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way up there, grinding into the locked position, so it had to be loud. When everyone made it to the bottom, no one wanted to say what was really going on. We just stood there, still and quiet, and tried to come to grips with the reality of our circumstances.
    We’d driven two hours out of L.A., walked down a very long and steep path into a desolate wood known by only a few. We’d trusted a crazy woman and let her lead us a hundred feet underground.
    And we’d let her close the door on us.
    We were trapped.
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    1 I have recordings of all the cures that took place at Fort Eden the last time we were there. I’ve posted them at www.willbesting.com. To see Kate’s cure and understand a little more about why she is plagued by terrible headaches, visit the site and use the password hollander .
    2 Connor’s cure left him with an ailment that sidelined him from sports for good. He was bitter about it and still believed he’d be playing again soon, once the doctors figured out what was going on. To see his cure, use the password falling at www.willbesting.com.
    3 When I’d turned twelve, my mom introduced me to online college classes at a tech school in India. They were cheap courses taught by thickly accented Indian tech gods about stuff I actually had some interest in. First I took video game programming, then a series on electronics, then hardware integration. I failed approximately half of the classes I took, but my interest was sparked.
    I was an audio geek at heart, but I liked video, too. Homebrew degrees in electronics and programming pushed me over the edge. I ended up on craigslist buying up old iPods and digital cameras until my money ran out.
    Then I opened them up and started digging around.
    Sure, my Recorder was basically the same thing as a new iPhone without the phone part; but I’d built it myself, and it looked gnarly.
    4 To watch Rainsford transform, go to www.willbesting.com and use the password transformation .
    5 To see Connor’s cure and experience his fear firsthand, go to my site, www.willbesting.com, and use the password falling .



3:00 PM–3:30 PM
    â€œIt’s locked, and it’s unbelievably dark up there.”
    Alex was back, sitting on the floor like he’d run a marathon, complaining about how much pain he was in. He put his hand on that olive green fanny pack at his side, and I could tell he was thinking about sticking himself with one of the needles. We might have sent the wrong guy, given his circulation problems. He’d climbed all the way to the top and tested the door, just to make 100 percent certain that a lunatic had just locked us underground.
    â€œSo we’ve got an insane witch holding us captive in the woods,” Kate said, shaking her head. “I didn’t wake up this morning thinking this was possible, but hanging out with you guys again, it’s starting to feel like it was inevitable.”
    While Alex 6 had been climbing all the way up and back down the ladder, the rest of us had waited, too nervous to fan out or go very far from the entryway before knowing for sure what we’d gotten ourselves into. The biggest reason for the holdup, I think, was what the place looked like. Three hallways led off in different directions, each with a different-colored arrow on the floor and a sparse set of words:
    RED ZONE
    BLUE ZONE / O ZONE
    GREEN ZONE
    But it was the shape and quality of the passageways that bothered me the most. When I was a kid, there was a round culvert that ran under a road near my house. It was big enough to crawl down the center of and end up on the other side, but there came a time when I wouldn’t do that anymore because it made me feel claustrophobic. There were a lot of bugs in there, plus I started thinking there might be a possum or a family of rats making a home out of it. The passageways under Fort Eden were like that, only a lot bigger. They were circular tubes, about fifteen feet around,