by Terry Miles
“Apparently, during their session they’d discovered some kind of clue, and we were all going out to Whitechapel to find it.”
“What was the clue?”
“They’d discovered a street that didn’t exist.”
“What does that mean?” I asked. But I knew exactly what she meant.
I felt a deep thrumming building in my chest. A street that didn’t exist. This was Emily Connors’s impossible woodpecker, this was that version of Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World with too many windows in the farmhouse. This was Sidney Farrow forgetting who I was.
This was Rabbits.
“All we were told was that it was a street that didn’t or shouldn’t exist,” Carlotta continued. “They didn’t know exactly where it was, so we were split into three groups of four. My friend and I were part of a group that included two young women, barely into their twenties.”
Carlotta stopped talking for a moment. She was clearly upset.
“Take your time,” Chloe said.
Carlotta took a few deep breaths and then continued.
“Right. Okay, so the two young women were really excited. They kept referring to a page covered in wild scribbles. I think they were using it as some kind of map to guide us through Whitechapel.”
“Do you have an idea where they found that map?”
“Apparently the drugs they’d taken during the first stage of the process helped them enter a trance, and they’d just write down whatever popped into their heads, like automatic writing or whatever. They scribbled all kinds of words, crazy symbols, and patterns. Somebody was in charge of looking at everybody’s scribbled nonsense and picking out repeating words and patterns. They took those repeating bits and apparently that’s what they used to build their map. At least, that’s what my friend told me.”
“Did that page of words and scribbles guide you to a street that didn’t exist?” Chloe asked.
“Yeah, it actually did,” she said. “But right before that, something else happened. The girls got excited. They kept whispering to each other that they could feel him, that he was coming.”
“Who?”
“They said that the Gray God was calling them, and they started to run. My friend and I followed, but it was hard to keep up. We ended up running for three or four blocks until we came to the entrance of a narrow old cobblestone alleyway, but when I looked down at the GPS on my phone, there was no alley. As far as Google Maps was concerned, we were standing in front of a solid building. And something else was strange.”
“What?” Chloe asked.
“There was nobody around. Somehow we’d ended up alone on a Friday night in London.”
“So?” Chloe said. “Maybe it was just a lull or something.”
“No. That doesn’t happen. This is London, mate. There are always people everywhere.”
Carlotta was silent for a moment, possibly reliving the weirdness of those vacant streets.
“What happened next?” I prompted.
“My friend told the girls that we were supposed to wait for the others and enter the alley as a group, but they weren’t having it. They said that the Gray God was calling to them, and that he wanted them to hurry. Then the two girls held hands and stepped into the alley. I can still hear the sound of their heels clicking against the cobblestones as they moved forward, hand in hand, into the darkness. My friend texted the others our location, and then we followed the girls.”
Carlotta paused for a moment to take a sip of something, and then continued.
“Now, this is when things start to get extra weird,” she said.
“What do you mean?” Chloe asked.
“Well, it’s kind of hard to explain but…something started to change in the alley, near the back.”
“Change how?” I asked.
“Well, it started like some kind of smudge in the distance…a smudge that soon became something else. It was like a horror film. The darkness was…folding around the alley somehow, and we could no longer see the two girls ahead of us. Suddenly I felt an irresistible urge to run away. Something was coming. I could feel it.”
“You felt like this thing was coming for you?” Chloe asked.
“It was worse than that,” Carlotta said.
“What do you mean?” I asked. My mouth was suddenly dry, and I felt the deep heat slowly rising from my chest to fill my head.
“It was coming for everyone,” she said.
I took a deep breath and did my best to calm down. I looked over at Chloe. She was staring back, worried, hands clasped between her knees, her knuckles white.
Carlotta continued. “Anyway, at that point, I grabbed my friend’s hand and the two of us sprinted away from there as fast as we could manage.”
“And the girls who’d entered the alley?” I asked, although I already knew the answer.
“Gone,” she said.
“Was there a door or something somewhere that they might have used to leave the alley?” Chloe asked.
“There was nothing. It was a dead end. No doors or fences. We caught up with the rest of the group on the next street over and breathlessly explained what had happened. They were excited and demanded we take them back to the alley immediately. We ran back over to where we’d last seen the girls, but the alley wasn’t there. The street was the same, but where the alley had been mere minutes ago, there was now nothing but solid building.”
“And you’re sure you had the right street?” Chloe asked.
“Positive. Everything else was exactly the same—but no alley. I don’t know what it was, but something happened to those girls. I didn’t sleep at all that night. The next morning, I called my friend to ask her about the alley and to let her know that she was leaving that cult no matter what. But she was gone.”
“She disappeared?”
“No. She was dead.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“They told us she’d suffered a heart attack—but she was only twenty-eight.”
Chloe and I shared another look.
