Rabbits(120)

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.