Rabbits(112)

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 everything 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.

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.