Baron was only thirty-nine.
28
ROCKET
“Now entering Westlake Station,” a lightly distorted robot voice declared as the mostly empty Link train car slowed and finally came to a stop inside the tunnel.
Chloe had to work for a few hours, so I decided to go downtown to Pike Place Market and grab some groceries for dinner.
I stepped out of the transit tunnel and looked up into the dark gray sky. It wasn’t raining, but there was a pretty good chance that was about to change. I pulled my hood up against the cool briny ocean air, and hurried down toward Third Avenue.
I was running over a few of the recipes that I could pull off in my mind (I was thinking fish and pasta) when I noticed a few things in quick succession: First, I saw a black sports car—some new model of Audi maybe—run a red light, turn, and start speeding in my direction. Next, I saw Swan and her bleached-blond twins walking toward me from about fifty yards up the street. Then, as if one onrushing car and the Swan/twins situation wasn’t enough, two other cars abruptly changed direction, tires squealing, and started speeding toward me against the traffic on either side of the Audi.
Suddenly, three cars were coming straight for me.
I turned and started to run as fast as I could, but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to avoid getting hit if at least one of them didn’t stop.
Just before those three cars were about to hit me or hit the brakes, a white van roared through the intersection and came to a screeching halt directly in front of them. The cars swerved out of the way like they were in a videogame, and I was left staring at the passenger-side panel door of a white van. The magnetic logo on the door read: GOLDEN SEAL CARPET CLEANING. That was the name of the company tied to the number Russell Milligan told us might belong to Hazel.
The side pane
l door slid open.
“Get in.”
I jumped inside and the man who’d spoken closed the sliding door behind me.
The van sped away from the intersection.
* * *
—
The interior was finished more like some kind of modern high-end camper than a carpet cleaning company’s equipment van. In fact, there was no equipment inside, just two small cream-and-teak Danish Modern sofas with a rectangular coffee table set between them.
The man who’d opened the door for me took a seat on the small sofa to my right. He had brown eyes and jet-black hair.
“I got your message,” he said, and motioned for me to take a seat across from him.
He spoke with a slight British accent and looked to be in his early forties. His ethnicity was hard to place, maybe Turkish or Italian. He was wearing a black suit, clearly tailored to fit his thin athletic frame.
“What message?” I asked.
“This one,” he said, and then pressed play on his phone. Suddenly my voice filled the car.
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.
“Hazel?” I asked.
The man just smiled.
“Where are we going?”
“I’m supposed to drop you off,” he said as he received a text alert on his phone.
“You’re supposed to drop me off?” I echoed.
He nodded.
“Where?”
“Please excuse me for just a moment,” he said as he started composing a message to somebody.
Was I actually taking a van ride with the legendary Rabbits player known as Hazel right now? Should I ask him about Alan Scarpio? I thought about it for a moment. No. Even though he may have just saved my life, I had no way of knowing who this guy really was.
Hazel or not, Chloe was going to be so pissed that she missed this.
As I was thinking about Chloe and how mad she was going to be, I noticed something for the first time.
There was nobody driving.
I’d never been inside a driverless car before, but the ride itself didn’t feel all that different. The way the steering wheel moved reminded me of an amusement park ride. I was fully prepared to be freaked out when I’d noticed nobody was driving, but actually, I found it oddly comforting.
* * *
—
A few minutes later, the van pulled over, and the mysterious man who may have been Hazel opened the side door and stepped outside.
“This is where I leave you,” he said.
“Where are we?”
“Seattle,” he said.
“Thanks a lot.”
He smiled.
“What am I supposed to do now?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” he said as he walked around the van and peeled off the magnetic sign that read GOLDEN SEAL CARPET CLEANING.
“Who sent you?” I asked.
“You called,” he said, and then he stepped into the driver’s seat, and guided the van away from the curb and out into traffic.
How did the call Chloe and I had placed to Golden Seal Carpet Cleaning almost two months earlier result in this guy and his driverless van coming to my rescue?
I took a look around. The van had dropped me off in the middle of the Fremont neighborhood, on Evanston Avenue, right in front of a coffee shop I used to frequent when Baron lived in the area.
Connected to the building that housed the coffee shop was something called The Fremont Rocket—a Cold War relic turned community totem that towered above the area. No actual rocket parts had been used to create the enormous work of art, but the bits of old airplane parts they’d used had been assembled in a perfect Art Deco interpretation of outer space, à la Barbarella or Flash Gordon.
As I stood looking up at the rocket, a red Volkswagen bug pulled up. Blasting from the windows of the vintage car was a song from the late 1980s by the band Def Leppard. I recognized the lyric “I can take you through the center of the dark” as it blared out of the bug’s powerful stereo.
The song was called “Rocket.”
