Chapter 19: Tracking (Patreon)

The conference room was on the second floor on Sunday, which it almost never was, at the end of a corridor that had not existed on Saturday, past a painting of a well.

Margaret Pell stopped in front of the painting for exactly one second. A stone ring in a gray field, in oils, unsigned, with a little brass plate on the frame that said nothing at all. Then she knocked the knock he answered and went in.

He was standing at the window. The conference room had a window this morning, which it also almost never did, and it looked out on a Manhattan that was not quite the Manhattan outside: gray and early, no cars on the street below. He was holding a cup of coffee he hadn't touched.

"It's Sunday, Margaret."

"Yes, sir." She sat. Behind her a large man in a gray parka came in and stood, because he was not allowed to sit and knew it. "Mr. Dunphy. Containment. You'll remember him from Woodsboro."

"I remember Mr. Dunphy." The man in the good suit turned from the window and looked at him with real interest, the way he looked at very few people. "You caught a falling child off a utility pole, Mr. Dunphy. Against orders."

Dunphy didn't move. "Yes, sir."

"I read the report. I didn't read a reprimand in it."

"No, sir."

"Good." He sat at the head of the long table and set the cold coffee down in front of him. "Tell me about the tape."

Dunphy had a folder he didn't open. He'd memorized it in the car, Margaret Pell knew, because he was the kind of man who memorized things in cars. "Applications has been tracking a cluster in Washington State since October, sir. Four teenagers from Moesko Island, dead of heart failure at the same minute on the same night in four places, after a weekend at a rental cabin on Shelter Mountain. The FBI has it. One agent. Mulder."

"Of course it's Mulder."

"Yes, sir. We left it with him. It looked like a closed loop. Four dead, no carrier." Dunphy's jaw moved. "It wasn't closed. One of the four took the tape home from the cabin. A fifth kid found it in his things in November, after the funeral, and watched it. And then showed it to a man on a ferry, sir. It's been going down the coast ever since. Contracts has eleven links."

"Eleven."

"Eleven we're sure of. It branches when somebody panics and makes two copies. We think it's branched twice." Dunphy finally opened the folder, turned it around, and slid it down the table. On top was a map of the Pacific Northwest with a red grease-pencil line from an island in Puget Sound to Bellingham, to Everett, to a town in Oregon, and then branching: one line east into Idaho, where it stopped, and the other south, down the coast, down and down, ending in a red circle on Sonoma County, California.

The man in the good suit studied the red circle.

"When," he said.

"Friday, sir. A padded mailer to the Woodsboro Motor Lodge, addressed to Gale Weathers." Dunphy didn't look at the folder. "She watched it last night at ten-forty Pacific with a sheriff's deputy, Dwight Riley. At eleven-twenty she called the Meeks house. The subject was there by eleven-forty."

"And."

"And at 12:08 a.m. Pacific, sir, the subject watched it too."

Margaret Pell had worked for him for nineteen years. She watched him not move.

"On purpose," he said.

"Yes, sir. Nobody showed it to him. Nobody's passed it at all, as far as we can tell. That's—" Dunphy hesitated. "That's the first time, sir. In eleven links. The first three people who've watched it and not passed it on."

"How do we know he watched it?"

"At two-ten a.m. Pacific the Weathers woman called the network in New York and asked for a jet, sir. Santa Rosa to Seattle, today, two p.m. Three passengers: Weathers, Riley, Meeks." Dunphy paused. "We own the charter company."

"We own a lot of charter companies." He picked up the cold coffee, looked at it, and put it down again. "So. He's going to Seattle with six days on the clock to find a way out that nobody's ever found, instead of handing it to a stranger. Because he knows how it ends."

"Sir?"

"Nothing." He folded his hands on the table. "Tell me the problem. You didn't come in on a Sunday to tell me a seventeen-year-old's taking a trip."

Dunphy looked at Margaret Pell. She looked back at him over her glasses, which meant say it.

"Containment's rating, sir," said Dunphy. "A curse that copies itself. One link a week, and it branches. It's slow. It's slow now. Every person who watches it is a person with a VCR and a reason to make a copy, and the math isn't good. And the Weathers woman has a national program." He took a breath. "If anybody ever puts it on the air. Any of it. Even by accident—"

"Then fourteen million people have seven days," said the man in the good suit. "Yes."

On the side table by the shelf, under the tapes, the red telephone rang.

Once.

Then, after a pause exactly as long as a breath, it rang again.

Dunphy didn't jump. He'd been told. He went still instead, the way large men go still, like furniture.

The phone stopped.

"Twice, sir," said Margaret Pell softly.

"I can count, Margaret." He didn't look at it. He was looking at the map, at the red line and the circle at the bottom. "Twice means they'd like to know what I'm going to do about it."

"What are you going to do about it, sir?"

He took his time.

"Contracts," he said. "Nobody at the Weathers woman's network so much as touches a VHS tape with no label on it for the next six days. I don't care how. Buy the building. Customs: every unlabeled cassette on a plane out of SeaTac, Portland or San Francisco with a destination in Asia gets opened, and not watched, and lost. There's already one of these in Japan, Margaret, and I would very much rather not find out what happens when they meet."

Margaret Pell wrote it down. She didn't ask how he knew there was already one in Japan. She'd stopped asking that kind of thing in 1981.

"Agent Mulder will be on Moesko Island by Wednesday. Leave him alone. His partner won't let him watch it." Something moved at the corner of his mouth. "Trust Scully."

"And the subject, sir?" said Dunphy.

"Leave him alone too."

Dunphy's face didn't change, but something in the way he stood did, and the man in the good suit saw it.

"Say it, Mr. Dunphy."

"Sir. He's seventeen. If he doesn't find it by Saturday—"

"Then we'll have learned something." The man in the good suit stood, buttoned his jacket, and went back to the window to look out at the empty street that was not quite New York. "And I'll be sorry. I'm sorry about a great many things, Mr. Dunphy. Most of them I let happen anyway."

He stood there a while longer with his hands in his pockets.

"He's not doing it to find a way out," he said. "He's doing it because he's the only one of them who's seen the end of the movie, and he doesn't like the end of the movie." A pause. "Neither did I, the first time."

"Sir?"

"Thank you, Mr. Dunphy. Ms. Pell will show you out." He didn't turn around. "And Mr. Dunphy. If you happen to be in Washington State this week on some other business, and you happen to see a boy go down a well..."

Dunphy waited.

"Don't catch him," said the man in the good suit. "This one he has to do himself."

When they were gone he stood at the window in the room that had moved, and after a while he said to nobody, "Let's see what you do with a tape you can't give back, Mr. Meeks." Out in the second-floor corridor that hadn't existed yesterday, the painting of the well was gone.

I. Six Days, Twenty-Three Hours

When I came back out of Dewey's kitchen, the first thing Gale Weathers did was take a pad of paper out of her purse, sit down at the little table by the window, write SEVEN DAYS at the top, and underline it twice.

The second thing she did was cross it out and write SIX DAYS, 23 HOURS.

"Gale," said Dewey.

"Don't." She didn't look up. Her pen was moving. "Don't, Dewey. If I stop writing things down I'm going to start screaming, and I'm going to scream for a very long time, and it's going to wake up Mr. Hendrickson downstairs, and he already doesn't like me." She wrote something else. "So I'm going to write things down."

Dewey looked at me over her head. I nodded. He went into the kitchen and put the kettle on, because that was a thing he could do, and he was the kind of person who needed one.

I sat down across from her. Behind me the static was still hissing on the TV. Nobody had turned it off, so I got up and did, and the room was suddenly very dark and very quiet, and I could hear the kettle starting to tick.

"Okay," said Gale. "Okay. Tell me what we know. Not what you think. What we know."

So I did.

We knew there was a girl and a well and seven days. We knew it started on Moesko Island, an island in Puget Sound with a ferry and a lighthouse and horses, because Mulder had told me so, and because a kid had told me so in my guestbook. We knew it had gone through Cabin 12 at a place called the Shelter Mountain Inn, because four kids had stayed there and four kids had died. We knew a fifth kid had passed it on. We knew an FBI agent had spent three months on it and found three people alive at the end of it, all of whom had shown it to somebody.

"And there's a reporter at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer who's been working it since October," I said. "Her name's Rachel Keller."

Gale's pen stopped.

"How do you know a reporter at the P-I?"

"I read her byline." That was true, in a way: I'd read her name in a credit sequence, in a different life, on a DVD case. "She's good. She's on the same four kids Mulder is."

Gale looked at me. Then she wrote RACHEL KELLER, P-I on the pad and underlined it once, which I understood was how Gale Weathers wrote down the name of somebody she already didn't like.

"What else," she said.

"There's a horse ranch on Moesko. The Morgans." I said it carefully. "There was a little girl there, a long time ago. I think the tape's hers."

"Hers?"

"I think she made it."

Gale put the pen down. "Randy. A little girl can't make a—"

"I know." I looked at my hands. "I know what it sounds like. You asked what I know, and I don't know that. I think it."

Dewey came back with three mugs of tea, the kind with the bag still in and the string hanging over the side, set them on the table, and sat on the arm of the couch behind Gale, close. He didn't touch her. He didn't need to.

"So we go to Seattle," said Dewey.

"We go to Seattle."

"And we find this—the girl. The Morgans. And then what?"

I didn't answer right away.

What I didn't tell them that night, with the static off and the tea going cold, was how the movie ends. In the movie, Rachel finds the well and the body, pulls it out of the water and holds it and cries, and everybody thinks that's the end: that that's what the girl wanted, to be found, to be buried, to be free. Then Rachel goes home, the clock runs out on somebody else, and the TV turns on by itself, and Aidan, the little boy, looks up at his mother and says, You weren't supposed to help her.

I didn't know what the real version was. That was the whole problem. I knew the movie version, and the movie version didn't work.

"And then I don't know," I said. "And then we find out what she wants. And it's not what everybody thinks she wants. I know that much."

"How," said Gale. Not how do you know. Just how, flat.

"Because everybody who's ever tried the obvious thing is dead."

Gale held my eyes. Then she picked up her pen, wrote NOT WHAT EVERYBODY THINKS on the pad, and underlined it three times, and I realized I'd just been given the highest grade Gale Weathers gave.

At ten after two, Gale picked up Dewey's phone and called New York.

It was ten after five there. She didn't care. She dialed a long number from memory, and I listened to it ring and ring, and then I listened to Gale Weathers wake a network vice president out of a dead sleep and not apologize.

"Marty. It's Gale." Pause. "I know what time it is. Marty, I need the plane." Pause. "The plane. The one you used to fly your wife's sister to Aspen. Yes. That one. I know about Aspen, Marty. Everybody knows about Aspen." Pause. "Today. Santa Rosa to Seattle. Three passengers." A longer pause. "It's a story. It's the biggest story. I can't tell you what it is. If I tell you what it is you'll want to air it, and Marty, I swear to God, if anybody at that network airs one frame of what I'm working on—"

She stopped and looked at the dead TV.

"Never mind," she said, in a different voice. "Just send the plane. I'll call you from Seattle."

She hung up and sat with her hand on the phone.

"He's sending it," she said. "Two o'clock. Sonoma County Airport." She looked at me. "He thinks I'm having a breakdown."

"Are you?" said Dewey gently.

"Not yet." She took her hand off the phone. "I'm scheduling it for Thursday."

Dewey called Sheriff Burke at three.

I didn't want to listen to that one, so I went out on the landing at the top of the outside stairs, into the cold. Main Street was empty. The Christmas decorations were still up on the lampposts, the cheap tinsel wreaths the Chamber of Commerce bought every year, turning slowly in the wind. At the end of the street the Rialto's marquee said JERRY MAGUIRE in letters that were missing an R. The only light on was in the window of the Donut Hut, where somebody was starting the fryer.

Through the door I could hear Dewey being a deputy. Personal leave, sir. Family thing. No, sir. No, it's not Tatum. Tatum's fine. It's a—it's a family thing, sir, I can't—yes, sir. A week. Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.

He came out after and stood next to me, looking at the turning tinsel.

"I lied to the sheriff," said Dewey Riley.

"You didn't lie. It's a family thing."

He thought about that. "Gale's not family."

I looked at the Donut Hut and let him hear it. After a while Dewey made a small sound, half a laugh, and rubbed the back of his neck, and his ears went red in the dark.

"Yeah," he said. "Okay."

"Dewey."

"Yeah."

"What do you want to do about the tape?"

He looked at the door behind us. The tape was still in his VCR. None of us had touched it since I'd rewound it and played it and the phone had rung.

