Rabbits

by Terry Miles

  “Now onward goes,” Scarpio said.

  “I’m sorry?” I asked.

  “Those are the first three words of the tenth canto of Dante’s Inferno. ‘Now onward goes.’ ”

  “Right,” I said. “ ‘Now onward goes along a narrow path, between the torments and the city wall. I follow my master,’ or something like that.”

  “Very good,” Scarpio said.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I spent half a semester studying Dante’s Inferno. What…I mean, why—?”

  “Sorry, I’ve been trying to remember that line all day.”

  “Why not just look it up online?”

  “Where’s the fun in that?” Alan Scarpio smiled and took a sip of coffee, and that’s when I heard the strange creaking and cracking sounds. For a second I thought I saw the lights of the diner flicker in concert with the odd noises, but I couldn’t be sure.

  Did talking about Rabbits somehow summon the game’s Wardens into existence? Was Scarpio’s Dante quote some kind of strange evocation?

  “What is that sound?” I asked.

  “The rhubarb,” he said, and pointed to his phone. “It’s so creepy. Throw a bit of reverb on it and it’s a fucking horror movie soundtrack.”

  I nodded. It was definitely creepy.

  Scarpio stared at me for a moment, as if he was waiting for something, then he finally smiled.

  “Something’s wrong with the game,” he said.

  “What do you mean ‘wrong’?”

  “I’m not sure exactly, but if we don’t fix it before the next iteration begins, we’re all well and truly fucked.”

  At this point, Scarpio’s phone buzzed. He looked down at the small screen. “Excuse me for one second.” He picked up his phone.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  I watched as most of the color slowly drained from his face.

  “Are you sure? Okay, I’ll be right there,” he said and hung up.

  “I gotta run,” he said, clearly flustered by the call he’d just received. “Late meeting. Do you mind walking me to my car?”

  “No. I mean—”

  “I’d like to keep talking for a bit as we walk, if that’s okay with you.”

  If Alan Scarpio wanted to keep talking, I’d be walking until my legs gave out.

  “Um, sure,” I said.

  As we stepped outside, I pulled my collar up against the light rain. Scarpio didn’t seem fazed by the weather at all. He started walking up the street. I hurried to keep up.

  “I’m going to tell you everything I know about what’s happening, I promise,” he said. “I just need to get a few things straight first, if you don’t mind.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Great. So let’s start with my earlier question. What do you know about Rabbits?”

  * * *

  —

  In the brief period of time it took us to walk the few blocks from the diner to Scarpio’s car, I told him everything I knew about the game: how it was a hidden and secret thing, a deep underground obsession, and how, if you weren’t looking for it, you’d most likely never heard of it. That it was reputedly ancient and possibly connected to the Knights Templar, the Illuminati, and the Thule Society. I detailed everything I’d heard about the alleged prizes: NSA or CIA recruitment, billions of dollars, or immortality, and about the list of winners known as The Circle that appeared all over the world, seemingly at random, before and after each new iteration of the game. I went on to tell him all I could remember about the mysterious Hazel, the most famous Rabbits player of all time, who’d supposedly checked out right after they’d won the eighth iteration. I ended with something about how most people who studied the game believed that Alan Scarpio was Californiac, the winner of Six, and that winning the sixth iteration of the game had resulted in his becoming extremely rich overnight.

  I looked at Scarpio’s face carefully while I was delivering that last bit of information, but his expression betrayed nothing.

  “Anything else?” he asked.

  “Most people interested in Rabbits believe the game is currently between iterations, and are waiting for the eleventh version to begin.”

  “That’s it?” he asked.

  “That’s all I can think of right now,” I said as the two of us finally reached Scarpio’s black Tesla sedan.

  “Can we continue this tomorrow? A late breakfast at the diner?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Great.” Scarpio pulled a small black leather case from his pocket, took out a business card, and handed it to me. It had been printed on some kind of thick off-white material, linen or bamboo maybe. On the card was nothing but a phone number.

  “Let’s meet back at that diner at eleven tomorrow morning to continue our discussion,” he said. “Give me a call if you have a conflict and we’ll set something else up, but this is important, and I’d really appreciate it if you could make it.”

  He got into the car, started it up, and rolled down the driver’s-side window.

  “I’ll be there,” I said, working extremely hard to stop myself from grinning like an idiot.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, and then he guided the shiny black sedan away from the curb, down the street, and out into the night.

  I stood there for a long time after his taillights had faded into the distance, doing my best to digest what had just happened.

  I was initially surprised that Alan Scarpio didn’t have a driver, but after thinking back on our conversation, it kind of made sense. For a billionaire, Scarpio was definitely what you’d call “down to earth”—except for the part where he’d allegedly won a fortune playing a potentially deadly secret underground game that most people had never heard of.

