by Terry Miles
Whatever’s really going on, it’s become clear that these keepers of the secrets of the game are highly dangerous and extremely complicated. And if they actually do exist, none of them is talking.
—HAZEL 8
36
EAST OF BARN
After we’d finished watching that Super 8 film, Chloe entered a kind of manic state. She buzzed around her apartment, darting back and forth between her laptop, desktop, and phone, her mind operating in a wild new gear.
The first thing she did was call every single number connected to the Magician that she could find, and ask if anybody had seen or heard from him. (They hadn’t.) Then she went over that Super 8 movie frame by frame, looking for something that might reveal a location or any kind of clue at all, but nothing stood out.
After that, she asked me to pull up all of the photos I’d found online featuring Silvana Kulig, and the two of us pored over them for anything we might have missed earlier.
Still nothing.
At one point, Chloe called Silvana herself and asked about the Magician. Did he say anything else? How did he sound? But Silvana didn’t have anything new to offer. After that, Chloe asked me to call Russell Milligan, and when I gently suggested we should get something to eat and maybe slow down for a minute, Chloe told me she wasn’t hungry and demanded I make the call. When I suggested that maybe we should wait until tomorrow, she asked me to leave.
Chloe was clearly freaked out by what we’d just seen, and, although I wanted to stay there for emotional support, I could tell that she needed some time alone.
* * *
—
I went home to finish some laundry I’d started earlier, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the Magician. If the woman with the pigtails from the American Hotel was right, and that locker hadn’t been opened for years, how the hell was the Magician in that movie? He looked exactly the same age as he was the last time I’d seen him.
Chloe wasn’t the only one shaken by watching that film.
After I’d finished folding my clothes, I lay down and tried to clear my mind and relax.
I must have fallen asleep at some point, because I woke up to knocking at my door.
I took a look at the time on my phone. It was just after six thirty. Nobody had buzzed up, so I ignored it. If it was Chloe, she’d call.
A few minutes later, there was another knock, louder this time.
I got up and walked over to the door. There was nobody visible through the peephole. They must have left. I was still looking through the peephole into the empty hall outside my apartment when…
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
Somebody started hammering on my door. It was so sudden that I stumbled and fell backward.
When the banging ended, there was still nobody visible through the peephole. Was somebody crouching on the floor of the hallway, or hiding around the corner while they hammered on my door? It didn’t seem possible based on the wide angle of view, but either way I took a couple of steps back, predialed 911, and held my finger above the call button.
“I’m calling the police, asshole!” I yelled.
I waited for a minute or so before I yanked the door open, ready to call, but the hallway was empty.
Whoever had been banging was gone.
I thought about making something to eat but I was full of adrenaline, and there was no way I was going to be able to relax enough to focus on cooking. I decided I’d go for a walk. I could always grab something along the way.
* * *
—
I had no idea if whoever had been banging on my door was watching my building, so I decided to leave out the back.
It had recently stopped raining, and the alley behind my building smelled like wet garbage. I started breathing through my mouth as I walked past a row of overflowing dumpsters. At the end of the alley, I jumped a large puddle of rainwater and stepped onto the broken sidewalk that led to a nearby park.
I shoved my hands into my jacket pockets as I walked by the children’s playground that marked the beginning of the park. The pinkish-orange light from the setting sun reflecting off the slide and swing set reminded me of the background of an anime movie I’d seen recently. I was thinking about going over to swing for a while, when I heard a familiar sound.
Somewhere behind me, somebody was riding a bicycle.
I decided to skip the swings and turned left at the end of the block.
The bicycle was still back there, following at a distance of about ten yards.
During my freshman year of high school, I’d been followed by a car filled with seniors looking to perform an initiation rite, and I’d recently been followed by a Prius that led to a man called Crow threatening me on a bus, but there was something about being followed by a bicycle that felt intimate, more threatening. It wasn’t just the fact that a car was bulkier and therefore more easily outmaneuvered by somebody on foot; it was the sound. If you’ve never experienced it, the sound of somebody following you on a bicycle—the rhythmic clicks and creaks of the gears and pedals—is just really fucking creepy.
A minute or so after I’d noticed the bicycle, I jogged across the street, cut through the front yard of a low-rise apartment building, and hurried toward the parking area around the back.
The setting sun was hidden by an adjacent tall building, so it was much darker in the parking lot. I was looking behind me for the cyclist as I jogged between a couple of parked cars, and when I turned back around, I almost ran directly into a man wearing a dark gray wool suit. The color of his suit matched the darkness of the late evening almost perfectly.
“I’m sorry,” I said instinctively as I twisted to avoid him.
He didn’t flinch.
