by Terry Miles
“I mean you don’t have any lights on.”
I sat up in bed. “Where are you?”
“Out front.”
“What are you doing?”
“I can come back tomorrow or meet you at the arcade, if it’s easier. It’s just that I was on my way home when it came to me.”
“When what came to you?”
“It’ll be way cooler if I show you.”
“Okay. Give me five minutes.”
I hung up, brushed my teeth, then pulled on a pair of light gray jersey pants. I tried on three shirts before I decided on the Red Dwarf T-shirt I’d received in the mail that morning. Red Dwarf was Chloe’s favorite television show of all time. I loved Red Dwarf as well—but to be honest, there’s a one hundred percent chance that I’d bought that shirt specifically because I knew Chloe would dig it.
“Alan Scarpio doesn’t have a dog,” she said as she rushed into my living room. “He’s allergic.”
She didn’t even glance at my shirt.
“What?” I asked.
Chloe picked up Scarpio’s phone from the coffee table. “His phone’s wallpaper features a dog.”
“So?”
“That has to be a clue.”
“Does it?”
“You have Alan Scarpio’s phone, K. He asked you to help him fix Rabbits. This is un-fucking-precedented territory.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You might be right.”
“There has to be something on here,” she said, swiping through the application screens on the phone.
Chloe was experiencing the rush that accompanied the game.
I could see it in the way her eyes were just a little wider and brighter than normal, her movements faster and less precise. We’d all felt it—the sense that the next iteration was about to begin, and that we might be about to discover a way in.
“You want something to drink? Wine or tea?” I asked.
Chloe bit her lip and made a clicking sound with her tongue. She did this when she was thinking.
“Why don’t we do tea,” she said, finally. “If there is something on the phone, we might miss it if we’re on our fourth glass of Malbec.”
“Sounds good,” I said, and stepped into the kitchen to boil some water.
* * *
—
My living room was filled with the pop culture anchors of my life—thousands of books that looked like they’d been shelved by blindfolded maniacs, vintage videogame consoles precariously piled beneath the television on a fading Ikea stand that had some funny name I can’t remember, and countless shelves filled with a variety of toys, candles, board games, records, and antique nautical navigation equipment.
It was an eclectic collection of slightly useful but mostly ornamental detritus.
I handed Chloe a mug of decaffeinated Earl Grey tea, and the two of us sat on my worn-out couch with its red wine stain shaped exactly like Japan and took yet another look at Alan Scarpio’s phone.
We looked into the picture of the dog—the breed (a Cavalier King Charles spaniel cross of some kind), the background of the photograph (the dog was sitting on grass in front of what appeared to be rhododendrons), and the dog’s bandana (a shade of blue called cerulean). What did any of it mean? Did it have to mean anything?
We went through another pot of tea and our conversation eventually veered away from the game to other topics—like love (Chloe had just broken up with her boyfriend, a drummer named Griff whom she and I always referred to as the Muppet), life (my hardwood floors had water stains and needed to be repaired or replaced), and family (I didn’t have any left; Chloe still had all of hers, but mostly wished she didn’t).
Chloe’s mother had recently been incarcerated for assaulting a convenience store clerk somewhere in Florida. Even though Chloe’s family situation was a consistently fucked-up shit-tower of sadness and neglect, and she still got stressed out about her mom—a lot—Chloe was remarkably cool and well-adjusted. Or maybe she’d become so adept at playing cool and well-adjusted that it was impossible to tell the difference anymore. Either way, it was impressive.
I took a look at the clock. It was just after three in the morning.
“It’s probably time for bed?”
Chloe yawned and nodded.
“You can crash here,” I said. “The guest bedroom is all yours.”
“You sure?”
“Of course, yeah. You know where the towels and everything are.”
“Sure do,” she said.
“Great.”
I handed Chloe a pair of thin blue sweatpants and a Tanis podcast T-shirt, in case she wanted something clean to sleep in.
After she thanked me for the shirt, the two of us stood there in the hallway for a moment. Chloe toyed with the string of her tea bag, which I’d wrapped around the handle of her mug. An unreadable smirk crossed her face as she shifted her weight to her back foot.
I muttered a hasty good night, slipped into my bedroom, and shut the door.
* * *
—
When I got into bed, I pulled out my phone and took another look at the screen capture I’d taken of Scarpio’s home screen.
I mindlessly zoomed in and out on the image as I thought about Chloe across the hall in the guest bedroom.
Was she thinking about me? And if so, what was she thinking? No way she was thinking about me. There were a million things she could be thinking about.
But what about that smirk? Was that some kind of challenge? Did it mean I should have kissed her? No. That would just complicate things, wouldn’t it?
Totally.
So? What the hell is wrong with a little complication?
I zoomed in on the dog’s face. And why wouldn’t Chloe be thinking about me? I moved over to examine the details of the building in the deep background. We’re both single now, right? I turned my attention back to the dog. There is absolutely no reason to feel weird about being attracted to a smart and beautiful woman. I zoomed in on the grass. Okay, settle down. No point in obsessing like this. The dog’s bandana. But Chloe is perfect. Okay, now you just sound sad.
