by Terry Miles
And there was something else there, somewhere deep in the darkness.
There were currents.
Each of these currents led somewhere…else…every one of them a potential avenue of escape from the way I was feeling. But no matter how hard I tried, I was never able to choose a current and use it to escape. So I’d remain stuck in that dark limbo, feeling like my eyes were open but my body was frozen in place, and eventually, finally, I’d wake up screaming.
It was my mother who taught me how to deal with my nightmares.
One night, after a particularly bad dream, she sat up with me while I tried to calm myself enough to fall back asleep.
She asked me to describe how it felt when I was lying there paralyzed.
I told her everything—how helpless and terrified I felt, stuck in the floating darkness, how I was unable to choose any of the currents that I knew would allow me to escape my paralysis.
My mother told me that the best way to deal with the situation was to follow my instincts and make a choice. First, she said, I needed to bring all of the emotion I could to the surface—think about the love I felt for my family, think about being strong and centered—and then she told me to concentrate as hard as I could on the currents and focus on finding the best path, the one that felt right. And once I’d done that, all I had to do was reach down into that specific current, grab her hand, and she’d be there to help me wake up.
I don’t remember ever using that technique my mother taught me, but the night she told me about it, I had the best sleep I’d had in ages. The following week I began seeing a behavioral therapist who put me on some medication and taught me a number of techniques designed to diminish my stress and anxiety.
The night terrors eventually became less frequent, but by that point I had the real-life nightmare of the accident with Annie Connors to deal with, and not long after that, the death of my parents.
* * *
—
As I was sitting there, in that diner, frozen in place in the pitch-blackness, I wondered what it would be like to live there in the in-between place forever. It felt cool and quiet, but it didn’t feel evil or scary. It was more…indifferent—like, no matter what happened to me or anybody else, the darkness was always going to be there: cold, unfeeling, and constant.
In that moment, I thought back to what my mother had said that night, how I’d be able to choose the correct path. All I had to do was make a choice.
I cleared my mind of everything but Chloe. I thought about the way her eyes lit up when she was excited, the way her lips tasted against mine, her smart-ass smile, and then I was moving, rushing past the currents.
My body soon felt like it was sinking, floating, and flying at the same time. I understood that if I didn’t make a choice soon, there was a chance I’d be stuck, lost in that endless darkness forever. So I reached down.
I felt something solid.
It was Chloe’s hand.
I pulled her up and away from the booth, and suddenly the two of us were sprinting toward the door.
“Don’t turn around,” I said as we ran, but Chloe was already looking over her shoulder.
“I think it’s okay,” she said. “There’s nothing there.”
“Swan and the twins?” I asked, as the two of us shoved open the front doors of the diner and burst out onto the sidewalk.
“Gone,” Chloe said. “I turned back and they weren’t there anymore.”
We kept running up the street and didn’t slow down until we reached Chloe’s car.
“Did you see anything…strange in the diner?” I asked as I opened the passenger-side door and slipped inside.
Chloe was shaking as she got into the car beside me and started it up. “I didn’t really see anything, but I…felt something.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Something really fucking scary.”
40
THE HORNS OF TERZOS
Chloe and I drove around for half an hour to make sure nobody was following us, and then we made our way back to her place. We walked up the steps to her building, arms around each other in comfortable but exhausted silence.
Once inside her unit, Chloe flipped on the lights and I tossed my jacket over a dining room chair.
The two of us shared a bag of slightly stale barbecue chips and an enormous can of Japanese beer while we rewatched a horror movie from 1977 called The Sentinel. Eventually, we fell asleep in each other’s arms, listening to the new album by David Bowie.
* * *
—
Half an hour later, I woke up and bolted upright in bed. “Fuck.”
“What?” Chloe said.
“I need your keys.”
Chloe held the building’s front door open as I ran out to her car and grabbed the copy of Steely Dan’s Gaucho that I’d purchased in the pop-up record shop. After the chaos at the diner I’d forgotten all about it.
We hurried back upstairs and unwrapped the album.
Chloe dug up what Baron had always referred to as her portable hipster picnic turntable, and the two of us read along with the lyrics while we listened.
There didn’t appear to be anything there, no secret message carved into the vinyl, no words hidden in between the lines.
But there was also no song called “Third World Man.”
I grabbed the cassette player we’d borrowed from the Magician’s office, and we relistened to the track that our song ID app had identified as “Third World Man.”
“It’s a different song,” I said.
“What?” Chloe asked.
“On the vinyl. It’s different.”
The song “Third World Man” wasn’t on the version of the album that we’d just purchased. In its place was another song titled “Were You Blind That Day.” The music sounded the same, but there were different lyrics.
It was a different song.
We flipped the album over and checked the track listing. The fourth song on side B was called “Were You Blind That Day,” not “Third World Man.”
