Rabbits

by Terry Miles

  —HAZEL 8

  27

  THE CHILDREN OF THE GRAY GOD

  I must have fallen back asleep, because when I woke up to the sound of somebody buzzing my apartment, it was after noon.

  I stumbled into the living room and hit the button that would let whoever it was into the building. I didn’t have the energy to ask. If it was Swan and her twins, so be it. I unlocked my door and started the process of making coffee.

  As I was pressing the lever down on my electric kettle, Chloe rushed into my apartment and shoved open my living room curtains.

  “What’s with the darkness, K?”

  “It’s Seattle. It’s always dark.”

  “That’s why we need as much light as we can get,” Chloe said as she moved through my apartment and switched on all of the lights. “Cousin Johnny’s going to call as soon as he gets a break on set.”

  “Johnny from England?”

  “Obviously.”

  “Didn’t you guys have a fight?”

  “His mother and mine hate each other, but we’re cool.”

  “When’s the last time you spoke with him?”

  “His dad’s funeral, I think.”

  “Okay, so…why is he calling?”

  “I texted him last night. He said he might know somebody who was in that sex cult.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, he knows way too many people.”

  Chloe pulled her laptop out of her backpack.

  “I found something else,” Chloe continued.

  “What is it?”

  “Minister Jesselman was working on an Internet privacy bill on behalf of a number of lobbyists at the time of his death.”

  “And?”

  “And, one of the companies connected to that bill is Chronicler Enterprises.”

  Chloe opened up her computer.

  “Wait,” I said. “Isn’t that the company behind Tabitha Henry’s escape rooms?”

  “It sure is.”

  “Shit. Were you able to dig up anything else on them?”

  “There’s nothing online but a defunct URL.”

  Chloe loaded a Web page, which displayed the following text.

  Page not found (404 error).

  Below the text was the ubiquitous error 404 graphic of an exclamation point inside a yellow triangle.

  It was a dead site, but something about it looked familiar. It took me a few seconds to figure it out.

  “The font,” I said.

  “What about it?”

  “It’s the same.”

  “The same as what?”

  “As the error message page the QR code led us to from those Gustave Doré drawings we found in the museum.”

  I loaded that website on my laptop and we compared the page from the QR code that featured the 404 error message below the graphic of a spinning ball, with the new site that Chloe had found featuring the same error message above a triangle with an exclamation point.

  The style of the pages and the font were exactly the same.

  “They look identical except for the graphic,” Chloe said.

  We took a look at the HTML source code using the developer tab in our browser, but we couldn’t find anything in the code.

  “What is this stuff?” Chloe pointed to a line of text that appeared at the bottom of each of the two pages. There were a bunch of seemingly random numbers, spaces, and letters followed by the message: Request failed with HTTP status 404.

  “Looks like nonsense,” I said.

  Chloe nodded.

  “But…what if it isn’t?” I leaned in for a closer look.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have a theory,” I said as I sent the pages to my printer.

  “You wanna share?”

  I rushed across the room and waited for the printer to finish.

  “What are you doing?”

  I pulled the two pages out of the printer, pressed them together, and held them up to my dining room chandelier.

  “This,” I said, and motioned Chloe over.

  “Holy shit,” she said.

  Set amidst the random numbers and letters that ran along the bottom of the page was one section of comprehensible text. A URL: gatewickinstitute.com

  “What the hell is the Gatewick Insitute?” I asked.

  The two of us sat down to try to figure that out.

  “Gatewick is linked to a number of obscure experimental medical research studies that took place in the seventies and eighties,” Chloe said as she scrolled through what she’d been able to dig up.

  I couldn’t find anything, so I closed my computer and moved over to sit beside Chloe on the couch.

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “A little.”

  The last physical address Chloe had been able to find was a cluster of buildings in San Francisco, but that was way back in 1987. There was nothing current.

  It looked like the Gatewick Institute had sold itself as some kind of medical research facility–slash–self-help spa retreat, promising peace of mind and body for a very reasonable price.

  Along with the cluster of buildings in San Francisco, Chloe managed to uncover a handful of newspaper and magazine ads from around that time that shared a now-defunct telephone number with the Gatewick Institute. The ads were mysterious and vague. They were looking for research subjects for some kind of medical study that appeared to straddle the line between pharmaceutical well-being and new-age enlightenment.

  The handful of people Chloe had been able to find connected to the institute were either dead, completely detached from the world of social media, or both.

  We were just about to take a break and get something to eat when Chloe showed me a photo on her phone—a picture of a narrow red-brick-and-glass building with long uniform rows of birch trees running along concrete pathways on either side of it.

  “Where is this?” I asked, my mouth suddenly dry, my breathing slightly shallow and labored.

  “San Francisco. One of a small cluster of buildings that belonged to the Gatewick Institute in 1982.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “Darknet forum.”

