Rabbits(47)

“Are you sure they’re actually missing?” Chloe asked.

“Are you sure you want to keep asking stupid fucking questions?” he spat, his voice loud and strained.

The Magician wasn’t himself.

He’d always been quick to anger if you came at him with any theory or question that he deemed lazy or half-baked, and he could shut you down easily with a partially raised eyebrow or a well-placed sigh, but in all the years I’d known him, I’d never seen him like this. He’d never once raised his voice with Chloe.

“Here are some more from Germany and Canada,” he said, lifting up another printed page.

“What do you think it means?” I asked.

“The game has become corrupt. These people are gone. And if you two keep playing, the same thing is going to happen to you.”

He grabbed Chloe and me by our shoulders, held us together, and did his best to focus his wild, bloodshot eyes. “From now on, the game is off-limits. You understand?”

We nodded.

“I have to get back to work,” he said, and with that, the Magician kicked us out of his office.

As I was closing his office door behind us, I heard him yell out: “I mean it. No playing the game!”

The Magician’s warning was sobering. His had been by far the most knowledgeable and encouraging voice when it came to the game.



* * *



—

It was right after I’d met the Magician that my interest in Rabbits became a lifelong obsession.

From that point forward, I did almost nothing but try to uncover the strange anomalies, patterns, and connections that might lead me into the game. I had almost as much fun uncovering secret Rabbits chat groups filled with similarly obsessed people as I had trying to figure out how to play.

The entire experience felt like coming home.

I’d spend days combing through clues online, talking to other players, trying to find out information about the next iteration.

One day, shortly before the ninth iteration ended, I was out following a clue.

I’d uncovered an anomaly in a scanned photograph of the top Billboard hits from 1979 that I’d found online. A misprint in a certain artist’s chart position led me to an independent art show in a gallery in San Francisco. At the gallery, I discovered something in one of the paintings that led me to a small theater in Portland, Oregon, where I met with a bunch of musicians who told me about a secret exclusive event—a performance that was being held at the home of the owner of a local boutique record label. There was supposed to be a clue of some kind hidden in the band’s set list, something potentially relevant to winning the current iteration of the game.

It turned out there was no clue—at least nothing I was able to uncover at the time—but it was a really great show.

On the way back to my hotel, however, something strange happened.

The night was overcast and cool, the moon and stars hidden somewhere deep behind the dark gray clouds that had been threatening rain all day. I’d been going over some recent clues in my mind, trying to find a connection between a Blue Oyster Cult album, a Kundera short story, and a gas plant in northern Russia.

As I walked through the quiet streets of an upscale residential neighborhood mulling all of this stuff over, I was struck by an overwhelming feeling that somebody was following me.

I spun around, but nobody was there.

I started walking a bit faster, but no matter how fast I walked, I could still feel somebody or something back there not only matching my speed, but accelerating. I turned around again.

Nothing.

As I continued to walk through that neighborhood, I could feel whatever it was behind me getting closer, slowly sucking the air and light out of the world as it moved.

I felt a sudden windless chill and turned around again.

This time I saw something—or rather, a lack of something.

There was a kind of darkness hanging way up in the sky—a pool of thick inky murk, blacker than the rest of the night—and it was moving toward me, slowly sinking into the world from somewhere else. I could feel its hunger. Not only did I understand that this thing was invading our physical world from someplace far away, I knew that it was coming for me specifically.

I doubled my speed in an effort to get farther away from it, even as I told myself there was no way that thing could be real. I was simply experiencing a mental break of some kind. I just needed to relax and let it pass.

But it didn’t pass.

And at that point I felt something moving forward from within the swirling darkness like a wave. This wave was darker than everything around it—and I understood that, whatever this thing was, it was going to completely erase me from the world.

I felt the temperature drop again, and a dampness filled my nostrils. It smelled like moldy grass and sludge from the shore of a rotten lake.

I tried to run, but my feet were stuck.

As I stood there, a wet cold entered my body from somewhere deep beneath the ground and moved slowly up my legs, eventually clouding its way into my head. I tried to call out for help, but my mouth was suddenly filled with coarse black hair that tasted like the sour musk of an oily animal from the sea.

I tried everything to shake it off and get away, but I couldn’t move. I was frozen in place as the darkness rose up into the night sky and poured forward to devour me completely.

Then I woke up.