Rabbits

by Terry Miles

  “What?” I asked.

  “Are you two playing the game?”

  Chloe and I did our best to keep our expressions neutral.

  “Well then,” Swan said, “you’d better hurry.”

  “Why is that?” I asked.

  “Because you’re running out of time.” Swan followed the twins out into the hallway and shut the door behind her.

  As soon as I heard the door click into place, I ran over and locked it.

  I turned around to find Chloe standing in the hallway behind me.

  “What the fuck, K?” Chloe asked.

  “Yeah.” What the fuck was right.

  Chloe pulled out her phone. “Come on, come on,” she said, urging whatever app she had activated to hurry up and load as she sat down and started putting on her shoes.

  “What are you doing?”

  She looked up with a grin. “Putting on my shoes.”

  “I can see that, but why? Where are you going?”

  “We are going to follow them.”

  “They could be anywhere by now.”

  “They’re right here,” she said, and held up her phone to reveal a blinking green dot on a map.

  “You’re tracking them?”

  “Yep.”

  “How?”

  “We’re living in the twenty-first century, K. It’s a free tracking app. I connected Scarpio’s phone.”

  She finished putting on her shoes, grabbed her coat, and stepped out of my apartment. I heard her yell out “You drive” as she hurried down the hallway toward the elevator.

  I grabbed my coat and followed her, even though I was pretty sure the whole thing was a terrible idea.

  18

  NOW ONWARD GOES

  We followed the blinking green dot on the map as it moved away from my apartment in Capitol Hill and down toward the water. We had no idea what kind of vehicle they were driving, so I did my best to stay a couple of blocks behind the dot on the map as it blinked its way through the city.

  They eventually stopped moving, right in the middle of a parking garage off Union Street.

  I guided Chloe’s car into in the parking garage and waited. It didn’t take long before the dot started moving again, much slower this time.

  They had to be on foot.

  We parked the car and followed until the dot stopped again. It looked like they’d reached their location. They were somewhere inside the Seattle Art Museum.

  On the weekend, clerks would be busily swiping credit cards and slipping purchases into shiny museum gift bags, but it was a Wednesday and the museum had only been open for about an hour, so things were fairly quiet.

  “Where are they, exactly?” I asked as we moved slowly past the gift shop along a wide white concourse.

  “There’s a lot of concrete. Sketchy Wi-Fi. The app can’t get properly connected.”

  “Well, it shouldn’t be hard to pick out those weird Matrix twins.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Chloe said, and then the two of us began a methodical section-by-section sweep of the museum.

  There was a lot of open space, so we were able to move through the building fairly quickly. There was no sign of Swan or the twins.

  “We lost them,” Chloe said, and sat down on a bench next to an exhibit guide.

  “Yeah,” I said, “but how? They have to be here. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  I started looking over the exhibit guide, mentally checking off everything we’d seen, when I noticed something.

  “An Exploration of Heaven and Hell?” I said. “I don’t remember that one.”

  “We saw the sign upstairs. That display isn’t open.”

  I smiled and shook my head. “Now onward goes,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s something that Alan Scarpio said to me in the diner.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It says here that the Exploration of Heaven and Hell exhibit contains some parchments on loan from the Museum of Prints and Drawings in Berlin, and a handful of works from the Vatican library.”

  “Great. We’ll have to stop by when it’s open.”

  “Some of the parchments are Sandro Botticelli drawings.”

  “And that’s important because?”

  “Because Sandro Botticelli was responsible for creating almost a hundred works of art on parchment related to Dante’s Inferno.”

  “I’m afraid we’re back to who gives a shit.”

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

  “Fuck,” Chloe said. “Way to bury the lede.” She jumped up, grabbed my hand, and yanked me back toward the escalators.

  * * *

  —

  As we carefully approached the cordoned-off area that contained the Exploration of Heaven and Hell exhibit, we noticed a number of small No Entry signs on stands set up around the perimeter. About five feet or so behind the signs, two extremely wide pieces of thick, dark gray canvas about the size of theatrical stage curtains hung from the ceiling like the wings of a giant moth.

  Chloe pulled the closest piece of canvas aside and peeked into the exhibit area.

  “Yahtzee,” she said.

  “What are they doing?” I whispered.

  “It looks like they’re taking pictures.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of everything.”

  “What’s in there?”

  “I don’t know. Museum shit,” she said.

  “What kind of—”

  Chloe yanked her head back. “They’re coming out.” She grabbed my hand and dragged me around the corner and into the bathroom.

  We waited in the bathroom for five minutes or so, and then we carefully and quietly made our way back to the exhibit area that had been roped off.

  We took another peek inside.

  Swan and the twins were nowhere to be seen.