"I don't want it in my house," said Dewey. "I don't want it in anybody's house. I don't want it anywhere somebody could find it and put it in a machine. I keep thinking about Mr. Hendrickson's grandkids coming up here for a Coke on a Saturday. I keep thinking about—I keep thinking about Tatum." His jaw worked. "I want to put it in a bag and drive it out to the landfill and pour gasoline on it."

"Then somebody'll be dead on Saturday and you'll never know why."

He looked at me.

"The four kids in October," I said. "The kid who found it after. The man on the ferry. It's not about the tape, Dewey. The tape's just how she gets out. If you burn it, she's still down there, we're still on the clock, and we've got nothing to show anybody about what she is." I looked at him. "There's a guy in Seattle who knows video. Or there will be. I want somebody who knows what a tape's supposed to look like to look at that one. And I want it with us. Not here. With us, where we can see it."

Dewey thought about it a long while.

Then he went back inside and came out two minutes later with the tape in a brown paper evidence bag, the kind with red tape across the top and lines on the front for who'd had it and when. He'd sealed it and written on it in careful block capitals with a pen from Hendrickson's Hardware:

CASE: ____ITEM: VHS cassette, no label, 1COLLECTED BY: Dep. D. RileyDO NOT VIEW

He'd underlined DO NOT VIEW three times. Then he'd thought about it and added, smaller:

seriously

"Chain of custody," said Dewey. "Nobody opens this bag unless I'm there. Not you. Not Gale. Not the guy in Seattle. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Okay." He held it against his chest under his arm, like a football he planned to carry the whole way. "Okay."

I drove home at 3:20 in my father's Volvo with the heater on high and nothing on the radio, pulled into the driveway with the lights off the way I had once before, in October, and sat there with the engine ticking.

The house was dark. The new front window, sticker still on it, reflected the streetlight. Upstairs in Martha's window was a faint little green light: the walkie-talkie on her pillow, on standby.

I went in through the kitchen. The note was still under the sugar bowl where I'd left it for my mother at eleven-thirty, because my father had told me to: Dewey needs help. Back by morning. - R. She hadn't found it yet. I left it there.

In the den I turned on the computer and waited out the long gray minute of the hard drive grinding. The modem screamed; I turned it down and listened to the house, and nobody woke up.

I wrote to Mulder.

To: F. MulderSubject: it got to me

It came south. A copy reached Gale Weathers in Woodsboro on Friday, Bellingham postmark. She and Deputy Dwight Riley watched it at 10:40 p.m. Saturday. I watched it at 12:08 a.m. Sunday. On purpose. Nobody passed it to me, and nobody's passing it on.

We're flying to Seattle today. Gale got a plane. I want to find the Morgan ranch on Moesko Island, and the cabin, and I want to talk to Rachel Keller at the P-I, who's been on your four kids since October.

I know what you're going to ask. I can't tell you how I know. I'm going to need you to trust me anyway, for six days.

You can call this number. You can call it after 10.

— R

I looked at it for a while. Then I hit SEND, the modem screamed again, and it was gone.

I didn't go to bed. I sat at the kitchen table in the dark with my coat still on, wound the Hamilton, looked at the note under the sugar bowl, and thought about what I was going to say in three hours to the three people asleep upstairs.

I'd been thinking about it since the phone rang in Dewey's kitchen.

A month ago I'd have lied to them, and been good at it. Gale's network is flying me to Seattle to consult on a story. It's a big opportunity. It's a week. I'll call every night. I'd done it for Ohio. I'd lied to them about Billy's hand and Stu's voice and a garden spade and the batteries in my pocket in October, every day for three months, out of love and fear and because I didn't know how to start.

Then a doll had come in through my sister's name, and I'd stood up in the living room at two in the morning with a light around my throat and started.

Rule One, my father had said across this table at three in the morning, with a cane between the coffee cups. No lies. Not to us. Not ever again.

Rule Two. You tell us before you go.

I'd kept them for a month, through Christmas and the scarf and the hall floor, Kristen at the airport, Cotton on the courthouse steps. I'd kept them at eleven-thirty tonight, too, knocking on my parents' door with my coat already on: Rule Two. Dewey's. Something bad. Back by morning. My father had lifted his head off the pillow, looked at me for one long second, and said, Take the Volvo. Leave your mother a note.

So lying wasn't on the table. A man in a bathrobe had settled that in December.

The hard part was the rest. It was one thing to tell them about a doll in a box under the tree when they could watch it move and catch a bat and go out through a window. It was another to sit at the kitchen table on a Sunday morning and say I watched a videotape last night, and a little girl called me on the phone, and in six days I'm going to die—with nothing to show them. No doll, no bat. Just me at the table, saying it.

They'd believe me. They'd believed me about worse. But I knew my mother, and I knew what she'd do with it, because she'd done it in December: she'd believe me, and then she'd sit across the table and look at me for six days, trying to work out how much I was softening it for her. How much I really thought I'd come home. Whether I've got a plan was a plan or a thing you say to your mother.

I couldn't give her six days of that. Not while I was gone.

I opened the panel in the dark kitchen, the light of it the color of a TV in an empty room.

Ability Slot 1: Dark Spear · Ability Slot 2: Poison BreathStored: Wind Barrier · Morbing · Truth Assertion · Ember · Spirit Gun

Truth Assertion. Common Ability. Allows you to make others believe the truth of your words, but at the same time, for as long as the ability is active, you cannot speak or communicate with the intent to deceive.

The last time I'd worn it in this house it had been for a doll, so they'd believe me fast enough to live.

This time it was for the other half of the card. With the choker on I couldn't soften it. I couldn't make it smaller than it was, and I couldn't make it bigger either. If I said I'm going to come home and the choker let me say it, my mother would know I believed it all the way down—not as a thing you say to your mother, but as the truth. That was the only thing I had to give her, so I was going to give her that.

I went upstairs to my room without a sound, closed the door, sat on the bed, and opened the panel.

Ability Slot 2: Poison Breath → Truth Assertion[SWAP] (5:00)

I confirmed it.

The Hamilton ticked without ticking. I felt Poison Breath go, the dead-battery taste at the back of my throat fading out like a light on a dimmer, and then nothing, the empty slot like a missing tooth. At the very end of the five minutes something settled around my neck, light and cool, like a hand.

I sat on the bed and waited for the sun to come up. At 6:04 I heard my father's alarm.

II. The Choker

My father came down first. He always did. Sunday or not, his body got up at 6:04 and went downstairs and made coffee, because it had been doing that for twenty years and didn't know how to stop.

I heard him on the stairs. I heard him stop in the kitchen doorway, the light switch, and then him finding the note under the sugar bowl where my mother hadn't found it yet.

When I came down into the hall, the light from my neck went ahead of me down the wallpaper, faint and white and cool like the light from an open refrigerator. My father turned around in the kitchen doorway with the note in his hand and saw it.

He'd seen it once before, in the living room at two in the morning in December, with a box under the tree. I watched him remember. His face went careful, the way it had that night before he picked up the bat.

"Bud," said my father softly. "Is it another doll?"

"No," I said. "It's worse. Can you get Mom? And Martha? I need to say it once. I don't think I can say it twice."

He looked at me a second longer. Then he set the note on the counter like it might break and went upstairs.

We sat at the kitchen table.

The same table. The burn mark from the time Mom put the casserole down without a trivet; the wobble in the leg by the window that Dad had been meaning to fix since before I was born, both times. The table where I'd eaten the first breakfast anybody ever made for me, my first morning, and tried not to cry. Where, a month ago at three in the morning, I'd put a cane down between the coffee cups and told them what I could, and my father had made three rules.

Mom sat across from me in her bathrobe with her hands around a mug of coffee she wasn't drinking. Dad sat next to her. Martha sat next to me in her pajamas with the walkie-talkie in her lap. She'd looked at my neck once on the stairs, eyes very wide, and then sat down beside me without a word, close enough that her shoulder touched my arm. On my side of the table.

The light from the choker lit the bottoms of their faces. I'd turned off the overhead because it seemed easier, and the gray in the window over the sink was still too weak to do much, so it was just me lighting up my family at the kitchen table at six-twenty on a Sunday morning, like a kid holding a flashlight under his chin to tell a ghost story.

"You know what this is," I said. "From December. While it's on, you'll believe me. And while it's on, I can't lie. Not even a little. Not even to be nice." I looked at Mom. "That's why I put it on. Not so you'd believe me—you'd believe me anyway, I know that. I put it on so you'd know I'm not making it smaller than it is. So whatever I tell you, you don't have to spend all week wondering how much I left out."

Mom's hands had gone tight on the mug. "Randy, what—"

"Rule Two," I said. "I'm going somewhere. Today. For a week. I'm telling you before I go."

The refrigerator hummed. Outside, a car went by on Elm.

"Okay," said my father. "Tell us."

I told them about the tape first. The padded mailer at the motel on Friday, Gale, Dewey, the phone that rang. Gale calling here at eleven-twenty last night, which Mom had slept through and Martha hadn't. The static, the little girl's voice on the phone, the two words.

I told them what the tape did. Seven days, and then on the seventh night, at the same minute you watched it, you die. I told them about four kids in Washington State in October, and a fifth who'd lived by showing it to a stranger, and a chain of people going down the coast, each of them looking somebody in the eye and handing it over, until it reached a motel room in Woodsboro.

I told them Dewey wouldn't pass it. I told them Gale wouldn't either, and what her face had looked like when she decided.

Then I told them I'd watched it too.

Mom made the sound you make when you miss a step in the dark.

"Why," she said. "Randy, why would you—"

"Because I didn't know what was on it." That came out easily, because it was true, and the choker glowed. "And because somebody had to know. And because Dewey and Gale had seven days, and I couldn't let them go up there alone, and I couldn't—" I stopped and started over. It was the true thing, so it had to come out. "And because if I was on the clock too, I couldn't quit on them. I couldn't decide on Thursday that it was too hard and come home. I'd have to find it. I wanted to not be able to quit."

My father closed his eyes.

"When," he said, with them still closed.

"Twelve-oh-eight this morning."

"So, Saturday night." He opened them. "Eight minutes after midnight."

"Yes."

Mom's face had gone white. She was looking at the light under my jaw, and I could see her believing every word and what it was doing to her. The choker didn't make it any easier. It made it true. It took away the part where she got to hope I was exaggerating and left her only the part where her son had six days.

I made myself keep looking at her.

"There's a way out," I said. "There has to be. Nobody's ever found it because nobody's ever looked—they all just passed it on. I know some things about it that nobody else knows. I know where it started. I know who she is. Gale's network is flying us to Seattle this afternoon, and there's an FBI agent who's been working on it since October, and a reporter, and I'm going to find out what she wants. And then I'm going to give it to her. And then I'm going to come home."

The choker glowed. I'd said I'm going to come home, and it had let me.

I watched my mother see the light hold on the word home, and understand that I wasn't saying it for her.

She put her mug down.

"Who," said Martha.

Everybody looked at her.

"You said you know who she is." Martha's voice was very small and very even. "The girl. Who is she?"

"Her name was Samara," I said. "She was a little girl, a long time ago. Her mom wanted her, and then got scared of her, and her dad wouldn't look at her, and the people who were supposed to help her locked her in a room. And then somebody put her somewhere dark, and nobody came to get her." I stopped. "I think that's what the tape is. I think it's the only way she has left to make people look at her."

Martha thought about that with her hand on the walkie-talkie.

"That's really sad," she said.

"Yeah, Mart. It is."

"Is she like the doll?"

"No," I said. "The doll was a man. A bad man, who put himself inside a toy because he wanted to keep hurting people. She's not like that." The choker glowed. "She's a kid. She's a kid nobody came for."

Martha studied me. Then she nodded slowly, like that settled it.

"Then you should go get her," said my sister.

My mother made a small sound and put her hand over her mouth.

"And what is it?" she said through her fingers. Her voice cracked on it. "The thing you—the things you can do. Is there something you can do? For this? Is there something you've got that—"

I thought about it honestly. The choker made me.

"I don't know," I said. "I've got a spear that went through a doll. I've got wind, and a sword in a cane, and some other things you haven't seen yet. I don't know if any of it works on her." The light at my throat held. "But I know the rules. I know more about her than anybody alive. And I've got Gale, and Dewey, and the FBI." I looked at my mother. "And I've got three rules. I'm keeping all of them."

My mother looked at me with her eyes very bright, and then she asked it. The question she'd almost asked on the hall floor on Christmas morning with the kid's old Polaroid between us. The one my father had refused to ask in the side yard in December with pellets in his back, after a doll told him that ain't your boy. The one I'd been afraid of since the first morning I woke up in this house and smelled breakfast and didn't know whose mother was calling me down.

