Work Text:
Tell me the truth of things
Show me where the raven sings
I will listen to its call
And drink to its undoing
Shoes scrape against concrete, scuffing marks into the grime that coats it like a second skin in uneven steps. Gravity doesn’t seem to be doing its job properly. It tugs Stan one way, then the other, with no thoughts spared for Stan’s poor churning stomach. He stops by a streetlight and leans bodily against the strangely warm pole while he tries to decide whether or not to let go of the bottle he snagged from behind the counter when the brawl began. It’s half-empty already, and his head is spinning, and he isn’t really sure if he’s the one who emptied it or if he found it that way.
Either way, it doesn’t matter. He’s trashed. There’ll be no driving tonight, not if he doesn’t want to end up like every other dead rat on the side of the road, but he’d better find his car anyway and hope it hides him from anyone who might be looking for him. Just as soon as bile stops trying to sneak its way up his throat and out his mouth.
The sounds of the bar and the brawl are distant behind him. It makes him feel distant, too, like he’s not really here – he realizes he’s dropped the bottle when he’s halfway across the parking lot and attempts to take another gulp of the gasoline. Burning a little hotter will get the fire over with quicker, or at least that’s what he’s heard, but it’s probably for the best that he doesn’t. Quicker would be dead, or worse, hospital-worthy.
He’s too caught up trying to remember how this happened to notice that anything is wrong when he finally gets to his car and sluggishly goes to unlock the driver’s side door, only to find it opens without the key. He shuts the door, locks it in a moment of drunken clarity, and reaches over for the mostly-empty bottle of water that should still be waiting in the seat next to him, and that’s when he feels it: something cool and hard presses into the back of his neck.
From the back of the car comes a voice that sounds like it’s coming from the other end of a telephone line, speaking one word only. “Drive.”
Stan swallows. His flushed face, which has been building up a good sweat since the beginning of the night, produces a new trickle of sweat that slowly begins to make its way down to his temple. He means to hold up his hands, but they don’t really respond to him, so he just laughs at his misfortune and tries to think of who would sneak into his car when he wasn’t looking and what they’d want with him. Usually people are more upfront, fight-first and talk-later.
“Hey,” he slurs. “No need to be so-”
The metal – only it doesn’t quite feel like metal – digs deeper into his skin, and he moves away from it, but it gets the point across anyway.
“Drive,” the mysterious guy in the backseat of his car commands again.
“Yeah, okay, I get it. No chat – no chit-chat,” he agrees, tripping awkwardly over his words as they tangle together in his mouth. “But, mgh, I can’t-”
“Keys in ignition.”
“You got it.” He blinks hard, trying to shake the fuzzy-blurriness from his vision and shoves his key at the ignition. His hand is shaking bad, either from the copious amounts of alcohol he may or may not have consumed or from the fact that someone’s pointing some kind of gun at him and telling him to drive when he can hardly tell his left from his right. The key misses twice before it finally slips in and he turns the engine on, relieved beyond words when it actually starts. This would be a terrible time for it to break down, but with his luck it’s always a risk.
He gets out of the parking lot without being told. Years of driving in both the best and worst conditions, for hours on end, are really his savior here: he only bumps into the curb a couple times and manages to get to the right side of the road without too much trouble. He was planning on getting out of here soon anyway, so this isn’t too far from the original plan, aside from the whole ‘stranger in the car who might kill him’ thing.
“Where to?” he asks, as the car in front of him doubles and swims. Maybe if he’s nice enough it’ll lessen his chances of getting murdered.
“Oregon.”
“Huh?” Stan turns around at that, baffled, and is even more surprised to find that the guy in his backseat isn’t some everyday thug and his gun isn’t some ordinary gun. The guy is completely outfitted in countless black layers, wearing a mask over his face and ski goggles over his eyes and a hood over his head. Not an inch of skin is left uncovered, not even his hands, which are gloved. One of them is holding up a small handheld gun-shaped thing that doesn’t look like any real gun Stan’s ever seen, but sure doesn’t look like plastic either.
“Watch the road,” Ski Goggles says, in the same tone of voice as before.
Stan whips his head back around just in time to avoid a collision with a stop sign. He yelps and hits the brakes, jerking the whole car and nearly making him fall out of his seat, then swerves back onto the road. With one hand, he attempts to grab his seatbelt and put it on in a desperate bid to reduce his chances of dying in a car crash tonight since apparently he won’t be staying put. He can’t drive and buckle it at the same time, though – it’s starting to make his head hurt like it’s being split in half.
