Rabbits(21)

“Kind of a weird name for a dog,” she said, suddenly much more alert.

“Right?”

Chloe sprang into action. “We should look into the history of rhubarb. Maybe there’s something there?” She pulled out her phone and started to do precisely that.

“I already did a search, checked numerology, and put the word ‘rhubarb’ through a prelim puzzle matrix.”

“Find anything?”

“Yes, but not on the Internet.”

“Where?”

“On the phone.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“In the diner, Alan Scarpio played me a recording he told me was rhubarb growing.”

“And the dog’s name is Rhubarb?”

“So it would appear.”

“Holy fuckballs.”

“I found the rhubarb file in his music library. It was the only thing there. No artist or album title.”

“I need to hear that shit, right now,” Chloe said.

As I hooked Scarpio’s phone up to my Bluetooth speaker, Chloe stretched her arms way up to the ceiling in what appeared to be some kind of half yoga pose. “I like your shirt,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“Have I seen it before?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe?” I lied.

I double-clicked the audio file, and the familiar eerie creaking and crackling of the growing rhubarb filled my spare bedroom.

Chloe and I listened to the whole thing twice, paying close attention for any hidden bits of audio, but there didn’t appear to be anything there—no Morse code buried behind the sounds of the rhubarb, no apparent extra-aural frequency manipulation.

Nothing.

It was only after transferring the file to my laptop for further analysis that we noticed something.

The file was huge.

It was a WAV file, not an MP3, so of course a larger file size would make sense, but not this much larger. No way. This thing was too big for any kind of audio file.

Something not known by many civilians—that is to say, people who don’t spend almost every waking moment of their lives thinking about games, puzzles, patterns, and codes—is that it’s possible to hide other types of data files within audio files. It doesn’t work with a compressed format like MP3, but you can, however, do it with a WAV file.

Chloe and I booted up my old Linux machine and loaded a program that would be able to decode anything hidden within that audio file.

I hit a couple of keys, and in less than a second we had it.

Sitting on the left-hand side of the screen was a file entitled TabithaHenry.avi.

I double-clicked it, and a video began to play.

It opened on an empty chair sitting behind a desk on a small stage in an enormous old train station. There was text across the bottom of the screen that read:

Jeff Goldblum does not belong in this world.





8


    ROWING ALL THE BOATS


The camera pulls back to reveal twenty or so people standing in an orderly line in the train station. A young woman waits nervously near the back. She’s in her early to middle twenties, about five feet four inches tall, with deep hazel eyes and wild curly brown hair. She’s wearing a light blue denim jacket, ripped black jeans, and faded green cowboy boots. Pinned just above the pocket on the top left of her jacket is a three-inch happy-face pin featuring a small smear of blood—an image connected to the popular comic book Watchmen.

On the stage, there’s a low leather chair tucked behind a small desk. Atop the desk are five bottles of what appear to be Fuji water, featuring a well-known film company’s logo in place of the water company’s usual design, and a microphone on a small black metal stand.

A colorful poster for what looks like some kind of action-adventure movie sits behind the desk on a flimsy aluminum easel.

After about ten or fifteen seconds, a studio executive walks up to the microphone and explains to the people in line—participants in some kind of contest who’d won a chance to meet the cast of Steven Spielberg’s latest film via a viral-marketing campaign for a videogame property loosely connected to the film—that they would be meeting the actors from the movie one at a time over the next hour or so.

As soon as the executive finishes addressing the people in line, the first member of the cast takes the stage to a smattering of applause. It’s Jeff Goldblum. He’s followed by a publicity assistant from the movie studio—a six-foot-tall, thirtysomething blond woman in a tight navy blue suit.

Jeff Goldblum is a movie star, no doubt, but these people were clearly saving most of their excitement for the male and female leads of the film: that dark-haired scruffy-looking guy from the superhero movie with the plane crash, and the blondish woman from that TV show where she played an alien learning how to fall in love with a human.

After a polite wave and smile, Mr. Goldblum takes a seat behind the desk and the event begins in earnest.

One after another, people step up and onto the stage, and the tall blond publicity assistant takes their pictures with the actor.

This continues for about five minutes or so before it’s the curly-brown-haired woman’s turn.

After a quick hello to Jeff Goldblum, she hands her phone to the publicity assistant. Then, like he’s done dozens of times already, the famous actor smiles a wide, genuine smile, puts his arm around his temporary charge, and prepares for the photograph.