by Terry Miles
“Here you go,” she said.
She handed Chloe a small green cardboard box that contained a handheld game by Coleco from 1978 called Electronic Quarterback.
Chloe and I looked over the box. It was well-worn, with crooked strips of yellowed masking tape running up two of the four sides. It claimed to contain “all the action of a real football game.”
“What is this?” I asked, but Amanda had stepped away to help another customer.
Chloe pulled the game out of the box. It looked like any other handheld sports game from the seventies. It was green-and-cream colored. The top half was a little football field, and the bottom contained the switches and buttons that would have controlled the tiny red lights that represented the players, had the thing been equipped with batteries.
I was looking for the battery compartment when Amanda came back over. “What are you doing?”
“I assume we’re supposed to play this game to find the phone number somehow?”
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, kid,” Amanda said. She grabbed the game and pointed to something carved into the plastic on the back. It was a name and a phone number.
Property of Shirley Booth
1-425-224-6685
Amanda wouldn’t let us take a picture of the game itself, but she did let Chloe write down the phone number once we promised we wouldn’t post it anywhere online.
“Shirley Booth?” I asked.
“Google it,” Amanda said, then she boxed up the game and slipped it up onto a nearby shelf.
* * *
—
Chloe and I left Bloom Vintage and made our way back to my place to call the number.
A quick search for Shirley Booth revealed she was an actress who’d passed away in the nineties. She’d played the title character in an American sitcom called Hazel that ran from 1961 to 1966. That series was based on the comic strip Hazel by Ted Key.
“Shirley Booth was Hazel,” I said. “Clever.”
“Are you ready?” Chloe had predialed the number, and her finger was poised over the call button on her phone.
“Let’s do it,” I said.
Chloe pressed the button.
We were calling Hazel.
The phone started ringing. It sounded kind of rough and distorted, like an old analog line from the eighties. After three rings there was a click and a woman’s voice relayed the following message:
Hi, you’ve reached Golden Seal Carpet Cleaning. We’re currently out of the office. Please leave your name, contact information, and a brief message, and we’ll get back to you when time allows. If you’re applying for the advertised position, please visit the stationery room on the second floor. Thank you.
“My name is K. I’m here with my friend Chloe. We’d like to speak to you about…well, about a lot of things, but I suppose most pressing is the fact that Alan Scarpio told me something was wrong with the game, and that I needed to help him fix it before the next iteration began. Now Scarpio’s missing and we’re not sure where to turn. Please call me back.”
I left my number and hung up.
“What now?” I asked.
“I’m starving,” Chloe said. “Let’s grab something on our way.”
“On our way where?”
“Where do you think? Golden Seal Carpet Cleaning.”
14
SECOND FLOOR STATIONERY
We grabbed pizza and salad at the market, then made our way over to the address Chloe had dug up for Golden Seal Carpet Cleaning.
It was a four-story building on a quiet street in Georgetown.
Georgetown is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Seattle, where industrial commercial–meets–contemporary boho art chic. You can walk past a busy steampunk brew pub set next to a clown school, and a block later you’re standing in the middle of a quiet street staring at a low red-brick building from another age.
Vertical Art Deco lines running up the elevated corners of the building reminded me of the power station on the cover of Pink Floyd’s Animals (minus the enormous white smokestacks). The front doors were locked and there were no company names listed on the directory. We took a quick look around. Every uncovered window we were able to peek through revealed an empty room. There were no people, no cars, and no sounds of life at all. I’ve seen a lot of empty buildings. This was definitely one of them.
“There’s nobody here,” Chloe said, using her hand to shield her eyes from the daylight as she stared up at the top floor.
“No For Lease sign either,” I said. “Are you sure this is the right place?”
“It’s the only address listed anywhere.”
I walked up the stairs and tried the door again.
Still locked.
I took another look at the directory. There were small white buttons next to two rows of empty name plates. “Should we maybe try to buzz?”
“Let’s do it,” Chloe said.
“Which one?” I asked.
Chloe mashed her way down all twenty of the buttons, each of them releasing a sharp buzzing sound as she made contact.
“Or we could just press them all,” I said.
Chloe shrugged.
We waited, but nothing happened. As we started walking down the stairs toward the sidewalk, however, we heard the familiar buzz and clack of a door being unlocked electronically.
We shared a look. Somebody was letting us in.
We sprinted back up the stairs, and I managed to catch the handle of the door a split second before the lock started to reengage. I yanked it open, and Chloe and I tumbled forward into the lobby.
We exhaled in unison as the door closed behind us with a heavy clunk—a sound that echoed through the empty space, underlining the unsettling silence.
We were in.
