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The rhythmic thudding against the wood migrates from the doorframe into my skull, vibrating the springs of the mattress and rattling the loose glass in the windowpane.

"What the fuuuccck? I’m coming, damn," I croak, swingling my legs over the side of the bed. "You better hope the inn is on fire.”

The knocking stops.

I wait. Five seconds. Ten.

I roll out of bed with all the grace of a falling bookshelf. My vision swims as I stumble toward the door, my fingers fumbling with the locks.

"If this is about the swan’s motive, Tam, I swear to God⁠—"

I yank the door open.

The hallway is completely empty.

The dim amber light of the corridor exposes the grime on the floorboards, highlighting the uneven, warped grain of the wood. There are no footsteps, no retreating figure, just the low hum of the radiator at the end of the hall.

"Funny," I mutter, rubbing my face. "Hilarious. High-level comedy."

I take a half-step forward to peer toward the stairs, and my foot snags on something hard and unforgiving.

"Goddamnit." I stumble, my hands slapping against the doorframe to keep from face-planting into the hallway. I look down, and there’s a cardboard box sitting directly in front of the threshold.

It’s a standard moving box, the edges softened by age. It looks like it was pulled from the back of a damp garage. I stare at it for a long beat, my pulse doing a haphazard little tap-dance in my throat.

I look up and down the hall again, then grab the edge of the box and heave. It’s not as heavy as it looks—maybe fifteen pounds—but it’s awkward. I drag it across the floor, the cardboard scraping against the wood, and kick the door shut with my heel before relocking both locks.

I sink onto the floor, the box sitting between my knees. The flaps are just folded over each other, no tape, no identifying info outside of a handwritten C.W. scrawled in black marker on the side.

I take a breath, steadying the tremor in my hands, and pull the flaps open.

The box is filled to the brim with tiny, rectangular plastic cases.

I pick one up, the weight of it familiar in a way that makes my stomach drop. They’re MiniDV tapes—the kind that went into those palm-sized camcorders everyone was obsessed with in the early 2000s. There are dozens of them. Some are labeled with dates in faded ink: Summer ‘05. Lake Trip. The Launch. August 14th.

My throat goes dry.

My thumb finds the recessed notch in the casing. I don’t have to watch any of these to know what they contain: every vertical inch of rock Casey scaled, and every low-resolution, idiotic decision the four of us made between ninth grade and the week she disappeared.

But I don’t know who’s been sitting on them all this time, or why they decided that five in the morning was the optimal time for a hand-off. And to me, specifically? It doesn’t make sense.

Most importantly, I have absolutely no idea where the hell I’m going to find a working camcorder to play them on.

I’m standing in Baryn’s room at an hour generally reserved for emergency surgery and regrettable airport departures, and somehow, he doesn’t look remotely interested in murdering me.

He’s already digging through the box, lifting tapes one by one to read the labels before setting them aside, moving with an investigative hunger I’m starting to find—well, let’s go with noteworthy.

"Found it," he pulls a black plastic brick from the bottom of the stacks. It’s one of those oversized VHS adapters—a hollowed-out plastic shell that uses a series of internal gears to pull the smaller tape’s magnetic ribbon into alignment with a standard player.

"Great," I mutter, rubbing the crud from my eyes. "Now we just need a time machine to 1998 so we can find something to play them with."

"Marj." Baryn states plainly. He clicks the side-latch, and when the adapter pops open, he brings the plastic shell to his lips and lets out a sharp, directed burst of air, sending a cloud of dust billowing into the lamplight. "She’s got a TV-VCR combo in her sitting room. She uses it to watch recorded reruns of Days of Our Lives.”

“And you know this, how?” I ask.

“Because on my third day here, I went down to the front desk to ask for extra towels. She forced me to watch an episode with her before she would hand them over. She’s very protective of the tapes. By all accounts, Stefano DiMera is a pillar of her emotional stability. She said, and I quote, ‘I’ve seen enough happily ever afters to know they’re boring as a dry ham sandwich. Give me a man who’s a walking red flag any day. It keeps the circulation moving.’”

I snort, then immediately press the heels of my hands into my eyes. I need a second to recalibrate after that, and preferably, a very large coffee.