She asked it with the choker on, on purpose. I watched her decide to.

"Are you still my son?" said Diane Meeks.

The kitchen was silent.

I couldn't lie. I couldn't make it softer. I could say I can't tell you that; that was allowed. It was what I'd told my sister on the kitchen counter in December about the other four rules.

It wouldn't have been the true answer, though. Not anymore. I knew the true answer. I'd known it since a kid in a green vest walked through a gold door in a dream and said you're as much me now as I'm you.

"Yes," I said.

The choker glowed.

My mother put her hand over her mouth and cried at the kitchen table at six-thirty on a Sunday morning, not loud, the way you cry when something you've been holding up a very long time finally gets set down. My father put his arm around her and looked at me over her head, at the light at my throat and the word it had let me say, and his face did something I'd never seen it do. Martha put her head against my shoulder, and I put my arm around her, and the four of us sat there in the light from my neck while the sky in the window over the sink went from gray to white.

The phone rang at 7:02.

All four of us jumped. Mom made the missing-a-step sound again, Dad's chair went back an inch on the linoleum, Martha grabbed my arm with both hands, and every muscle in my body went tight at once, the way they had in Dewey's kitchen with a little girl's voice in my ear.

It rang again. The kitchen phone. The wall phone. FOR EMERGENCIES ONLY.

It doesn't call twice, I told myself. It called. It's done. It doesn't need to call again. It knows where you are.

At the back of my neck, Survivor said, very calmly, It's not her.

I got up and answered it.

"Meeks residence."

"It's after ten," said Fox Mulder.

I put my hand flat on the wall next to the phone and breathed out. Behind me I heard my family breathe out too, all at once.

"It's seven in the morning here," I said.

"It's ten here. You said I could call after ten." His voice was rough, like he hadn't slept either, and fast, and very focused. "I read your email at nine-fifteen. I've been sitting here for forty-five minutes trying to decide whether it was a joke. Scully says it isn't."

"Scully's right."

"Scully's usually right. I try not to tell her." A pause. "You watched it."

"Yes."

"On purpose."

"Yes."

"Why would anybody—"

"Because I didn't know what was on it," I said. "And somebody had to."

A long silence on the line. I could hear him breathing and, very faintly behind him, a TV, and somebody else moving around, and a woman's voice saying something I couldn't make out.

"I'm going to ask you a question," said Mulder. "And I'd like you to think about it before you answer. Because I've asked it before, in October, and you didn't answer, and I let it go, and I've been sorry since. How do you know?"

I closed my eyes.

The choker was on, cool around my neck. I couldn't lie to him, not even a little, not even to protect him. If I opened my mouth, only true things could come out, or nothing.

"I can't tell you that," I said. "Not yet. Maybe not ever. But I'm not lying to you. I've never lied to you, Mulder. Not in the guestbook, and not in October, and not now. Everything I've told you is true. That's all I can give you."

I felt it go out of me down the phone line, the way it had gone down a pay phone at O'Hare in November into Donald Thompson.

On the other end, Fox Mulder said nothing for a long while.

"Huh," he said finally, in a voice I didn't think many people had heard out of him.

"What?"

"I believe you." He said it like a man finding a twenty in an old coat. "That's—unusual, for me. I usually believe people for much worse reasons." Paper rustled. "Okay. Okay. Tell me what you need."

So I told him. Seattle. The P-I. Rachel Keller. Moesko Island, the Morgan ranch, the Shelter Mountain Inn, Cabin 12. He'd been to Moesko three times since October. He knew the ranch. He'd been on the property once, in November, and a man had come out of the barn with a shotgun and politely asked him to leave, and he'd left.

"Richard Morgan," said Mulder. "He breeds horses. Bred. He doesn't have many left. The island's had a bad year with horses."

"I know."

"Of course you know." I heard him write something. "I'm stuck in DC until Tuesday. There's a man named Skinner who's very interested in why I keep going to Washington State on the Bureau's money. Scully and I can be on the island Wednesday. There's a morning ferry out of Anacortes." He paused. "Where will you be?"

"On it."

"Okay." Another pause. "Hold on. Somebody wants to talk to you."

A rustle, the sound of a phone changing hands, and then a woman's voice, cool and precise and very tired.

"Mr. Meeks. This is Dana Scully."

"Hi."

"Hi." A pause, as if she were arranging something on a table. "I want you to know three things. The first is that I performed the autopsies on two of the four teenagers from Moesko Island in October, and I don't know what killed them. Their hearts stopped. There was no damage to the hearts. There was nothing in their blood. And their faces—" She stopped. When she started again, her voice was a degree cooler. "The second is that if you've been exposed to something—a toxin, a contaminant, something on the tape itself—I would very much like you to see a doctor. Today. Before you get on a plane."

"Okay," I said. "That's fair."

"It's more than fair. It's medicine." Another pause. "And the third is that Agent Mulder is not going to watch that tape."

"I know," I said. "I told him to let you hide it."

A long silence on the line.

"You did," said Dana Scully. It wasn't a question.

"In the email. At Christmas. I told him if you found it, let you hide it from him. That you'd be right."

Another silence. Then, softly, in a voice not quite as cool:

"Trust Scully."

"Yeah."

"He has that on his corkboard," said Scully. "Did you know that? Your website. Trust no one, but trust Scully. He printed it out. He thinks I don't know it's there."

"Does it bother you?"

"I haven't decided." The coolness came back, though not all the way. "Wednesday, Mr. Meeks. The morning ferry. See a doctor."

She hung up before I could say anything else.

I stood there with the receiver in my hand. Behind me at the table my family was watching me. Dad had his arm around Mom. Martha held the walkie-talkie in both hands.

"Was that the FBI?" said my mother faintly.

"Yeah."

"The FBI calls you?"

"Sometimes." The choker glowed. "Not usually this early."

My mother stared at me. Then she laughed once, a wet, startled, helpless laugh, and put her face in her hands. My father rubbed her back and looked at me over her head with an expression I'd never seen on him, and it took me a long time afterward to work out what it was. Pride, I think. And under it, being afraid of it.

Afterward I went upstairs and swapped the choker back out.

I didn't have to. It didn't cost anything to keep it on. But I'd said what I had to say, and the rest of the day was going to be people and planes and Gale Weathers, and I wasn't sure I could get through a day with Gale Weathers without lying at least once. And I didn't want to go to Seattle with a glowing ring around my neck that anybody on the street could see.

Mostly, though, it was Mom. I didn't want her spending all morning having to believe everything I said. I wanted to give her the regular kind back, the kind where she got to decide.

Ability Slot 2: Truth Assertion → Poison Breath[SWAP] (5:00)

At the end of the five minutes the light went off my neck and the cool went with it, and the dead-battery taste came back faintly at the back of my throat. I looked at myself in the mirror. Just me. Flannel buttoned to the collar. A face that hadn't slept.

When I came out, my father was standing in the hall.

He'd been waiting, and he didn't pretend otherwise. He was holding his coffee and wearing his old Cal sweatshirt, and he looked at my neck, where the light had been, and then at me.

"It's gone," he said.

"I put it away. It doesn't go away. I just put it away."

He nodded slowly, as though that made sense, like a man being told about a carburetor.

"In October," said my father. "In the garage. When you were going to Ohio."

"I remember."

"I said, whatever it is, you come back." He looked at the coffee. "Did you know, then? What it was?"

"Some of it."

"And you came back."

"I came back."

He nodded again and stood there a while.

"I want to come with you," he said.

I'd known he would. I'd known it at four in the morning at the kitchen table, and I'd had my answer ready since then. It was a good answer, and it was true, and it still took me a second to get it out.

"I need you here, Dad."

"Randy—"

"I need you here," I said. "With Mom. And Martha. If you come, I'll spend the whole week watching you instead of watching for her. I'll be thinking about you, and I can't be thinking about you." I looked at him. "And it's going around. The tape. It came south once already. If anything comes to this house in the mail—a tape with no label, a box, anything—I need somebody here who knows not to put it in the machine. Who knows to call Tatum, or Sid, or the sheriff, and put it in a bag and not touch it. I need somebody in this house who knows what's out there. And you do. You've known since December."

My father looked at me without saying anything.

"That's a pretty good answer," he said finally.

"I had four hours."

"Yeah." Something moved at the corner of his mouth, the place a smile would go. "Yeah, I figured." He put his hand on my shoulder, and then after a second he pulled me in, awkwardly, the way he did everything with his arms—the way the men in his family had done it, I guess, all the way back to a man with a Hamilton on his wrist in 1944—and held on.

"Whatever it is," said my father into my hair.

"I know."

"You call. Every night. Nine o'clock. I don't care where you are."

"Nine o'clock."

"And Saturday—" He stopped. He couldn't say it. He held on harder instead.

"Saturday I'll call at twelve-oh-nine," I said. "One minute after. So you know."

He let go and looked at me. His eyes were wet, and he didn't wipe them or look away.

"One minute after," said my father. "Okay."

Martha found me in my room while I was packing.

I didn't have much to pack; I'd done this before. The good running shoes from Christmas. Two pairs of jeans. The warm stuff, because it was January in Seattle and it was going to rain every minute of every day. The rainbow unicorn notebook. The Maglite from Bradley Video I'd had since the first night. The walkie-talkie—

I stopped. I'd bought the set for Martha, one for her and one for me, and mine was still on my belt from last night. I took it off and put it on the desk.

"Bring it," said Martha from the doorway.

"It's only got half a mile, Mart. It's not going to reach Seattle."

"I know how far it goes." She came in, picked it up off the desk, put it in my duffel herself on top of the jeans, and zipped the pocket shut over it. "Bring it anyway."

"Okay."

She sat on the bed. The Devas were awake on the desk, which they never were in the morning. San-D was at the bars up on her hind legs, looking from Martha's face to mine and back. Cham-P had pressed his whole round golden side against the wire nearest the bed, as close to her as he could get, with Jum-P asleep on top of him. Maga-Z wasn't in the cage at all. He was sitting on the corner of the desk next to my duffel in his crooked red scarf, eyeing the zipper like he was planning to stow away.

"You told them," said Martha.

"I told them."

"About the doll."

"You asked."

"I know I asked." She pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them and looked at me over them, very serious, with the face that saw everything. "I asked because I couldn't stand it anymore. Them not knowing. Every time Mom said those kids about the window, I wanted to scream. Every time Dad looked at the grill." She swallowed. "I'm not sorry."

"I know you're not." I sat down next to her. "I'm not either."

She leaned on me. We sat there.

"Is it true?" said Martha after a while. "What you said. That she's just a kid."

"I think so."

"Then why does she kill people?"

I thought about how to put it to a thirteen-year-old, and then decided she'd been through more than most thirteen-year-olds and I should just say it.

"Because she's angry," I said. "Because she's been down there a long time, and nobody came. And because every time somebody sees her, they look away. Her mom. Her dad. The doctors. Everybody she ever met looked at her and decided she was too scary to look at. And now the only way she can make anybody look at her is the tape." I looked at the Devas. "And then they look away again. They pass it on. They give her to somebody else."

Martha took that in.

"So don't look away," she said.

I turned and looked at her.

"That's what she wants," said my thirteen-year-old sister, like it was obvious, like she was telling me how to beat a level in a video game. "Right? Somebody to look at her and not look away. So you look at her. And you don't look away."

I sat on my bed with my sister leaning on me, the duffel half packed and San-D watching us both through the bars, and for a while I couldn't say anything at all.

I'd known. I'd known since I wrote NOT WHAT EVERYBODY THINKS at Dewey's, and before that, since a Christmas guestbook and a kid on Moesko writing im sorry im so sorry. I'd known the shape of it. I just hadn't put it in plain words like that, like it was simple.

"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, Mart. I think that's it."

"Okay." She sat up, satisfied, the way she looked when she beat a level. "Then do that."

"Okay."

"And bring the walkie-talkie back."

"I will."

She got up and went to the door, then stopped with her hand on the frame and turned around.

"Randy," said Martha. "Can I tell you something?"

"Always."

"When the thing was on your neck," she said, "you looked like you."

And she went out.

III. Executive Producer

Tatum hit Dewey so hard in the arm that he dropped the evidence bag.

He caught it before it hit the floor of the Rileys' kitchen, juggling it twice like a football with a sound like hup, and clutched it to his chest. Tatum didn't notice. She'd already hit him again in the same place.