Standing beneath a statue of a giant rocket listening to a song called “Rocket” would be an interesting coincidence on its own, but what if, at exactly the same time, a couple walked by—two women in their midforties, one wearing a light blue NASA T-shirt and the other an original 1988 Love and Rockets Sorted Tour jacket? At that point, you might take it as a sign—and if you were the kind of person who was obsessed with patterns and coincidences, you’d have to follow them to see where they were going.
So I did.
I tailed the couple up Evanston to North 36th, where they turned right. I tried to stay about half a block behind them as they walked. They looked happy, laughing and holding hands. Seeing them like that—so completely together and so seemingly unburdened—made me smile.
I couldn’t remember a time when I’d felt that free.
As the two women walked by the little walkway that led into Troll’s Knoll Park, I started to feel a familiar vibration at the base of my skull, and by the time they’d passed the narrow set of stairs that led up to Aurora Avenue, the gray feeling had firmly taken hold of my brain.
Every step I took felt labored, like I was pushing my way through sludge at the bottom of a lake. I forced myself to concentrate on my breath, and looked down as I walked, counting the lines on the sidewalk to calm myself. By the time the two women had stopped moving and were standing in front of the enormous cement troll that lurked beneath the bridge, the gray feeling had been tamped down enough for me to function, and I was able to move normally. But it was still there, somewhere in the back of my mind. I could feel it.
It was waiting for something.
* * *
—
The Fremont Troll is an eighteen-foot ferroconcrete troll that lives under the Aurora Avenue Bridge (officially known as the George Washington Memorial Bridge). Somebody won an art contest or something in the late eighties, and the Fremont Troll was the result. It’s a colossal, weirdly beautiful monument that I absolutely love. Sadly, people tag and otherwise vandalize the sculpture quite often, and layer after layer of cement has to be constantly applied to bring the troll back to something close to its original appearance.
One of the most interesting aspects of the Fremont Troll is that he (or she) is clutching a car in his (or her) left hand. In 1990, when the troll was being constructed, the artists included a red Volkswagen bug with a California license plate in the sculpture. Over the years, the appearance of the Volkswagen has changed. After decades of abuse at the hands of graffiti artists, vandals, and middle school kids playing truth or dare, the color of the car is no longer discernible and the license plate is long gone.
One fact remains indisputable, however, and that’s the fact that the troll is holding an original Volkswagen Beetle from the 1960s or ’70s.
Except it wasn’t. Not anymore.
There, clutched in the troll’s hand, in place of the Volkswagen bug, was an Austin Mini Cooper.
* * *
—
The two women took a selfie with the troll in the background, then continued their walk, moving leisurely along North 36th Street.
I was trying to decide whether to follow them—while also working to come to terms with the revelation about the new model of car in the troll’s hand—when I noticed some posters glued to one of the stanchions that held up the base of the bridge.
There were four identical posters, one on each side of the stanchion, advertising an upcoming music festival in Oregon. The genre was appar
ently something called space rock, and the festival was taking place about two and a half hours southwest of Portland in the area surrounding the Yaquina Head Lighthouse. The reason I’d found the posters so compelling was the fact that they featured an image of a lighthouse that had been converted into a rocket.
Another rocket.
I looked for significance in the date of the event, in the names of the bands (all local Pacific Northwest indie rock), but there was nothing.
Just the rocket-lighthouse.
Was I actually considering driving hours down the coast following clues related to rockets? What if the next clue pointed to Uganda?
If I hurried, I’d be able to catch up with the couple who’d led me here, but I was pretty sure that their connection to the clues I’d been following (whether real or imagined) was over. If I wanted to keep going, the rocket-lighthouse posters were the next clue. They had to be.
But I couldn’t drive three hours on a hunch—at least not at the moment. So I did the next best thing. I pulled out my phone and used Google Street View to take a closer look at the area surrounding the lighthouse.
* * *
—
The lighthouse sits on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. There are a few small outbuildings connected via a winding concrete pathway that bisects the wide rocky area.
I looked over everything—zoomed in to each building, explored the surrounding geography as closely as I could using Google’s images—but nothing stood out. At least, nothing obviously Rabbits or rocket-related.
I was getting hungry, so I made my way back to the coffee shop beneath the rocket. I ordered the avocado salad and grilled cheese sandwich that I’d always eaten when Baron and I used to frequent the place. I considered asking the clerk who served me about the model of the car in the Fremont Troll’s hand, but I was pretty sure he’d tell me exactly what I didn’t want to hear—that the car was now and had always been an Austin Mini Cooper.
While I ate, I zoomed in and around the area surrounding that lighthouse. I had no idea what I was expecting to find, but it gave me something to focus on while I was doing my best to avoid thinking about the implications of that car in the troll’s hand, and what this additional change in the nature of my reality might mean moving forward.