Rabbits(45)

“The Magician still seems a bit…off,” I said.

“Yeah, it’s getting worse. I don’t think he’s been home for days.”

“Do you think he’s playing the game?”

“Um…yeah. I sure do. Don’t you?”

I nodded. Chloe was doing her best to hide it, but I could tell she was worried.

“Maybe we should try to talk to him?” I asked.

“I don’t know…” Chloe said.

“Come on.” I started walking up to the Magician’s office. “If he doesn’t want to talk, he’ll just tell us to fuck off.”

“You’re probably right,” Chloe said as she followed me upstairs.

“I’m definitely right,” I said, then knocked on the door.

No response.

We stood there for almost a full minute before I knocked again.

“I said come in.” The Magician’s voice was muted, barely audible.

Chloe opened the door, and the two of us entered his office.

All of the blinds were closed. The Magician was working solely by the light of a small lamp and the soft bluish glow emanating from the screens of two ancient briefcase-style computers running some kind of operating system I’d never seen before.

It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the near-darkness before I was able to take a good look around the room.

His office was much messier than the last time I’d seen it. Stacks of random documents and bits of computing equipment still covered most of the tables and shelves, but now the floor surrounding his desk was a sea of paper scraps, computer cables, and take-out containers.

“Holy shit, is that an Amiga?” Chloe asked, pointing to the screen of the computer on the left.

“What is it?” The Magician spoke without looking at us as he rushed over to another desk and hit the space bars on two beat-up old laptops, pulling them out of sleep mode with a whirring sound, his head now bobbing frantically back and forth between the two screens. “I don’t have much time.”

Chloe continued to look around the room. I could tell by the expression on her face that she was shocked by the state of the Magician’s office.

When he finally turned to face us, I could see why Chloe was so worried. His eyes were wild and distant, his face gaunt and worn.

“How are you?” I asked.

“How am I?” the Magician repeated, then stared at me. I couldn’t tell if he wanted to embrace me or push me in front of a train. But, after a second or two, he just nodded absently. “I’m fine. Sorry about…Baron.”

“Thank you,” I said.

The Magician turned his attention back to whatever it was he’d been doing on his two laptops, muttering to himself as he glanced frantically from screen to screen.

I looked over at Chloe. She gave me a sign to keep talking.

“Umm…so, do you think that Minister Jesselman’s suicide means that the eleventh iteration of the game has started?” I asked.

“You saw The Circle and heard The Phrase, ‘The Door Is Open’?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then it’s started,” he said, and kicked a pair of rolling chairs over in our direction. “Maybe you two could take a look at something for me.”

We practically fell over each other on our way to him. The Magician didn’t normally ask for help looking into anything.

He had identical websites loaded on the two computers. The site was something called Abbey’s Skirt.

“What is it?” I asked as Chloe and I sat down on either side of the Magician.

“It’s a website,” he said, then leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes.

“How long have you been working?” Chloe asked.

“I don’t know,” the Magician said, still rubbing his eyes, “not long enough.”

“What is it that you’re trying to find?” I couldn’t see any difference between the two sites. They appeared to be identical.

The website was simple—an Art Deco image of a woman in a skirt, hands crossed in front of her waist, the title Abbey’s Skirt below the graphic, and a long blank form field with an enter button.

“Why Abbey’s Skirt?” Chloe asked.

“Abbey’s Skirt is an anagram for ‘Rabbits keys,’?” the Magician said. “There was a discrepancy here when I looked earlier.”

“What kind of discrepancy?”

“I don’t know…but it was there.”

“They look the same now,” Chloe said.

“Yes, they are. Same URL. Same company. Same source code.”

“So—” I said. “Is Abbey’s Skirt something important?”

“This site used to be the gateway to a bulletin board, a place we’d come to discuss the game,” the Magician said as he stood up and stretched. Then he slowly looked around the room as if he hadn’t seen it for a long time. “This place is a mess,” he declared, shaking his head as he walked across to the window, lifted the bottom of the wooden frame about six inches or so, and lit a cigarette.

I took another look around the room. Like the Magician said, it was messy, but it was a very familiar kind of messy. It reminded me of something. I looked over at Chloe and wondered if she was thinking the same thing.