Something takes the buckle from him and clicks it into place. He blinks, frowns, shakes his head, and squints at the road in front of him.
“Oregon…?” he mutters. “Why Oregon? Th’s’s Texas… Ya ‘spect me to drive you all the way up there?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t do that.” He frowns. Ford’s in Oregon, he doesn’t say. I can’t get banned there too, he also doesn’t say. Ski Goggles does not care about what he doesn’t say.
“Why not?”
“Gotta – gotta stop for gas,” he tries.
“That is fine.”
“What if I make a, make a run for it?”
“You won’t.”
Stan blinks again, squeezing his eyes shut and opening them as wide as they’ll go, hoping it’ll clear things up a little. It doesn’t. He’s drifting. He pulls back into his own lane and ignores the angry honk from the car behind him.
“How d’you know?” he asks.
“You need this car.”
“Not ‘s much as I need m’head,” he counters.
“I’m not going to kill you,” the man provides.
“Why not? Need me alive for somethin’?” Stan forgets to use his turn signal. He gets a few more angry honks, but he’s long since learned how to tune them out. He’s worried that he won’t even notice if he does something really bad like drive straight off the side of the road into a ditch, because all of the warnings around him are starting to feel as forgettable as birdsong. He tries to focus. Unfortunately that’s not how alcohol works. “Who you working for?”
“Killing you would be a waste of a tool-” Hey! Who’re you calling a tool? Stan doesn’t say, because he’s trying not to throw up. “- And at the moment I work for no one but myself,” the man finishes.
Stan goes quiet for a bit. He pulls onto the freeway so he doesn’t have to think so much about where he’s going, forgetting until it’s too late how fast cars go on the freeway. This was a mistake. (His whole life has been a mistake.)
“N’ you are…?”
“Irrelevant to you.”
“Seem pretty relevant right now.”
“When I have reached my destination, we will have no further business.”
“Y’ haven’t said what th’s business is. N’ why I’m the one driving you there.”
“Hm.” Now it’s Ski Goggles’ turn to go quiet for a while. Just when Stan’s beginning to think he’s not going to answer at all, he says abruptly, “I suppose I can tell you. I need to acquire materials to finish something I’ve started, and I need to finish it quickly before I am found. By my estimate I should have another three days at least before that happens, since I have already been gone for two weeks and four days, which is why I need you to hurry. You’re the one driving because I cannot trust myself to do it.”
It’s the most Ski Goggles has said since Stan had the misfortune to meet him, and it’s the most he says for the next three hours while Stan – for lack of anything better to do – drives vaguely and haphazardly westward. The guy never lowers the weird gun, but Stan’s starting to think (or hope, more like) that he doesn’t have the guts to actually kill anyone. He has to pull over when he can’t tell where the lines on the road are anymore, or how many cars are on the road, but his rambling excuses are met with nothing but an unaffected, “Okay.”
After a minute or two, he asks, “Y’ g’na stop pointin’ that thing at me so I c’n sleep or no?”
Ski Goggles tilts his head like an owl, then lowers the gun.
Stan curls up in his seat and mumbles, “Th’nks.”
Stan doesn’t know how long he sleeps, but when he wakes up again it’s bright outside, and he feels weirdly fine. No headache, no hangover, and even the bruises he’s sure he must have gotten from the fight are nowhere to be found. He looks around, but he doesn’t have to look long to see that the car is empty and Ski Goggles is standing right outside the door with his back to him. (He had been hoping it was just an alcohol-induced nightmare. No luck, it seems.)
He knocks on the window.
Ski Goggles turns around, sees him, and walks off. Stan watches him go around the front of the car and slip into the passenger seat. Then he holds up his weird gun (Stan had forgotten about the gun part) and says, “You’re awake. Good. Keep driving.”
So, well, he does. Not much else to do unless he wants to test what that thing does, and he doesn’t want to test his terrible luck any more than he already is. After only a couple hours he starts running low on gas, so he stops to fill the tank back up. Thankfully he doesn’t have to shell out a bunch of money he doesn’t have, because he has this cool thing called a siphon that lets him get all the gas he wants for no additional cost. Except for jail if he gets caught.
