It turned out she’d moved to Seattle a couple of years ago to work on a book. We told her we were also located in Seattle and set up a meeting at a coffee shop near her apartment in an hour.
* * *
—
Sandra Aikman was Black, about five feet tall, with deep brown eyes and a quick, genuine smile that lit up her entire face. She told us about her continued interest and research into the subject of her thesis, and we explained that we were looking for information about something we’d recently discovered using a DNA-mapping service. We told Sandra Aikman that Mordecai Kubler was Chloe’s grandfather.
We totally lied.
Sandra seemed surprised that we’d been unable to find a copy of Kubler’s novel. She told us she had at least two copies of her own and that we were more than welcome to come back to her apartment to take a look.
It turns out she actually had three copies of the book. I asked if she’d be willing to let us borrow one of them. She handed us a beat-up old paperback, so well-worn that the title was no longer visible on the spine. She told us to keep it, but made us promise to share any information we were able to dig up on Mordecai Kubler, especially if we were able to track down any of his work outside of The Horns of Terzos.
* * *
—
The Horns of Terzos was a short novel, barely two hundred pages. Chloe and I took it back to her place, and read it together in just over four hours.
The story was a kind of retelling of the myth of the Minotaur.
In Greek mythology, the Minotaur is a creature with the head of a bull and the body of a man who lives in the center of the labyrinth—an elaborate maze designed by Daedalus for King Minos of Crete. The Minotaur is eventually killed by Theseus after an arduous journey to the center of the labyrinth.
Mordecai Kubler’s novel was a contemporary （at the time） fantasy take on the myth. The hero of the book, a young woman named Xana, must pass through the labyrinth, fight the monster, and save the world. There was a map of the fictional land of the story printed on the first page of the book. The mythical land was called Terzos, and its largest continent, Tsippos, looked remarkably similar to another landmass.
It looked like North America.
In addition to the shape, the names of the cities and provinces that made up the magical land of Tsippos were also somewhat familiar. On the far-right coast there was Other Manhattan and Other Providence, down south there was Other Orleans and Other Athens, and on what we’d refer to as the West Coast you had Other Angeles and Other Venus. Above that, what we call the Pacific Northwest was divided into two provinces: Other Poseidon and Other Victoria.
Xana’s quest in the book is fairly straightforward. First she must pass three tests: The Cavern, The Gauntlet, and The Gate. Once she’s made it through those three challenges, Xana is supposed to enter The Labyrinth and fight her way to the center. There, in the center of The Labyrinth she’ll have to battle and defeat her final foe: The Man in The Tower.
Yeah, it was quite a coincidence.
* * *
—
There were a glossary of terms and some additional maps in the back of the book—including a roughly sketched map of the area where the climax of the story takes place, a city in the coastal province of Other Poseidon called Oudwood. This rough map of Oudwood was something that Xana carried with her and included the markings and notes she had made on her quest to find The Tower.
Those markings looked very familiar.
On the map, Xana had traced the three points of the triangle that made up the first part of her quest: The Cavern, The Gauntlet, and The Gate. Up near the top of the map, surrounding the apex of the triangle, she’d drawn a circle representing The Labyrinth. In the center of The Labyrinth, The Tower.
“It’s The Moonrise,” Chloe said.
Here it was again—the symbol from my elevator dream, and the logo of the Gatewick Institute.
“A man in a tower and The Moonrise symbol; there’s no way either of those things can be a coincidence,” Chloe said.
“Coincidences are nonexistent in Rabbits.”
“You sound like the Magician.”
We sat in silence for a moment. I could tell that Chloe was thinking about what had happened to the Magician in that Super 8 movie.
I put my arm around her and she leaned her head against my shoulder.
“What are we going to do?” she asked.
“Shit, I was just going to ask you the same question.”
At that moment, all the lights and appliances in Chloe’s apartment flickered on and off a few times.
“Does that happen a lot?” I asked.