Rabbits(86)

The scene with Robert Mitchum unfolded just as I remembered, with the two hands, love and hate battling for supremacy, but something was wrong. In the version I remembered, “love” had been written across the knuckles on Mitchum’s right hand and “hate” across his left. In the version I was looking at now, the words were reversed.

I performed a search and took a look at a dozen or so images. They were all the same. “Hate” on the right, “love” on the left.

I felt a wave of panic wash over me, and the world went black.



* * *



—

I was jarred violently awake by a beeping and blaring Klaxon followed by an announcement.

It was a test of the Washington Emergency Alert System.

I jumped up and switched off the television. The room was suddenly dark and completely silent. The only light came from the clock on the DVR: 4:44 a.m.





NOTES ON THE GAME:

MISSIVE BY HAZEL


     (AUTHENTICATED BY BLOCKCHAIN)


Find the game. Play the game.

Once you discover the entry point phrase, “The Door Is Open,” it’s time to follow the clues and find your path.

Once The Door Is Open, the game begins to focus on those players who are making progress. The game will guide them.

As the clues get deeper and more complex, the players begin to fall away. Eventually, if you make it far enough, you will be one of the few remaining who know something is different. You will be one of the few who understand. You will be one of the few who may have touched another world.

—HAZEL 8





27


    THE CHILDREN OF THE GRAY GOD


I must have fallen back asleep, because when I woke up to the sound of somebody buzzing my apartment, it was after noon.

I stumbled into the living room and hit the button that would let whoever it was into the building. I didn’t have the energy to ask. If it was Swan and her twins, so be it. I unlocked my door and started the process of making coffee.

As I was pressing the lever down on my electric kettle, Chloe rushed into my apartment and shoved open my living room curtains.

“What’s with the darkness, K?”

“It’s Seattle. It’s always dark.”

“That’s why we need as much light as we can get,” Chloe said as she moved through my apartment and switched on all of the lights. “Cousin Johnny’s going to call as soon as he gets a break on set.”

“Johnny from England?”

“Obviously.”

“Didn’t you guys have a fight?”

“His mother and mine hate each other, but we’re cool.”

“When’s the last time you spoke with him?”

“His dad’s funeral, I think.”

“Okay, so…why is he calling?”

“I texted him last night. He said he might know somebody who was in that sex cult.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, he knows way too many people.”

Chloe pulled her laptop out of her backpack.

“I found something else,” Chloe continued.

“What is it?”

“Minister Jesselman was working on an Internet privacy bill on behalf of a number of lobbyists at the time of his death.”

“And?”

“And, one of the companies connected to that bill is Chronicler Enterprises.”

Chloe opened up her computer.

“Wait,” I said. “Isn’t that the company behind Tabitha Henry’s escape rooms?”

“It sure is.”

“Shit. Were you able to dig up anything else on them?”

“There’s nothing online but a defunct URL.”

Chloe loaded a Web page, which displayed the following text.

Page not found (404 error).



Below the text was the ubiquitous error 404 graphic of an exclamation point inside a yellow triangle.

It was a dead site, but something about it looked familiar. It took me a few seconds to figure it out.

“The font,” I said.

“What about it?”

“It’s the same.”

“The same as what?”

“As the error message page the QR code led us to from those Gustave Doré drawings we found in the museum.”

I loaded that website on my laptop and we compared the page from the QR code that featured the 404 error message below the graphic of a spinning ball, with the new site that Chloe had found featuring the same error message above a triangle with an exclamation point.

The style of the pages and the font were exactly the same.

“They look identical except for the graphic,” Chloe said.

We took a look at the HTML source code using the developer tab in our browser, but we couldn’t find anything in the code.

“What is this stuff?” Chloe pointed to a line of text that appeared at the bottom of each of the two pages. There were a bunch of seemingly random numbers, spaces, and letters followed by the message: Request failed with HTTP status 404.

“Looks like nonsense,” I said.

Chloe nodded.

“But…what if it isn’t?” I leaned in for a closer look.