Then he gets some food, because who knows when he’ll be allowed to stop next, and brings some back for Ski Goggles too. He doesn’t know why exactly he goes and gets food for the guy threatening to shoot him if he doesn’t drive him halfway across the country, but he does know that it gives him a weird feeling of deja-vu when the guy takes off his cloth mask and reveals that he’s got a cleft chin, dark stubble, and a scar splitting his upper lip on the right-hand side. He’s light-skinned, got a strong jaw, but Stan stops taking note of the details when he takes off his goggles too.
Stan would know that face anywhere. It stares at him in disgust every time he looks in a mirror.
“What - Stanford!?” he splutters. “What the hell!?”
Ford turns to look at him, utterly unbothered even though this is the first time they’ve seen each other in years and years, and it suddenly strikes Stan how much older he looks. Older than he was the last time they saw each other, obviously, but also older than Stan himself looks, and – tired. Worn, like a rag bled dry of color, holding itself together by its last thread; but also hardened, world-weary, like he knows what he needs to do and exactly how to do it. The scar on his lip is the only scar on his face, but not the only marking. Framing his left temple is a tattoo of a triangle, one corner ending a hair’s breadth away from the corner of his eye. (The line-work there is shakier, thicker.) There are a bunch of smaller triangles scattered around and intermingling with it and lines trailing off into his hair and the shadows of his hood.
Stan gapes in shock at the sight of it. The tattoos, the weapons, the getup, and the fact that he’s been threatening Stan instead of just asking him – something somewhere must have gone irreparably wrong, because this isn’t the nerdy scientist with a handful of PhDs doing fancy research and shaking hands with other fancy scientists that he had imagined. This is someone else.
And instead of explaining why, Ford just tells him, “I’m not your brother.”
Stan feels something inside of himself give way that he didn’t know was still standing. He stares, attempting to process the shock and hurt and confusion and trying desperately to squeeze it all into anger just for something to hold on to, but it’s not working. He just – how could he have ever expected this?
“What?” tumbles unbidden from his lips. A plea.
“Your brother is in Oregon,” Ford says, with the same exact tone. Emotionless. Uncaring. His expression is flat, his voice is unnaturally calm, and Stan has never seen him so… apathetic before. A week ago, he would have said it was impossible.
“So, what – you’re some evil doppelgänger trying to get me to take you to Oregon so you can kill Ford and take his place?” he asks, and part of him even believes it, because he really hopes that this isn’t what became of his brother.
Ford (or Not-Ford) finishes his sandwich, having eaten it faster than even Stan can usually manage, and gives him a serious look. Not that he isn’t always serious, just that apparently he can concentrate all of that seriousness into one look. “No. If anything, your brother would be the evil version of me.” Before Stan can process that sentence, he continues, “I do not plan on ever crossing paths with him. I need materials and nothing else.”
“How can I trust you?” Stan asks skeptically. “Because if you’re going to Oregon to kill my brother I’m not going to -”
“Don’t,” Not-Ford interrupts. “Trust is worthless. Find the truth for yourself or not at all. I will tell you this. There are an infinite number of parallel universes, and only a slightly smaller infinity of universes in which I make a terrible mistake. If I were to attempt to fix all of them, I would die before ever making a dent in it, and it still would not fix any of my own errors. You can decide what to do with that.”
Stan is beginning to accept the story. Either this is his brother, and he has to come to terms with the fact that he’s gone insane and joined the mafia or something, or this is some – what, ‘parallel universe’? – version of him and the real Ford is still nerding away somewhere in Oregon. He knows which one he’d rather believe.
He takes another bite of his own sandwich, too busy thinking to say anything more. Once he’s done, Not-Ford pulls the gun back out and points it at him.
“Back in the car.”
Stan rolls his eyes and tells him, “Put the gun away, Not-Ford. If we’re going on a road trip I’m not gonna have you pointing that at me the whole time. I’ll take you where you want to go.” And keep an eye out in case you really are here to murder Ford, he thinks, but he doesn’t say that.
To his surprise, Not-Ford actually does it. The gun gets holstered, and they both get back in the car, Stan in the driver’s seat and Not-Ford in the seat next to him. Stan starts the engine back up and pulls out of his parking spot to the road. They have a long day of driving ahead of them.