As I continued to zoom around the photograph, obsessing about what Chloe might be thinking, I eventually noticed something.
A glimmer, just beneath the bandana.
There was a bit of metal on the collar. A tag, maybe.
I zoomed in further.
At this extremely low resolution, the words on the collar were far too small to read except for one: the dog’s name. Rabarber.
I jumped out of bed and threw on some pants.
* * *
—
“What the fuck is Rabarber?” Chloe asked, rubbing her eyes as she sat up in my spare bed. She’d already fallen asleep.
“Rhubarb,” I said. “In Danish.”
“Kind of a weird name for a dog,” she said, suddenly much more alert.
“Right?”
Chloe sprang into action. “We should look into the history of rhubarb. Maybe there’s something there?” She pulled out her phone and started to do precisely that.
“I already did a search, checked numerology, and put the word ‘rhubarb’ through a prelim puzzle matrix.”
“Find anything?”
“Yes, but not on the Internet.”
“Where?”
“On the phone.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“In the diner, Alan Scarpio played me a recording he told me was rhubarb growing.”
“And the dog’s name is Rhubarb?”
“So it would appear.”
“Holy fuckballs.”
“I found the rhubarb file in his music library. It was the only thing there. No artist or album title.”
“I need to hear that shit, right now,” Chloe said.
>
As I hooked Scarpio’s phone up to my Bluetooth speaker, Chloe stretched her arms way up to the ceiling in what appeared to be some kind of half yoga pose. “I like your shirt,” she said.
“Thanks.”
“Have I seen it before?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe?” I lied.
I double-clicked the audio file, and the familiar eerie creaking and crackling of the growing rhubarb filled my spare bedroom.
Chloe and I listened to the whole thing twice, paying close attention for any hidden bits of audio, but there didn’t appear to be anything there—no Morse code buried behind the sounds of the rhubarb, no apparent extra-aural frequency manipulation.
Nothing.
It was only after transferring the file to my laptop for further analysis that we noticed something.
The file was huge.
It was a WAV file, not an MP3, so of course a larger file size would make sense, but not this much larger. No way. This thing was too big for any kind of audio file.
Something not known by many civilians—that is to say, people who don’t spend almost every waking moment of their lives thinking about games, puzzles, patterns, and codes—is that it’s possible to hide other types of data files within audio files. It doesn’t work with a compressed format like MP3, but you can, however, do it with a WAV file.
Chloe and I booted up my old Linux machine and loaded a program that would be able to decode anything hidden within that audio file.
I hit a couple of keys, and in less than a second we had it.
Sitting on the left-hand side of the screen was a file entitled TabithaHenry.avi.
I double-clicked it, and a video began to play.
It opened on an empty chair sitting behind a desk on a small stage in an enormous old train station. There was text across the bottom of the screen that read:
Jeff Goldblum does not belong in this world.
8
ROWING ALL THE BOATS
The camera pulls back to reveal twenty or so people standing in an orderly line in the train station. A young woman waits nervously near the back. She’s in her early to middle twenties, about five feet four inches tall, with deep hazel eyes and wild curly brown hair. She’s wearing a light blue denim jacket, ripped black jeans, and faded green cowboy boots. Pinned just above the pocket on the top left of her jacket is a three-inch happy-face pin featuring a small smear of blood—an image connected to the popular comic book Watchmen.
On the stage, there’s a low leather chair tucked behind a small desk. Atop the desk are five bottles of what appear to be Fuji water, featuring a well-known film company’s logo in place of the water company’s usual design, and a microphone on a small black metal stand.
A colorful poster for what looks like some kind of action-adventure movie sits behind the desk on a flimsy aluminum easel.
After about ten or fifteen seconds, a studio executive walks up to the microphone and explains to the people in line—participants in some kind of contest who’d won a chance to meet the cast of Steven Spielberg’s latest film via a viral-marketing campaign for a videogame property loosely connected to the film—that they would be meeting the actors from the movie one at a time over the next hour or so.
As soon as the executive finishes addressing the people in line, the first member of the cast takes the stage to a smattering of applause. It’s Jeff Goldblum. He’s followed by a publicity assistant from the movie studio—a six-foot-tall, thirtysomething blond woman in a tight navy blue suit.
Jeff Goldblum is a movie star, no doubt, but these people were clearly saving most of their excitement for the male and female leads of the film: that dark-haired scruffy-looking guy from the superhero movie with the plane crash, and the blondish woman from that TV show where she played an alien learning how to fall in love with a human.
After a polite wave and smile, Mr. Goldblum takes a seat behind the desk and the event begins in earnest.
One after another, people step up and onto the stage, and the tall blond publicity assistant takes their pictures with the actor.
This continues for about five minutes or so before it’s the curly-brown-haired woman’s turn.
