Rabbits

by Terry Miles

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “What the fuck do you think? We’re going to the American to figure out what that key opens.”

  * * *

  —

  On our way over to the hotel, we came up with a plan. We’d ask for a tour, and then, as soon as we found the lockers, I’d ask to use the bathroom while Chloe continued with the tour. Then I’d sneak back to the lockers, open number 29, and grab whatever was inside.

  “Welcome. How can I help you?” A twentysomething blond woman, with two long, thick dreadlocked pigtails that made her look like a cantina character from a Star Wars movie, smiled as we entered the lobby.

  “Hey,” Chloe said. “We’re looking for a place for a few nights. We were hoping we might be able to take a look around?”

  “You bet,” she said. “Just a sec.” She grabbed a set of keys and came around to our side of the counter. “Follow me,” she said.

  She took us through the various rooms—the dining area, the communal spaces, and a few of the unoccupied bedrooms. There were a lot of bunk beds and some pretty cool eclectic hostel-style furnishings. There were also a whole bunch of lockers, but they were all secured with combination locks.

  It looked like our bathroom ruse wasn’t going to be effective.

  “Do you have any other lockers?” I asked.

  She thought for a moment, then shook her head. “No, I think we’ve seen them all. If you have something that won’t fit, I’m sure we can figure it out, keep it in a secure room or whatever.”

  “It’s not that.” I showed her the key. “Is there anything here that this might be able to open?”

  She took a look at the key, then back at me. “You’re not really looking for a room.”

  I looked over at Chloe.

  “Where did you get that key?” Pigtails put her hands on her hips. I could tell she was ready to shut us down completely. We needed to come up with something fast.

  “My brother,” Chloe said. “He always kept it around his neck.”

  I had no idea where this story was headed. Chloe didn’t have a brother.

  “No matter what,” Chloe continued, “swimming, showering, running a marathon, that key was always there. He never talked about the key with any of us, but it was obviously something really important to him.” Chloe paused and took a deep shaky breath. “My brother passed away recently.”

  “Oh my god,” Pigtails said. “That’s terrible. What happened?”

  Chloe shook her head. “He was electrocuted.”

  “What? I’m so sorry.” Pigtails’s hands involuntarily covered her mouth in horror.

  “Yeah, it was a downed power line. He touched a metal railing, slid down an icy road, and just…died.”

  I shook my head. Chloe and I had rewatched and subsequently reread The Ice Storm recently. I can’t believe she was using the Elijah Wood character’s brutally beautiful death to lie to this poor woman.

  “It’s this way,” Pigtails said as she led us through a narrow hallway and down a set of stairs into a basement.

  “Watch your heads on the stairs,” she said. “The ceiling is pretty low.”

  * * *

  —

  We stepped into a narrow room that smelled like old leather and damp newspaper. There were two short walls of old lockers, numbered 1 to 30, on either side of a long, worn wooden bench sitting on the polished concrete floor. It looked like a compact version of a changing room at a YMCA or a boxing gym circa 1982.

  “We use these for the staff. Number 29 is one of the lockers we don’t have a key for. I don’t think it’s been opened the entire time I’ve worked here. We haven’t needed the extra space, so we’ve never bothered to have a locksmith open it. Do you think there might be something inside?”

  I recognized that look in her eyes. She was getting excited about the mystery.

  “We’re not sure, but we think there might be,” I said.

  Pigtails nodded, and was about to open the locker when she turned to Chloe.

  “You should do it,” she said. “Your brother would have wanted it this way.” She handed Chloe the key.

  “Thank you,” Chloe said, grabbing the key.

  Did I see a tear rolling down her cheek?

  I shook my head. We were horrible people.

  Chloe opened the locker. There was something small and circular inside.

  “What is that?” Pigtails asked.

  “Looks like a movie,” Chloe said as she pulled out an old film canister, about six inches in diameter.

  Chloe opened the canister. Inside was a roll of film. There was a worn label on the inside of the lid that featured a familiar logo.

  A small circle atop a triangle.

  “Do you think it’s a movie of your family?” Pigtails asked, hopeful.

  “I’m absolutely sure it is,” Chloe said. “My brother loved making old-school home movies. Thank you so much for everything. This means a lot.”

  “You are so welcome,” Pigtails said, and then she led us back upstairs where she asked us to leave our information, just in case. We returned the locker key, and she made us promise to let her know what we found on that film.

  * * *

  —

  “I’ll drop you off on my way home,” Chloe said as we got into the car. “I promised my neighbor I’d walk her dog. First thing in the morning, I’ll dig up a film projector.”

  “Sounds good,” I said.

  On our way to my place, I rolled down the window and Chloe put on some music. As we drove through the city, I did my best to let the Belle and Sebastian album Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant take my mind off what had happened to Fatman Neil.

  I closed my eyes and leaned back.

  I remember hearing the first song from that album—“I Fought in a War”—the evening of the day I’d found out that my parents had died.

  I was standing in line at a grocery store.