"You watched it," said Tatum Riley. "You watched it. You watched a mystery tape that came in the mail with no label—"

"Ow. Tatum. Ow—"

"—at Gale's say-so, because she batted her eyes at you—"

"She didn't bat—"

"—when you are a sheriff's deputy and you know, Dewey, you know, you've been to the training, you don't put mystery tapes in your VCR—"

"There's no training for—"

"There's Randy!" Tatum flung an arm at me where I stood by the refrigerator trying to be furniture. "There's a whole website! It's number six, Dewey! It's number six on his list! It's been on his list since September! I read it! Everybody read it! What to do if you watch a videotape and the phone rings right after! What did you think that was about?"

"I didn't—" Dewey's face was very red. "Tate, I didn't read the—"

Tatum hit him a third time.

Then she threw both arms around him at once, the evidence bag crushed between them, and held on so hard I heard his back crack.

"You idiot," said Tatum into his chest, in a completely different voice. "You stupid—you big, stupid—"

Dewey put his free arm around her and his chin on top of her head and closed his eyes.

"I know," said Dewey. "I know, Tate."

I looked at the refrigerator. There was a Donut Hut magnet on it, and Tatum's ninth-grade school picture with braces, which she'd have killed me for looking at. I looked at it very hard.

It was eleven in the morning. The Rileys' parents were in Sacramento until Tuesday visiting an aunt; I'd forgotten that, and so had Dewey, until we pulled up and saw only the Cherokee in the driveway. So it was just Tatum, in sweatpants and my old Woodsboro Wildcats sweatshirt, which she'd been wearing since October and which I'd stopped asking about. She'd opened the door with a bowl of cereal in her hand, looked at her brother's face and then at mine, set the cereal down on the hall table without looking, and said, "What."

Now she let go of Dewey and turned around.

"And you," she said.

"I know."

"You watched it."

"Yes."

"On purpose."

"Yes."

"He told you not to? Dewey told you not to?"

"Dewey told me not to. Gale told me not to." I looked at her. "I did it anyway."

Tatum stared at me with her arms crossed and her eyes very bright, breathing hard through her nose, and I could see her deciding whether to hit me too.

"Why," she said.

"Because somebody had to know what was on it."

"Bullshit."

"And because Dewey and Gale had seven days," I said, "and I couldn't let them go up there by themselves. And I didn't want to be able to quit."

Tatum looked at me a long, long time.

Then she uncrossed her arms, walked across the kitchen, and hit me in the arm, exactly as hard as she'd hit Dewey, in exactly the same place.

"Ow."

"That's for watching it," said Tatum. Then she put her arms around me too and held on just as hard, her face in my shoulder, and said, much more softly, "And that's for watching it."

I put my arms around her. Over her head Dewey looked at me and then away, at the ninth-grade picture on the refrigerator, and his ears went red.

"I'm coming," said Tatum.

"No," said Dewey.

"I'm coming, Dewey."

"No, you're not."

"You don't get to tell me no, you're not Dad—"

"I'm not telling you as Dad." Dewey set the evidence bag on the kitchen table very carefully, put both hands flat on top of it, and looked at his little sister. His face did something I'd only seen it do once, on Stu Macher's lawn in September, bleeding into the grass. "I'm telling you as the guy on the clock. I'm the one who watched it, Tate. Me. Not you. I'm going up there to fix it, and I don't want you anywhere near it. Not on the plane. Not in the same state. I want you here, where it's safe, so that if something—so I know you're—" He stopped. His jaw worked. "I want you here."

Tatum opened her mouth and closed it. She looked at me.

"Don't look at me," I said. "I agree with him."

"Traitor."

"I agree with him," I said, "and I need you here too. Not to be safe—to work. You're the executive producer. I need you to produce something."

Tatum looked at me.

"Produce what."

"Get your camera," I said.

She filmed us on the Rileys' front lawn at 11:40.

It was a bright cold day, the kind Woodsboro got in January between rains, with a sky like blue glass and very sharp shadows. She set the Hi8 on its tripod at the end of the walk and had us stand in a row on the grass: Dewey, Gale, and me. Gale had arrived at 11:30 in a rented Taurus with her hair done, her makeup on, and two enormous suitcases, and she put on her TV face out of pure reflex the second the red light came on.

"What am I supposed to say?" said Gale.

"Nothing," said Tatum from behind the camera. "Just stand there. Look at the lens. Don't move."

"For how long?"

"Ten seconds."

"Why?"

"Because he said," said Tatum, and jerked her chin at me.

So we stood there, the three of us on the grass looking at a lens with the sun on our faces. It was a long ten seconds. Dewey shifted his weight. Gale didn't blink once. I could hear the tiny whir of the tape running.

"Okay," said Tatum. "Got it."

"Tonight," I said. "Freeze-frame it. Every frame, if you can. Look at our faces."

"For what?"

"You'll know," I said. "And then do it again tomorrow. Film something here at the house, something normal—your own face—and freeze-frame that, so you have something to compare. And call me at the hotel."

Tatum looked at me over the top of the camera, and I watched her work it out, her face going slowly from curious to something much worse.

"Their faces go weird," she said. "On tape. That's one of the things."

"That's one of the things."

Tatum looked down at the little LCD on the side of the camera, where the three of us were still frozen in the last frame, small and green and grainy.

"Okay," said Tatum Riley, very low. "Okay. Executive producer."

Sid came at noon.

She came on foot from her house, a mile and a half, running. I saw her come around the corner at the end of the block in the BE PREPARED shirt and sweats at a pace I could barely hold on a good day, and she didn't slow down until she reached the Rileys' lawn. Then she stopped dead in front of me, put her hands on her knees, and breathed.

"Tatum called," said Sid, when she could.

"I figured."

She straightened up and looked at Dewey, loading Gale's suitcases into the Taurus. At Gale on the porch with the Rileys' cordless, talking very fast to somebody named Marty. At Tatum, packing up her tripod with her jaw set and her eyes red. Then at me.

She didn't hit me. She just looked at me, very straight, the way she had at Ocean Beach in November with the wind in her hair before she said teach me.

"You watched it," she said.

"Yeah."

"You knew what it was. And you watched it."

"Yeah."

Sid nodded slowly. She looked at the ground, then up the street.

"Billy used to say," she said, "that you were the kind of guy who'd watch a horror movie and yell at the girl for going up the stairs." She looked back at me. "And then go up the stairs."

"Billy said that?"

"Billy said a lot of things." Something quick and dark went across her face and was gone. "He wasn't wrong about that one."

She reached up and unwound the scarf from her neck. The scarf—the lumpy dark green one, about nine feet long, that got suddenly wider a foot in for no reason, that she'd given me on the twenty-seventh and taken back on New Year's Eve because it was hers on holidays. She'd worn it every day since. In January. In California.

She put it around my neck, wrapped it twice, and tucked the end in.

"It's not a holiday," I said.

"It's a loan," said Sidney Prescott. "It rains up there. Every day. It's cold. I looked it up." She tugged the end once, hard, so I had to look at her. "So you have to bring it back."

"Everybody keeps saying that."

"Everybody's right." She let go and stepped back, and her mouth tried the small crooked smile from November, the one that comes out of storage to check if it still fits. This time it didn't fit. It came out wobbly and her eyes were wet, and she turned around fast and went to help Tatum with the tripod without being asked, her back to me.

I stood on the Rileys' lawn in a nine-foot scarf.

Behind me Gale Weathers said into the cordless, "Marty, I don't care, I'll call you from Seattle," and hung up. She looked at me, and at the scarf, and at Sid's back, and raised one perfect eyebrow.

"Well," said Gale.

"Don't."

"I didn't say anything."

"You said well."

"Well isn't anything." She put on her sunglasses. "Well is a hole in the ground." Then she stopped with her hand still on the sunglasses, and her mouth twisted, and she said softly, "Wrong thing to say."

"Yeah," I said. "Little bit."

Dad drove me to the airport.

Not SFO. Sonoma County, out past Santa Rosa, a little airport in the vineyards with one terminal, a coffee shop, and a wind sock. Mom came. Martha came too; nobody said she couldn't. She sat in the back seat with me the whole way with her hand on the duffel, on the pocket where the walkie-talkie was.

Gale and Dewey had driven ahead in the Taurus. Tatum and Sid followed in the Cherokee, and I could see it in the side mirror the whole way out the 101, the green hood and the two heads.

Nobody talked much. Dad drove the speed limit exactly. Mom looked out the window at the vineyards, bare in January, rows of brown sticks running away over the hills. At one point she reached back between the seats without turning around, found my hand, and held it, and we drove like that for a few miles with her arm bent back at an angle that must have hurt.

The plane was on the tarmac when we got there: small and white and sleek, with a blue stripe and no name on it and two pilots in white shirts at the bottom of the stairs. Gale was already halfway up the steps with one of the pilots carrying her suitcases behind her. Dewey stood at the bottom with the evidence bag under his arm like a football.

I got out of the car and got the duffel out of the trunk.

Mom hugged me without a word and held on a long time. Then she let go and put both hands on my face and looked at me the way she had on the porch in December in the broken glass, like she was memorizing it.

"Nine o'clock," she said.

"Nine o'clock."

"I'll be by the phone."

"I know you will."

Martha didn't hug me. She stood next to the car with her arms crossed, chin up, eyes very bright. She looked at the duffel, then at me.

"Over," she said.

"Over and out," I said.

She shook her head. "No. Just over. You don't say out until you're back."

So I said, "Over," and she nodded, satisfied, and got back in the car and didn't watch me walk to the plane. I knew she wouldn't. I knew she'd be watching in the side mirror the whole time.

Dad shook my hand and then didn't let go of it, and then he pulled me in again the way he had in the hall, awkward, all elbows, said "One minute after" into my ear, let go, got back in the car, and closed the door.

Tatum was standing at the bottom of the stairs with her camera.

She'd run from the Cherokee and was breathing hard. She had the Hi8 up on her shoulder without the tripod, red light on, filming me.

"Last shot," said Tatum. "For the archive."

"Tatum—"

"Shut up. Look at the lens." Her voice held. Her hands didn't. "Executive producer. I get the last shot."

So I looked at the lens. Sid stood a step behind her with her hands in her pockets, in her BE PREPARED shirt, no scarf, in January. Neither of them said anything else.

I went up the stairs. At the top, in the door, I turned around.

Tatum was still filming. Sid had her hand up—not waving, just up, the way you put your hand up to say I'm here. My parents' car was parked by the fence with the engine running. I couldn't see their faces through the windshield, but I could see the passenger-side mirror, angled wrong, angled toward the plane, and a small pale face in it, watching.

I put my hand up too.

Then I ducked into the plane, and the pilot pulled the door up behind me and it sealed with a sound like a refrigerator closing, and it was quiet.

Gale sat in a big leather seat by the window with her sunglasses on, not looking out. Dewey sat across from her with the evidence bag in his lap, holding it with both hands.

I sat down, took off Sid's scarf, folded it, and put it on the seat next to me. After a second I picked it up and put it back on.

"Six days, eighteen hours," said Gale, without looking at me. "Give or take."

I looked at the Hamilton.

"Give or take," I said.

IV. Boeing Field

It started raining over Oregon and didn't stop.

I watched it start. I had the window seat on the left, and somewhere past the Siskiyous the brown hills and snow below us turned into a flat gray floor of cloud. We went down into it and the window went white, then gray, then streaked, and stayed that way, water running backward across the glass in long trembling lines. The little plane bucked twice. Dewey grabbed the armrest with the hand that wasn't holding the evidence bag. Gale didn't look up from her pad.

She'd been writing since Santa Rosa, pages of it in her fast slanting hand, flipping them over the top of the pad as she filled them, the way she must have at a thousand crime scenes and city council meetings and wrecks on the 101. Once she stopped and read what she'd written, then tore the page out, folded it in half and in half again, and put it in her purse. She didn't say what it was. I didn't ask.

Dewey fell asleep over Portland, sitting up with his head against the window and the evidence bag held to his chest in both arms like a kid with a stuffed animal. His mouth was open. He snored a little.

Gale stopped writing and looked at him. With nobody watching but me, and her thinking I wasn't, her face did what it had done on Dewey's couch the night before. It got younger.

"He's an idiot," said Gale Weathers under her breath, to nobody.

"Yeah."

"He'd walk into traffic if I asked him to. He'd walk into traffic if I didn't ask him to, if I just looked like I wanted something on the other side of the street." She looked at the gray window and the water running backward. "He watched it because I wanted him to. You know that. He knew what it might be the second he saw the sticker—he's not as stupid as he looks, nobody could be—and I looked at him, and he put it in."

"Gale—"

"I'm not looking for absolution, Randy. I'm a journalist. We don't get any." She turned the pen over in her fingers. "I'm just saying it out loud. Once. So I know I said it."

I let her have it, and after a while she went back to writing.

We landed at Boeing Field at a quarter to five in the evening, in the dark and the rain.

