by Terry Miles
Darla walked us to the door, and on our way out, she made us promise to let her know if we found anything Rabbits-related in that hidden screen from Zompocalypso.
“For a support group working to help one another avoid playing a dangerous game, you all seem really interested in everything related to that game,” I said.
“We find that talking about it in a safe environment is helpful,” she said. “We think of it like methadone for heroin addicts. It’s better than the alternative. We’ve all had a pretty rough time playing the game.”
I nodded. “I understand.”
“Plus,” she said, lowering her voice to a whisper, “we need to make sure the game isn’t…following us.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
But just then, Easton called Darla back into the house.
“Sorry,” she said. “Gotta run.”
* * *
—
Chloe had to work, so she dropped me off at home and the two of us agreed we’d reconnect in the morning. She said she’d try to look into Zompocalypso during her shift if the arcade wasn’t busy.
I put some water on the stove for pasta and chopped up some garlic. While I was waiting for the water to boil, I thought about what had happened with Easton Paruth and her group. Had they actually retired from the game, or was something else going on? The possibility that we’d just met an infamous player was exciting, but if one of those people really was Murmur, we had no idea which one.
Sitting around talking about the game with like-minded humans felt good, and even a little bit inspiring, but we were no closer to figuring out what to do next.
After I’d finished eating (spaghetti aglio e olio with tiger prawns and a glass of California Zinfandel), I sat down to take a look at the strange numbers and symbols that Darla and her friends had found hidden in that secret level of Zompocalypso.
I turned on my console, downloaded the game, and quickly navigated my character to the hidden level, per Darla’s instructions.
After hours staring at those images and getting nowhere, I went into my bedroom and flopped down onto my bed face-first.
It didn’t take more than a few minutes to fall into a deep and dreamless sleep.
* * *
—
When I woke up, it was completely black.
I sat up and reached for my phone to find out how long I’d been sleeping, but it wasn’t there. I must have left it in the living room.
As I sat there in my bed, I began to feel strange.
I knew that I was in my bedroom, but something felt different.
There was enough ambient light coming in through the windows to illuminate the familiar shapes and shadows of my stuff. I could see the back of the old wood-and-leather chair I picked up from the side of the road the week I’d moved in, the overstuffed clothes hamper leaning out of my closet, and the crack of moonlight beneath the blinds that didn’t reach far enough down to properly cover the window. I was definitely still in my bedroom. But something wasn’t quite right. Was it the quality of the air or the humidity again?
As the sleepy feeling slowly left my brain and my senses became sharper and more focused, I knew it wasn’t the humidity. It was more than that.
I had the very distinct feeling I was somewhere else entirely. And as strange as it might sound, I didn’t want to turn on the lights.
It felt scary, but it was also exhilarating, and I really didn’t want to lose that feeling.
* * *
—
As a kid I’d been interested in (read: obsessed with) things that fell outside of our normal human experiences—not only paranormal and supernatural things like ghosts, ESP, and UFOs, but also stuff like religion, astrology, and mythology. I tried Ouija boards, séances, even whispering “Bloody Mary” into a mirror, but I was never able to conjure anything paranormal.
I would have given anything to have seen a ghost. That would have been confirmation there was something else out there.
As I grew older and my experiences led me to believe that things like ghosts and ESP were almost certainly fictional, my obsession with uncovering real-life mystery and weirdness in the world slowly began to fade.
But it never disappeared completely.
That night in the truck with Annie and Emily, the world felt different.
Something had changed.
Now I was feeling something eerily similar as I made my way slowly down my hallway in pitch-blackness.
My eyes gradually adjusted to the darkness as I entered the living room. The cool soft glow from the lights of the city coming through the large window dimly illuminated everything. Nothing appeared to be out of place.
I was in my living room, but still, something felt off.
I couldn’t see my clock from where I was standing, but something told me, if I could have seen it, it would have read 4:44 a.m.
I stood in front of the window and looked out over the city. I could see a young couple stumbling along the sidewalk below. They were arguing about something that seemed extremely important to him but meaningless to her.
I could tell by the weird buzzing and fluttering in my upper stomach that there was no way I’d be getting back to sleep—at least, not for quite a while. So I decided I’d make some coffee and do my best to get ready for the day.
While I was waiting for the water to boil, I stared out my windows at the slowly waking city. The arguing couple had been replaced by the first trickle of cars and pedestrians leaving their homes and straight-lining their way to another world. The world of work. The office.
The feeling that I’d somehow woken up in another world was still with me, but the muted sounds of the distant traffic and the slight hum as the compressor in my refrigerator kicked on slowly brought me back to reality. I was probably just dehydrated, or maybe I’d woken up at a weird time during a deep REM cycle. I grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge and drank the whole thing.
