“No worries. Ask away.”
“Okay, so, first thing,” Chloe said. “Have you ever heard of Rabbits?”
“Um…I’m sorry, what?”
“Not the animals. We’re talking about an obscure underground alternate reality game,” I added.
Nothing from Carlotta.
“Carlotta? Are you still there?”
“I’m here. Yes. Sorry, no, I haven’t heard of anything called Rabbits specifically, but the cult was definitely involved with some kind of weird game.”
“How so?” Chloe asked.
“Well, it was this thing that the elders would do with some of the adepts—a ceremony that was supposed to guide them to what they called the sacred path. I remember hearing a couple of them refer to that process as ‘the game’ at some point.”
“Do you know what they meant by the sacred path?”
“Not really, but they also referred to it as the path to the Gray God.”
“How long were you part of the group?”
“Oh, it’s definitely a cult, not a group, and I wasn’t really part of it. I was there for less than forty-eight hours. My friend was a journalist who’d been embedded with those weirdos for a year. She was writing a long-form article for a national newspaper. Near the end of her time with the cult, she began feeling like something was off, like she might be in danger, so she asked me if I’d be willing to join the group for her last week, you know, to keep an eye on her.”
“You weren’t worried about the fact that it was a cult?” I asked.
“I mean, I was only there for a short time, but I was worried about my friend. I’d tried to convince her to leave, multiple times, but she told me she’d put in way too much effort, and that she was close to discovering something big. I suppose I would have been more concerned had I known what was going to happen to those two girls.”
“The girls who were caught having sex with the minister on Glastonbury Tor?” I asked.
“No, the girls who disappeared.”
“What girls?” Chloe asked.
“The two girls who met the Gray God, if you believe those lunatics.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Okay, so my friend was pretty high up in the cult at this point, and she was able to persuade the elders to let me come along on what they call pathfinding.”
“What’s that?” Chloe asked.
“It was bloody nuts is what it was. First the adepts, including my friend, would get together in a room filled with all kinds of really strange old computers, do a boatload of drugs, and then they would somehow try to find the path to the Gray God. This was part of the thing I heard a couple of them refer to as ‘the game.’？”
“And you don’t recall them using the term ‘Rabbits’ at any point?”
“No, not that I remember, sorry.”
“What happened to the girls?” Chloe asked.
“Okay, so after they did whatever crazy shit they did in that room, the rest of us joined them, and we went out pathfinding.”
“What does that mean, pathfinding?” I asked.
“Apparently, during their session they’d discovered some kind of clue, and we were all going out to Whitechapel to find it.”
“What was the clue?”
“They’d discovered a street that didn’t exist.”
“What does that mean?” I asked. But I knew exactly what she meant.
I felt a deep thrumming building in my chest. A street that didn’t exist. This was Emily Connors’s impossible woodpecker, this was that version of Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World with too many windows in the farmhouse. This was Sidney Farrow forgetting who I was.
This was Rabbits.
“All we were told was that it was a street that didn’t or shouldn’t exist,” Carlotta continued. “They didn’t know exactly where it was, so we were split into three groups of four. My friend and I were part of a group that included two young women, barely into their twenties.”
Carlotta stopped talking for a moment. She was clearly upset.
“Take your time,” Chloe said.
Carlotta took a few deep breaths and then continued.
“Right. Okay, so the two young women were really excited. They kept referring to a page covered in wild scribbles. I think they were using it as some kind of map to guide us through Whitechapel.”
“Do you have an idea where they found that map?”
“Apparently the drugs they’d taken during the first stage of the process helped them enter a trance, and they’d just write down whatever popped into their heads, like automatic writing or whatever. They scribbled all kinds of words, crazy symbols, and patterns. Somebody was in charge of looking at everybody’s scribbled nonsense and picking out repeating words and patterns. They took those repeating bits and apparently that’s what they used to build their map. At least, that’s what my friend told me.”