“Who are you running from?” Stan asks, laying on his back on the hood of his car with his hands behind his head. In the day, the metal is hot against his skin, a bit like a brand, but now it is cool to the touch. Ford stands by the car, a different (and bigger) gun in hand as he keeps watch on the empty parking lot around them.
It’s night. Can’t see any stars, though, just murky black darkness and a pale waning moon. He wishes he had a cigarette or something, but he needs to save all his money for gas and food. (He can’t always get away with stealing.)
Not-Ford exhales, as if through a fan, stuttered and strange. “A monster,” he answers. “You should cross your fingers and hope to never meet it.”
“What happened to you?” Stan asks instead.
Not-Ford does not turn to face him. His silhouette in the darkness is nearly invisible, clad in black as he is, but the gleam on his goggles and on the metal of his gun is like a beacon in the night. The only other part of him that isn’t just shadows and indistinguishable mass is the white bandaging on his left wrist that Stan only glimpses when he shifts position and his sleeve rides up.
“Be more specific. A lot of things happened to me.”
“What happened to your wrist?”
“I failed.”
Stan swallows. He stares up at the empty sky. “Failed what?”
“Failed to escape,” Not-Ford elaborates. “He thinks that if he marks me every time I fail, one day I will be so covered in his signature that even when I am gone I will never be able to forget who I belong to; or that’s what he said. I’m inclined to believe he just likes doing it.”
“Can I… see it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I will not risk inviting infection by exposing the wound before it is healed just to satiate your curiosity.”
“Fair enough.”
Not-Ford is quiet for a moment. Then, “…I can show you the others, though.”
Stan sits up, propping himself up on his elbow, and stares as Not-Ford sets his gun on the top of the car and rolls up his sleeve. Above the bandages, which cover an area of space about as big as the span of a hand from thumb to fingertip and are stained in something dark, Stan can just barely make out a collection of dark, bold lines in various shapes wrapping around the arm and all the way up into the sleeve, where it presumably continues. They don’t look like scars, they look more like tattoos – but he’d have to see it in daylight to know for sure.
Not-Ford lets the sleeve fall and picks up the gun again, turning away.
“How many times have you tried to escape from him?” he asks.
“Only five. Six, now.” Not-Ford’s fingertips drum against the side of the gun. One-two-three-four-five. His thumb remains pressed to the metal.
“That doesn’t add up, unless he gives you thirty every time,” he points out. Not-Ford says nothing. He watches him a little longer, then frowns and sits up straighter. “Unless you meant to get caught the other times. But why would you…”
“He underestimates me,” Not-Ford answers, leaning back against the car with a mechanized sigh. “I escape. He catches me. This happens over and over again, until he comes to believe that he will always catch me. He puts less effort into finding me. He lets me get away with it for longer sometimes, just to see what I will do. Until one day -”
“- you leave for real,” Stan finishes.
“And I never come back.”
“Smart.”
“Necessary,” Not-Ford corrects.
“Where will you go? Witness protection or something?”
“No one can protect me,” Not-Ford replies, as if he is commenting on the weather. His fingers continue to idly tap against his gun. “No one but myself, and I can never go home again.”
They’re halfway through Arizona on their way to Nevada when Stan steals some gas from the wrong car and gets caught halfway through. The lady the car belongs to kicks him over and over again after bringing him down with a swing from her purse while he shouts and tries to appease her with a lot of various unconnected excuses and panicked offers to put it back or at least pay for it, but she’s not listening to anything he says, and the commotion attracts a passing security guard who promptly grabs him and pushes him against the hood of the car to arrest him.
He squirms and struggles, mostly out of habit rather than any actual hope that he’ll get out of it, but then he catches a glimpse of Not-Ford watching from a distance, gun out, and he starts struggling harder. “Wait, wait – let me go, you don’t know what you’re -”
“Nice try, fella,” the officer says. “Save it for the judge.”
Stan’s face is pushed into the scorching metal, the cuffs that get slapped on his wrists are wound tight, and there’s nothing he can do when his vision flashes white with a sound he can’t describe. The first flash catches him off guard, makes him squeeze his eyes shut, and the second flash he sees only through his eyelids – but he feels it when the hands pushing his head down and grabbing his arms go slack and fall away.