I was halfway up the stairs before I actually realized I was on my way to the roof.
I’d spent a little time up there in the mornings the previous summer, sipping coffee and staring out at the city, but I’d never been there in the dark.
As I stepped out onto the roof and looked up into the night sky, the otherworldly feeling that had been bothering me since I woke up disappeared into the back of my mind. All I could think about was the stars. I’d never seen the sky this cloudless and clear in Seattle.
I’d spent some time up in northern British Columbia, and this reminded me of the wide, bright starlit skies I’d experienced out there in the middle of the forest, far away from the lights of any town or city.
I stood there staring up at the sky for a long time.
Even with the light of the moon and the wild shine emanating from the lights of the city below, I could clearly see the stars.
I was looking up at the Big Dipper when it came to me.
The hidden level from Zompocalypso.
While I was rearranging the placement of everything in my mind, I began to see a pattern. Those seemingly random scribbles of numbers and symbols suddenly weren’t random at all.
I ran back downstairs, turned off the kettle (which had boiled dry), loaded a map of current constellations onto my laptop, and navigated my way back to the hidden level in Zompocalypso.
It took me about five minutes to find the secret hidden within that mess of scribbles and symbols.
There were yellow numbers on the Zompocalypso screen that corresponded to the specific locations of each star that made up the constellations of the night sky.
I began with Polaris, the brightest star that makes up the Little Dipper, or Ursa Minor, and quickly mapped out the numbers on the hidden screen that matched the locations of each of the seven main stars that comprised that constellation.
When I c
ombined those numbers, I had sixteen digits.
I’d played enough alternate reality games and studied Rabbits for long enough to suspect that these numbers were most likely some kind of code. I tried every alphanumeric, hexadecimal, and binary combination I could think of, but there was nothing. I stared at the screen again. Something was bothering me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. What was I missing?
After going back and forth over every pattern and number combination I could think of, I eventually found it. It wasn’t the numbers that had been bothering me. It was something else entirely.
There was an extra constellation.
I was aware of Ophiuchus, the large constellation represented by a man holding a serpent that people occasionally (and incorrectly) refer to as the thirteenth sign of the zodiac, but this was different.
I couldn’t believe I’d missed it. It was smaller than the others, hidden in a mess of numbers and symbols I’d initially thought were just part of the background.
It was composed of twelve stars in the shape of a triangle and circle—the symbol from my elevator dream.
Once again, I went through every combination of possible clues and patterns I could think of that might connect those stars and numbers, but still couldn’t find anything that looked even remotely like a clue.
But there was no way I was going to give up now.
I made some coffee for real this time, and went back to work.
I combined the numbers and letters associated with the twelve stars that made up the thirteenth constellation in the image on the hidden Zompocalypso screen, and then typed that enormously long string of alphanumeric characters into the address bar of a Web browser, added dot com, and pressed enter.
Nothing.
But when I typed those same characters into the address bar of a Tor Browser and added .onion (a darknet URL suffix), something happened.
A website loaded, and what appeared to be a video started playing.
But it wasn’t a video. It was the Earth, and the way the camera was zooming closer was familiar. I was looking at some kind of satellite application.
I sat back and watched as the application zoomed forward into North America, up to Washington State, and finally came to a stop, right above a back alley in downtown Seattle.
31
NOBODY SAID IT WAS GOING TO BE EASY
When I discovered the satellite footage or video or whatever it was that had zoomed in to that back alley on my laptop screen, it was just after six in the morning.
I called Chloe, but she didn’t answer, her phone most likely on her nightstand, on silent.
I was on my own.
I stepped out of my building into a light rain. The sky was monochromatic, a layer of dark, gloomy gray covered the city from the horizon to the Space Needle. I zipped up my hoodie and hurried across the street into the waiting Uber.
We drove in silence through the city toward the Pike Place Market, the rhythmic clunking of the wipers and the wet glimmer of lights reflected in the streets hypnotic and comforting.
When we were a block or so away from the alley, I asked the driver to pull over and I hopped out of the car.
I double-checked the exact location on my phone, and then started walking.
I didn’t notice the rain at all as I hurried between the towering buildings toward whatever was waiting for me at that spot on the map.
I was close.
The camera had zoomed in to the middle of the alley between Western and First. This area would soon be filled with the hum and bustle of the waking city, but at that moment it was peaceful and still. I could hear the distant cries of seagulls waking in anticipation of another day spent scavenging around the waterfront.
I stepped off the street and into the alley. This was it.
I took a deep breath and readied myself. If there was something waiting in there, I really hoped that something wasn’t a murderous back-alley-dwelling human.