  * * *

  —

  We stepped carefully through the canvas curtains and entered the exhibit area. The main portion of the exhibit was held within an enormous glass case that covered the entire back wall of the room. Arranged behind the thick glass were works of art in a wide variety of media, including a tapestry called Glimpsing Hell from the Vank Cathedral in Iran that depicted, among other things, a circle of demons beheading a copulating couple; a brief but terrifying poem by a Japanese writer called “Yushimo’s Hell”; and, sitting on a vintage turntable just below eye level, a copy of Heaven and Hell, the ninth studio album by Black Sabbath. Everything on display appeared to be related in some way to the concept of heaven and hell.

  I started taking pictures immediately. If museum workers discovered what we were doing and kicked us out, I wanted to have as many images as possible of whatever Swan and those twins had been looking at.

  The whole experience—following them here from my place, hiding in the bathroom, taking pictures of an exhibit that wasn’t yet open to the public—was both scary and exhilarating. This feeling was exactly what I’d been after when I picked up my first set of Dungeons & Dragons dice as a kid, and what I’d felt years later, when I’d heard Emily Connors mention the name Rabbits in connection with a mysterious real-world game.

  This kind of intrigue and adventure was everything.

  * * *

  —

  The summer before my parents died, and two months before our world would be changed forever by September 11, I climbed up onto the roof of our high school for the first time.

  It’s amazing how many ways you can find to reach the top of something if you’re firmly committed. I chose a wide rusted metal drainpipe and a window ledge, but there were at least five other ways I could have made it up onto that roof.

  I stood up there for a l
ong time, staring out at the lights of the city.

  The world felt smaller from that vantage point, and much easier to understand. Life was messy and complicated when you were in the middle of it, while it was rushing toward you from all angles, close-up and in full color. Up there on that roof, I felt like I could breathe a little better, zoom out just enough to feel myself situated in the cosmos. From up there I could make out the gridlike arrangement of the houses, streets, and lights and listen to the calming symphony of mundane sounds rising up from the neighborhood. Staring out at the shapes and patterns that made up the city, I felt like I was a bit more in control of my environment.

  That summer I began climbing onto all kinds of roofs: houses, apartment buildings, a shopping mall, and countless others. I found looking out at the world from a higher vantage point meditative. It calmed me down, made it easier to think.

  One night, while I was up on the roof of my high school, I discovered a hatch. It was clearly supposed to be locked, but the worn old padlock was just looped over its housing, unsecured. Whoever used it probably got tired of locking and unlocking it whenever they needed access.

  I opened the hatch and found myself looking down a set of gun-metal gray stairs that led to part of the school I didn’t recognize.

  I knew that it was wrong, but I didn’t hesitate for more than a second or two before I climbed down and entered the forbidden world.

  And I was suddenly somewhere else.

  It felt like magic.

  Walking through the halls of school after hours was like descending into a shadow version of my own world. In this new place, things existed in a different state of being. It was as if everything was suspended there somehow, inactive until the bells rang at the start of September.

  Wandering those halls at night alone in a place I wasn’t supposed to be felt special, and dangerous—which was exactly the way I felt as Chloe and I slipped between those huge sheets of canvas and rushed across that room to examine the exhibition called An Exploration of Heaven and Hell.

  There had to be a specific reason Swan and the twins had visited this exhibit, maybe the same reason Alan Scarpio had quoted Dante to me in the diner.

  There had to be something connected to the game.

  * * *

  —

  As we explored the myriad works of art that made up that exhibit, we saw terrifying things, including some images by Gustave Doré and a number of truly bizarre religious sculptures and drawings, but one piece grabbed our attention immediately, an oil painting by an unknown artist.

  It was harrowing.

  Near the bottom of the canvas, hundreds of small figures poured from burning cracks in the earth in tiny rows as a dozen or so grotesque demons with animal heads stood poised to yank them up and consume them. There was one demon, much larger than the rest, towering over the proceedings like a twisted puppet master, its mouth wide and bloody, waiting to devour its next victims.

  That demon had the head of a large hare.

  Printed on the image, beginning directly beneath the bloody mouth of the enormous hare-headed demon, was the opening of the tenth canto of Dante’s Inferno, which began with the three words Alan Scarpio had said to me in the diner: Now onward goes.

  Right at that moment, similar to what had happened to me in that high school when I was a kid exploring someplace I didn’t belong, the museum’s security personnel arrived and kicked us out.

  * * *

  —

  “What do you think?” Chloe asked.

  We were back at my place. Chloe was staring over my shoulder as I examined one of the photographs I’d taken of the giant demon rabbit painting.

  “I think these might be significant,” I said, pointing to a group of tiny Roman numerals on some rocks near the bottom of the painting. There were four numbers in total.

  Chloe leaned forward. “Why are there tiny numbers in that painting?”

  “Not sure,” I said, “but there are four more numbers on the hands of these demons.”

