Rabbits(121)

“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.