I looked over at Chloe. She gave me a sign to keep talking.
“Umm…so, do you think that Minister Jesselman’s suicide means that the eleventh iteration of the game has started?” I asked.
“You saw The Circle and heard The Phrase, ‘The Door Is Open’？”
“Yes,” I said.
“Then it’s started,” he said, and kicked a pair of rolling chairs over in our direction. “Maybe you two could take a look at something for me.”
We practically fell over each other on our way to him. The Magician didn’t normally ask for help looking into anything.
He had identical websites loaded on the two computers. The site was something called Abbey’s Skirt.
“What is it?” I asked as Chloe and I sat down on either side of the Magician.
“It’s a website,” he said, then leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes.
“How long have you been working?” Chloe asked.
“I don’t know,” the Magician said, still rubbing his eyes, “not long enough.”
“What is it that you’re trying to find?” I couldn’t see any difference between the two sites. They appeared to be identical.
The website was simple—an Art Deco image of a woman in a skirt, hands crossed in front of her waist, the title Abbey’s Skirt below the graphic, and a long blank form field with an enter button.
“Why Abbey’s Skirt?” Chloe asked.
“Abbey’s Skirt is an anagram for ‘Rabbits keys,’？” the Magician said. “There was a discrepancy here when I looked earlier.”
“What kind of discrepancy?”
“I don’t know…but it was there.”
“They look the same now,” Chloe said.
“Yes, they are. Same URL. Same company. Same source code.”
“So—” I said. “Is Abbey’s Skirt something important?”
“This site used to be the gateway to a bulletin board, a place we’d come to discuss the game,” the Magician said as he stood up and stretched. Then he slowly looked around the room as if he hadn’t seen it for a long time. “This place is a mess,” he declared, shaking his head as he walked across to the window, lifted the bottom of the wooden frame about six inches or so, and lit a cigarette.
I took another look around the room. Like the Magician said, it was messy, but it was a very familiar kind of messy. It reminded me of something. I looked over at Chloe and wondered if she was thinking the same thing.
It looked almost exactly like Baron’s place the night before he died.
“If you know where to look,” the Magician said, “there have always been bulletin and message boards where people gather and talk about the game.” He exhaled a cloud of smoke and stared out at the city.
I looked over at Chloe, unsure if I should say something.
She shook her head.
Eventually, the Magician continued. “This particular bulletin board was very active in the midnineties. A lot of us came here to discuss developments with the game, but there was one participant in particular—somebody who went by the name Neuromancer—who always knew a lot more than the rest of us. He would only post sporadically, but it was always something helpful or insightful.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Well, for one thing, it was Neuromancer who suggested we consider the game outside of its existence in the form most of us refer to as the modern version—the version that began in 1959. He was convinced that the game had existed for much longer.”
“How much longer?” Chloe asked.
“Perhaps as long as humanity, life, or the Earth itself. Neuromancer believed that Rabbits was extremely dangerous and powerful—that it was a game, but so much more. He hinted that there might be something…otherworldly connected to it.”
I experienced a sudden chill. It was probably the fact that the Magician had recently opened a window. I crossed my arms to try to keep warm.
“I was very interested in what Neuromancer had to say,” the Magician continued, “not only about the historical version of the game, but the danger surrounding the modern version as well. He came at everything from a new angle, told us he was searching for something ‘behind the game,’ something…” The Magician trailed off, seemingly lost in thought for a moment.
“Something otherworldly?” I suggested.
The Magician took a long drag from his cigarette and closed his eyes.
I didn’t move. I didn’t want to do anything to startle the Magician, to make him stop talking.