I walked past the rusted fire escapes and barred windows looking for anything related to that hidden screen in Zompocalypso, anything that might be connected to Rabbits.
But there was nothing.
No pattern hidden in the wet gray-brown cobblestones, no clues in the number of rungs that made up each of the fire escape ladders, no hidden messages in the graffiti spray-painted on the brick walls and dumpsters that lined the alley.
Had I been wrong about the extra constellation?
I was just about to leave when I heard a deep, low scratching sound coming from one of the nearby dumpsters.
I wrapped my hand around my key ring and arranged it so a couple of the keys slid in between my fingers—as if that was going to help me fight off whatever Seattle night terror was waiting behind the dumpster. I shook my head, let go of my keys, and walked slowly and carefully toward the dark green metal container, ready to run for my life if a person (or something worse) suddenly stepped out.
I was about three feet away when a large rat scuttled out from around the bin.
I jumped backward and almost fell over.
I wasn’t afraid of rats—Seattle had more than its share of them—but echoes of the strange otherworldly feeling I’d experienced when I woke up remained with me, and no matter how excited I was about following the potential clue I’d uncovered, I was still walking through a long dark alley alone in the rain.
I took a deep breath and pulled the wet dumpster away from the brick wall.
There was nothing there except for another rat.
This one was even bigger than the first. She was lying on her side on a pile of wet newspapers feeding a handful of little pink babies.
I carefully pushed the dumpster back into place and was about to switch my focus to potential connections between the businesses and addresses that made up the streets on either side of the alley, when I noticed another dumpster directly across from the one providing shelter for the brand-new family of rats. The last thing I wanted to do was disturb another rodent family feeding, but I’d come all this way. I knew that if I didn’t check everything it would gnaw at me, and I’d have to come back again later.
I took a deep breath, readied myself for any and all types of rat contact, and pulled.
One of the dumpster’s casters was missing, which resulted in a deep reverb-y scraping howl as I dragged the large, wet metal box away from the wall.
There were no rats.
But there was something.
The wall behind the dumpster was covered in a mess of numbers, letters, and symbols, all surrounding something familiar.
The circle atop the triangle.
The layout and style of the art were similar to that hidden screen from Zompocalypso. Seeing it here in this context felt like a glimpse into a secret world. My breath quickened and I could suddenly hear my heart beating in my ears.
“What do you think?”
I’m not sure whether I heard her voice before or after I’d taken out my phone and started taking pictures.
I turned around to face the speaker.
It was Easton Paruth.
I hadn’t heard her approaching. She must have entered the alley while I’d been moving the dumpster away from the wall.
“You’re following me?” I asked.
“I had Darla hide a bit of tracking technology in one of your shoes.”
“What?”
She didn’t answer my question. “Do you mind if I take a look?”
I stepped aside so she could get a better view.
“It’s beautiful,” she said as she stepped forward and placed her hand on the triangle in the middle of the wall.
“You’ve seen this symbol before,” I said.
Easton continued to run her hand along the wall.
“A circle atop a pyramid is a familiar sigil in the world of the game. It�
��s something we refer to as The Moonrise,” she said.
The strange symbol from my elevator dream suddenly had a name.
“What does it mean?” I asked.
“I’m not sure. But it’s deeply connected to the game. It’s something that normally appears as a marker—a sign that you’re on the right path.”
I nodded toward the wall. “Are you going to take a picture?”
“I do believe I will, thank you.”
She took about a dozen photographs from a few different angles.
“Why are you following me?” I asked.
Easton finally stopped taking pictures and put away her phone.
“Let me buy you a coffee. I’ll tell you all about it.”
“Are you Murmur?”
“Coffee,” she said.
She helped me push the dumpster back against the wall, and then started walking back toward the entrance to the alley.
I ran after her. There was no way I was going to let her out of my sight without some kind of explanation.
* * *
—
Easton took off her jacket and placed it over the back of her chair. She was wearing an elegant orange-and-blue top cut at an angle across her shoulders. She had a significant collection of metal bracelets on her wrists and huge golden hoops hanging from her ears.
“So, I’m sure you have some questions for me, and I promise I’ll try to answer them to the best of my ability, but do you mind if I ask you a couple of things first?”
We were sitting across from each other at a low table in a coffee shop. It was still fairly early, but the locals were beginning to file in for their morning fix.
“What would you like to know?” I replied, then burned my tongue as I nervously sipped at my coffee, which was still way too hot to drink.
“Is it true that Alan Scarpio asked you for help?”
I stared at Easton for a moment. I couldn’t decide what to say. It was clear she already knew or suspected that I’d spoken with Scarpio, but she wanted confirmation for some reason.