Not SeaTac. Boeing Field was the little airport south of downtown where the corporate jets and cargo planes came in, along with Boeing's own test aircraft, enormous half-painted things parked in rows behind a chain-link fence, their tails lit up by floodlights in the rain like sculptures in a museum. We came down the stairs onto wet tarmac, and a car was waiting: a black Lincoln Town Car with a driver in a black coat holding an umbrella, because Gale Weathers had not, in fact, had her breakdown yet, and until she did she had the network's account number memorized.

"The Alexis," she told the driver. "First and Madison." And to me, when he'd shut the door: "It's small. It's quiet. Nobody at the network stays there, so nobody at the network will know I'm here." She looked out at the rain. "Marty thinks I'm at the Four Seasons."

"Why?"

"Because I told him I was at the Four Seasons." She smiled very slightly, for the first time since Dewey's couch. "If I'm going to die on Saturday, Randy, I'm not going to do it with Marty Kessler calling my room every hour to ask about the story."

Seattle in the rain at night, from the back of a Town Car, was a smear of light.

I'd never been. Theo had, once, on a layover in another life, and remembered nothing but an airport bar and a gray window. Randy had never been north of Eureka. So I looked at it with both pairs of eyes and saw it for the first time through a window running with water: the freeway lifting over the industrial flats, the stadium, the old Kingdome like a concrete mushroom, and then the city coming up out of the dark on its hills all at once, towers and lights and the black water of the bay beyond. The rain fell through all of it without any wind, as if it had been falling forever and had no plans to stop.

"Jesus," said Dewey, who'd woken when the wheels hit the runway and hadn't said anything since. "Does it always do this?"

"Every day," I said. "Sid looked it up."

The scarf was still around my neck. I'd forgotten I had it on. I put my hand on it, and it was very warm.

At a red light on First Avenue a man stood at the curb in a long coat with no umbrella, looking at nothing, getting wet. As we pulled away he turned his head and looked at our car. At the back window. At me.

I didn't know him. He had a long, pale, forgettable face. He watched us go by and didn't blink.

That's nothing, said Survivor at the back of my neck. That's a man in the rain.

I watched him in the side mirror until we turned the corner.

The Alexis was small and quiet and expensive, an old brick building with a doorman and a lobby that smelled like cedar. Gale got us three connecting rooms in a row on the fourth floor without asking either of us, hers in the middle.

"So I can hear if something happens," she said at the door.

"If what happens?"

She looked at me, then at the TV cabinet in my room, a big old armoire with the doors closed. She didn't need to say anything.

After she'd gone into hers, I opened the armoire. Inside were a twenty-five-inch Sony, a VCR, and a remote on a little doily. I unplugged the TV and the VCR, turned the TV around so the screen faced the back of the armoire, closed the doors, and pushed the desk chair up against them.

It wasn't going to help. In the last scene of the movie, the TV wasn't even plugged in. I did it anyway, and through the wall I could hear Dewey doing the same thing, furniture moving and armoire doors closing, and after a while, faint through the other wall, from Gale's room, a chair being dragged across carpet, and then nothing.

I called home at nine.

Dad picked up before the first ring finished. I'd known he would. Behind him I could hear the TV, and Mom asking is it him, and Martha farther away on the stairs yelling IS IT RANDY.

"It's me," I said. "We're here. We're fine. It's raining."

"It's raining here," said my father. It wasn't; it hadn't rained in Woodsboro in two weeks. I could hear in his voice that he knew I knew, and that he was saying it anyway, because it was a normal thing to say on the phone to your son on a business trip, and he wanted very badly, for one minute, to say a normal thing.

So I let him.

"Yeah?" I said. "Bad?"

"Not too bad." A pause. "How's the hotel?"

"Fancy. Gale's paying. There's a doily."

"A doily." I heard him almost laugh. "Your mother wants to talk to you."

Mom wanted to know if I'd eaten. I hadn't. She wanted to know if I'd seen a doctor, because at the kitchen table, before I swapped the choker out, I'd told them Scully said to. I hadn't. She made me promise to do both first thing tomorrow, and I promised. Without the choker she couldn't tell whether I was lying (I wasn't), and I heard her decide to believe me anyway, the regular way, on her own.

Then Martha got on and said "Over," and I said "Over," and she said "Did you bring the walkie-talkie," and I said yes, and she said "Turn it on," and I said, "Mart, it's eight hundred miles," and she said, "I know. Turn it on anyway." So I got it out of the duffel and turned it on and set it on the nightstand, where it hissed softly at nothing.

"Is it on? Over."

"It's on. Over."

"Okay," said my sister, satisfied. "Mine's on too. Over."

At ten-thirty I called Ohio.

It was one-thirty in the morning there. I called anyway, because I'd promised her in October that I'd call if anything happened, and because at SFO she'd looked at me with her face very white and said something's coming, isn't it, and I'd said soon, and then it had come.

She picked up on the first ring, like Dad.

"Randy." Wide awake, not a trace of sleep in it. "What happened."

"How'd you know it was me?"

"Because it's one-thirty in the morning and you're the only person in the whole world who'd call me at one-thirty in the morning, and you said you would if something happened, and you never call after ten." She took a breath. "What happened."

So I told her.

I didn't have the choker on. I'd never needed it with her. In October I'd sat in our kitchen with a phone against my ear, keeping her awake through the night and telling her about Freddy Krueger, and she'd believed every word without anything around my neck at all. Ok weirdo, she'd typed, the first time, and then believed me anyway.

She listened to all of it without a word. I could hear her breathing, and very faintly the sounds of her bedroom: the radiator ticking, a car going by outside on a street in Springwood, Ohio, in the snow.

When I was done, she was quiet for a long while.

"You watched it," said Kristen Parker.

"Yeah."

"On purpose."

"Everybody keeps saying that."

"Because it's stupid, Randy." Her voice cracked on it. "It's the stupidest thing I ever heard. It's stupider than anything Kincaid ever did. It's stupider than me in October. It's—you knew. You knew what it was."

"I knew what it was."

"Then why—"

"Because you came in to get me," I said.

She stopped.

"In the dream," I said. "In October. Every night. You didn't have to. You could've stayed awake. You knew what was out there better than anybody, and you came in to get me anyway, every time." I looked at the walkie-talkie hissing on the nightstand. "Gale and Dewey are on the stairs, Kris. I couldn't leave them there."

Kristen Parker didn't say anything. When she finally spoke, her voice was very low.

"I can't come in and get you from a tape."

"I know."

"I can't do anything. I'm in Ohio. I'm in Ohio, Randy, and you're in Seattle, and there's a girl in a well, and I can't do anything—"

"You can do one thing."

"What."

"Bring me in tonight," I said. "When I'm asleep. I haven't slept since Friday, and when I close my eyes I see the well." I swallowed. "Bring me somewhere else. Just for tonight. Just so I can sleep."

There was a very long pause on the line.

"Okay," said Kristen. "Okay. Go to bed. Right now. I'll be there."

"Where are we going?"

"Somewhere with no TVs," said Kristen Parker. And then, softly, before she hung up: "Stay small, okay? Whatever's down there. You make it stay small."

I dreamed I was on the garage roof.

Our garage, in Woodsboro. It looked like New Year's Eve except that it was summer, a warm August night when the fog didn't come in and the stars were out over the hills, and the shingles were still warm from the day under my hands. I sat in my flannel with my back against the chimney, and there was no well anywhere, no static, no little girl with her hair in her face. Just the street and the streetlight and the crickets and the smell of somebody's barbecue a few houses down.

Kristen sat next to me in the RANDY vest with the burn hole, knees up, chin on them.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi."

"This is your house."

"I know."

"I picked it because I've been here. I can only take you places I've been." She looked at the street. "Is it okay?"

"It's perfect."

She leaned on me. I put my arm around her. We sat there.

"I can't stay long," she said after a while. "It's hard, doing it from this far. It's like holding a door open in the wind." She didn't sound upset about it. "I'll stay until you're asleep. Really asleep, the kind where you don't dream. And then I'll go."

"Okay."

"And tomorrow night I'll do it again."

"Kris, you don't have to—"

"Tomorrow night," said Kristen Parker, "I'll do it again. And the night after that. And every night. Until Saturday." She looked at the street, not at me. "That's what I can do. So I'm going to do it."

I couldn't answer that.

We sat on the roof in a summer that wasn't, and I listened to the crickets, and after a while, without noticing when, I stopped listening to anything at all.

V. The P-I

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer was on Elliott Avenue on the waterfront north of downtown, a long, low building with a huge steel globe turning slowly on the roof, a neon eagle on top of it, and IT'S IN THE P-I running around its equator in red letters. In the rain at nine in the morning, the neon was the only bright thing on the street.

"Charming," said Gale.

"You've been here before?"

"Once. In 1993. For an award." She looked up at the globe. "I didn't win."

"Who won?"

Gale didn't answer. She pushed through the revolving door.

Everything I knew about Rachel Keller came from a DVD case and two hours in a dark theater in another life.

She was a good reporter. She was a single mother with a little boy who drew pictures, an ex who knew more about video than anybody she'd ever met, and a niece she loved. She was smart and fast and lonely. She didn't believe things until she'd seen them, and once she'd seen them she didn't look away. In the movie she'd watched the tape on purpose too—to know what was on it, because somebody had to—and sitting in that theater I'd liked her more than anybody else on the screen.

At the end of the movie she'd found the well and pulled the girl out and held her and thought it was over. It wasn't. And to save her son, she'd made a copy.

I didn't know which Rachel Keller I was about to meet, the one from the beginning or the one from the end.

She met us in the lobby. She'd come down herself, which I didn't expect, in a long gray coat she hadn't taken off since coming in from the rain, hair pulled back, a reporter's notebook in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. She was in her early thirties, with a sharp, pale, tired face and eyes that looked at things the way a camera does. She looked at Gale first. Of course she did.

"Gale Weathers," said Rachel Keller.

"Rachel."

"You called the city desk at seven-thirty this morning and asked for whoever wrote the Moesko piece in October." She didn't put out her hand. "I wrote the Moesko piece in October. It was eleven inches on B-6. Nobody read it." Her eyes went over Gale—the camel coat, the hair, the makeup—and over the two of us behind her, the deputy with the paper bag and the kid in the scarf. "So I'm wondering why the host of Top Story flew to Seattle in a private jet to talk to me about it."

Gale didn't blink. "How do you know I flew in a private jet?"

"Because I called Boeing Field." Rachel sipped her coffee. "I'm a reporter."

For a second nobody spoke. Two women in a lobby with a revolving door, looking at each other the way cats do across a yard. I'd seen that look before, in my driveway on New Year's Eve at five in the morning.

"I'm not here for your story," said Gale.

"Everybody's here for my story. Nobody's ever here for my story. And then a woman from network television flies up in a jet." Rachel looked at me, suddenly and fast, the camera eye. "And who's this? Your intern?"

"Randy Meeks," I said.

Rachel's face changed. Only a flicker, but I saw it. She'd heard the name. Everybody had; Gale had made sure of it on Thursday, with an hour of national television called Did Randy Meeks Know?

"The kid from Woodsboro," said Rachel Keller slowly. "The one with the list."

"The one with the list."

She studied me. Then she looked at the paper bag under Dewey's arm, with DO NOT VIEW on it in block capitals and seriously underneath, and then back at me, and I watched her put it together the way she had in the movie—fast, without wanting to, pieces sliding into place behind her eyes.

"Number six," she said softly.

"Number six."

"What to do if you watch a videotape and the phone rings right after." Her coffee had stopped halfway to her mouth. "Four kids from Moesko Island. In October. The same minute." She looked at the bag. "You found it."

"It found us," said Gale.

We sat in a third-floor conference room with a window over the train tracks and the bay, rain on the glass and the gray shapes of container ships out on the water, and Rachel Keller listened to the whole thing with her notebook open and didn't write anything down.

I did most of the talking. I'd gotten good at it. Two nights ago I'd told it to Gale and Dewey on a couch over a hardware store, and yesterday morning I'd told it to my family with a light around my neck. I knew where the pauses went now, and the part where people's faces changed. I didn't have the choker on and I didn't lean on Unbroken's hum either. I just told it plainly, like giving somebody directions to my house.

When I was done, Rachel sat looking at her blank notebook.

"That's insane," she said.

"Yeah."

"That's completely insane. You know that, right? You know how that sounds? A videotape. A little girl. A phone call. Seven days." She shook her head. "I've been on this since October. I talked to the families. I talked to the medical examiner in Island County. I talked to two FBI agents who wouldn't tell me anything except that one of them believes in UFOs. I've got a theory, and it's a good theory—it's carbon monoxide at the cabin, a defective heater, and the coroner missed it because the deaths were a week out from the exposure, and—"

"They died at the same minute," I said. "In four different places. A week after."

