Rabbits(22)

But instead of smiling for the camera, the woman with the curly brown hair whispers something into Mr. Goldblum’s ear, and then—with practiced precision—deftly removes a razor blade from her mouth and attempts to sever his carotid artery.

This shocking attempt on Jeff Goldblum’s life is foiled by the publicity assistant, who is standing close enough to intervene, and—in a remarkable act of bravery—forces herself between the actor and his assailant.

Mr. Goldblum is unharmed, but the publicity assistant doesn’t make out quite as well.

While wrestling with the famous actor’s attacker, the assistant is wounded—a deep gash from her elbow all the way to her wrist. A rush of blood fountains from her arm, covering Mr. Goldblum and flooding the white linoleum floor of the stage.

It isn’t until the publicity assistant looks down and notices the blood on the floor that she realizes she’s been cut.

At that point, she passes out and the stage erupts in a wild flurry of blood and chaos.

The two members of the security team standing closest to the action rush forward to help, but they’re unable to get their hands on Mr. Goldblum’s would-be assassin due to the slippery smears of deep red blood now covering the stage.

With the security guards slipping and flailing in the blood, the woman with the curly brown hair continues to slide around the stage like a rabid deer on a frozen lake, screaming her strange message repeatedly into the astonished faces of the audience: “Jeff Goldblum does not belong in this world.”



* * *



—

Chloe pushed the space bar on my laptop and the video stopped playing.

“Well, that was certainly fucked,” Baron Corduroy said as he sat down next to Chloe on the couch. He’d come over to my place right after we called him and described what we’d discovered on Scarpio’s phone.

I leaned back and exhaled.

We’d watched it at least six times before Baron arrived.

“Fuck,” Chloe said, as if another usage of that particular word was required to release some kind of pressure that had been building up.

She hit the space bar and we started watching again.

I found it hard to keep my eyes on the screen.

I’ve never been all that freaked out by blood or violence in movies or videogames, but there was something about the raw, visceral nature of this clip that really affected me.

Something about the video just felt…wrong.

I turned away from the screen, pulled out my phone, and started looking for other versions of that video online, or any corroborating evidence of this attack on Jeff Goldblum.

There was nothing.

I was able to track down various television interviews with audience members taken after the promotional event depicted in that video, but everything seemed perfectly normal, no mention of a brutal attack on the famous actor.

As far as the world was concerned, the event went off without a hitch.

“It was obviously some kind of publicity stunt,” Baron said, then pulled out a vaping apparatus in the shape of an old-school Sherlock Holmes–style pipe and took a hit. “Fuck, I love Jeff Goldblum,” he said, somehow managing to get the words out while his lungs were full of the highest THC-content vapor available to mankind.

“Yeah,” Chloe replied. “He’s cool.”

I loved Jeff Goldblum too, but at the moment I was more concerned with the woman with the curly brown hair, and even more concerned with why Alan Scarpio had a hidden file on his phone of her attacking the well-known actor.

“If it was a publicity stunt,” I said, “there would most likely have been some publicity.”

“That’s a fucking good point,” Baron said, pointing at me with his vape pipe.

“You think it’s some kind of deepfake?” Chloe leaned in, looking closer at the screen, as if this might magnify some previously unidentified element of the footage.

“It definitely has to be fake,” I said.

Chloe nodded.

“I mean, it looks pretty real to me,” I added, “but we would have heard about this, right?”

“Fuck, yes,” Chloe said. “For sure.”

The video file was called TabithaHenry.avi, so the first thing we did was look up the name Tabitha Henry.

“Find anything?” Baron asked.

“Just one picture on an old Facebook page,” Chloe said, holding up her phone, “and it’s definitely her.”

It was clear that Tabitha Henry was the woman with the curly brown hair from the video. In the photograph, she was pictured smiling on a boat somewhere.

“This girl doesn’t have much of an online presence,” Chloe continued, “although she does follow Jeff Goldblum.”

“We need more,” I said.

“Darknet?” Baron suggested.

“Oh, sure,” I said. “We just fire up the old Tor Browser and type in ‘Jeff Goldblum murder video’?”

“Attempted murder,” Chloe said.

“You’re not helping,” I replied as I opened up a browser and performed a Torch for “Jeff Goldblum attempted murder video.”

There was nothing.

After a few hours of fruitless research, Baron had an idea. He pulled out a phone I’d never seen him use before and left the room.

A few minutes later, he came back, and before we could ask him what the hell he was doing, a text alert sent him rushing over to my laptop.