“It’s Seattle. It’s always dark.”
“That’s why we need as much light as we can get,” Chloe said as she moved through my apartment and switched on all of the lights. “Cousin Johnny’s going to call as soon as he gets a break on set.”
“Johnny from England?”
“Obviously.”
“Didn’t you guys have a fight?”
“His mother and mine hate each other, but we’re cool.”
“When’s the last time you spoke with him?”
“His dad’s funeral, I think.”
“Okay, so…why is he calling?”
“I texted him last night. He said he might know somebody who was in that sex cult.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, he knows way too many people.”
Chloe pulled her laptop out of her backpack.
“I found something else,” Chloe continued.
“What is it?”
“Minister Jesselman was working on an Internet privacy bill on behalf of a number of lobbyists at the time of his death.”
“And?”
“And, one of the companies connected to that bill is Chronicler Enterprises.”
Chloe opened up her computer.
“Wait,” I said. “Isn’t that the company behind Tabitha Henry’s escape rooms?”
“It sure is.”
“Shit. Were you able to dig up anything else on them?”
“There’s nothing online but a defunct URL.”
Chloe loaded a Web page, which displayed the following text.
Page not found （404 error）。
Below the text was the ubiquitous error 404 graphic of an exclamation point inside a yellow triangle.
It was a dead site, but something about it looked familiar. It took me a few seconds to figure it out.
“The font,” I said.
“What about it?”
“It’s the same.”
“The same as what?”
“As the error message page the QR code led us to from those Gustave Doré drawings we found in the museum.”
I loaded that website on my laptop and we compared the page from the QR code that featured the 404 error message below the graphic of a spinning ball, with the new site that Chloe had found featuring the same error message above a triangle with an exclamation point.
The style of the pages and the font were exactly the same.
“They look identical except for the graphic,” Chloe said.
We took a look at the HTML source code using the developer tab in our browser, but we couldn’t find anything in the code.
“What is this stuff?” Chloe pointed to a line of text that appeared at the bottom of each of the two pages. There were a bunch of seemingly random numbers, spaces, and letters followed by the message: Request failed with HTTP status 404.
“Looks like nonsense,” I said.
Chloe nodded.
“But…what if it isn’t?” I leaned in for a closer look.
“What do you mean?”
“I have a theory,” I said as I sent the pages to my printer.
“You wanna share?”
I rushed across the room and waited for the printer to finish.
“What are you doing?”
I pulled the two pages out of the printer, pressed them together, and held them up to my dining room chandelier.
“This,” I said, and motioned Chloe over.
“Holy shit,” she said.
Set amidst the random numbers and letters that ran along the bottom of the page was one section of comprehensible text. A URL: gatewickinstitute.com “What the hell is the Gatewick Insitute?” I asked.
The two of us sat down to try to figure that out.
“Gatewick is linked to a number of obscure experimental medical research studies that took place in the seventies and eighties,” Chloe said as she scrolled through what she’d been able to dig up.
I couldn’t find anything, so I closed my computer and moved over to sit beside Chloe on the couch.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“A little.”
The last physical address Chloe had been able to find was a cluster of buildings in San Francisco, but that was way back in 1987. There was nothing current.
It looked like the Gatewick Institute had sold itself as some kind of medical research facility–slash–self-help spa retreat, promising peace of mind and body for a very reasonable price.
Along with the cluster of buildings in San Francisco, Chloe managed to uncover a handful of newspaper and magazine ads from around that time that shared a now-defunct telephone number with the Gatewick Institute. The ads were mysterious and vague. They were looking for research subjects for some kind of medical study that appeared to straddle the line between pharmaceutical well-being and new-age enlightenment.