  I suppose I could have asked somebody to bring me some groceries, but I needed milk and just didn’t have the emotional energy to start a conversation with anyone I knew.

  It wasn’t so much that whoever I saw would be feeling pity for me—although that definitely would have been hard to take. It was more the idea that I might have to look at somebody else’s face and give a shit what they thought about me, or about the way I presented myself in that moment of grief.

  I couldn’t handle the idea of being forced to consider somebody else’s opinion of my reaction to my parents’ death. Was I crying enough? Was I crying too much? I really didn’t need anybody else to be sorry for my loss.

  It was none of their fucking business.

  While I was waiting to pay for my milk and bread, a young woman stepped into line behind me. She was around twenty years old. She was wearing two different-colored flip-flops on dirty feet, ripped jean shorts, a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt, and a vintage puka shell necklace. The smell of the watermelon gum she was chewing filled my nostrils as the loud music coming from the huge headphones she’d pulled off her head and left dangling around her neck filled my ears.

  The song was “I Fought in a War” by Belle and Sebastian.

  When I looked back at that girl, slowly swaying to the music, blissfully unconcerned with anything else in the whole world, I was pretty sure I’d never seen anything so carefree and beautiful in my entire life.

  I started crying, and I couldn’t stop.

  35

  NO SPITTING ON STAGE

  I called Chloe the next morning. She was in a thrift store haggling over the price of an old 8 mm projector. She told me to be at her place in fifteen minutes.

  I rode my bike over and ran into her just as she was pulling into her parking space.

  “Did you end up getting a projector?”

  “I actually g
ot two. One’s 8 millimeter and the other is Super 8.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “No idea. The guy said something about the size of the sprockets. He told me I could return whichever one doesn’t work.”

  We each carried a projector up from Chloe’s car.

  I opened the canister we’d found in the locker and took a look at the sprockets while Chloe pulled up images of 8 mm film online. It looked like what was in that canister was Super 8, with a magnetic stripe for sound.

  “Does that projector play sound?” I asked.

  “Don’t know. It’s got speakers.”

  “If whoever recorded this footage had a microphone hooked up to their camera, there could be audio on there.”

  “It’s too bright in here,” Chloe said, pointing at the huge windows. “Let’s do it in the bedroom.”

  * * *

  —

  I set the Super 8 projector down on a cedar chest at the foot of Chloe’s bed, closed the thick set of blackout curtains that covered the windows, and switched off the lights. The room was suddenly completely black. It felt impossible to me that someplace this dark could exist in the middle of the day.

  “Let’s see if the bulb works,” Chloe said, startling me.

  I’d been so absorbed in cataloging the items in her room, I hadn’t noticed she’d entered and was standing beside me.

  I felt the skin of her arm brush mine as she reached for the projector, but before she turned it on, she leaned back and kissed me. While we were kissing, she flipped a switch on the projector and the room exploded with light.

  “Ouch,” I said.

  Chloe laughed as she focused the light into a bright rectangle and guided it over to the giant Howard the Duck movie poster that filled one of her walls.

  I jumped up and started taking down the poster.

  “Careful,” Chloe said, “that’s a rare and valuable piece of cinema history.”

  “Of course,” I said as I gently set the poster aside.

  And just like that, we had a place to watch a movie—or whatever the hell was lurking inside that ancient can of Super 8 film.

  It turns out this particular projector was a bit tricky to load. It took us about twenty minutes to figure it out. When we finally got it working, I switched off the lights again and Chloe started the projector.

  The first thing that popped up on the wall was a name and logo: the Gatewick Institute, and the now familiar symbol of a triangle and circle, The Moonrise.

  “Fuck,” Chloe said as she grabbed and squeezed my hand.

  It was exciting.

  The projector was loud, but I could hear what sounded like distant muted music coming from somewhere.

  “Can you hear that?” I said.

  At first I thought it was coming from a car outside, but it was actually the projector’s tiny built-in speakers.

  The film had sound.

  We turned the volume up as high as it could go. It was much better, but it still wasn’t very loud.

  * * *

  —

  The movie opens on what appears to be an empty hallway. The muted piano music is coming from somewhere off-screen, probably upstairs.

  After a few seconds, the subject of the film, a man in a long dark leather jacket, enters the frame and begins walking down the hall.

  Whoever’s operating the camera remains behind the subject, keeping him in focus as he moves forward. Leather Jacket Man never turns around completely as he walks down the hall, so we can’t see his face. The camera follows as he turns and moves down another hallway to a door. He eventually reaches the door, opens it, steps inside a room, and switches on a light.

  A dim bulb hanging from a thin wire in the ceiling illuminates a medium-size room. The walls are almost completely covered with graffiti. There are a few scattered chairs and tables sitting on a filthy gold-colored carpet. All of the furniture has been scratched and carved up with graffiti that matches the walls. There’s a framed sign hanging in the middle of the wall directly across from the door that reads: PERFORMERS THAT GO OVER THEIR SET TIMES BY MORE THAN TEN MINUTES WILL NOT BE PAID. NO SPITTING ON STAGE.