"I know that."

"Carbon monoxide doesn't keep time."

Rachel looked at me with her jaw tight.

"No," she said finally. "No. It doesn't."

She got up and went to the window and stood with her back to us, arms crossed, watching the rain.

"I want to see it," she said.

"No," said all three of us at once.

She turned around.

"You're asking me to believe a videotape kills people, and you won't let me see the videotape?"

"Yes," said Dewey. He put both hands on the bag in his lap. "Yes, ma'am. That's exactly right. Nobody else sees it. Nobody. That's the rule. I'm sorry. It's not personal."

"It's a little personal," said Rachel.

"It's really not," I said. "It's the opposite of personal. I'm not letting you watch it because I don't want you to die next Monday."

She looked at me.

"And I don't want you to ever have a reason to make a copy," I said. "For anybody. You have a son."

Rachel Keller went rigid.

"How do you know I have a son," she said.

There it was. I'd known that question was coming from the moment I decided to walk into the P-I and ask for her by name.

I didn't have the choker on. I could have lied. It's in your bio. It was in the October piece. You've got a picture on your desk. Anything.

"I can't tell you that," I said instead. "I'm sorry. I can't tell you how I know any of it. I know it sounds—"

"It sounds like you've been following me."

"I've been in Woodsboro, California, since I was born, Ms. Keller. Until yesterday at two o'clock. You can check." I held her eyes. "I'm not asking you to trust me. I'm asking you to let me prove it. And then decide."

"Prove it. How?"

Gale stood up.

Without a word she opened the purse she'd had on the table the whole time and took out a camera: a Polaroid OneStep with the rainbow stripe, the kind every family in America had in a drawer somewhere. She'd bought it at the drugstore on Madison at eight that morning, before the P-I, before I was even up, and I hadn't known she had it. She held it out to Rachel.

"Take our picture," said Gale Weathers.

Rachel looked at the camera, then at Gale.

"Take it," said Gale. "All three of us. Right now. And then watch it develop."

Rachel took the camera.

She stood by the window with the rain behind her, and Gale and Dewey and I stood in a row against the wall under a framed front page from the Mount St. Helens eruption, and she lifted the Polaroid to her eye.

The flash went off. The camera whirred and spat out a square of gray film.

Rachel held it by the edge, the way you're supposed to, and we all watched it come up slowly, the way they always do: gray, then a ghost of shapes, then color swimming up out of nothing. The wall. The framed front page with the mushroom of ash on it. Three people in a row.

And our faces, which were wrong.

Smeared, the way a face smears in a photograph when somebody moves during a long exposure—except nobody had moved, it wasn't a long exposure, and the smear went every direction at once. Twisted and pulled, stretched sideways and downward like wet paint dragged with a thumb, like a reflection in moving water, like something seen on a TV screen with the tracking off. Dewey's mouth was a long dark hole. Gale's eyes were two streaks. Mine—

I looked at mine for about a second, and then I stopped looking.

Everything else in the picture was sharp. The wall. The frame. Dewey's badge on his belt. The paper bag under his arm, every block-capital letter of DO NOT VIEW clear.

Rachel Keller stood by the window holding the Polaroid by its edge and said nothing for a long, long time.

Then, without asking, she lifted the camera again and took another one: the window, the rain, and her own reflection in the glass. It came up perfect. A woman in a gray coat, a little blurry, a little dark, with the bay behind her and her face fine.

She put both pictures on the table side by side.

"Okay," said Rachel Keller.

At eleven-fifteen Dewey's nose started to bleed.

We were still in the conference room. Rachel had brought in the whole October file, two accordion folders of notes and photocopies and clippings, and spread it across the big table, and we were going through it: the four Moesko kids, their school pictures, their families, the rental receipt from the Shelter Mountain Inn, Cabin 12, Sept. 27–29, 1996, signed by a boy named Tyler Walsh, seventeen, who'd been the last of them to die by about thirty seconds. Rachel had talked to his mother. She said he'd brought a videotape home from the cabin the Sunday after, and she'd thrown it out with his things after the funeral, and a month later she'd gone looking for it, because she wanted everything of his back, every last thing, and it was gone.

"His cousin," said Rachel. "Danny. He's sixteen. He was going through Tyler's room in November. The mom thinks he took it." She looked at me. "Your fifth friend."

"im sorry," I said under my breath. "im so sorry."

"What?"

"Nothing. Something he wrote." I looked at Tyler Walsh's school picture, a skinny kid with a buzz cut and big ears, grinning. "Where's Danny now?"

"Still on the island. He wouldn't talk to me. His mom says he hasn't left his room since Thanksgiving." She looked at the picture too. "She says he cries all night. She thinks it's grief."

Then Dewey said "Oh" in a surprised voice and put his hand to his face, and when he took it away there was blood on it.

It came fast, the way a nosebleed comes when it isn't a regular nosebleed: bright and thin and unrelenting, out of both nostrils at once, over his lip and down his chin and dripping—pat, pat, pat—onto the October file. Big round drops on a photocopy of Tyler Walsh's death certificate.

Dewey stared at them.

"Head back," said Rachel, already on her feet. "No, forward, forward, pinch it, here—" She had a box of tissues from somewhere, the way reporters always do, and put a wad in his hand. He pinched his nose and tipped forward and bled into the tissues, and his eyes over the top of them went to Gale.

Gale sat very straight in her chair. She'd gone white under the makeup.

"It's okay," said Dewey thickly, through the tissues. "It's okay, Gale. It's just a nosebleed. I get them. I got 'em when I was a kid, all the time. It's the dry air."

"It's raining, Dewey," said Gale.

He didn't have anything to say to that.

Rachel looked at the blood on the death certificate, and then at me.

"That's one of the things," she said. "Isn't it."

"That's one of the things."

She picked the death certificate up by the corner, looked at Dewey's blood on Tyler Walsh's name, and set it down again very carefully.

"Okay," said Rachel Keller, for the second time that morning. "What do you need?"

I needed three things.

"A doctor," I said, "because I promised my mom and an FBI agent. Somebody to look at the tape who knows what a tape's supposed to look like, without watching it. And the Shelter Mountain Inn. I need to know who's renting Cabin 12, and when, and I need nobody to rent it until Sunday."

Rachel wrote all three down. Then she looked at the second one for a while.

"Somebody who knows tapes," she said slowly.

"Somebody who can look at the signal and tell me what's wrong with it. Without looking at the picture."

"Is that possible?"

"I don't know," I said. "I don't know anything about video. I sold it for a living, that's all. I just know it's wrong. I know it wasn't recorded the regular way, and I want somebody to tell me how."

Rachel tapped her pen against the notebook. Once. Twice.

"I know somebody," she said, in the voice of a woman agreeing to a root canal. "He's—he's very good. He's the best. He's also—" She seemed to give up on finishing it. "He's my son's father."

"Noah," I said, before I could stop myself.

Rachel's head came up, and her eyes were very cold.

"I'm going to stop asking you how you know things," said Rachel Keller. "Because every time you answer, I like you less."

The doctor was at a walk-in clinic on Second Avenue: a tired man with a ponytail who looked in my nose and ears and eyes, took my blood pressure, listened to my heart, and told me I was a perfectly healthy seventeen-year-old who needed more sleep and possibly a vegetable. He looked in Dewey's nose and said it was the dry air. He wanted to look in Gale's nose, and Gale looked at him, and he decided not to.

I called Scully from a pay phone outside, got her voicemail at the Bureau, and left a message: Saw a doctor. Healthy. He says eat a vegetable. See you Wednesday. I didn't know if she'd laugh. I hoped so.

We walked back through Pike Place Market because it was on the way, and because Dewey, nose packed with cotton and face very pale, said he needed air, and Gale took one look at him and didn't argue.

It was a Monday in January in the rain, so it wasn't crowded. The market was mostly under a roof, long arcades of stalls running down the hill toward the water, and it smelled like fish and coffee and wet wool and flowers. At the big stall by the entrance the fish guys were throwing salmon over the counter to each other and yelling for a handful of tourists in ponchos. A man was playing a saw with a violin bow. Somewhere a radio was playing Nirvana. It was the first time I'd heard Nirvana on a radio since I woke up as Randy, and it hit me like a brick, because Kurt Cobain had been dead almost three years here too, and some things don't change between worlds no matter how many killer dolls you put in coffee cans.

At the bottom of the market, on the cobblestones where the street curved in front of the stalls, there was a policeman on a horse.

A big bay, sixteen hands at least, wet and shining in the rain, with a yellow reflective blanket that said SEATTLE POLICE in black letters. The cop on its back wore a rain cape and held the reins loose and easy, watching the tourists. The horse stood like a statue, the way police horses do, head down, rain running off its mane.

We came down the cobblestones toward it: Gale first, then Dewey, then me.

The horse lifted its head.

It lifted it slowly while we were still thirty feet off, and turned, and looked at us, and its ears went flat back against its skull. I'd only ever seen a horse do that in movies. In real life it was worse. The whole shape of its head changed, like something drawn back on a string.

"Whoa," said the cop mildly. "Whoa, Duke."

Twenty feet. The horse's eye rolled white all the way around.

"Gale," I said. "Dewey. Stop. Back up—"

Duke screamed.

I'd never heard a horse scream, and I don't want to again. It was high and ragged and full of something that sounded like a person, nothing like a neigh, and it went up into the roof of the market and echoed down the arcades, and every tourist in Pike Place turned around at once. The horse went up, straight up on its hind legs, enormous, front hooves pawing the air ten feet off the ground and the cop clinging on with both hands, rain cape flying. It came down with a crack on the cobblestones that I felt in my teeth, spun, and went up again—at us and away from us at the same time, like it couldn't decide whether to run or kill.

I grabbed Gale by the arm and Dewey by the coat and hauled them backward up the hill into the doorway of a cheese shop. The horse came down again and spun, and the cop somehow got it turned, swearing, and it bolted down the street toward the water with its shoes sparking on the wet cobbles. Away from us. Away, away, away.

The cop got it stopped at the end of the block. I saw him lean down over its neck and talk to it while its sides went in and out like a bellows. It wouldn't look back at us.

In the doorway of the cheese shop, Gale Weathers was breathing very fast.

"Horses," she said. "You said horses. On Dewey's couch. You said horses go crazy."

"Yeah."

"I thought you meant—" She laughed. It was a terrible laugh. "I don't know what I thought you meant."

Dewey didn't say anything. He was looking down the street at the horse and the cop and the tourists, all of them staring at the three of us in the doorway, and there was fresh blood on the cotton in his nose. The radio was still playing Nirvana.

Tatum called the hotel at nine-thirty that night.

I'd talked to Dad at nine. I'd told him we'd seen a doctor and that I'd eaten a vegetable, both true. I hadn't told him about the horse, because he hadn't asked, and because in the cab back from the market I'd decided there were things I could carry by myself for six days so he didn't have to.

When the phone rang at nine-thirty I knew it was Tatum before I picked it up. Tatum never called at a normal time, and nine-thirty was a normal time, which meant she'd been sitting by the phone waiting for exactly the right minute.

"Hi," said Tatum.

"Hi."

"So." Her voice was very bright and very cheerful—her executive-producer voice, the one she used when the tape was rolling and something had gone wrong and she didn't want the guest to know. "So I did the thing."

"Okay."

"With the freeze-frame. I hooked the Hi8 up to the VCR in the den and I went through it. Frame by frame. Every one. Like you said." A pause. "I did it twice."

"Okay."

"And then I filmed myself. Like you said. In the den, ten seconds, looking at the lens. And I went through that too, frame by frame." Another pause. "I'm fine. My face is fine. I look like crap, because I've been crying since you left, but I look like me."

"Tatum."

"Dewey's isn't." The brightness was going out of her voice the way the light had gone off my neck, slowly and then all at once. "On the lawn. In the ten seconds. It's okay for the first couple frames, and then it—it goes. It slides. Like his face is on a piece of film somebody's pulling sideways. And then it comes back for a frame or two. And then it goes again." She swallowed. "Gale's too. Gale's is worse. And yours—"

"I know," I said. "I saw a Polaroid."

"Yours is the worst," said Tatum Riley. "Yours is the worst, Randy. At the airport. The last shot. You turned around at the top of the stairs and put your hand up, and I've got it, I've got every frame, and in every single one—" She stopped.

"Tatum. You don't have to—"

"In every single one," said Tatum, "you're not there."

I let the line hiss.

