Rabbits

by Terry Miles

  “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said as I opened the box.

  If there was something horrible inside, I didn’t want Chloe exposed to it before I was.

  But it wasn’t anything horrible. At least, not yet.

  There was nothing inside except for a photograph and a cassette tape.

  “What is it?” Chloe asked as I handed her the box.

  She picked up the cassette tape and looked it over. “Does Baron have a player?”

  “I bought him a Sears model on eBay for his birthday. It should be around here somewhere.”

  People who play the game need to access all kinds of obscure and out-of-date media; you never know where the clues, connections, or inconsistencies are going to pop up. I have two different brands of micro-cassette recorders, three reel-to-reels, two turntables, and a MiniDisc player, and those are just a few of the archaic media formats I’ve had to use in my search for clues related to Rabbits.

  “This looks familiar,” I said as I lifted the photograph out of the box.

  “What?” Chloe said, handing me Baron’s cassette player.

  I passed Chloe the photograph. It was a picture of a brick wall in a back alley—the brick wall I’d discovered behind that dumpster.

  “It’s the same place,” I said.

  “It has to be connected,” Chloe said.

  As Chloe was looking for an outlet so she could plug in Baron’s cassette player, I heard the sound of footsteps outside the door.

  “Sshhh,” I said.

  “What?”

  I pointed toward the front door.

  Chloe and I sat in silence staring at the crack between the door and the floor.

  Shadows.

  Somebody was there.

  We heard the muted whisper of voices, followed by the jangle of something that sounded like keys or tools.

  I grabbed the cassette tape, photo, and wooden box and the two of us tumbled out the window we’d climbed through earlier.

  I heard the door to Baron’s apartment open as my feet hit the ground, but I didn’t risk sticking around to see who it was.

  I ran to catch up with Chloe.

  * * *

  —

  “Did you see who it was?” Chloe asked as the two of us got into her car.

  “No,” I said.

  “Your place?”

  “Do you have a cassette player at yours?”

  “You don’t wanna go home?”

  I finally told her about the creepy wool-suit dude and cyclist combo from earlier, and we agreed that my place was probably being watched.

  “We need to hear what’s on that cassette,” I said.

  “There’s a player at the arcade,” Chloe said.

  I nodded. “Good idea.”

  * * *

  —

  We entered the arcade, said a quick hello to the part-time evening-shift guy named Marcus, and made our way upstairs to the Magician’s office.

  Chloe stepped over the piles of books and papers with practiced precision as she made her way to a tall wooden filing cabinet filled with a variety of anachronistic electronics. She fished around for a few seconds and finally pulled out a Realistic brand portable cassette player.

  “I’m pretty sure this one works,” she said as she bent down and plugged it into the wall behind one of the Magician’s desks.

  I pulled a couple of rolling chairs over and the two of us sat down.

  “You ready?” Chloe asked, her finger resting on the play button.

  “Ready.”

  She pressed play.

  The recording began with what sounded like somebody opening a door, walking across a room, and putting a vinyl record onto a turntable.

  The person walking around on the recording never spoke. They just set the needle down and a jazzy lounge-type song started to play.

  I didn’t recognize it, so I loaded the world’s most popular audio fingerprint app and pressed the button that would activate its “listen and identify” function.

  A few seconds later I had the information.

  The app told us it was a song called “Third World Man” from the album Gaucho by Steely Dan.

  The recording ended as soon as the song stopped playing.

  “Fucking Steely Dan?” Chloe said.

  I shrugged. “Let’s listen again,” I said.

  Just as Chloe was about to press play on the cassette player, we heard a knocking from downstairs.

  Chloe pulled out her phone and loaded a security application.

  “Fuck,” she said, and handed me the phone.

  On the screen was a security-camera feed from the front door. There were three people visible.

  It was Swan and the twins.

  38

  R U PLAYING?

  We left the arcade through the back and drove over to Chloe’s apartment, checking every few minutes to make sure we weren’t being followed.

  At Chloe’s place, we made a digital copy of the recording and then put the resulting file through a bunch of specialized software to see if there was some kind of clue hidden in the visual wave form depiction of the audio.

  There was nothing.

  Chloe picked up the photograph of the back alley from the wooden box I’d found in Baron’s place. “I think we should go down there and check out the wall.”

  “What for?”

  “This picture had to be in Baron’s weird Rabbits box for a reason.”

  “Okay,” I said, “but we should eat at some point. I’m starving.”

  “Me too, but let’s check the alley first.”

  * * *

  —

  It took us twenty minutes to get downtown.