Maybe I was just feeling edgy because of everything that had been happening, but I had the distinct feeling that the man had been waiting there, behind that building, specifically for me.
At that moment, a car pulled into the parking lot, headlights slicing through the dark, and I caught a flash of something shining in the man’s hand.
It looked like a gun of some kind, or maybe a Taser.
I started walking away. Fast.
After a few seconds, I turned and risked a look behind me. The man in the wool suit was following, perfectly matching my speed.
I started lightly jogging up the alley toward the street, doing my best to look casual, like I was just a little late for a nice dinner with friends.
The man started jogging behind me. He had a slight hitch in his gait, just enough to make him appear a little bit crooked as he ran.
It made him even more menacing.
I sped up.
I felt like if I could just make it out of the alley, I’d be okay. There would be cars on the street, probably some people out walking. There’s no way the man would risk attacking me in such a public setting.
I started to run faster, and I heard the man behind me do the same.
I looked back, and saw him sprinting toward me, loping slightly as he ran, like some kind of comic book villain.
He was moving too fast, I thought, as he suddenly lunged forward, grabbing at my shoulders, his fingers raking my neck and back. At that point, fight-or-flight adrenaline kicked in, and I was able to hit another gear. My lungs burned as I pushed my knees and arms up and forward in a burst of desperate kinetic synchronicity.
After a couple of seconds that felt like minutes, I twisted my head back to check on the man. He was too far behind.
I was going to make it.
About ten yards from the street, as I started to slow down in order to ensure I didn’t lose my balance and tumble into the middle of the road, the cyclist from earlier burst into the alley directly in front of me, effectively blocking my way.
I swerved to the left and somehow managed to maneuver myself between two large r
ecycling containers, jump a low gate, and keep my balance as I ran along the narrow pathway between two matching gray brick–and-glass apartment buildings.
I was in the zone now, running for my life.
I had no idea where either of my pursuers was at this point.
I felt nothing but the need to escape.
* * *
—
I didn’t stop running until my legs gave out and I stumbled out of a back alley, moving so fast that the front of my body ended up way over my knees, and I slid across the pavement headfirst into a parked car. My body was so full of adrenaline that I didn’t feel a thing. I stood up and took a quick look around. I was miles from where I’d encountered the man in the wool suit. No sign of him or the cyclist.
I relaxed a little and took a longer look at my surroundings.
I was standing in the middle of a familiar street.
Without realizing it, I’d run pretty much straight over to Baron’s place.
I had no idea if the people who’d been following me were still around. I needed to get out of sight as soon as possible.
* * *
—
I made my way along the narrow corridor between Baron’s building and the apartment complex next door, past the plastic chairs and the rest of the familiar junk. Just like the last time I’d been there, Baron’s living room window was cracked open.
I took a cursory look around to make sure nobody was watching, and then I pushed opened the window, crawled through, and tumbled inside.
* * *
—
I had no idea what the process was when somebody died, how it worked with the mortgage payments or what was done with a person’s personal effects, but the place looked pretty much the same as the last time I’d been there, except that the kitchen had been cleaned, all of his food was gone, and the weird makeshift murder wall he’d created had been removed.
I made my way across Baron’s living room, past the coffee table with the brass knob that always fell off when you bumped it, and through the dining room that had previously contained the murder wall.
I wasn’t searching for anything in particular, but I figured, since I’d taken the time to break and enter, the least I could do was take a quick look around.
I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to find anything. If Baron had something he wanted to keep secret or safe, he most likely would have hidden it somewhere on his laptop, which wasn’t there.
After a cursory search of the bedroom and kitchen, I sat down on the couch and took another look around.
What was I expecting to find?
Chloe and I had already gone through all of the weird nonsense written on Baron’s murder wall, and there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary in his drawers, walls, or cupboards.
I swung my legs up onto the couch, leaned back, and rested my head on the armrest.
As I lay there, staring at the ceiling in my dead friend’s apartment, I realized that it felt good to be inside his place, surrounded by his things: the clay ashtray he’d made in seventh grade (half a joint still balanced on the side), the original 1963 Mouse Trap game by Ideal Toy Company (sitting in a constant state of half-assembly on his dining room table for more than two years), and the huge framed poster of Mad magazine issue number 166 from April 1974 featuring a painting of a giant middle finger (a gift from me for his thirty-fifth birthday).
I could almost feel him there in the room with me.
After I’d been lying on the couch for a few minutes, I started to get the feeling that something was different, like I was missing something obvious, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.
A few things had been moved around and his framed Sword and the Sorcerer movie poster was on the floor instead of on the wall above the couch, but those things weren’t what was bothering me.
And then I finally saw it. His Apple IIe.