"Your hand's there," said Tatum. "Your hand, and the scarf, and the door, and the pilot. And where your face should be there's just—it's like the tape's been chewed. Like the VCR ate it. Like there was a picture there once and something wiped it off." Her voice broke. "I'm going to keep it. I'm not going to erase it. I'm going to put it in the archive with a label. I'm going to label it SEATTLE. And then on Sunday, when you're back, I'm going to film you again, and you're going to be there, and I'm going to put them next to each other, and I'm going to watch them every day—"

"Tatum."

"What."

"Dewey's okay," I said. "He's asleep. Next door. He had a nosebleed today, and it stopped. He's okay."

She was quiet a long while.

"Is Gale okay?"

"Gale's in the middle room with the door open, so she can hear him breathe."

A long breath on the line.

"Good," said Tatum, very low. "That's—good." Then, in a different voice: "Don't tell her I said that."

"I won't."

"And you," said Tatum. "Are you okay?"

I looked at the armoire with the desk chair pushed against its doors. At the walkie-talkie on the nightstand, hissing softly at nothing. At my reflection in the dark window with the rain running down it. I couldn't see my face in it. It was too dark. I told myself it was too dark.

"I'm okay," I said.

"Liar," said Tatum Riley, but she said it gently.

VI. Tracking

Kristen took me to Goat Rock on Monday night.

The beach from Thanksgiving, at Jenner, where the Russian River comes out into the sea, with the big rock standing up out of the surf and the seals on the sandbar. She'd been there once, the Saturday after Thanksgiving, with eleven other people and a Frisbee, and she remembered it perfectly: the wind, the cold, the smell of kelp, the waves coming in over the gravel. We sat on a log above the tide line in our coats and watched the seals, and neither of us said much. When I woke at six-fifteen on Tuesday in the Alexis with rain on the window, I'd slept eight hours and hadn't dreamed about the well once.

There was a message under my door from the front desk, in a clerk's careful handwriting on hotel stationery.

Mr. Meeks: A Mr. Mulder called at 5:50 a.m. Message: "Ferry confirmed. 7:30 a.m. Wednesday, Anacortes. Scully says she got your message and you are to eat another vegetable."

I read it three times. Then I folded it into the unicorn notebook on the page that said DELAWARE and went to wake up Dewey.

Noah Clay lived in Fremont, across the ship canal, on the second floor of an old brick building over a used-bicycle shop. You went up an outside stair like Dewey's, except iron and slick with rain, through a steel door with three locks, into one big room with a wall of windows facing the canal and the gray bridge over it. Every other surface was covered in electronics.

I mean every surface. Monitors. Decks. Cameras old and new, some of them in pieces. Racks of equipment with blinking lights, coiled cables hanging off hooks in the ceiling like vines, an editing console the size of a kitchen table, a soldering station, and a tangle of wire on the floor you had to step over like stones in a creek. In one corner, an unmade mattress on the floor. In the other, a refrigerator with nothing on it but one crayon drawing: a stick figure with a beard and a camera, labeled NOAH in a kid's blocky capitals.

Noah stood in the middle of it in a gray thermal and jeans with the knees gone, drinking coffee out of a Fremont Solstice Parade mug, and he looked at Rachel when she came in the way you look at weather you'd forgotten was coming.

"Rachel," he said.

"Noah."

"You said it was important."

"It is important."

"You always say it's important."

"And it always is, Noah." She stepped over a cable without looking. She'd been here before—a lot, once, I thought. "These are the people. Gale Weathers. Deputy Riley. Randy Meeks."

Noah looked at Gale with polite blankness, like somebody he'd seen on a bus. He looked at Dewey, and the paper bag, and the cotton in Dewey's nose. Then he looked at me with his head tilted a little, the way he'd look at a picture he was deciding whether to fix.

"You're the kid from the list," he said.

"Everybody keeps saying that."

"Aidan's teacher has your list on the bulletin board in the second-grade room. Under Safety. Next to Stop, Drop and Roll." Noah sipped his coffee. "I thought you'd be taller."

"I'm six feet."

"I thought you'd be taller anyway." He set the mug on a stack of equipment that didn't look like it should have anything set on it. "Rachel says you want me to look at a tape without looking at it."

"Yes."

"Rachel says if I look at it, I die."

"In seven days."

Noah looked at Rachel. Rachel looked back. Something passed between them that I didn't understand and wasn't meant to: years, and a kid, and a mattress on a floor, and a lot of times one of them had said it's important and the other had come anyway.

"Okay," said Noah Clay. "Let's see your tape."

Dewey opened the bag.

He did it on the editing console under a desk lamp with everybody watching, the way he'd probably been trained at some academy in Sacramento a long time ago: carefully, cutting the red tape across the top with a pocketknife instead of tearing it. Under his own name he wrote in block capitals, OPENED 1/14/97 9:52 AM, SEATTLE, D. RILEY. Then he handed the pen to Noah.

"You have to sign," said Dewey.

Noah looked at him. "I have to sign."

"Chain of custody."

"It's a videotape, Deputy. It's not a murder weapon."

Dewey just held out the pen. After a second Noah took it and signed.

The tape lay on the console under the lamp. Black, no label, the faded orange sticker on top peeling at one corner: BE KIND, REWIND. It looked like any tape. Like every tape. I'd shelved ten thousand of them at Bradley Video, and if I'd seen this one on the return cart I'd have checked it in without a second look.

Noah didn't touch it right away. He stood looking at it under the lamp with his hands in his pockets. Then he picked it up, turned it over, pushed the little button on the side with his thumb, lifted the dust door, and looked at the tape inside.

"Huh," he said.

"What?"

"Nothing yet." He put it down. "Okay. This is what I'm going to do. I've got a deck here that'll play anything, and I've got a waveform monitor and a vectorscope." He pointed at two small square screens in a rack beside the console, both dark, with green grids on them. "Those don't show you the picture. They show you the signal. The waveform's the brightness, line by line. The vectorscope's the color. If you know what you're looking at, you can tell almost everything about a tape from those two without ever seeing a single frame—where it was recorded, on what, whether it's been dubbed and how many times." He looked at me. "That's what you want?"

"That's what I want."

"And the picture?"

"I'll watch the picture," I said. "On a separate monitor, facing away from everybody. I've already seen it. It doesn't matter if I see it again." I looked at Gale and Dewey. "Nobody else. Not even you two. You've seen it once. You don't need it twice."

Gale opened her mouth.

"Gale," I said.

She closed it.

Noah had his head on one side again. "You want to go through it frame by frame."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because I've seen it once at regular speed," I said. "In somebody's living room, at midnight, with my heart going two hundred. I saw what it wanted me to see. I want to see what's actually on it."

Noah studied me. Then a small thing happened at one corner of his mouth that I think was respect.

"Okay," he said. "Get a chair."

So that was Tuesday.

I sat at a small monitor on a rolling cart, a Sony broadcast monitor with a heavy gray case and knobs down the front, which Noah had turned to face the wall of windows so only the person in front of it could see the screen. Noah sat at the console with his back to me, three feet away, watching his two green grids. Rachel and Gale and Dewey sat on the far side of the room on a ratty couch by the refrigerator with their backs to all of it, because Noah had told them to and I'd asked.

Before he started, Noah reached over my shoulder without looking and pushed a button on the monitor I hadn't noticed.

"Underscan," he said. "Every TV you've ever seen cuts off the edges of the picture. Overscan—about ten percent, all the way around—so you don't see the junk at the edges, the blanking, the sync, the stuff that isn't supposed to be picture. This shows you all of it. The whole frame. Everything that's on the tape." He sat back down. "If there's anything at the edges, you'll see it."

The picture on the monitor shrank a little, with a black border all the way around.

Noah hit play.

It was a little different this time.

First, it was slow. Noah's deck could step one frame at a time, forward and back, with a big jog wheel on the console that he handed me on a long cable, and I went through it like that, thirty frames to the second. The ring of light took four hundred and eleven frames to come up out of the black and go away again. I watched every one, and on frame two hundred and six, for that one frame only, there was something in the center of the ring. A dark shape against the white: a head and shoulders. Somebody standing at the bottom of the well, looking up.

I stopped on it and stared. Then I wrote 206 in the unicorn notebook and kept going.

"You okay?" said Noah, without turning around.

"Yeah."

"You stopped breathing."

"I'm okay."

The second thing that was different was the waveform.

"It's wrong," said Noah, about ten minutes in.

I stopped the wheel. "Wrong how?"

"Every tape has a control track," said Noah Clay. He didn't turn around; he had his elbows on the console and his chin on his fists, watching the green grid. "A separate track down the edge with a pulse on it, once a frame. It's like sprocket holes on film. It's how the deck knows where the frames are. Without it the heads don't know where to read, and you get garbage—snow, rolling. It doesn't play." He pointed at the screen. "There's no control track on this tape."

"None?"

"None. Not damaged, not worn. It was never there." He sat back. "And it's playing. Perfectly. Rock solid, better than most of the tapes I get from broadcast." He turned his head just far enough to look at me out of the corner of his eye. "It can't be playing. It's a car doing sixty with no wheels."

"How would you make a tape like that?"

"You wouldn't. You couldn't. Nobody could. There's no machine on Earth that records a picture without laying down a control track. It's not a setting. It's not something you can turn off." He paused. "This tape wasn't recorded, kid."

He turned back to his grids.

"It was made," said Noah Clay.

Across the room on the couch, I heard Rachel let out a breath.

The third thing was the edges.

I'd gotten to the woman at the mirror. Frame by frame she brushed her hair in long slow dark strokes, and the mirror on its stand turned and turned back. I'd seen it once at regular speed and every night in my sleep until Kristen took me somewhere else. I knew it.

I'd never seen it in underscan.

At the bottom of the frame, below where any TV in America would have cut it off, there was more picture: a strip maybe a tenth of an inch tall on the monitor. Most of it was black. But on the left side was the edge of a window in the room where the woman was brushing her hair, and through it, very small and gray and far away, as if from a high place, stood a white tower with a red top on a point of land with the sea behind it.

A lighthouse.

And below the lighthouse, closer, a long dark barn roof, seen from above. From a window higher than the barn.

I stopped the wheel and leaned in close and studied that tenth of an inch at the bottom of the screen.

"Noah," I said. "Can you push the tracking?"

"Tracking won't do that. Tracking's the heads." He didn't turn around. "You want to roll the picture. That's the V-hold."

"Then roll it. Down. Up. I want to see if there's more."

He reached over without looking and turned a knob on the monitor. The picture rolled slowly, the black bar at the bottom creeping up into the frame and the woman at the mirror sliding up and away, and under her, in the place that wasn't supposed to be picture, the strip got wider. Not much. Enough.

It was a view: the same view, from the same window, behind every image on the tape. I went back and checked. The chair rocking in the empty room: at the bottom edge, in the dark, the same window and the same lighthouse. The ladder: the window. The horse lying too still in a field: under it, at the very edge, blurred, the window. They'd all been shot from the same room. Or seen from it. Or remembered from it.

Somebody had sat in a high room in a barn with one window, looking out at a lighthouse and a field of horses, for a very long time. Long enough that the window got into everything. Long enough that it sat at the edge of every picture she ever made, the way the bars of a cell would sit at the edge of everything you saw if you'd been in the cell long enough.

The loft. Richard Morgan's barn. The room at the top of it, where they'd kept her.

These are her pictures, I thought. She's showing us her room.

I wrote LOFT and LIGHTHOUSE and THE WINDOW IS IN ALL OF THEM in the notebook and underlined the last one, and my hand shook the whole time.

The fourth thing was the fly.

Frame by frame, the fly crawling across the screen was worse than at speed. You could see every one of its legs, the little hairs on them, the way it rubbed its front legs together over its head, cleaning itself on the inside of the glass. I stepped forward one frame and it moved a quarter of an inch. Another frame. Another.

I stopped.

It kept moving.

The deck was stopped. The jog wheel was still. The frame counter on the console wasn't changing, and on the waveform, Noah told me later, the trace was frozen on a single still frame, not one line of it moving. And on my monitor the fly walked slowly across the inside of the glass from left to right, cleaning its legs, and stopped right in front of me at about the height of my eyes.

I don't know why I did it.

Battle Maniac would make a good excuse, or Survivor, or something in the panel, but Battle Maniac had been asleep for three days, sulking, because there was nothing on a videotape you could fight, and Survivor was calm. It was just me. The same thing that had made me rewind the tape at Dewey's: I don't know this. I want to know it.

I reached out and put my finger on the screen, on the fly.