  “Is there any other information?” I tried to focus on the moment, to anchor myself next to Chloe on the couch, but I could feel my heart beginning to race in my chest. I took a deep breath and held it for a few seconds before exhaling.

  “You recognize this place,” she said.

  Forty-thirty.

  “Maybe,” I lied. “I’m not sure.” I was having trouble keeping my voice level.

  “Are you okay?”

  Deuce.

  “I’m fine.”

  But my stomach felt light and empty. A few glittering stars danced around the edges of my eyes as my peripheral vision threatened to tunnel.

  Advantage, McEnroe.

  I looked at Chloe and followed her eyes. She was staring down at my legs where I’d been tapping out the 1992 U.S. Open fourth-round match between John McEnroe and Jim Courier.

  “K, you need to tell me what the hell is going on.”

  I tried to force a smile, act like everything was fine. I took four or five slow deep breaths, then got up and walked over to the closet. I reached up and removed a black-and-brown banker’s box from the top shelf.

  “I’ve seen that building before,” I said as I sat back down on the couch beside Chloe and opened the box.

  “What is this?” she asked.

  “It’s everything I have left of my parents.”

  * * *

  —

  Chloe and I had spoken about our families countless times over the years. She was aware of the ferry accident that had killed my parents, and I knew about her experiences with an alcoholic mother and a sister wh
o was constantly on the verge of being institutionalized for an extreme personality disorder. But I’d never taken Chloe through the contents of the box. It was one thing to talk about this stuff; it was quite another to see it staring back at you in full color.

  Although I hadn’t opened the box in years, my mind had cataloged everything in significant detail.

  Chloe’s eyes scanned each item as I pulled it out and set it down on the coffee table. There were a number of worn, old file folders filled with papers—including birth, marriage, and death certificates—a couple of baseball and hockey trophies, Ruby’s leash and collar, a large stack of old photographs, and a bunch of other distant memories in physical form.

  “Oh my god. You dress exactly the same.” She held up a picture of me in jeans and a David Bowie T-shirt.

  “Settle down,” I said. I was starting to feel a bit better. Having Chloe with me as I went through this stuff helped a lot.

  I opened one of the folders and flipped through a bunch of pages until I found what I was looking for. It was a picture that had been paper-clipped to a photocopy of the deed to our old house in Olympia.

  “Holy shit,” Chloe said.

  “Yeah. I don’t know what’s happening.”

  The photograph Chloe had picked up featured my parents and their best friends, Bill and Madeline Connors, standing with a few other people in front of a brick building. She held up that picture and the photo from the darknet forum, side by side. The buildings were identical. The birch trees, the concrete paths, everything.

  “It’s the same place,” Chloe said.

  Even though the angles were slightly different, it was clearly the same building. I knew it the moment I’d seen it on Chloe’s phone earlier.

  Maybe Crow was right.

  Maybe my parents hadn’t actually been accountants after all.

  “I have something else,” Chloe said as she swiped away the image and started searching through the darknet forum again.

  “Wait,” I said, “go back.”

  She returned to the photograph. “What?”

  “Can you zoom in on the doorway?”

  Chloe zoomed in, framing the door of the building in the center of her screen.

  There on the wall, just next to the door, was a thin, dusty silver sign. A small circle atop a triangle—the symbol from my elevator dream.

  An image from my recurring nightmares was the logo of the Gatewick Institute.

  “Do you recognize that symbol?” Chloe asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I lied.

  Chloe pulled up some other documents from that darknet site: three scanned pages. The headers on top of all three featured the logo of the circle atop the triangle.

  “Look at this shit,” Chloe said, handing me her phone.

  I read through the contents of the first page. There were a bunch of questions that appeared to be related to mental and physical fitness, followed by a checklist of activities designed to “counter the negative” and “enhance the positive.” “Looks like part of an outline for a treatment plan, maybe?”

  “Do you think your parents really were involved in this stuff?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Chloe was shaking her head as she read over my shoulder. “What does all this shit mean?”

  “Probably nothing,” I said, hoping Chloe would concur.

  “Oh, it’s definitely not nothing.” She pointed at the second of the three pages. “Medication and meditation, float tanks, DMT? This is some MKUltra bullshit right here, K.”

  “What if it was just some kind of intense self-help retreat thing?”

  “Strobe light treatment, hypnosis…Jesus, K, the medication panel includes ayahuasca.” She held up the page.

  “Lots of people do ayahuasca these days,” I said. “The nouveau new age set take that shit like it’s vitamin C.”

  “Not back then,” she said.

  I shrugged.

  “And the rest of the ingredients have been redacted.”

  “So?”

  “So, if ayahuasca is the mildest ingredient in your psychotropic stew, you’re in serious fucking trouble. You had no idea your parents were into this stuff?”