Baron’s ancient Apple computer sat next to his turntable on a beat-up old brown wicker credenza his grandmother had given him. Everyone just assumed the old computer was decorative, and for the most part it was, but I knew that it actually worked. What I didn’t know was why it was plugged in, and why one of Baron’s dining room chairs was sitting in front of it.
I switched on the computer and waited for the old machine to boot up. A few seconds later, 8-bit music started playing, and a message appeared on the screen:
Your adventure is loading…
A few seconds after that, the following appeared on the screen:
EAST OF BARN
You are standing in a clearing in the middle of a densely wooded area. Located just to your west, at the far end of the clearing, is a large rust-colored barn.
There is a small leather case on the ground near your feet.
It looked like the opening scene of some kind of text-based adventure game like Zork—a Lord of the Rings–style fantasy game written in the late seventies by a couple of MIT students.
In Zork, you’d maneuver through a world of dungeons using simple commands like “take leaflet” or “read leaflet.” Zork had been inspired by the original text-based adventure game called, imaginatively, Adventure. Apparently the MIT guys weren’t all that impressed with Adventure’s limited vocabulary, so instead of “kill orc,” they made sure Zork could understand more complete sentences like “kill orc with broadsword.”
The lines of text on Baron’s computer screen were followed by a blinking cursor.
I stared at the screen for a few seconds and then entered the words “go west.” The screen changed, and I was suddenly playing the game.
I did my best to memorize everything about the narrative as it unfolded.
It appeared to be a simple dungeon crawl: Find the golden idol (using the cloak of invisibility), kill the big boss (with the flaming sword of Arioch), and rescue the town from a fire-breathing dragon (imaginatively named Burnie).
I finished it in about twenty minutes. It was a fairly simple quest, but there were quite a few really cool riddles and puzzles along the way.
I stood up and stretched, and, as if on cue, the screen changed.
Your adventure continues in Morlana’s Quest II.
An online search for Morlana’s Quest brought up a handful of results. The first was an article on classic videogames from 1984 mentioning a trilogy of text-based adventure games that were supposed to be released by an Infocom competitor but were never completed. The other search results were all images—or rather, different versions of the same image.
They were all photographs or scans of a vintage ad from an old videogame magazine. The ad featured a boy, about eleven or so, wearing glasses and a cream-and-brown houndstooth shirt. He was holding a dark brown wooden box covered in arcane symbols. Next to the box on the table were a full color map, a game cartridge, and a floppy disk. The game was called Morlana’s Quest. The ad stated that the game was available for both home computers and the Atari 2600.
Morlana’s Quest had been created by a fairly new company in the world of videogames. That company was called WorGames.
The visionary mind behind both Morlana’s Quest and WorGames was, of course, Hawk Worricker. Coincidence? No way.
And there was something else.
I’d seen a wooden box like that before. It had been sitting on Baron’s lap the night Chloe and I found him staring at that weird video—the night before he died.
I jumped up and ran over to Baron’s desk.
The wooden box was still there, sitting on the floor next to the desk, exactly where Baron had set it down that night.
I picked it up.
Looking at it up close, the first thing I noticed was that one of the symbols on the lid was familiar. It was, of course, a small circle balanced on the tip of a pyramid.
The Moonrise.
I wanted to open the box, b
ut even more than that, I wanted to open the box with Chloe.
I looked at my phone. It was just after eight.
It was time to check in and see if Chloe was ready for company.
37
FUCKING STEELY DAN?
Chloe crawled into Baron’s apartment through the window.
“I would have buzzed you in,” I said as her feet hit the floor.
“Where’s the fun in that?” she asked, brushing the dirt from her jeans.
“Are you okay?”
Chloe walked over and hugged me for a long time.
“It couldn’t be the Magician in that movie. It doesn’t make sense,” Chloe said, finally pulling away. “That movie is so old and he looks just the same. It has to be fake.”
It sounded like Chloe was still trying to rationalize what we’d seen happen to the Magician. I was happy that she was doing better, although I wasn’t sure I agreed with her thesis. That movie looked pretty legit to me.
“I don’t think we should jump to any conclusions. Let’s just try to figure out what’s going on. One step at a time.”
“I’m sorry I was being a weirdo earlier,” she said. “That movie really freaked me out.”
“Me too,” I said.
I thought about telling Chloe what had happened with the bicycle person and the man in the wool suit, but I didn’t want to up her current level of anxiety.
“Is that it?” Chloe pointed to the box.
I nodded and handed it to her.
“Shit. That’s the Gatewick symbol.”
“Yeah, suddenly this thing is everywhere.”
Chloe was just about to open the box when I grabbed it from her hand.