Chloe jumped up and asked me to play both versions again.
“That’s so weird,” she said.
I did an online search and found something immediately.
Our audio fingerprint app had identified both songs as “Third World Man,” but it was incorrect.
Apparently, during sessions for their previous album, Aja, Steely Dan had recorded an early version of the song that would eventually become “Third World Man.” That song was titled “Were You Blind That Day,” but because the music was essentially identical, our audio fingerprint app was unable to tell the two songs apart.
The weirdest thing about this “twin song” situation was that it wasn’t a rough demo version from the Aja recording sessions. It was perfectly polished studio-quality Steely Dan, the kind of pristine recording that audiophiles used to test their speakers.
But this was impossible.
No version of “Were You Blind That Day” had ever been officially released in any form. “Third World Man” was, and had always been, the final song on the Gaucho album.
We searched the Internet. Every single image of Gaucho contained “Third World Man” as the last song. We checked scans of the album’s liner notes online and compared them to the album we’d just purchased. Everything was identical except for that one song.
Like a rare stamp, coin, or baseball card with an error, somehow we’d ended up with a copy of an album that featured a song that never appeared on the official release.
But there was more.
It wasn’t just the title; the lyrics of “Were You Blind That Day” were completely different as well, and one of the names of the musicians credited on that song wasn’t listed on the official release of the album.
His name was Mordecai Kubler. He was credited as �
��Horns of Terzos.”
“What the fuck kind of instrument is a Horns of Terzos?” Chloe asked.
“No idea,” I said. “But neither song has any brass instruments at all.”
We did an online search for Mordecai Kubler and Horns of Terzos. Nothing came up.
“Can you try the darknet?” I asked.
“You know that’s not how it works, K. You don’t just try the darknet.”
“Okay, so, how does it work?”
“You can try a blind Torch, but for this kind of thing you need to know where to look,” she said.
“So where do we look?”
She flipped her computer around. “I checked everything,” she said. “There’s nothing.”
“You could have led with that.”
Chloe suggested we try something else. She had a friend at the university who had access to a number of older education- and library-based intranets. Because the majority of these databases weren’t online, she thought we might get some different results.
And we did.
“This could be something,” Chloe said. She turned her screen around and revealed an abstract for a graduate thesis written by somebody named Sandra Aikman. Her thesis compared the imagined worlds of Frank Herbert, J. R. R. Tolkien, Fritz Leiber, and Mordecai Kubler to contemporary people and cultures.
“Oh shit,” I said. “Can we take a look at that thesis?”
“For six dollars and ninety-nine cents we sure can,” she said.
I entered my credit card information, and Chloe downloaded the PDF.
We devoured that thesis in less than an hour.
It was interesting to read Sandra Aikman’s political take on the imagined worlds of some of my favorite writers, but sadly, Mordecai Kubler was a minor character. Sandra Aikman had used only one novel by Kubler as reference material. Thankfully, however, that book was The Horns of Terzos. She’d included a notes section at the end of her thesis along with a biography of all of the writers mentioned in her work. The entry for Mordecai Kubler was brief:
Mordecai Kubler. Born in 1937 in Chicago, Illinois, Kubler studied science and English at Brown University, publishing his first and only novel, The Horns of Terzos, in 1973.
We did one more deep dive online for any mention of Mordecai Kubler or his novel, but we were unable to turn up anything new.
“We’ve got nothing,” Chloe said.
“We have Sandra Aikman.”
“We do?”
“It looks like she lives in Portland,” I said as I spun my computer around to reveal Sandra Aikman’s Facebook profile.
“Please tell me it’s not Portland, Maine.”
“Oregon,” I said. “She hasn’t posted in years, but the last time she did, she was teaching English at Portland State.”
“Message or visit?” Chloe asked.
“Let’s message first and see what she says,” I said.
* * *
—
The next morning, we received a return message from Sandra Aikman. We called the number she’d left and she answered on the second ring. We explained how we’d read her thesis and were interested in talking to her about it in person. She said she’d love to meet, but she was no longer living in Portland.
It turned out she’d moved to Seattle a couple of years ago to work on a book. We told her we were also located in Seattle and set up a meeting at a coffee shop near her apartment in an hour.
* * *
—
Sandra Aikman was Black, about five feet tall, with deep brown eyes and a quick, genuine smile that lit up her entire face. She told us about her continued interest and research into the subject of her thesis, and we explained that we were looking for information about something we’d recently discovered using a DNA-mapping service. We told Sandra Aikman that Mordecai Kubler was Chloe’s grandfather.
We totally lied.
Sandra seemed surprised that we’d been unable to find a copy of Kubler’s novel. She told us she had at least two copies of her own and that we were more than welcome to come back to her apartment to take a look.