  It had recently stopped raining, but the streets were still wet. Walking along cracked and crooked sidewalks, looking up at the Lego shapes of overcast black-gray sky visible between the towering buildings, I almost felt like everything was back to normal, like Chloe and I were just moving through downtown enjoying a standard cool dark night in the Pacific Northwest. But then I remembered Baron, sitting in front of his computer wide-eyed and broken, and the Magician being ripped apart by some kind of horrible cosmic darkness. I grabbed Chloe’s hand. She squeezed back, and the two of us entered the alley.

  We pulled the dumpster away from the wall, and used the flashlights on our phones to reveal the markings surrounding the circle and triangle that I’d discovered earlier.

  But something was different.

  Splashed across the original symbols and numbers on that brick wall, in thick yellow letters, somebody had painted the following question:

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  “Crazy,” Chloe whispered. She stepped forward and touched the yellow paint reverently, as if she was worried it was going to disappear the moment she made contact.

  “It’s dry,” she said.

  We took pictures of the wall in case we needed to compare it with my original photographs, but I could tell nothing had been changed other than the question that had been painted over everything.

  Yes, we certainly were.

  * * *

  —

  We’d just gotten into Chloe’s car and started driving when I thought of something.

  “Can you pull around the other side of the alley?”

  “You wanna check out the front of the building with the spray-painted message?”

  “We might as well. I think it’s the pizza place with the chewy crust.”

  “No, that’s a few doors down. Last week the space we’re looking at was a Holy Cow Records pop-up shop, and before that some hipster Pottery Barn thing. That’s where I bought those Edison bulbs you wanted to steal from my kitchen.”

  “Right,” I said. “I remember.”


  Chloe guided her car around the corner and pulled in front of the building. She was right. It was a retail space that had been used by a number of pop-up shops lately. It looked like the record store was still in there.

  “Are we going in?”

  “Is it open?”

  “Looks like it,” she said. “You go in. I’ll park and order us some pizza.”

  “Make my half plain cheese, please,” I said.

  “So basic.”

  “So perfect.”

  Chloe drove away and I stepped into the pop-up record store. I thought I’d have to rush through the place, but the sign on the door indicated they’d be open for another forty-five minutes.

  A twentysomething woman with orange hair wearing a fifties-style poodle skirt smiled at me from behind an old gray tanker desk as I entered. I smiled back.

  I was the only customer.

  I took a look around for anything that might be related to the game—messages hidden in the way a bunch of collectible records had been arranged on the walls, some kind of pattern in the décor, or the number of bins, but I couldn’t find anything.

  If there was something in there related to Rabbits, it wasn’t jumping out.

  A few minutes later, a young couple came in and I felt comfortable sneaking a few photos of the place. I tried to get shots of everything, including all the walls and bins, so we could go over them in detail later.

  Chloe texted. She’d ordered and was sitting at a table in the back.

  I waved goodbye to the woman behind the counter on my way out and hurried up the street to join Chloe. I felt my blood sugar crashing. I’d forgotten I was starving.

  “Anything in the record store?” Chloe asked in between bites of pizza.

  I shook my head.

  As we ate, I tracked a tall blond woman walking by on the sidewalk outside the restaurant and wondered if Swan and the twins were lurking somewhere nearby, watching and waiting to pounce.

  “What if your friend Emily’s right and Crow really is out there killing Rabbits players?” Chloe asked.

  “Well, then, we might be fucked,” I said.

  “Murdered by a game. What a way to go.”

  “Yeah, what a way to go.”

  All of the color suddenly left Chloe’s face. “Shit,” she said.

  “Baron would have said exactly the same thing if he’d been here.”

  Chloe nodded. She knew I was right. But that didn’t make it any easier.

  * * *

  —

  Chloe and I had finished our pizza and were waiting for the check when I thought of something.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I’ll be right back.” I rushed out of the pizza place and ran the half a block or so down to the pop-up record store. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it sooner. I grabbed the handle of the door and pulled.

  Locked. Fuck.

  I pressed my face against the window. I could see the young woman with the orange hair behind the register. I knocked on the door and waved. She set down a handful of cash she’d been counting, looked up, and saw me. I could tell she was thinking about opening the door.

  I made a praying motion with my hands.

  It worked. She let me in.

  I told her I knew exactly what I wanted to buy, and it would take me less than a minute. I went straight to the vinyl records, flipped to the S section and pulled out Steely Dan’s Gaucho. I would have bought them all, but they had only one copy.

  Chloe was standing in front of the store when I came out.

  “What the hell?” she asked. Then she saw the Steely Dan record.

  “Damn it. Why didn’t we think of that earlier?”

  “We were hungry?” I suggested.

  We started walking over to where Chloe had parked her car and as we walked, something strange started happening. The streetlights began switching off—going completely dark, one by one, immediately after we passed each of them in turn.

  At first we thought it was just a funny coincidence. I mean, what kind of weird power outage could possibly be connected to the location and pace of two people walking? But eventually it started to feel like something else—like somebody or something in the darkness was following us.