The glass was cold, colder than glass should be. And soft. For a second it gave under my fingertip like the skin on cold milk, like the surface of water, and my finger went in—only a quarter of an inch—and I felt the fly under the glass, small and hard and alive, its legs moving against the pad of my finger.

I pinched it, and pulled.

The glass let go of my finger with a wet little tock, like a lip coming off a straw, and my hand came back, and between my thumb and finger, buzzing, angry, and real, was a fly.

A housefly. In January. In Seattle.

I made some kind of noise; I don't know what. Noah spun around in his chair, Rachel came up off the couch, Gale said Randy, sharp, and I opened my fingers without meaning to.

The fly went up. It buzzed once around the desk lamp, loud in the hush, a fat ordinary summer sound, and then it flew to the wall of windows and hit the glass twice, bump, bump, trying to get out into the rain. It dropped onto the sill and lay on its back with its legs folded up.

Nobody spoke.

On the monitor in front of me the frame was still frozen. The fly was gone from it. There was only the gray glass and the dark and, at the very bottom, in underscan, the edge of a window and a tiny white lighthouse.

Noah Clay got up and went to the window and crouched and looked at the dead fly on the sill without touching it.

"That," said Noah softly, "isn't possible."

In front of my eyes, in the gray light off the canal, the panel opened.

Feat: Take something out of a picture.Bronze Item (held).Story in progress: Seven Days.

I looked at it, and then at my thumb and finger where the fly had been. There was a little smear of something gray on them, like dust off a moth's wing, or like TV snow, if TV snow were something you could touch.

A Bronze Item, I thought, for a fly. Then my nose started to bleed.

Not bad, not like Dewey's. A thin line out of the left side only, warm, over my lip and into my mouth, tasting like a battery. I put the back of my hand to it and looked at the blood and thought, very clearly, the way you think things when you're very tired: right on schedule.

Rachel had the tissues again. She always had the tissues. She put them in my hand and her other hand on the back of my neck and pushed my head forward, gently, as if I were a kid, the way she'd done it for Dewey the day before, and held it there.

"Pinch," said Rachel. "Breathe through your mouth."

I pinched. I breathed. I bled into the tissues and looked at the tangle of cables on the floor between my shoes, and she kept her hand on my neck the whole time.

"Day three," said Rachel Keller above me, low.

"Day three."

"You've got a lot of things written down in that notebook."

"Yeah."

"Do any of them tell you how it ends?"

I thought about it with my head down and my nose pinched and her hand on my neck.

"One of them says it doesn't end the way everybody thinks," I said.

Gale's started at two-twenty.

I wasn't there for the start. I'd gone to the window to look at the fly again, and Noah was showing Rachel something on the waveform, and Dewey had gone to the bathroom at the back of the loft, come out, gone back in, and not come out again. After a while I went to see.

The door was half open. Gale was sitting on the edge of an old claw-foot tub with a rust stain under the faucet, a wad of toilet paper pressed to her face, head tipped forward the right way, blood on the cuff of her camel coat. Dewey knelt on the tile in front of her holding more toilet paper, and her other hand in both of his.

"Don't look at me," said Gale into the toilet paper, muffled. "Dewey. I mean it. Don't look at me like this."

"I'm not," said Dewey.

"You are. I can feel you."

"Okay. I am." He didn't move. "I always look at you, Gale. That's not new."

She made a sound that might have been a laugh, or the other thing.

I backed away from the door without a sound and went to the window and looked at the canal and the gray bridge and the rain. When they came out five minutes later Gale's makeup was perfect again, the cuff of her coat was turned under so the blood didn't show, and Dewey was carrying her purse. Nobody said anything about it.

VII. Cousins

Rachel's apartment was on Capitol Hill, the top floor of an old building with a cage elevator nobody used because it took four minutes, so we took the stairs, five flights, Dewey breathing hard by the third. Inside it was small and warm and full of books, and there were drawings everywhere: on the refrigerator, on the walls, taped to the hall closet. Crayon and marker and colored pencil. A little kid's drawings, careful and strange.

I didn't look at them. Not yet. I knew what I'd see.

The TV in the living room had a dish towel over it.

"Since this morning," said Rachel when she caught me looking. That was all. She went into the kitchen and started taking cartons of Thai food out of a paper bag.

There was a girl on the couch.

She was sixteen, light brown hair in a ponytail, a Garfield High sweatshirt, a math textbook open on her knees. She had her feet up on the coffee table and was talking on the cordless, and when we came in she said "Becca, I gotta go, my aunt's home," hung up without waiting for an answer, swung her feet down, and looked at us.

Then she saw me, and her mouth fell open.

"No way," said Katie Embry.

"Katie," said Rachel from the kitchen.

"No way. Aunt Rachel. Aunt Rachel. That's Randy Meeks." She was on her feet. "That's Randy Meeks from TV. That's the list guy. From the thing with Gale—oh my God." She'd seen Gale. "Oh my God. You're Gale Weathers."

"I'm aware," said Gale.

"I watched your special. On Thursday. Did Randy Meeks Know. Everybody watched it. Becca taped it. We watched it twice." She turned back to me. "Did you?"

"Did I what?"

"Know." Katie's eyes were huge. "Everybody at school's been fighting about it. Josh says you totally knew. Becca says there's no way, you're just, like, a movie nerd who got lucky. I said—" She stopped, and her face went pink. "I said I didn't care, because you saved like four people, and also you're kind of cute on TV, but Becca says that's not an argument—"

"Katie," said Rachel. "Go get Aidan. Tell him dinner."

"But—"

"Katie."

Katie went, mostly backward, looking at me all the way down the hall until she bumped into a bedroom door, turned around, and knocked.

I looked at Rachel. Rachel looked at the Thai food.

"She watches Aidan on Tuesdays," said Rachel. "After school. Ruth's working late." She put a carton down very hard. "I didn't know you'd be coming here. I didn't know any of you would be coming here, until Noah—" She stopped. "She's sixteen."

"She's fine," I said.

"She thinks you're cute on TV."

"She's sixteen," I said. "She thinks everybody's cute on TV."

Behind me Gale made a noise that in anybody else I'd have called a snort.

We ate Thai food out of the cartons, sitting on the floor around the coffee table because there weren't enough chairs. Noah had come too, after a long argument with Rachel in the stairwell that I mostly didn't hear. He sat on the arm of the couch with a carton of pad thai and didn't talk much.

Katie talked enough for everybody.

She told us about school. About Becca, her best friend; and Josh, who was her boyfriend, sort of, it was complicated; and Scott, Josh's best friend, kind of a jerk but okay. She asked me eleven questions about Woodsboro in a row without waiting for answers. She asked Gale if it was true she'd been offered a job at 60 Minutes, and Gale said "Who told you that?" in a voice that meant yes. She asked Dewey why he had cotton in his nose, and he said it was the dry air, and Katie looked at the rain on the window and opened her mouth, and Rachel gently kicked her ankle under the table, and she closed it.

Then she said, "Oh, and this weekend we're going up to Shelter Mountain."

I put down my carton.

"Josh's brother booked one of the cabins at the Inn," said Katie. "For the weekend. Friday to Sunday. It's going to be so fun. There's a lodge, and a hot tub, and they've got a TV in every cabin with, like, a whole shelf of tapes, so if it rains we can just—"

"Katie," said Rachel.

"What? Mom said I could go. Mom already said—"

"Which cabin," I said.

Everybody looked at me. Katie did too. Something in my voice had gotten through, I think; her face changed a little, uncertain.

"I don't know," she said. "Twelve? Josh said twelve. Why?"

Nobody moved.

Rachel had put her carton down. She was looking at me across the coffee table, and I watched the whole thing cross her face: the October file, Tyler Walsh's rental receipt with Cabin 12 on it, the Polaroid, the dead fly on Noah's windowsill, and her niece on her floor with a carton of pad see ew in her lap, talking about a hot tub.

"She can't go," I said.

"What?" said Katie. "Why not? Aunt Rachel—"

"Katie," said Rachel, very calm, the way my father is calm about flat tires and the IRS. "Go in the kitchen and call your mom. Tell her I need to talk to her tonight. Tell her it's important."

"You always say it's important," said Katie, in a perfect imitation of Noah, without knowing it.

On the arm of the couch, Noah made a sound like he'd been hit.

"Katie," said Rachel. "Go."

Katie went, slowly, looking back over her shoulder at all of us, at me, and her face wasn't pink anymore. It was confused and a little scared, the way a kid looks when all the grown-ups in a room go quiet at once and nobody will tell her why.

I sat on the floor of Rachel Keller's apartment looking at the pad thai and thought about a movie I'd seen in another life. A girl named Katie on the floor of her bedroom in front of a TV at ten o'clock at night, with her face—

Not this time, I thought. Not her.

I didn't notice Aidan until he was standing next to me.

He'd come out of his room when Katie knocked, eaten three bites of rice at the end of the coffee table without a word, and disappeared again, and I'd forgotten about him. People forgot about Aidan. He was eight and small for it, with dark hair in his eyes and a face too old and too solemn, and he moved through rooms like he was trying not to disturb the air in them.

Now he stood at my elbow holding a piece of paper.

"Hi," I said.

He didn't say hi. He looked at me. He had his mother's camera eyes, only darker, and they didn't look at you so much as through you, at something about a foot behind your head.

"Rachel says you know about the well," said Aidan.

On the couch, Rachel froze.

"Yeah," I said. "I know about the well."

Aidan nodded like that was what he'd expected, and held out the paper.

"This one's for you," he said.

I took it.

It was a crayon drawing on cheap manila paper from a school supply closet, a little torn at one corner. It was good, better than a kid his age should be able to draw, every line pressed hard into the paper, the way kids press when they want something to stay.

It was a well.

A ring of gray stones in a field of green grass under a gray sky. Over the well, a rope tied to something out of the picture. On the rope, going down into the black circle in the middle, a figure: a boy, tall and skinny, all arms and legs, the way a little kid draws a teenager. Brown hair. A red and black checked shirt done square by square in two crayons, a careful little grid. And around his neck, trailing behind him up the rope and out of the well, over the stones and onto the grass, a scarf.

A long, long green scarf, with a place a little way down where it got suddenly wider for no reason at all.

I stared at it.

"That's you," said Aidan.

"Yeah," I said. My voice didn't sound like mine. "Yeah, I see that."

"When did you draw this, Aidan?" said Rachel from the couch, barely above a whisper.

Aidan didn't look at her. He was looking at me.

"Last Wednesday," he said.

Last Wednesday. January eighth. Two days before the tape came to Gale's motel, four days before I watched it, before I'd ever heard of the Alexis or Boeing Field or a man named Noah Clay. Before Sid put her scarf around my neck on the Rileys' lawn.

Rachel made a sound on the couch. I didn't look at her.

"Aidan," I said. "Do you know who's down there?"

He nodded.

"Is she—" I didn't know how to ask it. I asked it anyway. "Is she mad at me?"

Aidan thought about that seriously, the way Martha thinks about things, with his whole face, looking at the drawing in my hands.

"No," he said finally.

"How do you know?"

"Because everybody else looks away," said Aidan. He reached out with one finger and touched the boy in the drawing, on the rope, going down. "And you're going to look."

He took his finger back. Then he turned around and went down the hall to his room without saying good night to anybody, the way he'd come, without disturbing the air, and the door closed behind him very softly.

I sat on Rachel Keller's floor with a crayon drawing in my hands.

Nobody spoke. Gale was looking at me. Dewey was looking at Gale. Noah was looking at the hallway where his son had gone. Rachel had her hand over her mouth. And in the kitchen, behind the swinging door, I could hear Katie on the phone saying Mom, I don't know, she just said it's important in a small, scared voice.

The TV under the dish towel was silent and off. It wasn't even plugged in; Rachel had pulled the plug that morning before she left for the P-I. I'd seen the cord coiled on the carpet beside it.

I looked at my wrist, at a Hamilton with R.M. 1944 on the back, the second hand sweeping around without a sound.

9:51 p.m. Tuesday, January 14, 1997.

Three days down and four to go. A ferry in the morning; an island with a lighthouse and a barn, and a loft with one window. A man named Richard Morgan who'd come out of that barn with a shotgun, and who'd been standing at a window in a picture, with his back to the room, for years. And at the end of all of it, a well and a rope, and a boy going down in a scarf that didn't belong to him, that he'd promised to bring back.

I folded the drawing in half carefully, along a line that didn't cross the boy, and put it in the unicorn notebook next to the message from Mulder and the page that said DELAWARE. Then I opened to a new page and wrote:

DAY 3. Frame 206. The window is in all of them.It was made.Cabin 12, this Friday. Katie.Aidan drew it last Wednesday.

And under that, after a long time, smaller:

Don't look away.