by Terry Miles
The weeds eventually gave way to mud and brown grass. Our shoes made almost no sound as we walked, as if the canopy of dark starlit sky above was somehow absorbing all of the sound from the world.
Somebody had left their blinds open in the building next door, and as we passed by I could see directly into their apartment. There was a small fish tank sitting on a water-stained black Ikea table directly in front of the window. The dark greenish-gray algae running up the side of the tank was so thick that I couldn’t tell if there was anything left alive on the other side.
For just a second, I thought I saw a flash of something slither behind the wall of brackish green, but then it was gone.
If there was something in there, swimming around in the briny darkness, trying to catch a glimpse of another world through the sludge, I definitely understood how it felt.
* * *
—
Baron’s curtains were closed but his window was open.
He smoked a lot of weed, so he always kept this window cracked a few inches.
I knocked on the glass and called his name. No answer.
“He must be out,” I said.
“Let’s take a look,” Chloe said, and she lifted the window another couple of inches and pushed the curtains aside.
Baron was there, sitting at his desk in the middle of his living room in front of his computer. He was wearing a set of huge white vintage-style headphones and just staring at the screen.
We knocked and yelled a few more times, but he didn’t budge.
Chloe lifted the old wooden window up as high as it could go, which was just enough room for the two of us to fit through.
“I’m climbing in,” she said.
“I don’t know…”
“What? He’s not jerking off or anything,” she said as she jumped up and pushed her head and shoulders through the small opening.
“Okay, but—”
“He’d totally climb into your house,” Chloe said, then she slid headfirst through the window and into Baron’s apartment.
She was right; Baron would totally climb into my house. I took a look around. Our B&E appeared to be going unnoticed.
“Fuck,” I said, to nobody in particular, and followed Chloe inside.
* * *
—
Chloe gently removed Baron’s headphones and waved in his face.
“Hey,” Baron said, blinking. “What’s up?”
He didn’t appear angry that we’d just broken into his place. He was completely out of it. For a moment, I wasn’t even sure if he recognized me.
Then, “K-mart, what’s happening?” he said, his eyes working to focus.
It was as if he’d been looking at me through some kind of thick fog from someplace far away, kind of like whatever had been swimming around behind the algae in that tank.
There was a small black wooden box on Baron’s lap, which I assumed had to be filled with weed. He picked up the box and set it gently down on the floor next to his desk as he shook his head and tried to focus his eyes.
“What’s going on?” he said, still dazed.
It took about a minute or so for us to notice the smell. I thought maybe there was a dead badger rotting in his sink or something, but it quickly became clear it was Baron himself. He smelled terrible—and it wasn’t just that he hadn’t showered in days, which he clearly hadn’t. It looked like he’d peed himself—and possibly more than once.
“Not much,” I said. “What’s up with you?”
“I think maybe I lost track of time a little,” he said, slowly coming out of whatever weird state he was in.
“Do you think maybe you lost track of a bit more than that?” Chloe said as she looked around the room.
Baron’s place was a complete disaster.
There were dishes piled everywhere. Stacks of documents covered his desk and side tables. Dozens of ripped bits of paper and Post-it notes littered with messily scribbled words and symbols had been pinned to a huge corkboard. Aside from the names of a few famous Rabbits players like Hazel, Murmur, and The Dark Thane, there was nothing in any of the photographs and images accompanying the notes that made any sense. It looked like a murder wall from the lead detective’s office in a serial killer movie, minus the cinematic red threads that were always connecting things.
Nothing appeared to be connected here.
“When’s the last time you showered?” Chloe asked.
“Fuck, is that me?” Baron said. His nose scrunched up suddenly, as he finally noticed the smell.
“What are you doing?” I asked, leaning into the screen.
“I don’t remember,” he said, still clearly dazed. “Watching a movie, I think?”
Chloe led Baron into his bathroom, turned on his shower, and shut the door behind him.
The video Baron had been watching was just a few minutes long. It was playing in a browser window on some kind of darknet website.
The video reminded me of that demonic student film that made the girl crawl out of the television in The Ring and Ringu, but this thing Baron had been watching felt much worse, darker, and more weirdly lo-fi.
The video begins with an impossibly tall shadowy figure hunched over a second figure seated on a metal chair. They’re in the middle of a small room. The walls are covered in countless thousands of tiny arcane markings. Every once in a while, the light flickers a certain way and the markings suddenly look alive, like so many tiny insects crawling the walls to try to escape the sudden unwelcome illumination.
A minute or so into the video, the tall shadowy figure leans down farther and whispers something into the seated figure’s ear.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the seated figure begins sinking into the chair. At first it looks like they’re simply sliding down, trying to escape the tall shadowy thing, but that isn’t the case. The seated figure isn’t sliding down at all—they’re actually disappearing into the chair.
