds her of Rachel, but then, everything does. Cigarette between her lips, she crosses the street. The Two Whales is all lit up like it's the friendliest place in town, and, shit, maybe it is. She walks to the corner and looks into the alley. Nobody there. Which is suspicious as shit. Like, where is this homeless person going to be for two days, if she's not in hiding? Deliberately avoiding questions about Tommy, whom she definitely knows. Trying to protect the tribe.
You just wait lady. If this Tommy or your tribe did something to Rachel…
She enters the diner through the back door, "Heys" the cook. In the main room, Joyce Madsen, her arms folded on her chest, is contemplating the diner's single current customer. He's got a beard - could be an abandoned goatee - and a laptop, which the latter, sitting on the table in front him, more than the former, marks him as an out-of-towner. Too un-hick for Arcadia Bay. Except he's probably looking at porn.
"Mom, has the homeless lady been around at all?"
"Chloe, why aren't you sleeping at home?"
"David told me to move out."
"He… what? No, he didn't."
"Sure, believe your stopgap husband over your own flesh and blood."
"He's not the one who constantly lies to me."
"Oh yeah, was he honest about that surveillance system he rigged the whole house with?"
"What on earth are you talking about?"
Wait, did that happen in the real world? Cameras in every hallway and room of the house, installed without anybody noticing and concealed to be virtually invisible? Fuck…
"Uh… anyway, seen the homeless lady lately?"
Joyce stares at her for a while like she has a hole in her skull, but she's not sure if it's new.
"No," she finally says, "I haven't. What do you want with her now? And where's your friend?"
"She's sleeping at the motel. Can you call me if you see her, mom? I'm gonna head out."
"Do you want some breakfast?"
"Nah. Too early. We might stop by later. Or you can send a text message," she adds, by way of a warm familial jest meant to lighten the mood, but Joyce's face doesn't move an iota from "concerned." The laptop creeper takes a fake sip of coffee from his empty mug and goes on clickity-clacking his keyboard.
Outside it's noticeably lighter. The sun is probably already up in fucking Idaho or somewhere, but it's gonna be another half hour before Arcadia Bay sees it because of these hills in the east.
"I couldn't have done it without Frank," Max says. "Now let's get in and out."
"You'll need this, Max!" Chloe Price exclaims, handing her this femur-looking thing she apparently just found in the diner's dumpster.
"On your mark! Get set! Throw!"
She stumbles and almost falls off the curb into the road, as the flashback glitches when Max seems to throw the bone in two opposite directions at the same time.
"The meat is in the street," Chloe mutters, rubbing her temple.
Dead dog. Dead birds. Dead whales. Dead doe.
Dead… people.
Huge fucking storm killing everyone.
Is it the drug that's dark or my mind?
Are these "flash-forwards" colored by random, wild imagination of the subconscious, or two weeks' worth of lost memory?
Is it Max rewinding time, or is it me wishing I could go back to when Max and I were just two dorky kids and my dad was alive and I never met Rachel?
Does dying repeatedly mean I'm fated to die in October, or is it me wishing to die?
And am I doing it because of what she did or because of what I did?
As their raised hands meet at the window - there's that gesture again - two seconds before the logging truck smashes into William's car, Rachel catches on fire.
"Of getting burned," William says.
And it burns.
It burns her. It burns her heart and it burns her eyes and she's about to scream when she hears the whale song. Except it's not a whale. Doesn't even sound like a whale. It's a 1337 train coming out of the north.
Wiping her eyes, she runs back to the motel.