Chloe leaned forward. “Why are there tiny numbers in that painting?”
“Not sure,” I said, “but there are four more numbers on the hands of these demons.”
“Holy shit,” Chloe said, leaning in. “You’re right.”
Those numbers were also incredibly small, but they were there.
I booted up my laptop and pulled up a Web page featuring Dante’s Inferno. Chloe helped me count the stanzas and compare them to the numbers.
It took us a few tries to match everything up, but a few minutes later, we found it.
The Roman numerals on the rocks gave us the lines, and the numbers on the demon’s hands gave us the words. Those clues led us to the following from the tenth canto:
7 （the） 108 （portal） 81 （is） 93 （open）
“The door is open,” Chloe said. “We already know that, though, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “There has to be something else.”
The two of us spent the next couple of hours staring at the photos we’d taken in the museum and trying to figure out our next steps.
“There’s nothing else here,” Chloe said, rubbing her eyes.
“There has to be,” I said, pointing to a section of the painting that featured a whole bunch of people, some of them almost microscopic, spilling out of a large crack in the earth. “Maybe it has something to do with the number of figures.”
I counted the figures in every single row until I came up with the same number three times. I made a note of the resulting digits and handed it to Chloe. She grabbed my laptop and I read the numbers while Chloe typed.
We put those numbers through every kind of alphanumeric code and puzzle algorithm we could find, but nothing came up.
Then, as I was reorganizing the photos we’d taken on my desktop, I noticed something.
“Holy shit,” I said.
“What?” Chloe leaned forward to check out my screen.
“Look at this.” I grabbed four photographs of etchings from various parts of the exhibit and pulled them together to form one square image.
“What is it?” Chloe asked. “It’s geometrically pretty but it’s just—”
Then she saw it.
“That’s impossible,” she said.
But it wasn’t impossible. It was right in front of us.
Those four separate illustrations, created by Gustave Doré in the mid-1860s, when combined into a square, formed a perfect QR code—technology that wouldn’t be created until 1994.
Chloe pulled up a QR code reader on her phone and took a picture. The resulting URL brought us to a Web page.
“Shit,” Chloe said as she flipped her laptop around to show me her screen.
Below the image of a spinning ball were the words “404 error. Page not found.”
“Defunct link,” I said.
Chloe slowly closed her screen.
“What are you doing?” I said. “We need to keep digging.”
“Maybe,” Chloe said, “but first we need to figure out what’s going on with you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about you missing six hours of your life, forgetting we go to The Kingfish Cafe all the time, and remembering Richard Linklater movies that don’t exist.”
“I know how it sounds.” I exhaled.
I was just about to tell Chloe that I must have misremembered that movie and the rest of it, and that this wasn’t really a big deal, but I couldn’t lie to her. “Okay,” I said, “please try to keep an open mind.”
Chloe nodded.
“I remember everything about that movie,” I said. “It exists—or existed—and The Kingfish Cafe was closed permanently more than five years ago. I understand that, for you, Before Midnight was never made or released and The Kingfish Cafe is open for business as usual, but—and this is going to sound crazy—I think that, not that long ago, things may have existed in a…different state, for both of us.”
“You’re kind of freaking me out right now, K.”
“I understand, believe me. I’m more than a little freaked out myself.”
“A different state? What the hell does that mean?”
“I’m not sure quite yet. All I’m asking is that you give me a bit of time to figure it out. Just don’t…lose faith.”
Chloe stared at me for a moment, and then she grabbed my hand.
“I’m not going to lose faith, I promise, but you have to tell me if anything else…”
“Out of the ordinary?” I suggested.