I was standing in the middle of a familiar street.
Without realizing it, I’d run pretty much straight over to Baron’s place.
I had no idea if the people who’d been following me were still around. I needed to get out of sight as soon as possible.
* * *
—
I made my way along the narrow corridor between Baron’s building and the apartment complex next door, past the plastic chairs and the rest of the familiar junk. Just like the last time I’d been there, Baron’s living room window was cracked open.
I took a cursory look around to make sure nobody was watching, and then I pushed opened the window, crawled through, and tumbled inside.
* * *
—
I had no idea what the process was when somebody died, how it worked with the mortgage payments or what was done with a person’s personal effects, but the place looked pretty much the same as the last time I’d been there, except that the kitchen had been cleaned, all of his food was gone, and the weird makeshift murder wall he’d created had been removed.
I made my way across Baron’s living room, past the coffee table with the brass knob that always fell off when you bumped it, and through the dining room that had previously contained the murder wall.
I wasn’t searching for anything in particular, but I figured, since I’d taken the time to break and enter, the least I could do was take a quick look around.
I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to find anything. If Baron had something he wanted to keep secret or safe, he most likely would have hidden it somewhere on his laptop, which wasn’t there.
After a cursory search of the bedroom and kitchen, I sat down on the couch and took another look around.
What was I expecting to find?
Chloe and I had already gone through all of the weird nonsense written on Baron’s murder wall, and there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary in his drawers, walls, or cupboards.
I swung my legs up onto the couch, leaned back, and rested my head on the armrest.
As I lay there, staring at the ceiling in my dead friend’s apartment, I realized that it felt good to be inside his place, surrounded by his things: the clay ashtray he’d made in seventh grade （half a joint still balanced on the side）， the original 1963 Mouse Trap game by Ideal Toy Company （sitting in a constant state of half-assembly on his dining room table for more than two years）， and the huge framed poster of Mad magazine issue number 166 from April 1974 featuring a painting of a giant middle finger （a gift from me for his thirty-fifth birthday）。
I could almost feel him there in the room with me.
After I’d been lying on the couch for a few minutes, I started to get the feeling that something was different, like I was missing something obvious, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.
A few things had been moved around and his framed Sword and the Sorcerer movie poster was on the floor instead of on the wall above the couch, but those things weren’t what was bothering me.
And then I finally saw it. His Apple IIe.
Baron’s ancient Apple computer sat next to his turntable on a beat-up old brown wicker credenza his grandmother had given him. Everyone just assumed the old computer was decorative, and for the most part it was, but I knew that it actually worked. What I didn’t know was why it was plugged in, and why one of Baron’s dining room chairs was sitting in front of it.
I switched on the computer and waited for the old machine to boot up. A few seconds later, 8-bit music started playing, and a message appeared on the screen:
Your adventure is loading…
A few seconds after that, the following appeared on the screen:
EAST OF BARN
You are standing in a clearing in the middle of a densely wooded area. Located just to your west, at the far end of the clearing, is a large rust-colored barn.
There is a small leather case on the ground near your feet.
It looked like the opening scene of some kind of text-based adventure game like Zork—a Lord of the Rings–style fantasy game written in the late seventies by a couple of MIT students.
In Zork, you’d maneuver through a world of dungeons using simple commands like “take leaflet” or “read leaflet.” Zork had been inspired by the original text-based adventure game called, imaginatively, Adventure. Apparently the MIT guys weren’t all that impressed with Adventure’s limited vocabulary, so instead of “kill orc,” they made sure Zork could understand more complete sentences like “kill orc with broadsword.”
The lines of text on Baron’s computer screen were followed by a blinking cursor.