Rabbits

by Terry Miles

  “Will you answer one question first?” I asked at last.

  She nodded slowly—not an affirmation, but rather, an indication that she was thinking about it. “That depends, I suppose.”

  “Are you the player known as Murmur?”

  She smiled for a moment, then finally nodded.

  Shit. Easton Paruth just got a whole lot scarier.

  “How long have you been playing the game?”

  “That’s two questions,” she said, “but that’s okay. I’ve been playing the game for a long time.”

  “That’s not exactly what I meant.”

  She smiled. “You’d like to know how long I’ve been playing the eleventh iteration?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d like to tell you about my experiences, K, but lately people affiliated with the game have a habit of…disappearing or turning up deceased.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. There was no reason for me to share the fact I’d been hearing the same thing—at least, not yet.

  “Several players I know personally have recently died or gone missing, and there are rumors that the worldwide numbers are much, much higher.”

  “What do you think is going on?”

  She shrugged. “I know I have something of a…reputation for playing a little outside the rules, but it really is getting dangerous out there. You should watch yourself, K. There aren’t that many of us left.”

  “Do Darla and the others have any idea that you’re using them to help you play Rabbits?”

  “Not talking about the game is still an important part of it. You would do well to remember that.”

  A threat—or hint of a threat—from Murmur wasn’t something that could be taken lightly, but I was tired and, frankly, at this point, I was almost beyond caring. “We’re talking about it now, though, aren’t we?”

  “Well, yes,” she said with a wry smile. “I suppose we are.”

  I blew on my coffee to cool it down.

  “You’re not angry that I used you to track down this clue, are you?” she said.

  I shrugged. “Not really.” And it was true. I really didn’t care. I was having coffee with Murmur, and she’d used me to help her play the game. It was an honor. Chloe was going to lose her mind.

  “We all have our own methods of playing,” Easton said. “But the fact you’re here and still alive is impressive.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and took another small sip of coffee, careful not to burn myself this time. “It’s true,” I confessed. “Alan Scarpio did ask me for help. He told me that he believed something was wrong with the game.”

  Easton leaned across the table. “He was right. The game has always been dangerous, but what’s happening now…it’s different. Players are disappearing and dying at an unprecedented rate.”

  I nodded.

  “If Scarpio really did ask you for help, then you must be connected to whatever’s going on.”

  “I suppose so.” I fidgeted with my coffee cup on the table. As excited as I was about speaking with Murmur, there was no way I was going to tell her about Crow and the Gatewick Institute.

  “No connection at all between you and Scarpio before this?” she asked.

  “None. The first time I met him was just before he disappeared.”

  Easton took a sip of coffee and leaned back in her chair, metal bracelets jangling around her wrists. I counted them—ten on each wrist. Twenty bracelets, a twenty-dollar bill in a man’s hand in line, twenty sugar containers on the servers’-station table. I shook my head. The last thing I wanted to do now was fall into some kind of pattern-recognition sinkhole. There was a fine line between those patterns that were connected to the game and the ones that weren’t, and although I felt like I was still operating on the right side of that line, it was getting blurrier every day. I’d grown to depend on Chloe and Baron to keep me focused and on track, but Baron was dead and Chloe wasn’t here. I took a slow deep breath.

  “Why are you still playing?” I said. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

  She stared at me for a moment, then looked around as if she was worried somebody might be listening. She pulled her chair closer to the table.

  “Because I know what happens when you win. I’ve seen it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was there. I’ve seen somebody win the game.”

  “Who?”

  She shook her head. I wasn’t getting that information.

  “I’ve seen somebody get their heart’s desire,” she said as she stood up and set a ten-dollar bill on the table. “It was real, and it was amazing, and that’s why I’m still playing.”

  She smiled warmly. “I wish you luck, I really do, but I hope you understand, you’re not to attempt to contact me again.”

  I nodded, and Easton Paruth walked out of the coffee shop.

  As soon as Easton was out of sight, I slipped off my sneakers and found a small flat device that had been hidden beneath the insole of my left shoe. It was flat and gray. It looked like one of those Tile things people use to track their keys.

  I slipped the tracking device into what was left of my coffee like a secret agent crushing a sim card, and rushed outside to follow Easton.

  But by the time I stepped out of the coffee shop, she was nowhere to be seen.

  32

  THE MOONRISE

  Chloe was waiting outside my building when I got home.

  “You called me at six in the morning?” she asked.

  “I did.”

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  I smiled.

  * * *

  —

  “You got to have pie with Scarpio and coffee with Murmur? What’s next, bagels with rescue-van Hazel?”

  While Chloe made us breakfast, I told her everything that had happened; how I’d figured out the secret astrological code in that hidden level of Zompocalypso, and how Easton Paruth—who’d admitted she was Murmur—had followed me to that wall behind the dumpster.