  “No way. As far as I knew, they were accountants. I mean, I guess I knew they were involved in some kind of spiritual community with most of their friends, but I was an only child. Whenever our families got together, I was focused on hanging out with the other kids.”

  “Are you still in touch with any of those family friends?”

  I thought about the Connors sisters, and the accident came flooding back.

  The sound of the static on the radio. The smell of the cab of the truck.

  “Hey,” Chloe said. “K?”

  “What?”

  Chloe put her hand over mine. At some point I’d begun tapping on my thigh again. “Are you okay?”

  “No,” I said, “I mean, yes, I’m fine. No, I’m not in touch with any of those childhood friends.”

  This was true. I’d tried to look a few of them up on social media over the years, but there wasn’t much there. Once again, I left out the fact that I’d recently seen one very close family friend named Emily Connors in Crow’s office.

  Chloe’s hand on top of mine was comforting, and I found myself able to relax a little while she did another darknet search on the Gatewick Institute.

  There was nothing we hadn’t seen already.

  Then Chloe’s phone rang. It was her cousin in England. She answered and put it on speaker.

  “Hey, Johnny.”

  “Chloe, how are you?”

  “I’m good. I’m here with my friend K. You’re on speaker, so don’t say anything fucking weird.”

  “So nothing family-related?”

  “Definitely not,” she said.

  Johnny laughed. “Okay. So, I spoke to a woman I know about your cult thing. She says she’ll be up until midnight your time and you can give her a ring if you like.”

  “Was she part of the cult?”

  “Not sure, but she seems to know quite a lot about it.”

  A bunch of other voices started speaking on the other end of the line.

  “Sorry, kid, I’ve gotta run back to set. Good luck.”

  “Thanks, Johnny,” Chloe said.

  A second after her cousin had hung up, Chloe received a text with a name and phone number. The woman’s name was Carlotta Blake.

  “You wanna call or wait until the morning?” I asked.

  “What do you think?” Chloe said as she dialed the number.

  Carlotta picked up on the first ring.

  “Hi, Carlotta, my name is Chloe and I’m here with my friend K.”

  “Hi, it’s nice to meet you. Johnny said you’d be calling.”

  “Cool,” Chloe said. “He told us you’d be okay with answering a few questions about the Gray God people?”

  “No worries. Ask away.”

  “Okay, so, first thing,” Chloe said. “Have you ever heard of Rabbits?”

  “Um…I’m sorry, what?”

  “Not the animals. We’re talking about an obscure underground alternate reality game,” I added.

  Nothing from Carlotta.

  “Carlotta? Are you still there?”

  “I’m here. Yes. Sorry, no, I haven’t heard of anything called Rabbits specifically, but the cult was definitely involved with some kind of weird game.”

  “How so?” Chloe asked.

  “Well, it was this thing that the elders would do with some of the adepts—a ceremony that was supposed to guide them to what they called the sacred path. I remember hearing a couple of them refer to that process as ‘the game’ at some point.”

  “Do you know what they meant by the sacred path?”

  “Not rea
lly, but they also referred to it as the path to the Gray God.”

  “How long were you part of the group?”

  “Oh, it’s definitely a cult, not a group, and I wasn’t really part of it. I was there for less than forty-eight hours. My friend was a journalist who’d been embedded with those weirdos for a year. She was writing a long-form article for a national newspaper. Near the end of her time with the cult, she began feeling like something was off, like she might be in danger, so she asked me if I’d be willing to join the group for her last week, you know, to keep an eye on her.”

  “You weren’t worried about the fact that it was a cult?” I asked.

  “I mean, I was only there for a short time, but I was worried about my friend. I’d tried to convince her to leave, multiple times, but she told me she’d put in way too much effort, and that she was close to discovering something big. I suppose I would have been more concerned had I known what was going to happen to those two girls.”

  “The girls who were caught having sex with the minister on Glastonbury Tor?” I asked.

  “No, the girls who disappeared.”

  “What girls?” Chloe asked.

  “The two girls who met the Gray God, if you believe those lunatics.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Okay, so my friend was pretty high up in the cult at this point, and she was able to persuade the elders to let me come along on what they call pathfinding.”

  “What’s that?” Chloe asked.

  “It was bloody nuts is what it was. First the adepts, including my friend, would get together in a room filled with all kinds of really strange old computers, do a boatload of drugs, and then they would somehow try to find the path to the Gray God. This was part of the thing I heard a couple of them refer to as ‘the game.’ ”

  “And you don’t recall them using the term ‘Rabbits’ at any point?”

  “No, not that I remember, sorry.”

  “What happened to the girls?” Chloe asked.

  “Okay, so after they did whatever crazy shit they did in that room, the rest of us joined them, and we went out pathfinding.”

  “What does that mean, pathfinding?” I asked.