They’re disappearing from the world.
This scene felt murky, dark, and far creepier than anything I’d seen in a movie or television show. Something terrible was happening to that person in the chair, and that something was real.
I heard a sound, distant at first, but as I focused my attention, the sound intensified. It was a kind of low whispering voice, and soon it was vibrating in my skull, a warm pleasant tickling feeling. I looked down. The sound was coming from Baron’s headphones, sitting on the floor at the foot of his chair.
I picked up the headphones and was about to slip them on when Chloe pressed the space bar and the video stopped playing.
“Are you fucking crazy?” she demanded. “You wanna end up peeing yourself too?”
The second Chloe pressed the space bar, the video and the link vanished.
I tried to refresh the page, but there was nothing there.
“It’s gone,” I said. The pleasant tingling sensation in my head was suddenly gone as well.
“Good.” Chloe closed the lid of Baron’s computer. “Because we have a little fucked-up something to deal with here.”
* * *
—
As soon as Baron got out of the shower, we sat him down at the table and fed him chicken soup and crackers.
“What’s happening? We’ve been calling and texting,” I said.
“Sorry, I’ve been busy. Working from home a bit.”
“What’s all…this?” Chloe said, pointing at his wall of photographs and ripped bits of paper.
“Work,” Baron said. “I can’t talk about it.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“They made me sign an NDA.”
Chloe took a closer look at the murder wall while I did the dishes.
“So, how’s working with Sidney Farrow?” I asked. “Is she amazing?”
He smiled and nodded.
“She is. I’ll introduce you.”
“Cool.”
“You’d better introduce me too, fucker,” Chloe said.
“Of course.”
“Dude,” I said. “Seriously, I’ve been worried.”
“I’ve been working on something…” His voice trailed off. I could tell he’d completely lost his train of thought.
“What?” I asked.
But Baron could barely keep his eyes open. I had the feeling he might not even remember having this conversation tomorrow.
“I’m kind of tired,” he said. “Can we talk in the morning?”
“You promise?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Because we really need to talk about Rabbits,” I said. “We found some crazy shit. Things are getting…wild.”
“We’ll talk tomorrow, Scout’s honor.”
“You weren’t a Scout,” I said.
“What do you want, a fucking pinkie swear?”
I smiled and relaxed a little. He seemed a bit more like himself.
“We’re talking about all of this shit in the morning,” I said.
I heard him yell out “Scout’s honor, muthafuckas” as he locked the door behind us.
Chloe and I left Baron’s place and started walking to her car.
Chloe handed me her phone. “What the fuck, K?”
She’d taken pictures of Baron’s murder wall. The scribbles that covered the scraps of paper and Post-it notes were almost completely illegible, and the photographs were just as confusing.
“Is this even English?” I asked, zooming in and pointing to a couple of scraps of paper.
“It’s complete fucking nonsense,” Chloe said. “Something is way the fuck off with him.”
She was right. It was complete nonsense. And something had been way off.
The next morning, Baron Corduroy was dead.
16
NO PLAYING THE GAME!
Baron’s official cause of death was listed as cardiorespiratory collapse due to a faulty valve.
Natural causes.
His sister had shown up to take him to brunch the morning after Chloe and I found him watching that weird video. She’d discovered Baron sitting on his bed, back against the headboard, empty eyes staring straight ahead.
A few days later, a memorial service was held at a church downtown.
Chloe and I spent the week following the ceremony doing nothing but playing videogames and drinking. We did everything we could to take our minds off one of our closest friends dropping dead from heart failure before the age of forty.
Because of what had happened with Baron, Chloe and I were doubly worried about the Magician. It had been forever since we’d discovered the WorGames connection, and he still hadn’t sat down with us to discuss what, if anything, he’d been able to dig up about what was happening with the game.
* * *
—
Not long after Baron’s memorial, Chloe and I were eating lunch together in the arcade when the Magician—barefoot and wild-eyed—burst out of his office, practically slid down the stairs, and shuffled across the room to the Robotron: 2084 machine. He pulled a folded old journal of some kind out of his back pocket and made a couple of notes. After muttering incoherently for a few seconds, he nodded in our direction and then scuttled back through the arcade and up the stairs.
“The Magician still seems a bit…off,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s getting worse. I don’t think he’s been home for days.”
“Do you think he’s playing the game?”
“Um…yeah. I sure do. Don’t you?”
I nodded. Chloe was doing her best to hide it, but I could tell she was worried.
“Maybe we should try to talk to him?” I asked.
“I don’t know…” Chloe said.
“Come on.” I started walking up to the Magician’s office. “If he doesn’t want to talk, he’ll just tell us to fuck off.”