When he turns to look, both the lady and the officer lay unmoving on the ground. For a moment, he just stands there, chest heaving. Their eyes are open, their faces are blank. He can’t help but think about the fact that he never doubted for a second that Not-Ford was going to pull the trigger. He can’t help but think about how that could have been him.
Not-Ford has gotten closer in the meantime; close enough to pull out something that turns out to be a lock-pick when he motions for Stan to turn around and gets the handcuffs off. He drops them on top of the unconscious (paralyzed?) (dead?) man.
“We need to go,” he says.
“Yeah,” Stan agrees, a little light-headed, with one last glance at the guard. His heart is pounding now more than it had been when he was getting clobbered and arrested. Would Not-Ford have really shot him with that if he hadn’t agreed? Would he have been stuck, unable to move, staring out at nothing? Would he have died? Would Not-Ford have taken the car anyway?
Back in the car, Not-Ford pulls his hood off, letting his wild, frizzy hair fluff up further in the breeze that sneaks through the cracked windows but leaving his goggles and mask on. He taps his fingers against his knee, one-two-three-four-five, and then looks at him.
“They aren’t dead.”
“I know,” Stan lies.
“I don’t like to kill,” Not-Ford says, and his voice is still neutral, but he says it with the abruptness that Stan has come to understand is his tell for when something is important to him. “It’s needless waste. Potential – it. There’s so much of it, and when you kill it, it is gone, and you can never bring it back.”
Stan nods in agreement, because it seems like that’s what Not-Ford is looking for. Not-Ford watches him searchingly for a moment longer before nodding back and settling into his seat.
“You said my brother was like the evil version of you,” Stan says when they pass the first sign that says Oregon on it. He’s driving the speed limit, just so he can say he isn’t stalling, but his usual speed is at least fifteen over so Not-Ford can probably tell anyway. He’s hungry, but he doesn’t want to eat. His nerves make him feel sick.
Not-Ford, who has been looking through a stack of magazines he snagged from the last gas station for the last few hours, glances up. He looks more and more like the brother Stan remembers, now that he’s started keeping the mask off and the goggles on his head. The dark circles under his eyes seem less prominent now, and the emotion that doesn’t show plainly on his face or in his voice shows itself in the minuscule movements of his pupils and the slight dip of his head.
“I did,” Not-Ford agrees.
“Why?”
He looks away. “It might be more accurate to say he is me, but from a time when I did not know how many mistakes I was making. Things went wrong for me, or right, and I learned.” His fingers are still. His gaze is distant and hard. “Your brother is a fool. He has no idea what he is doing. He believes that he is doing good work, even against all the advice he is given, and he will doom everyone else to destruction at the hands of the monster for the sake of his own pride.”
“My brother is working for the guy you’re running from?” Stan asks, stomach sinking. He had thought that whatever had happened to Not-Ford was something in his Ford’s distant future, something preventable if it would ever happen at all, but now it looks like it’s already begun.
“A version of him, yes,” Not-Ford replies.
“Is he okay?”
Silence. Stan’s gut churns, but when Not-Ford looks at him it’s not with grim tidings but with quiet astonishment; as if the very thought had never once occurred to him. He stares for a second longer and Stan turns back to the road.
“Well?” he asks, mouth dry. “Is he?”
“Yes,” Not-Ford says finally. “He is… okay.”
Stan lets out a breath. “Good.”
“I want to go back,” Not-Ford says as they near Gravity Falls, which is where he says he needs to go. His voice is tight. Choked. His posture is tense, as if he is bracing for impact, and Stan slows the car to look at him. The trees cast long shadows over them, interrupted only by an arrhythmic pattern of dappled spots of sunlight. There are no other cars on the road.
“Back home?”
“Back to him.”
“Why?” Stan asks cautiously. His hands flex around the wheel.
“I don’t know,” Not-Ford answers, curling further in on himself. His tone is raw now, angry and scared, and it’s the most emotion Stan has heard from him since they met. This is where the fault line is. This is the crack in his wall. “I keep – I keep trying. To leave. And I keep going back. Sometimes I mean to, but sometimes I get so close, and I just – I just – I can’t do it. He has a hold on me that I cannot shake. When I am with him, it hurts, but I feel so good. I feel important. I feel like he and I are the only two people in the multiverse, like he is the sun and I am the moon, or like he is the moon and I am the tides, where without him I am nothing.