  After breakfast, I pulled up the photographs I’d taken of that wall, and the two of us spent a couple of hours staring at my phone, trying to make sense of the mess of numbers, letters, and symbols.

  “That’s the symbol from the door at Gatewick,” Chloe said, pointing to the small circle atop the triangle sitting in the center of all the other symbols and letters.

  “Easton called it The Moonrise,” I said.

  “What do you think it means?”

  I shook my head. “I have no idea.”

  We sat there in silence for a moment.

  “The Magician would know about this,” I said, and immediately regretted it.

  The Magician was still MIA, and the last thing I wanted to do was remind Chloe about that fact.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  Chloe shook her head. “It’s fine. There has to be somebody else we can ask about this thing.”

  I thought about Russell Milligan, but there was no way he was going to speak with us again.

  “I don’t know, maybe Fatman?” I said.

  Chloe jumped up from the couch. “Fuck, yes. Fatman,” she said, as she ran over to the front door and tossed me my shoes.

  “Wait,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Check for tracking devices.”

  The two of us pulled our shoes apart, but we couldn’t find anything.

  33

  AN INVISIBLE CITY

  We found parking a block and a half away from the porn shop, hopped out of the car, and pulled up our hoods in unison against the rain. As we ran across the street, Chloe reached out and grabbed my hand—and, for just a moment, I felt like I was living in a normal world, like Chloe and I were a regular couple running across a street in the rain toward a warm table in a cozy bistro, not a coupl
e of game-obsessed lunatics rushing toward a porn shop basement in order to ask a crossbow-wielding shut-in to help us win a deadly game that might be the only thing keeping the multiverse together.

  While we made our way up the sidewalk toward the store, I imagined what it would be like to do all of this stuff alone. There was no way I would have been able to handle it. I was really happy that Chloe and I were doing this together.

  We approached the store, and I could see that the tall wrought iron gate was open and hanging out over the sidewalk.

  “What the hell?” Chloe said. She’d clearly noticed the same thing.

  As we walked through the gate and down the steps toward the basement door, we heard a distant banging and shuffling coming from somewhere deep inside the office.

  “Hello?” Chloe called out.

  The banging and shuffling grew louder and then abruptly stopped.

  The door that opened into Fatman’s office was ajar. I knocked and then pushed it open a bit farther. The slow creak of the door against the silence inside the office was unnerving.

  “Fatman?”

  “Neil?” Chloe said, right behind me.

  There was no answer.

  “We’re coming in,” I said. “Please don’t murder us with a crossbow.”

  We stepped into the room.

  The fluorescents were out, but the office was dimly illuminated by a swath of warm light coming from somewhere in the back of the room.

  The entire place had been torn apart. What had once been somewhat orderly rows between shelves were now winding rivers of scattered books and papers.

  “Hello?” I called out again. I figured it would be worth losing the element of surprise if we could avoid a crossbow bolt through the rib cage.

  Still no answer.

  “What the hell happened here?” Chloe said as we waded through the mess of books and papers strewn across the floor.

  “Looks like the ransack scene in every movie ever,” I replied. “Don’t touch anything.”

  “Holy shit.” Chloe was staring at the back wall of the office. “Mother’s gone.”

  I followed her eyes. She was right. There was nothing left of the huge makeshift supercomputer that had taken up the entire back wall. Where there had once been more than a hundred monitors and a shit ton of other electronic stuff, there were now only wires and splinters of black spray-painted wood.

  While we were standing there staring at the wall, we heard another series of dull scraping sounds coming from the back room—quieter this time.

  “Shit,” I whispered. “Do you think whoever did this is still here?” I was so floored by the state of the place, I hadn’t even considered that possibility.

  Chloe picked up a lamp and tested its weight.

  “That’s probably not gonna help,” I said as I unscrewed the metal leg from an old dining room table that used to be covered in boxes.

  “Where the fuck did you learn that?” Chloe asked.

  “No idea. Saw it in a movie maybe?”

  I handed the heavy table leg to Chloe, unscrewed another for myself, and the two of us carefully made our way to the back of the room, toward the source of the light and the dull scraping sounds.

  * * *

  —

  The light was coming from the entrance to a hallway that ran parallel to the main room. As we turned the corner, we could see that the source of the light was a slightly ajar door at the end of the hall.

  We approached slowly, and when we finally made it to the end of the hall I used the table leg to gently push open the door.

  It was hard to tell what kind of room it was at first, because of all the blood.

  It wasn’t until we saw the toilet, located on the other side of a metal divider, that we realized it was a bathroom.

  There was a man sitting on the floor with his head propped up against the back wall next to the toilet.

  It was Fatman Neil.