  NOTES ON THE GAME:

  MISSIVE BY HAZEL

  (AUTHENTICATED BY BLOCKCHAIN)

  Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A man walks into a dead letter office and asks the person in charge of the facility if they’d be willing to keep their eyes open for one very particular stamp. It was pressed into service in 1932, and on the front of the stamp is what appears to be an arctic hare. The stamp comes from the country of Thirland. Now, if you know anything at all about geography, you’re aware that Thirland doesn’t exist.

  It remains, however, a beautiful stamp. I’ve seen it.

  There’s something about the stamp that makes you feel strange—like you know you’ve seen it before, like you’ve been aware of its existence your entire life.

  Picking out what’s important from the static they use to confuse us is a key aspect of achieving success in the game of life. This game isn’t so different.

  Just because you’re convinced there’s a dangerous secret process running beneath a secret world doesn’t mean there isn’t a dangerous secret process running beneath a secret world.

  —HAZEL 8

  4

  THE PASSENGER DISCREPANCY

  My parents died when I was seventeen. I can’t say that it happened suddenly, because I have no idea how long they were trapped inside that capsized ferry before they eventually succumbed to the freezing cold water.

  My mother was an only child, and my father’s brother—an uncle I’d never met—declined familial custody. All of my grandparents were dead by that point, which left me almost completely alone as far as family goes.

  I’d already graduated high school and was waiting to start college in the fall. I had no desire to sample the hospitality of the foster care system, so, rather than take my chances with social services, I fought to become emancipated by court order.

  It was easy. I represented myself. They don’t recommend it, but what do they know? Trust me, there’s no way you would have said no either if you’d seen me up there, just seventeen years old, arguing my case in legalese like the main character in a
coming-of-age comedy from the early nineties.

  I received a modest amount of money from my parents’ passing, which I eventually invested in the stock market.

  I did a shit ton of research and practiced using mock stocks in a simulated investment environment for a full year before I did any real investing. My ability to pick out deeply embedded patterns and causal fluctuations resulted in my turning seventy thousand fake dollars into almost four hundred thousand fake dollars. The following year, I invested my money for real. Then I sold my parents’ house and purchased a modest apartment in Capitol Hill.

  I was a young adult living in a hip neighborhood in Seattle—in a home I’d purchased with my own money—coasting through college with a GPA much higher than I deserved.

  I should have taken things more seriously, put more work into my studies, but what did I do instead?

  I played games.

  And after graduation, while everybody I knew was taking global surf trips, pretzeling themselves into enlightenment at an ashram in India, downing ridiculous amounts of cheap beer with the other American tourists in Prague, or going on any number of other adventures, I was doing something else.

  I was playing games.

  I’d played games when my parents had been alive, of course, but after they died, I spent every minute outside of work and school devoted to nothing else. Focusing my attention on games resulted in my becoming a little bit more social, and it had another added benefit; it helped me avoid thinking about what had happened to my parents.

  At first the games were effective, and I was able to use them to not only calm my racing mind, but learn how to better interact with others. But, similar to a longtime drug user, the games I’d been playing began to lose their efficacy and I needed more.

  So I started playing longer and sleeping less.

  From role-playing games to first-person shooters, online to dice on a table, I played them all. I became so obsessed that I was lucky if I managed to get two or three hours of sleep a night.

  It was during this period that I joined an active online community of role-playing gamers, discovered alcohol in a big way, and narrowly avoided doing a long stint in a psychiatric facility.

  * * *

  —

  The court referred to it as a trespassing incident, but it was full-on breaking and entering. By the time I was finally arrested in the basement of the Harvard Exit Theatre, I hadn’t eaten or slept for three days.

  The arresting officer claimed I’d told her I was there waiting for someone—that I’d been following important signs, and needed to be in that theater at a very specific time in order to meet somebody I referred to as The Passenger.

  Full disclosure, there were a couple of things that had happened during this period that may have added to my confused state of mind. My psychiatrist had recently changed my medication, and our family dog had passed away from complications during a routine dental surgery. My dog was older, but she’d been completely healthy at the time of her accidental death. I was crushed. She was a little brown Chihuahua named Ruby, and she was the last living connection I had to my parents.

  Ruby had been there for me when I came home from the press conference where they’d announced that the rescue operation—which had eventually turned into a recovery operation—was now strictly a salvage operation.

  When my parents were finally pronounced dead, having Ruby there needing to be fed and walked helped me make it through the seemingly endless days.

  When she died, I was well and truly alone.

  * * *

  —

  One night, shortly after Ruby died, I was playing a brand-new massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) called Underlight, when another game popped into my mind. It was something my parents had played with me when I was a kid, something called Connections.

  Connections was all about trying to find patterns and relationships between a number of seemingly disparate and unrelated images.