  “Holy shit,” Chloe said, leaning in. “You’re right.”

  Those numbers were also incredibly small, but they were there.

  I booted up my laptop and pulled up a Web page featuring Dante’s Inferno. Chloe helped me count the stanzas and compare them to the numbers.

  It took us a few tries to match everything up, but a few minutes later, we found it.

  The Roman numerals on the rocks gave us the lines, and the numbers on the demon’s hands gave us the words. Those clues led us to the following from the tenth canto:

  7 (the) 108 (portal) 81 (is) 93 (open)

  “The door is open,” Chloe said. “We already know that, though, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “There has to be something else.”

  The two of us spent the next couple of hours staring at the photos we’d taken in the museum and trying to figure out our next steps.

  “There’s nothing else here,” Chloe said, rubbing her eyes.

  “There has to be,” I said, pointing to a section of the painting that featured a whole bunch of people, some of them almost microscopic, spilling out of a large crack in the earth. “Maybe it has something to do with the number of figures.”

  I counted the figures in every single row until I came up with the same number three times. I made a note of the resulting digits and handed it to Chloe. She grabbed my laptop and I read the numbers while Chloe typed.

  We put those numbers through every kind of alphanumeric code and puzzle algorithm we could find, but nothing came up.

  Then, as I was reorganizing the photos we’d taken on my desktop, I noticed something.

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  “What?” Chloe leaned forward to check out my screen.

  “Look at this.” I grabbed four photographs of etchings from various parts of the exhibit and pulled them together to form one square image.

  “What is it?” Chloe asked. “It’s geometrically pretty but it’s just—”

  Then she saw it.

  “That’s impossible,” she said.

  But it wasn’t impossible. It was right in front of us.

  Those four separate illustrations, created by Gustave Doré in the mid-1860s, when combined into a square, formed a perfect QR code—technology that wouldn’t be created until 1994.

  Chloe pulled up a QR code reader on her phone and took a picture. The resulting URL brought us to a Web page.

  “Shit,” Chloe said as she flipped her laptop around to show me her screen.

  Below the image of a spinning ball were the words “404 error. Page not found.”

  “Defunct link,” I said.

  Chloe slowly closed her screen.

  “What are you doing?” I said. “We need to keep digging.”

  “Maybe,” Chloe said, “but first we need to figure out what’s going on with you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about you missing six hours of your life, forgetting we go to The Kingfish Cafe all the time, and remembering Richard Linklater movies that don’t exist.”

  “I know how it sounds.” I exhaled.

  I was just about to tell Chloe that I must have misremembered that movie and the rest of it, and that this wasn’t really a big deal, but I couldn’t lie to her. “Okay,” I said, “please try to keep an open mind.”

  Chloe nodded.

  “I remember everything about that movie,” I said. “It exists—or existed—and The Kingfish Cafe was closed permanently more than five years ago. I understand that, for you, Before Midnight was never made or released and The Kingfish Cafe is open for business as usual, but—and this is going to sound crazy—I think that, not that long ago, things may have existed in a…different state, for both of us.”

  “You’re kind of freaking me out
right now, K.”

  “I understand, believe me. I’m more than a little freaked out myself.”

  “A different state? What the hell does that mean?”

  “I’m not sure quite yet. All I’m asking is that you give me a bit of time to figure it out. Just don’t…lose faith.”

  Chloe stared at me for a moment, and then she grabbed my hand.

  “I’m not going to lose faith, I promise, but you have to tell me if anything else…”

  “Out of the ordinary?” I suggested.

  “Fucked-up beyond imagining happens,” Chloe finished.

  “I promise I’ll let you know,” I said.

  “You’d better,” she said as she packed up her laptop. “I’m going to work, but if you find anything else like that weird demon rabbit QR code bullshit, you call me right away.”

  I nodded.

  “We’re going to figure this shit out, K.”

  “Are we?”

  “You’re goddamn right we are.”

  19

  FOURS

  I walked down the street toward the arcade, a thin hooded sweatshirt my only protection against the pouring rain. I could feel the tiny rocks and pebbles on the wet asphalt through the thin soles of my favorite brown leather boots as I ignored the Don’t Walk sign and jogged across the street.

  I was about half a block away from the arcade when I felt the familiar sensation.

  It began, like it always did, with a deep tingling in the pit of my stomach—a deep tingling would soon turn into a fuzzy thick vibration. And then the worst of it would begin.

  Fuck. It was happening again.

  I lunged for a nearby lamppost in an attempt to avoid what I knew was going to happen next. What happened next was the end of the world.

  Gravity was the first thing that went.

  Everything that wasn’t tied down left the surface of the Earth at once and began moving slowly upward. The screaming and crying of people and animals was deafening as we all began our inevitable ascent toward oblivion.