“You’re probably right,” Chloe said as she followed me upstairs.
“I’m definitely right,” I said, then knocked on the door.
No response.
We stood there for almost a full minute before I knocked again.
“I said come in.” The Magician’s voice was muted, barely audible.
Chloe opened the door, and the two of us entered his office.
All of the blinds were closed. The Magician was working solely by the light of a small lamp and the soft bluish glow emanating from the screens of two ancient briefcase-style computers running some kind of operating system I’d never seen before.
It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the near-darkness before I was able to take a good look around the room.
His office was much messier than the last time I’d seen it. Stacks of random documents and bits of computing equipment still covered most of the tables and shelves, but now the floor surrounding his desk was a sea of paper scraps, computer cables, and take-out containers.
“Holy shit, is that an Amiga?” Chloe asked, pointing to the screen of the computer on the left.
“What is it?” The Magician spoke without looking at us as he rushed over to another desk and hit the space bars on two beat-up old laptops, pulling them out of sleep mode with a whirring sound, his head now bobbing frantically back and forth between the two screens. “I don’t have much time.”
Chloe continued to look around the room. I could tell by the expression on her face that she was shocked by the state of the Magician’s office.
When he finally turned to face us, I could see why Chloe was so worried. His eyes were wild and distant, his face gaunt and worn.
“How are you?” I asked.
“How am I?” the Magician repeated, then stared at me. I couldn’t tell if he wanted to embrace me or push me in front of a train. But, after a second or two, he just nodded absently. “I’m fine. Sorry about…Baron.”
“Thank you,” I said.
The Magician turned his attention back to whatever it was he’d been doing on his two laptops, muttering to himself as he glanced frantically from screen to screen.
I looked over at Chloe. She gave me a sign to keep talking.
“Umm…so, do you think that Minister Jesselman’s suicide means that the eleventh iteration of the game has started?” I asked.
“You saw The Circle and heard The Phrase, ‘The Door Is Open’?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Then it’s started,” he said, and kicked a pair of rolling chairs over in our direction. “Maybe you two could take a look at something for me.”
We practically fell over each other on our way to him. The Magician didn’t normally ask for help looking into anything.
He had identical websites loaded on the two computers. The site was something called Abbey’s Skirt.
“What is it?” I asked as Chloe and I sat down on either side of the Magician.
“It’s a website,” he said, then leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes.
“How long have you been working?” Chloe asked.
“I don’t know,” the Magician said, still rubbing his eyes, “not long enough.”
“What is it that you’re trying to find?” I couldn’t see any difference between the two sites. They appeared to be identical.
The website was simple—an Art Deco image of a woman in a skirt, hands crossed in front of her waist, the title Abbey’s Skirt below the graphic, and a long blank form field with an enter button.
“Why Abbey’s Skirt?” Chloe asked.
“Abbey’s Skirt is an anagram for ‘Rabbits keys,’ ” the Magician said. “There was a discrepancy here when I looked earlier.”
“What kind of discrepancy?”
“I don’t know…but it was there.”
“T
hey look the same now,” Chloe said.
“Yes, they are. Same URL. Same company. Same source code.”
“So—” I said. “Is Abbey’s Skirt something important?”
“This site used to be the gateway to a bulletin board, a place we’d come to discuss the game,” the Magician said as he stood up and stretched. Then he slowly looked around the room as if he hadn’t seen it for a long time. “This place is a mess,” he declared, shaking his head as he walked across to the window, lifted the bottom of the wooden frame about six inches or so, and lit a cigarette.
I took another look around the room. Like the Magician said, it was messy, but it was a very familiar kind of messy. It reminded me of something. I looked over at Chloe and wondered if she was thinking the same thing.
It looked almost exactly like Baron’s place the night before he died.
“If you know where to look,” the Magician said, “there have always been bulletin and message boards where people gather and talk about the game.” He exhaled a cloud of smoke and stared out at the city.
I looked over at Chloe, unsure if I should say something.
She shook her head.
Eventually, the Magician continued. “This particular bulletin board was very active in the midnineties. A lot of us came here to discuss developments with the game, but there was one participant in particular—somebody who went by the name Neuromancer—who always knew a lot more than the rest of us. He would only post sporadically, but it was always something helpful or insightful.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Well, for one thing, it was Neuromancer who suggested we consider the game outside of its existence in the form most of us refer to as the modern version—the version that began in 1959. He was convinced that the game had existed for much longer.”
“How much longer?” Chloe asked.
“Perhaps as long as humanity, life, or the Earth itself. Neuromancer believed that Rabbits was extremely dangerous and powerful—that it was a game, but so much more. He hinted that there might be something…otherworldly connected to it.”