  My parents had introduced me to Connections on a weekend evening, sometime in the late summer. We were getting ready to go to the drive-in, and it had started raining really hard. I was angry, because for the first time I’d managed to persuade my parents to let me pick an R-rated movie. I’d chosen Peter Jackson’s The Frighteners, and they’d reluctantly agreed.

  I called the drive-in theater, but they told me all of the movies had been canceled because of the weather. My mother decided this wasn’t an unfortunate event but rather an opportunity for a family game night.

  She made popcorn and the three of us played Monopoly. It was a far cry from The Frighteners, but I enjoyed playing games with my parents, and I loved the way my mother made popcorn. She called it a delivery system for butter.

  Later, after we’d all made banana splits (a delivery system for hot fudge), my father brought out a worn rectangular black box with the word “Connections” written in burnt orange across the front in a modern font. I’d been through the closet where our family kept our games a million times. I’d never seen that box before.

  I remember my mother wasn’t impressed when she saw it. I heard her whisper to my father that he was forcing things, that I wasn’t ready, that this game might exacerbate something she referred to as my “condition.” He told her that was exactly why it was important.

  Inside the box were a variety of photographic images in a series of color-coded envelopes. The pictures had been printed on some kind of thick card stock. Each card had some words or numbers printed on the back of it.

  I wasn’t allowed to see the backs of the image cards, only the pictures themselves.

  After a minute or two spent arranging the images and envelopes, my father lifted up one of the cards and asked me to look at the image carefully.

  It was a picture of a tiger in a lush green jungle setting.

  After a moment, he put that card away and held up another one. This one was a photograph of a woman sitting at a Formica table in a 1950s-style kitchen. She was doing some kind of accounting work.

  My mother asked me if I could see anything in the second picture that was similar to something in the first. I told her that the patterns of the tiger’s markings matched some of the patterns on the wallpaper.

  Then my father brought out a third photograph.

  Taken in what appeared to be some kind of honky-tonk bar, the photograph featured a bottle of beer sitting on top of an old Wurlitzer jukebox.

  My father asked me if there was anything in the third photograph that matched the second. I told him that the time on the clock in the second picture matched the numbers of the song on the jukebox in the other.

  This continued a few more times, until I could no longer come up with anything to connect the images.

  That’s when the game ended.

  We played Connections a few more times over the next couple of months. It was fun spending time with my parents, but staring at cards and trying to find some kind of link between them really wasn’t much of a game. After a while, I found myself getting bored. I’d started dreading the sight of the black box with the orange letters.

  But the last time we played Connections was different.

  My parents had taken me out for pancakes. This time there were no cards.

  This time we were looking for connections in real life.

  My father asked me to look for things that could be related somehow, for any kind of link between two or more things in the restaurant.

  I hadn’t noticed anything that stood out until after we’d eaten and were just about to leave. I pointed out a girl wearing a T-shirt with a horse on the front. It was very similar to a painting of a horse hanging above the door to the kitchen.

  We followed the girl and her family as they went outside and got into their car.

  As we were standing outside the restaurant, a bus pulled up and stopped. Th
ere was an ad on the side of the bus for a group of artists at the Frye Art Museum. The ad featured a horse. And just like the girl’s T-shirt and the painting above the kitchen door, the horse was rearing up on its back legs. My mother grabbed my hand and we ran for the bus.

  We didn’t make it. My parents had a brief conversation, then we got into the car and drove to the Frye Art Museum.

  We entered the museum and my parents took me straight to the painting of the rearing horse that had been featured on the side of the bus. There was something in the title and catalog number of the painting that led my parents to drive us to a park. I can’t remember exactly which park, but I remember seeing a bust of a man’s head attached to a small fountain, and some kind of outdoor performance stage.

  While my parents were excitedly working out something related to the numbers they’d found connected to that painting, I wandered off.

  They found me a minute or so later, screaming my lungs out.

  I’d stumbled onto a large concrete chessboard.

  It was protected from the elements by a large metal roof and surrounded by four stone benches. I remember stepping up onto the board and playing an imaginary game of chess. I’d recently learned how to play and had become fascinated with the way the pieces moved. I was still too young to be any good, but I loved the rules and the seemingly endless possibilities.

  I imagined the pieces—bishop, pawn, rook, and the rest—clashing in my head as I performed each allotted movement in turn. The giant board became a mental battleground as I strode across the squares, my purposeful footsteps representing the movements of black and white in their fight for supremacy. While I was taking one of white’s pawns with one of black’s knights, however, something happened. A deep panic overwhelmed me, and dark blurring shapes slowly started seeping into my eyes from the edges of the world. I felt like my peripheral vision had betrayed me somehow. I was suddenly frozen in place. I couldn’t move.