After a quick hello to Jeff Goldblum, she hands her phone to the publicity assistant. Then, like he’s done dozens of times already, the famous actor smiles a wide, genuine smile, puts his arm around his temporary charge, and prepares for the photograph.
But instead of smiling for the camera, the woman with the curly brown hair whispers something into Mr. Goldblum’s ear, and then—with practiced precision—deftly removes a razor blade from her mouth and attempts to sever his carotid artery.
This shocking attempt on Jeff Goldblum’s life is foiled by the publicity assistant, who is standing close enough to intervene, and—in a remarkable act of bravery—forces herself between the actor and his assailant.
Mr. Goldblum is unharmed, but the publicity assistant doesn’t make out quite as well.
While wrestling with the famous actor’s attacker, the assistant is wounded—a deep gash from her elbow all the way to her wrist. A rush of blood fountains from her arm, covering Mr. Goldblum and flooding the white linoleum floor of the stage.
It isn’t until the publicity assistant looks down and notices the blood on the floor that she realizes she’s been cut.
At that point, she passes out and the stage erupts in a wild flurry of blood and chaos.
The two members of the security team standing closest to the action rush forward to help, but they’re unable to get their hands on Mr. Goldblum’s would-be assassin due to the slippery smears of deep red blood now covering the stage.
With the security guards slipping and flailing in the blood, the woman with the curly brown hair continues to slide around the stage like a rabid deer on a frozen lake, screaming her strange message repeatedly into the astonished faces of the audience:
“Jeff Goldblum does not belong in this world.”
* * *
—
Chloe pushed the space bar on my laptop and the video stopped playing.
“Well, that was certainly fucked,” Baron Corduroy said as he sat down next to Chloe on the couch. He’d come over to my place right after we called him and described what we’d discovered on Scarpio’s phone.
I leaned back and exhaled.
We’d watched it at least six times before Baron arrived.
“Fuck,” Chloe said, as if another usage of that particular word was required to release some kind of pressure that had been building up.
She hit the space bar and we started watching again.
I found it hard to keep my eyes on the screen.
I’ve never been all that freaked out by blood or violence in movies or videogames, but there was something about the raw, visceral nature of this clip that really affected me.
Something about the video just felt…wrong.
I turned away from the screen, pulled out my phone, and started looking for other versions of that video online, or any corroborating evidence of this attack on Jeff Goldblum.
There was nothing.
I was able to track down various television interviews with audience members taken after the promotional event depicted in that video, but everything seemed perfectly normal, no mention of a brutal attack on the famous actor.
As far as the world was concerned, the event went off without a hitch.
“It was obviously some kind of publicity stunt,” Baron said, then pulled out a vaping apparatus in the shape of an old-school Sherlock Holmes–style pipe and took a hit. “Fuck, I love Jeff Goldblum,” he said, somehow managing to get the words out while his lungs were full of the highest THC-content vapor available to mankind.
“Yeah,” Chloe replied. “He’s cool.”
I loved Jeff Goldblum too, but at the moment I was more
concerned with the woman with the curly brown hair, and even more concerned with why Alan Scarpio had a hidden file on his phone of her attacking the well-known actor.
“If it was a publicity stunt,” I said, “there would most likely have been some publicity.”
“That’s a fucking good point,” Baron said, pointing at me with his vape pipe.
“You think it’s some kind of deepfake?” Chloe leaned in, looking closer at the screen, as if this might magnify some previously unidentified element of the footage.
“It definitely has to be fake,” I said.
Chloe nodded.
“I mean, it looks pretty real to me,” I added, “but we would have heard about this, right?”
“Fuck, yes,” Chloe said. “For sure.”
The video file was called TabithaHenry.avi, so the first thing we did was look up the name Tabitha Henry.
“Find anything?” Baron asked.
“Just one picture on an old Facebook page,” Chloe said, holding up her phone, “and it’s definitely her.”
It was clear that Tabitha Henry was the woman with the curly brown hair from the video. In the photograph, she was pictured smiling on a boat somewhere.
“This girl doesn’t have much of an online presence,” Chloe continued, “although she does follow Jeff Goldblum.”
“We need more,” I said.
“Darknet?” Baron suggested.
“Oh, sure,” I said. “We just fire up the old Tor Browser and type in ‘Jeff Goldblum murder video’?”
“Attempted murder,” Chloe said.
“You’re not helping,” I replied as I opened up a browser and performed a Torch for “Jeff Goldblum attempted murder video.”
There was nothing.
After a few hours of fruitless research, Baron had an idea. He pulled out a phone I’d never seen him use before and left the room.
A few minutes later, he came back, and before we could ask him what the hell he was doing, a text alert sent him rushing over to my laptop.
He quickly loaded a program, typed in a bunch of numbers and letters, and then waited. A couple seconds later, he opened a Tor Browser of his own and entered a .onion URL. Once the site had loaded, he leaned back in his chair and motioned us over.