“Who am I if I’m not fighting him? Who am I if I’m not resisting him, foiling his plans, acting as his counterweight?” he asks desperately. “What if I’m making a mistake by leaving? What if he does something terrible that I could have prevented, if only I had stayed? He’ll find me. He always finds me. And this time, he’ll know that I was holding out on him. He’ll know not to underestimate me, and he’ll tighten security, and he’ll make sure I’ll never have another chance at freedom. If I turn back now, maybe I can -”
“Hold it right there,” Stan cuts in. He pulls over and the car comes to a halt. Not-Ford turns to look at him, brows pinched together in pain, and Stan turns to face him fully, resting his elbow on his knee. “What happened to the plan? You’ve been working up to this for how long, again?”
“Almost twenty years,” Not-Ford answers. “But -”
“No! No buts!” Stan shouts and pinches his nose, exasperated. “You told me yourself he’s been trying to condition you to stick around. You know what he’s doing. You’re tricking him the same way, by making him think he’ll always get the better of you, but if you always let him get the better of you, then you’re not tricking him at all. You’re just lying to yourself. You’re better than him, Stanford. I don’t care who this guy is or how supposedly important he is. I don’t need to know him to know you. You picked me to take you here because you knew I’d do it, so here I am, and I’m not letting you give up now.”
Not-Ford breathes. His fingers tap against his knee. One, two, three, four, five. He closes his hand into a fist, thumb on the outside, and glances at Stan. “What if I fail?”
“Then at least you’ll know you tried,” Stan tells him, firmly, “instead of giving up on yourself without even putting up a fight.”
Not-Ford nods, jaw tightening. “Not this time,” he whispers.
“Not this time,” Stan echoes. He gives Not-Ford another scrutinizing look, but some of his resolve from earlier seems to have returned. It’s shaky, but he hopes it gets stronger. He hopes it lasts.
Not-Ford asks to be let off at the end of a long and winding road through the forest near Gravity Falls. Stan stops the car and gets out, debating if he should follow or not, when Not-Ford takes the decision from him by walking up to him, pausing, and pulling him into a clumsy but fierce embrace.
“I miss my brother,” he tells him, with a note of grief. “And I’ll miss you too.”
Stan awkwardly pats him on the back while trying very hard not to think about how this is the first hug he’s gotten in four years and the best one he’s had in a lot longer, but it’s a losing game. He swallows around the lump in his throat and holds him tight. Suddenly he feels like if he lets go, he will drown, and he will die.
“Yeah,” is all he manages to say. “Don’t let him catch you, okay?”
“I won’t,” Not-Ford replies, taking a breath. Then he pulls away, and Stan feels like a part of him goes with it. Not-Ford holds his head up high and says, “You know what they say - sixth time’s the charm.”
Stan’s mouth twitches into a smile in spite of himself. He takes a breath too and punches Not-Ford in the arm to stop himself from trying to hug him again. “Well, guess I’ll see you around, then.”
“Maybe,” Not-Ford says before he goes, looking over his shoulder, and there’s a ghost of a smile on his face before he pulls his mask up over his nose and pulls his goggles back down over his eyes.
They both know the truth. It’s a rare kindness that neither of them say it.
The twigs and leaves crunch beneath his boots and the tattered ends of his various layers catch in the wind as he goes, making his silhouette harder to pick out. All too soon, he disappears behind the trees, and Stan can’t find him again.
With Not-Ford gone, there’s nothing Stan needs to do. He could turn around right now and get out of Oregon before he does anything he’ll regret and keep living his life as usual, like nothing ever happened. It’s tempting, but he can’t get Not-Ford’s voice out of his head, saying, “I can never go home again.” He can’t forget about Not-Ford being on the run, trusting no one, thinking that he’s nothing without someone standing next to him.
He knows what it’s like. Never before had he considered the idea that Ford could feel the same way, that anything like that could ever happen to his brother, but now the idea has fully settled in his brain as very possible and very, very real. Right now, he has a chance, because whatever happened to Not-Ford hasn’t happened to Ford yet – even though it’s already begun – and it might just be the most terrifying thing he’s ever done but he can’t turn his back on him when there might be something he can do about it.
So he gets in his car and he drives to the place Not-Ford told him about. ‘The place where it all began’: the cabin in the woods.
He gets out, goes up to the door, raises his hand – and knocks.