  It looked like he was dead, and had probably been that way for a while.

  Chloe pulled out her phone, but just as she was about to dial 911, we heard a banging noise coming from outside.

  It sounded like the front gate.

  We ran out of the bathroom, back through Fatman’s ransacked lair, outside, and up the stairs.

  There was nobody there. The street in front of the porn shop was empty.

  There was a pretty good chance that whoever was responsible for murdering Neil had been in there with us at some point. I felt a shiver as I wondered just how close Chloe and I had come to ending up with Neil on the floor of that bathroom.

  We went back to the bathroom to call the police, but just as Chloe was about to dial, Fatman started gurgling.

  We rushed to his side.

  “Hang on,” I said. “We’re calling for help.”

  Neil grabbed my arm and pulled me close. I could see that he’d been stabbed numerous times. One of those wounds was a jagged open cut along the side of his neck. He was extremely weak and couldn’t speak—most likely because something in his throat had been severed. I got the feeling he wasn’t going to make it until the ambulance arrived.

  He kept trying to talk, but whatever he was trying to say came out as gurgling bubbles of blood. He stretched out a bloody finger and pointed toward one section of the floor that wasn’t completely covered in blood.

  “What?” I asked. “There’s nothing there.”

  But Neil wasn’t using his finger to point, he was using it to write.

  It took every ounce of strength he had left, and in the end, he managed just one word, written in his own blood:

  Valdrada.

  Then Fatman Neil died.

  Chloe tried CPR and mouth-to-mouth while I dialed 911, but Neil wasn’t coming back.

  We leaned against the wall and waited for the ambulance. We were completely freaked out, but relatively calm. I’m pretty sure we were both in shock.

  “What the fuck is Valdrada?” Chloe asked.

  The exact same question had been rattling around in the back of my mind while Chloe was performing CPR.

  It finally came to me.

  “It’s an invisible city,” I said, jumping up.

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “It’s a novel by Italo Calvino,” I said as I ran back into Fatman’s office.

  Fatman kept all of his books in alphabetical order, and, although the place had been ransacked, the books remained somewhat alphabetical when they’d landed on the floor. It didn’t take me long to find what I was looking for. It was a hardcover book called Invisible Cities.

  There was a chapter in that book about an invisible city called Valdrada.

  Valdrada had been constructed on the shore of a lake so that the entire city would be reflected in the water. This reflection wasn’t simply a two-dimensional representation of Valdrada, however, it was a complete manifestation of the city above. The interior of every room, all of the people, and every single action they performed were mirrored in the city below.

  I opened the book and turned to a chapter called “Cities & Eyes 1.” I was looking for something hidden in the text of the novel or written in the margins, some clue that might help us find out what the hell was going on. I didn’t find anything like that, but there was something.

  Nestled into the spine of the book, on the first page of that chaper, was a small thin metal key.

  I’d been looking for some kind of clue in the text of the novel. I definitely wasn’t expecting a literal physical key.

  I slipped the key into my pocket just as the paramedics burst through the door. They were followed a minute or so later by the police.

  Suddenly, Fatman’s office was an extremely active crime scene.

  34

  THE AMERICAN

  We were questioned for
about an hour and a half at the police station.

  We told the police we’d gone to that porn shop basement to ask Fatman Neil a question about a game we were playing. We didn’t mention Alan Scarpio, the surveillance computer array Neil called Mother, or the fact that the game might be connected to Neil’s death.

  They asked us all kinds of questions about the game. We told them it was something called Starfire Enterprises, which was an ongoing alternate reality game connected to the marketing surrounding the ninth movie in a popular action movie franchise. Their eyes glazed over when we started explaining what an ARG was and how it worked. They took dutiful notes, but they had no idea. Their takeway was clearly: weird gamers, knew the deceased a little, keep them in mind if anybody else they know gets killed.

  Eventually, a tall brunette woman with a scar across the bottom of her mouth who told us her name was Detective Marianne Sanders took down our contact information and told us we were free to go.

  The police gave us a ride back to Chloe’s car.

  Chloe started the car, and the two of us sat together in silence for a few moments.

  “What the fuck, K?”

  “I know. That was messed up.”

  “What are we going to do now?” Chloe asked.

  I pulled the key from my jacket pocket and handed it to Chloe.

  “What is this?”

  “Found it in the book.”

  “Invisible Cities?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Look at this,” Chloe said, holding the key up to the light.

  It was faded, but something had been stamped into the front:

  The American

  29

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “The American Hotel?”

  I nodded. “That makes sense. It looks like this key might fit some kind of locker, maybe?”

  “I’ve been to the American,” Chloe said. “It’s a backpacker kinda place. I’m sure they have lockers.”

  She typed the address into the GPS app on her phone, put her car into drive, and pulled out into the street.