It turns out she actually had three copies of the book. I asked if she’d be willing to let us borrow one of them. She handed us a beat-up old paperback, so well-worn that the title was no longer visible on the spine. She told us to keep it, but made us promise to share any information we were able to dig up on Mordecai Kubler, especially if we were able to track down any of his work outside of The Horns of Terzos.
* * *
—
The Horns of Terzos was a short novel, barely two hundred pages. Chloe and I took it back to her place, and read it together in just over four hours.
The story was a kind of retelling of the myth of the Minotaur.
In Greek mythology, the Minotaur is a creature with the head of a bull and the body of a man who lives in the center of the labyrinth—an elaborate maze designed by Daedalus for King Minos of Crete. The Minotaur is eventually killed by Theseus after an arduous journey to the center of the labyrinth.
Mordecai Kubler’s novel was a contemporary (at the time) fantasy take on the myth. The hero of the book, a young woman named Xana, must pass through the labyrinth, fight the monster, and save the world. There was a map of the fictional land of the story printed on the first page of the book. The mythical land was called Terzos, and its largest continent, Tsippos, looked remarkably similar to another landmass.
It looked like North America.
In addition to the shape, the names of the cities and provinces that made up the magical land of Tsippos were also somewhat familiar. On the far-right coast there was Other Manhattan and Other Providence, down south there was Other Orleans and Other Athens, and on what we’d refer to as the West Coast you had Other Angeles and Other Venus. Above that, what we call the Pacific Northwest was divided into two provinces: Other Poseidon and Other Victoria.
Xana’s quest in the book is fairly straightforward. First she must pass three tests: The Cavern, The Gauntlet, and The Gate. Once she’s made it through those three challenges, Xana is supposed to enter The Labyrinth and fight her way to the center. There, in the center of The Labyrinth she’ll have to battle and defeat her final foe: The Man in The Tower.
Yeah, it was quite a coincidence.
* * *
—
There were a glossary of terms and some additional maps in the back of the book—including a roughly sketched map of the area where the climax of the story takes place, a city in the coastal province of Other Poseidon called Oudwood. This rough map of Oudwood was something that Xana carried with her and included the markings and notes she had made on her quest to find The Tower.
Those markings looked very familiar.
On the map, Xana had traced the three points of the triangle that made up the first part of her quest: The Cavern, The Gauntlet, and The Gate. Up near the top of the map, surrounding the apex of the triangle, she’d drawn a circle representing The Labyrinth. In the center of The Labyrinth, The Tower.
“It’s The Moonrise,” Chloe said.
Here it was again—the symbol from my elevator dream, and the logo of the Gatewick Institute.
“A man in a tower and The Moonrise symbol; there’s no way either of those things can be a coincidence,” Chloe said.
“Coincidences are nonexistent in Rabbits.”
“You sound like the Magician.”
We sat in silence for a moment. I could tell that Chloe was thinking about what had happened to the Magician in that Super 8 movie.
I put my arm around her and she leaned her head against my shoulder.
“What are we going to do?” she asked.
“Shit, I was just going to ask you the same question.”
At that moment, all the lights and appliances in Chloe’s apartment flickered on and off a fe
w times.
“Does that happen a lot?” I asked.
“Nope,” Chloe said. “Glass of wine?”
“Definitely. And I think, while we’re drinking, we should probably go over The Horns of Terzos again—in detail,” I said.
Chloe poured us each a glass of Malbec, and I started going over everything we’d written down the first time we’d read through the novel.
“The editor doesn’t exist, and neither does the publishing imprint,” Chloe said as she sat back down beside me on the couch.
“There has to be a clue in here somewhere,” I said.
“Maybe we should try something else?” Chloe asked. “We’ve been staring at this stuff for hours.”
I looked away from my computer and rubbed my eyes. When I opened them again, I found myself staring up at a gift I’d given to Chloe for her birthday. It was a map of Washington State drawn in the style of the maps of Middle-earth that Christopher Tolkien had illustrated for Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.
“What?” Chloe could tell I was thinking about something.
“In the Mordecai Kubler novel, Other Poseidon is made up mainly of Washington State, right?” I said.
“Yeah, so?”
“So I have an idea,” I said. “Is that printer on the network?”
“Yeah, why? What’s up?”
I pulled out my phone, took a photo of the map in the back of The Horns of Terzos, adjusted the brightness and contrast, then sent that image to Chloe’s printer.
“Can you bring up Seattle on Google Earth?” I asked.
Chloe started typing while I jumped up and ran over to the printer. Once the page had finished printing, I pulled a rolling chair over to where Chloe was sitting. She’d loaded a map of Seattle from Google Earth, which I adjusted until it was the size of the fictional city of Oudwood from the novel.