  As we moved up the sidewalk toward the car, I felt a chill. I grabbed Chloe’s hand and the two of us started walking faster.

  When we were a few blocks away, I turned and looked behind us. It took a second to make them out but they were there, in the distance—dark shapeless things moving slowly, like large black fish at the bottom of a dark sea.

  It was happening again.

  The same thing that happened all those years ago in Portland. The same thing that had happened to the Magician in that Super 8 film.

  The shadow things were coming.

  We ran the remaining two blocks to the car and didn’t look back.

  * * *

  —

  I listened to the sound of the rain against the windshield as we drove back to Chloe’s place.

  Chloe told me that she hadn’t actually seen any weird shapes in the darkness, but the streetlights switching off behind us had been more than freaky enough for her.

  I was thinking about those streetlights and the strange twisting shapes in the darkness when I received a text alert.

  It was an image of a white towel hanging on a rack.

  Chloe was beside me and Baron was dead. There was nobody else who knew our secret emergency code.

  A few seconds after that message, I received a Google Maps link. There was a yellow pin marking a location.

  It was the diner across from the arcade.

  39

  TOWEL

  As we approached the diner, I thought I saw the sky dim for a moment, just a little, like somebody had been adjusting the brightness and then suddenly changed their mind.

  “Did you see that?” I asked Chloe.

  “What? The billboard?”

  I shook my head. I was talking about the sky. But when I took another look up in that direction, I saw the billboard Chloe was referring to, and I noticed something odd.

  It was an advertisement for an album by a famous recording artist. At first glance, it didn’t seem out of place, but when I looked again, I noticed that the billboard was promoting the artist’s brand-new album, not a collection of greatest hits or previously unreleased material.

  The artist was David Bowie.

  “Okay,” I said, grabbing Chloe’s hand just as she was about to open the door to the diner, “I’m going to ask you what might sound like a strange question, but…is David Bowie alive?”

  “Umm…yes, I mean, as far as I know. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah,” I said, opening the door to the diner. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  —

  The diner wasn’t busy. There were five or six other people inside, but none of them looked up as we entered. Maybe whoever had sent the towel wasn’t here yet.

  We took a seat near the back and ordered coffee. After we’d ordered, Chloe moved over and slid into my side of the booth.

  “Why did you ask me if David Bowie was alive? We just saw him with Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris at the Tacoma Dome.”

  “Gram Parsons?”

  “K, you’re really freaking me out right now.”

  “I’m sorry, it’s nothing.”

  I wanted to ask Chloe a whole bunch of questions about Gram Parsons, but I just forced a smile and turned my attention to the shopkeeper’s bell jangling by the front door. Somebody was entering the diner.

  It was Swan and the twins.

  I felt a wave of anxiety crash through my body, and vertigo hit me l
ike a wave of wet cement. I grabbed Chloe’s hand and tried to stand, but I couldn’t move.

  Swan slid into the booth across from Chloe and me, and the twins stood on either side of the table, blocking any potential escape.

  “You got my message,” Swan said.

  “Why did you kill Fatman Neil?” Chloe asked, glaring at the twin blocking our side of the table.

  “We didn’t kill him, sweetheart,” the twin on the right said.

  “Bullshit,” Chloe spat.

  At that moment I saw something. It was the shadow things again, moving slowly toward us from the back of the diner.

  “We have to leave, right now,” Swan said, standing up and reaching for my hand.

  “We’re not going anywhere with you,” Chloe said.

  I looked back at the shadow things, then at Swan. I could see her yelling, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying.

  That’s when the lights went out.

  The diner was completely black and the sounds of people talking had suddenly transformed into a garbled hum that filled my head.

  And then I was somewhere I didn’t recognize—or rather, I was nowhere.

  I had the strange feeling that I was stuck, hovering in between places, straddling some kind of line, and I wasn’t able to tell which side of that line was mine, or exactly how many sides of the line there actually were.

  I had no idea where I belonged.

  It was horrible, feeling completely alone and untethered, but it wasn’t a new feeling. I’d felt this way before, a long time ago, as a child.

  * * *

  —

  I had nightmares when I was a kid—night terrors, the doctors called them.

  In these dreams, I would find myself lying in a thick inky darkness, paralyzed and unable to wake up. I felt like I was stuck in a dark empty limbo.

  I called it the in-between place.

  In the beginning of the nightmare, the in-between place was always empty, terrifyingly void of anything but the cool darkness, but if I concentrated extremely hard, I was often able to tune in to something—something I could feel alive and swirling all around me. Then suddenly I’d feel like I was floating, like I’d become part of the thick viscous darkness, and it wouldn’t be long before I’d lose my ability to feel where I ended and where the darkness began.