“What for?”
“This picture had to be in Baron’s weird Rabbits box for a reason.”
“Okay,” I said, “but we should eat at some point. I’m starving.”
“Me too, but let’s check the alley first.”
* * *
—
It took us twenty minutes to get downtown.
It had recently stopped raining, but the streets were still wet. Walking along cracked and crooked sidewalks, looking up at the Lego shapes of overcast black-gray sky visible between the towering buildings, I almost felt like everything was back to normal, like Chloe and I were just moving through downtown enjoying a standard cool dark night in the Pacific Northwest. But then I remembered Baron, sitting in front of his computer wide-eyed and broken, and the Magician being ripped apart by some kind of horrible cosmic darkness. I grabbed Chloe’s hand. She squeezed back, and the two of us entered the alley.
We pulled the dumpster away from the wall, and used the flashlights on our phones to reveal the markings surrounding the circle and triangle that I’d discovered earlier.
But something was different.
Splashed across the original symbols and numbers on that brick wall, in thick yellow letters, somebody had painted the following question:
“Holy shit,” I said.
“Crazy,” Chloe whispered. She stepped forward and touched the yellow paint reverently, as if she was worried it was going to disappear the moment she made contact.
“It’s dry,” she said.
We took pictures of the wall in case we needed to compare it with my original photographs, but I could tell nothing had been changed other than the question that had been painted over everything.
Yes, we certainly were.
* * *
—
We’d just gotten into Chloe’s car and started driving when I thought of something.
“Can you pull around the other side of the alley?”
“You wanna check out the front of the building with the spray-painted message?”
“We might as well. I think it’s the pizza place with the chewy crust.”
“No, that’s a few doors down. Last week the space we’re looking at was a Holy Cow Records pop-up shop, and before that some hipster Pottery Barn thing. That’s where I bought those Edison bulbs you wanted to steal from my kitchen.”
“Right,” I said. “I remember.”
Chloe guided her car around the corner and pulled in front of the building. She was right. It was a retail space that had been used by a number of pop-up shops lately. It looked like the record store was still in there.
“Are we going in?”
“Is it open?”
“Looks like it,” she said. “You go in. I’ll park and order us some pizza.”
“Make my half plain cheese, please,” I said.
“So basic.”
“So perfect.”
Chloe drove away and I stepped into the pop-up record store. I thought I’d have to rush through the place, but the sign on the door indicated they’d be open for another forty-five minutes.
A twentysomething woman with orange hair wearing a fifties-style poodle skirt smiled at me from behind an old gray tanker desk as I entered. I smiled back.
I was the only customer.
I took a look around for anything that might be related to the game—messages hidden in the way a bunch of collectible records had been arranged on the walls, some kind of pattern in the décor, or the number of bins, but I couldn’t find anything.
If there was something in there related to Rabbits, it wasn’t jumping out.
A few minutes later, a young couple came in and I felt comfortable sneaking a few photos of the place. I tried to get shots of everything, including all the walls and bins, so we could go over them in detail later.
Chloe texted. She’d ordered and was sitting at a table in the back.
I waved goodbye to the woman behind the counter on my way out and hurried up the street to join Chloe. I felt my blood sugar crashing. I’d forgotten I was starving.
“Anything in the record store?” Chloe asked in between bites of pizza.
I shook my head.
As we ate, I tracked a tall blond woman walking by on the sidewalk outside the restaurant and wondered if Swan and the twins were lurking somewhere nearby, watching and waiting to pounce.
“What if your friend Emily’s right and Crow really is out there killing Rabbits players?” Chloe asked.
“Well, then, we might be fucked,” I said.
“Murdered by a game. What a way to go.”
“Yeah, what a way to go.”