Rabbits(46)

It looked almost exactly like Baron’s place the night before he died.

“If you know where to look,” the Magician said, “there have always been bulletin and message boards where people gather and talk about the game.” He exhaled a cloud of smoke and stared out at the city.

I looked over at Chloe, unsure if I should say something.

She shook her head.

Eventually, the Magician continued. “This particular bulletin board was very active in the midnineties. A lot of us came here to discuss developments with the game, but there was one participant in particular—somebody who went by the name Neuromancer—who always knew a lot more than the rest of us. He would only post sporadically, but it was always something helpful or insightful.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Well, for one thing, it was Neuromancer who suggested we consider the game outside of its existence in the form most of us refer to as the modern version—the version that began in 1959. He was convinced that the game had existed for much longer.”

“How much longer?” Chloe asked.

“Perhaps as long as humanity, life, or the Earth itself. Neuromancer believed that Rabbits was extremely dangerous and powerful—that it was a game, but so much more. He hinted that there might be something…otherworldly connected to it.”

I experienced a sudden chill. It was probably the fact that the Magician had recently opened a window. I crossed my arms to try to keep warm.

“I was very interested in what Neuromancer had to say,” the Magician continued, “not only about the historical version of the game, but the danger surrounding the modern version as well. He came at everything from a new angle, told us he was searching for something ‘behind the game,’ something…” The Magician trailed off, seemingly lost in thought for a moment.

“Something otherworldly?” I suggested.

The Magician took a long drag from his cigarette and closed his eyes.

I didn’t move. I didn’t want to do anything to startle the Magician, to make him stop talking.

“Neuromancer believed,” the Magician said, “that if you were willing to look hard enough, you’d eventually find direct connections between the game and significant world events: wars, market collapses, assassinations, mass suicides, and many other global occurrences.”

He fell silent again, and this time, I felt like if we didn’t keep the conversation moving, we were going to lose him.

“But couldn’t connections to events on that scale just as easily fall into the world of conspiracy theorists and other nut jobs?” I asked.

“Maybe,” he said as he extinguished his cigarette in a small glass jar.

“What happened to Neuromancer?” Chloe asked. She clearly wasn’t ready to let this information session end either.

“One day, just as suddenly as he appeared, he stopped posting.”

“When was this?” I asked.

“Sometime near the end of the eighth iteration of the game.”

“Do you think this Neuromancer could have been Hazel?” I asked.

“I don’t think so…but it’s possible, I suppose.”

We sat there in awkward silence for a moment before we were startled by a loud ringing. The old yellow analog phone on the Magician’s desk rang once and then stopped.

The Magician ignored the phone and walked over to an old wooden filing cabinet that stood beside the door to the bathroom. He opened the bottom drawer and pulled out a gray metal box. He lifted the lid of the box, removed an ancient Motorola flip phone, and dialed a number.

I looked over at Chloe. She shrugged.

The Magician held the phone to his ear and listened. He didn’t say a thing. After a minute or so, he hung up, put the phone back into the box, and slid it back into the drawer.

“The Jesselman suicide has everybody freaked out,” he said, shaking his head.

“Who’s everybody?” Chloe asked.

The Magician ignored her question. “Eleven has started, and something is wrong.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means you have to stop,” he said.

“Stop what?”

“Playing the game.”

“But it just started,” I said.

“A significant number of players are disappearing…and worse,” the Magician said as he pressed his fingers against the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“Hmmm?” the Magician replied.

“On the phone.”

“A friend,” he said.

The Magician clearly wasn’t going to give us any more details.

“What about Neuromancer? Any idea who he is…or was?” I asked.

The Magician exhaled and pressed his fingers to his temples. “How the fuck do I know? It’s the name of a William Gibson novel. Could be anybody.”

“How does your friend on the phone know that players are disappearing, or whatever?” Chloe asked.

The Magician stood up and started digging through a mess of printed pages on his desk. Eventually he found what he was looking for and handed it to Chloe.

“That is a list of people who were playing the game and then went missing. I recognize most of the names on this list. These are experienced players. Very careful people.”