The whole experience—following them here from my place, hiding in the bathroom, taking pictures of an exhibit that wasn’t yet open to the public—was both scary and exhilarating. This feeling was exactly what I’d been after when I picked up my first set of Dungeons & Dragons dice as a kid, and what I’d felt years later, when I’d heard Emily Connors mention the name Rabbits in connection with a mysterious real-world game.
This kind of intrigue and adventure was everything.
* * *
—
The summer before my parents died, and two months before our world would be changed forever by September 11, I climbed up onto the roof of our high school for the first time.
It’s amazing how many ways you can find to reach the top of something if you’re firmly committed. I chose a wide rusted metal drainpipe and a window ledge, but there were at least five other ways I could have made it up onto that roof.
I stood up there for a long time, staring out at the lights of the city.
The world felt smaller from that vantage point, and much easier to understand. Life was messy and complicated when you were in the middle of it, while it was rushing toward you from all angles, close-up and in full color. Up there on that roof, I felt like I could breathe a little better, zoom out just enough to feel myself situated in the cosmos. From up there I could make out the gridlike arrangement of the houses, streets, and lights and listen to the calming symphony of mundane sounds rising up from the neighborhood. Staring out at the shapes and patterns that made up the city, I felt like I was a bit more in control of my environment.
That summer I began climbing onto all kinds of roofs: houses, apartment buildings, a shopping mall, and countless others. I found looking out at the world from a higher vantage point meditative. It calmed me down, made it easier to think.
One night, while I was up on the roof of my high school, I discovered a hatch. It was clearly supposed to be locked, but the worn old padlock was just looped over its housing, unsecured. Whoever used it probably got tired of locking and unlocking it whenever they needed access.
I opened the hatch and found myself looking down a set of gun-metal gray stairs that led to part of the school I didn’t recognize.
I knew that it was wrong, but I didn’t hesitate for more than a second or two before I climbed down and entered the forbidden world.
And I was suddenly somewhere else.
It felt like magic.
Walking through the halls of school after hours was like descending into a shadow version of my own world. In this new place, things existed in a different state of being. It was as if everything was suspended there somehow, inactive until the bells rang at the start of September.
Wandering those halls at night alone in a place I wasn’t supposed to be felt special, and dangerous—which was exactly the way I felt as Chloe and I slipped between those huge sheets of canvas and rushed across that room to examine the exhibition called An Exploration of Heaven and Hell.
There had to be a specific reason Swan and the twins had visited this exhibit, maybe the same reason Alan Scarpio had quoted Dante to me in the diner.
There had to be something connected to the game.
* * *
—
As we explored the myriad works of art that made up that exhibit, we saw terrifying things, including some images by Gustave Doré and a number of truly bizarre religious sculptures and drawings, but one piece grabbed our attention immediately, an oil painting by an unknown artist.
It was harrowing.
Near the bottom of the canvas, hundreds of small figures poured from burning cracks in the earth in tiny rows as a dozen or so grotesque demons with animal heads stood poised to yank them up and consume them. There was one demon, much larger than the rest, towering over the proceedings like a twisted puppet master, its mouth wide and bloody, waiting to devour its next victims.
That demon had the head of a large hare.
Printed on the image, beginning directly beneath the bloody mouth of the enormous hare-headed demon, was the opening of the tenth canto of Dante’s Inferno, which began with the three words Alan Scarpio had said to me in the diner: Now onward goes.
Right at that moment, similar to what had happened to me in that high school when I was a kid exploring someplace I didn’t belong, the museum’s security personnel arrived and kicked us out.
* * *
—
“What do you think?” Chloe asked.
We were back at my place. Chloe was staring over my shoulder as I examined one of the photographs I’d taken of the giant demon rabbit painting.
“I think these might be significant,” I said, pointing to a group of tiny Roman numerals on some rocks near the bottom of the painting. There were four numbers in total.