They had to be on foot.
We parked the car and followed until the dot stopped again. It looked like they’d reached their location. They were somewhere inside the Seattle Art Museum.
On the weekend, clerks would be busily swiping credit cards and slipping purchases into shiny museum gift bags, but it was a Wednesday and the museum had only been open for about an hour, so things were fairly quiet.
“Where are they, exactly?” I asked as we moved slowly past the gift shop along a wide white concourse.
“There’s a lot of concrete. Sketchy Wi-Fi. The app can’t get properly connected.”
“Well, it shouldn’t be hard to pick out those weird Matrix twins.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Chloe said, and then the two of us began a methodical section-by-section sweep of the museum.
There was a lot of open space, so we were able to move through the building fairly quickly. There was no sign of Swan or the twins.
“We lost them,” Chloe said, and sat down on a bench next to an exhibit guide.
“Yeah,” I said, “but how? They have to be here. It doesn’t make any sense.”
I started looking over the exhibit guide, mentally checking off everything we’d seen, when I noticed something.
“An Exploration of Heaven and Hell?” I said. “I don’t remember that one.”
“We saw the sign upstairs. That display isn’t open.”
I smiled and shook my head. “Now onward goes,” I said.
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s something that Alan Scarpio said to me in the diner.”
“What does it mean?”
“It says here that the Exploration of Heaven and Hell exhibit contains some parchments on loan from the Museum of Prints and Drawings in Berlin, and a handful of works from the Vatican library.”
“Great. We’ll have to stop by when it’s open.”
“Some of the parchments are Sandro Botticelli drawings.”
“And that’s important because?”
“Because Sandro Botticelli was responsible for creating almost a hundred works of art on parchment related to Dante’s Inferno.”
“I’m afraid we’re back to who gives a shit.”
“The first three words of the tenth canto of Dante’s Inferno are ‘Now onward goes.’？”
“Fuck,” Chloe said. “Way to bury the lede.” She jumped up, grabbed my hand, and yanked me back toward the escalators.
* * *
—
As we carefully approached the cordoned-off area that contained the Exploration of Heaven and Hell exhibit, we noticed a number of small No Entry signs on stands set up around the perimeter. About five feet or so behind the signs, two extremely wide pieces of thick, dark gray canvas about the size of theatrical stage curtains hung from the ceiling like the wings of a giant moth.
Chloe pulled the closest piece of canvas aside and peeked into the exhibit area.
“Yahtzee,” she said.
“What are they doing?” I whispered.
“It looks like they’re taking pictures.”
“Of what?”
“Of everything.”
“What’s in there?”
“I don’t know. Museum shit,” she said.
“What kind of—”
Chloe yanked her head back. “They’re coming out.” She grabbed my hand and dragged me around the corner and into the bathroom.
We waited in the bathroom for five minutes or so, and then we carefully and quietly made our way back to the exhibit area that had been roped off.
We took another peek inside.
Swan and the twins were nowhere to be seen.
* * *
—
We stepped carefully through the canvas curtains and entered the exhibit area. The main portion of the exhibit was held within an enormous glass case that covered the entire back wall of the room. Arranged behind the thick glass were works of art in a wide variety of media, including a tapestry called Glimpsing Hell from the Vank Cathedral in Iran that depicted, among other things, a circle of demons beheading a copulating couple; a brief but terrifying poem by a Japanese writer called “Yushimo’s Hell”; and, sitting on a vintage turntable just below eye level, a copy of Heaven and Hell, the ninth studio album by Black Sabbath. Everything on display appeared to be related in some way to the concept of heaven and hell.
I started taking pictures immediately. If museum workers discovered what we were doing and kicked us out, I wanted to have as many images as possible of whatever Swan and those twins had been looking at.