  It looks like some kind of green room for bands, comedians, or other entertainers, probably located in the back of a sketchy live music venue somewhere.

  It’s at this point that Leather Jacket Man turns around and we see his face for the first time.

  As the man in the movie turned around, Chloe gasped and squeezed my hand really hard.

  The man in the leather jacket was the Magician.

  He looked similar to the last time we’d seen him, the same worn-out look in his eyes, his hair the same length and style. But there’s a calmness to his demeanor in the film. Whatever’s about to happen, he appears to be ready for it.

  “Go on, now,” he says to whoever’s operating the camera. “But leave it rolling.”

  After a few seconds, the Magician pulls out what appears to be a journal. Then he compares something in its pages with some of the graffiti on the wall in front of him, and just as he turns to check out one of the other walls, there’s a burst of static and light. It only lasts a millisecond, but in that time, something has happened.

  The Magician is no longer alone.

  In the corner, behind the Magician, is an impossibly tall figure, maybe seven or eight feet in height—way too tall for the size of the room. The figure is standing incredibly still, its neck bent beneath the ceiling, towering over the Magician, who doesn’t seem to realize that he’s no longer alone.

  When the tall figure finally begins to move, it becomes immediately clear that—whatever this thing is—it’s definitely not a man.

  Its form slowly changes as it begins to fill up the shadows, sucking up what little light remains in the room.

  Suddenly, the Magician stops looking at the wall and straightens up.

  He understands there’s something behind him.

  I felt Chloe shudder beside me. She moved closer, hooking her arm around mine.

  Back on the screen, the Magician looks down at his journal and then up again. He can see it now, the darkness moving toward him from the corners of the room—a terrible thing made up of smaller dark gray shapes pouring and swirling in from around the edges.

  I could feel myself reacting to the familiar gray shapes. My heart was racing, and an unpleasant warmth began seeping into my body.

  Then the film itself slowly begins to lose light.

  As the darkness moves to take over the frame, the Magician looks up toward the camera and we can see immediately by his expression that something is terribly wrong.

  “No,” he says, looking down at his journal and then up at one of the graffiti-covered walls. “This isn’t right. This can’t be right!”

  He drops his journal, turns, and bolts toward the camera.

  He doesn’t make it more than two steps before he runs into part of the darkness that has been slowly seeping into the room.

  As he lunges forward, something happens.

  The lower part of his body becomes stuck immediately, but the top continues to move, stretching unnaturally as his momentum carries him forward.

  For a moment it looks as though he’s entered some kind of advanced and beautiful yoga pose. He’s stretched thin, like he’s made of hot, freshly blown glass, and then his body snaps and pops, slowly breaking in two, right around the middle of his chest.

  Dark pink-and-crimson mist sprays the air as his body splits open.

  For just a moment, we can see his lungs moving beneath the shining white teeth of his rib cage, and then he’s suddenly snapped apart and sucked back into the darkness, and the room is completely black again.

  The film ran out with a metallic flapping snarl and Chloe jumped.

  I switched off the projector, and everythin
g was silent. I could feel Chloe shaking beside me. She was crying.

  “Chloe,” I said, but I didn’t have the words to continue.

  After a minute or so, Chloe got up, switched on the lights, and opened the curtains. Her tears were gone, and the broken expression I’d seen on her face as she’d watched the film had been replaced by a look of resolute focus.

  “That wasn’t the Magician,” she said. “It’s impossible.”

  I nodded, but I wasn’t sure. There was something about that movie that felt…real.

  “It was pretty freaky,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “Those gray shadow things? Come on, K. Those were clearly visual effects.”

  I nodded and tried to hide the fact that my heart was pounding and I was having trouble breathing. I’d just seen the Magician torn apart by a deadly, terrifying darkness, but unlike Chloe, I was pretty sure those shadow things weren’t special effects.

  I’d seen them before.

  I saw them coming for me the night I’d spent walking around Portland, outside the elevator in The Tower, with Crow on that city bus, and I’d seen them in a dream, standing in the middle of the road, the night of the accident with Annie and Emily Connors.

  I understood something in that moment.

  If we didn’t stop playing the game, those shadow things were coming, and they were going to keep coming until what had happened to the Magician happened to everyone on Earth.

  NOTES ON THE GAME:

  MISSIVE BY HAZEL

  (AUTHENTICATED BY BLOCKCHAIN)

  Who is in charge?

  Gameplay dictates that someone or something is guiding the players, pointing us toward potential solutions or possible pitfalls, but are these Wardens of the game capable of conscious thought the way we imagine it? Or are they controlling things based on factors outside of humankind’s capacity to understand?

  There are some who believe a group of Illuminati-esque secret operatives are out there somewhere, guiding the players from a distance. Others are certain there’s a dark alien race—a species so different from our own that we’re unable to comprehend any part of them with our basic human senses—working behind the scenes to control the players’ movements through the game.