* * *
—
The floor of the lobby was checkered with well-worn beige and white linoleum tiles. An empty building directory hung on the wall directly in front of us. To the right was an old gray elevator and just left of that, a set of stairs leading up.
“What do you think?” Chloe stared up at the blank directory.
I walked over and pressed the call button next to the elevator. “The outgoing message said that if you wanted to apply for the job to visit the stationery room on the second floor.”
Chloe came over and pressed the call button again, three times in a row.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m excited,” she said, and punched my shoulder.
I was pretty excited myself, but I was doing my best to keep it together.
* * *
—
On our way here, I’d started noticing the number twenty-three. Twenty-three flowers on a billboard advertising a local florist, twenty-three steps to cross the street, a kid in a LeBron James jersey (23) stepping onto a number twenty-three bus. And now, we were going up to the second floor and Chloe had just pressed the elevator button three times. Twenty-three.
I could feel the wild exhilaration that often accompanied my obsession with patterns and connections and I took a deep breath. One of my many therapists had told me that the best thing I could do when I felt overwhelmed like this was to recognize the remarkable coincidence, marvel at the random chance, then simply let it pass. So I took another deep breath and waited for the number twenty-three to wash over me and disappear.
I couldn’t afford to lose control again. Not now.
* * *
—
We stepped off the elevator and into a long hallway that featured the same scuffed beige-and-white checkerboard linoleum.
The second floor was just as quiet as the lobby. If there was anybody inside the building, they were completely silent.
Our footsteps echoed off the floor and the walls as we made our way slowly down the ha
ll. Most of the office doors had been left open, and as we passed by, we could see that the rooms were empty—no furniture, no phones, nothing at all. The dust we kicked up into the air as we walked led me to believe that nobody had been there in a very long time.
When we reached the end of the hall, we turned right into an almost identical hallway—same linoleum, same empty offices on either side, but there was one significant difference.
At the end of this hallway was a closed door.
It looked exactly like a private investigator’s door from an old noir detective film. The word STATIONERY had been stenciled or glued onto it using some variation of the Futura font. Directly below the word STATIONERY was the suite number. Twenty-three. Of course.
Chloe and I looked at each other. She raised her eyebrows and smiled, and then she tried the door. It was unlocked.
We entered the room and turned on the lights.
* * *
—
The room was small, about twenty-five feet square. Two large windows filled the wall to the left of the door. There were a number of things inside, but stationery definitely wasn’t one of them. The wall to our right, directly opposite the large windows, was covered by three dented gunmetal-gray bookshelves filled with old books, most on the subject of industrial design. In between the books were a number of small potted plants, which were all still alive.
Whatever was going on up there, someone had been watering the plants.
There was a small, low teak desk with matching chair positioned in the exact center of the room. Sitting on top of the desk was an old computer. There was no logo visible, but it looked like a machine from the 1970s, an 8-bit computer called a Commodore VIC-20. Beside the old computer on the left was a cassette tape recorder, and just to the right of everything was an ancient cream-colored cathode-ray monitor.
Chloe sat down in front of the computer, and I switched everything on.
The recorder was something called a Datasette—an archaic system that used cassette tapes to store data. I’d seen something similar in a vintage computer store in New York City, but this setup was different, the keyboard in particular.
From above it appeared normal, just regular letters and numbers, but there were two tiny symbols on the front face of each of the keys: One was a symbol in a language I’d never seen before, and the other was geometric. The VIC-20 had symbols on the front of the keys as well, but not like these. These looked like symbols you might find in a book on alchemy or the occult, but maybe they were simply part of an old computer-programming language; I had no idea.
Once the computer was up and running, I knelt down on the floor beside Chloe and the two of us were faced with a flashing cursor and the word “Ready.”
We tried typing the handful of BASIC programming language commands that we could remember, but nothing happened.
I decided to try a different approach. I typed in one word—“Hazel”—and hit return.
Nothing.
Then I tried the word “Rabbits.”
After a momentary flicker and hum, followed by a bright flash and jumble of images, the screen entered a boot sequence, and the tiny speaker atop the cassette player crackled to life.
Suddenly, the monitor was displaying full-color video, and we were looking at a press conference or something similar.
In the center of the screen was a lectern set on a low stage. A crowd of reporters were milling around, waiting for whoever was going to be speaking to arrive.
After a few seconds, a tall, thin thirtysomething woman wearing a white skirt suit waded through the throng of reporters and made her way up and onto the stage. She purposefully stepped up to the lectern, and her amplified voice, strong and clear with a thick British accent, filled the room.
“Minister Jesselman is going to make a brief statement, but we’re not going to be taking any questions at this time. We will, however, brief you again after tomorrow’s session. Everybody clear?” The assembled press grumbled and moaned; clearly they had some questions about whatever was going on.
For a moment, with everyone milling around, it wasn’t clear exactly what was happening or where to focus your attention. Was Minister Jesselman involved in some sort of personal or political scandal? Was he going to announce a run for office? Or were we waiting on something else entirely?
Finally, as if in response to those questions, a distinguished-looking gray-haired man in a blue designer suit stepped up to the lectern and cleared his throat.
“Good morning, everyone. I came here today to address the clean energy initiative bill’s initial failure and our desperate need to keep it alive in parliament, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to deliver another message instead.”
And with those words, Minister Jesselman calmly reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and removed a snub-nosed silver revolver.
The crowd erupted in a flurry of chaotic movement, yelling and climbing over one another in an attempt to get as far away from the front of the stage as possible, but Jesselman wasn’t concerned with them. He just looked directly into the camera, smiled a strange, sad smile, and delivered his message:
“The door is open.”
Then he calmly set the gun directly beneath his chin, drew back the hammer with an audible click, and pulled the trigger.
Blood exploded in a dark red wave from behind his head, splashing everything nearby. Then the video cut to black and the tiny cassette player’s speaker went quiet.
“Jesus,” Chloe said.
I tried to respond, but I couldn’t speak. My mouth was dry, my field of vision suddenly tunneled and blurred. The sound of static roared into my head, and I felt the familiar humming and tingling filling me up, like blood rushing to a limb that had fallen asleep.
The gray feeling was back.
Chloe pulled out her phone and did a quick online search for Minister Jesselman. Dozens of articles sprang up immediately. This video wasn’t some relic of the past, stored in the magnetic tape of an ancient computer system. This was all over the news.
This had just happened. The video we’d been watching was live.
Then, suddenly the monitor flickered on again.
Instead of that press conference footage, there was something new on the monitor. It was a list of Roman numerals followed by a series of names.
It was The Circle.
But this version of The Circle was different. Instead of ending with the Roman numeral for ten, like the most recent versions, here XI flashed at the bottom of the screen.
I looked over at Chloe and then pulled out my phone and texted Baron. I sent him two words and an image. The image was a towel hanging on a rack. The words were: Call. Now.
It looked like the eleventh iteration of the game had officially begun.
NOTES ON THE GAME:
MISSIVE BY HAZEL
(AUTHENTICATED BY BLOCKCHAIN)
How do you play the game? Find the discrepancies, follow the clues; follow the clues and find the discrepancies. Playing is the easy part; what’s harder is knowing if you’re playing or not. There’s no entry fee, application form, or guidebook, and whoever’s in charge isn’t talking. So how do you know if you’re playing the game?
The good news is that if you’re playing Rabbits—actually playing the game, for better or worse—you’ll eventually know it. Something will be off. Something will be different. Something will be wrong.
And everything will be dangerous.
—HAZEL 8
15
WE HAVE A LITTLE FUCKED-UP SOMETHING TO DEAL WITH HERE
“I’m worried about Baron,” I said.
It was ten thirty p.m. and Chloe was locking up the arcade. It had been over twenty-four hours, and Baron still hadn’t responded to our emergency towel text.
“Yeah,” Chloe said as she grabbed her backpack and
flipped it over her shoulder. “He’s gonna lose his shit when we tell him about Golden Seal Carpet Cleaning. Maybe he can help us figure out how the hell that ancient computer tape was playing a live video, and then how it managed to wipe itself clean.”
“I think we should head over there,” I said.
“Good call.”
* * *
—
It took us fifteen minutes to get to Baron’s building.
We stepped out of Chloe’s car, and I shivered a little. I’m not sure if it was due to the fact that it was cold outside, or because two of the streetlights in front of Baron’s place had burned out, giving the building a serious retro-horror-movie vibe. It didn’t help that the place used to be a nunnery in the fifties, and as a result, there were some Gothic-style flourishes in the masonry that seriously amplified the Rosemary’s Baby of it all.
We ran across the street and I buzzed his unit.
“No answer,” I said.
“He’s still not answering his phone, either.” Chloe had been calling him repeatedly while I buzzed.
Baron’s apartment was on the ground floor. We tried knocking on his window, calling, and buzzing a few more times, but there was still no answer.
Chloe and I looked toward the side of the building at exactly the same time.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Chloe smiled.
* * *
—
We made our way around the side of the building and stepped through a small wooden gate into the narrow lane that ran along the side of Baron’s place. The lane was maybe four feet wide and overgrown with weeds and wildflowers.
We walked between the buildings past a rusted tricycle, a few old plastic toys, and a patio chair that must have been white at some point but was now covered in an uneven layer of filth.