The Briar Archive

11. The Rabbit Hole-1

The Rabbit Hole

“There are so many rabbit holes and most of them don’t lead anywhere.”

Mike

Whoever King Rabbit was—an actor, another recruit masquerading as a malevolent “collector,” or some honest-to-guild magical entity—he certainly had the Mountaineers’ attention. They were all deeply concerned about Deirdre being stalked in real life, especially since she’d mentioned in previous blog entries that she’d sworn she’d seen a man watching her on several occasions back in London.

This was only the second of sixteen “fragments,” and the hunt had already taken a strangely dark and foreboding tone. The Mountaineers began investigating King Rabbit immediately. This would normally be my bread and butter, but without a real name or Deirdre’s physical location, I essentially had nothing to go on. Bash, the Mountaineers’ resident tech expert, couldn’t find an IP address for King Rabbit, but Mike eventually stumbled across the Rabbit’s i********: page. The only image he’d posted, though, was the one he had shared on the forums.

After Mike reached out to King Rabbit on i********:, the Rabbit took to taunting him on the forum:

King Rabbit:If I’m dangerous, what does that make @Mike? He’s halfway to my home in the ground and hasn’t told a single soul. Hmm . . . naughty naughty, Mike. Wanting all the glory for himself.

He then called out other recruits by name.

King Rabbit:Johanna, Piki, AlisonB, Bash, CameronP, AndyisNowSkynet, how do you feel about the mouse in your midst?

The Mountaineers had been a historically tight-knit group and hadn’t changed in that regard over the past two decades. Even for the new recruits, there was a bond between them, an unspoken rule that they were in this together, whatever “this” was. If King Rabbit was trying to sow discord among the Mountaineers, he was going to have to try harder. Mike led the initial charge.

Mike:To my fellow recruits, I believe KR has just unwittingly given us a clue. I believe he has a secret to one of the fragments. Remember, the Book told us to look for one “in the ground.” And if I’m “halfway to his home in the ground” then this is one rabbit hole we definitely need to explore.

As for his i********: page, before you can view it he has to accept you (which he did me). He has only one post: the doctored image of Deirdre in the gallery he’s posted here in the forums. We’ll have to see if we can find any other clues on his i********: page, if he follows anyone else, which images he’s liked, etc. to see if it leads us anywhere.

Who’s up for a rabbit hunt?

Piki noticed the tag line on the i********: page— “Burrow in the Fray”—and found King Rabbit’s website: burrowinthefray.com. The site was dark and beautiful. An image of a dim forest slowly scrolled across the screen in a never-ending stream of movement. Of course, this discovery had only emboldened King Rabbit, as he then commented.

King Rabbit:And down the burrow we all go. Come see my collection, come see.

Join me at the bottom where the fraylilies reach and the roots of things you need are waiting.

It’s sweet and black and warm down here, and all the eyes are watching.

Down below the scrolling image of the forest were four blank text fields, and a fifth far below those.

King Rabbit’s burrow ran deep. Somehow the mysterious entity, or at least the site he claimed as his home, was working in league with The Book of Briars to set out another strange puzzle to solve and further unlock the book.

It was here when more recruits began trickling in after finding the Guide, all eager to help discover just how deep the rabbit hole went. The only other clue they had was the photograph King Rabbit had posted. Piki noticed that the photograph was tagged at the Whitney Museum of American Art. A few weeks earlier, Deirdre had posted a photograph of a painting from the Whitney on her own i********: page: Work Reconsidered #1 by John Wilde.

The painting was of a woman with several butterflies and insects on her arms and in her hair. A fish and an apple sat on the table before her while she pointed up to a piece of paper floating before her. On the paper were the words, “OBJECTA e. Dv.”

King Rabbit then posted the image of Deirdre on the forums again, this time with a different caption:

King Rabbit:The butterflies were beautiful, all things (re)considered.

What wilde and wondrous work she found. What otherworldly sights for final days, laid before the bride of butterflies.

Lay gifts to mark this day. Nineteen fish with eyes that glisten and two score rotting fruit. Three worms await the day, but the bird has flown away.

The Mountaineers noted the references to butterflies, the play on the artist’s name, the allusions to the painting’s title. The final paragraph, which began “Lay gifts to mark this day,” was a reference to the year John Wilde married his wife, Helen: 1943. And it was Helen herself who was the subject of Work Reconsidered #1.

The painting held some significance; King Rabbit had, in his annoyingly clever way, told them as much three different times.

A clever and resourceful recruit, AlisonB, discovered that “OBJECTA e. Dv.” was the answer they had been looking for. She entered the Latin phrase into the first entry field in King Rabbit’s burrow, which revealed a word above the field—“Her.” What’s more, the word was also a hyperlink, leading to a fifteen-minute video of a rolling hillside with clouds and grass that swayed gracefully in the breeze. The sun set, then rose, over and over again for the full fifteen minutes.

However, AlisonB discovered that when the video was downloaded, it was in fact six hours long. And then King Rabbit posted to i********: a new picture of Deirdre, casually walking down a sidewalk with the following caption:

King Rabbit:We found a somber view, and darker still, when visions change with changing tides.

Several Mountaineers tried reaching out to Deirdre through her blog and social media, to give her a heads up, but strangely their comments never appeared. So they focused instead on solving the puzzle as quickly as possible. While some of the Mountaineers were trying to decipher the caption, others continued to scan the video for clues. How anyone was able to sit through six hours of (admittedly beautiful) monotony, I’ll never know. But Mike discovered that the word “EYE” appeared a few hours into the video. It faded into view for just a moment before fading out again. The clue was only visible for three seconds of a six-hour video.

Who was King Rabbit? What was his role or motivation in all this? Had The Book of Briars reached out to him prior to all this, recruited him? I even wondered, at the time, if he was possibly an old Mountaineer, though his teasing tone wasn’t playful, it was impatient, even cruel. He seemed to be taking all this as seriously as the Mountaineers.

While the burrow was being explored, Piki noticed that someone going by the handle “thelastofthetravelers” had posted a strange comment on one of Deirdre’s i********: posts.

thelastofthetravelers:A brave sourl released from jewelled eyes bereft of home, his light soars free.

It seemed unrelated to King Rabbit, but according to the last Book clue, the Mountaineers were looking for two fragments at once. The comment was briefly set aside, though, when King Rabbit reposted the second picture with a new caption:

King Rabbit:A final rising bow, a hand of bronze outstretched, to pull a dying man to death. What came of you, where did you go? Gifts bestowed upon the sea or something else did capture thee?

The location tag on this picture of Deirdre was Battery Park, and Piki made the connection between that clue, the location, and a bronze sculpture in Battery Park: the American Merchant Mariners’ Memorial, which depicts four merchant seamen with their sinking vessel, the SS Muskogee, after it had been attacked by a U-boat during World War II.

But it wasn’t until King Rabbit posted the Battery Park photo with a third caption that the Mountaineers were finally able to solve his puzzle.

King Rabbit:How cruel to watch the drifting men, captured cries caught in time, memorialized, mortality immortalized. Who are you? A monster with a cold glass eye, who would not look away.

Piki and fellow recruit Johanna discerned that the answer to King Rabbit’s latest clue must be Reinhard Hardegen, the captain of the U-boat that sank the SS Muskogee.

When they put that into the second text field in the burrow, the following word appeared: “eNor.” It linked to another six-hour video.

By now, it was apparent that it would be fully within the bounds of King Rabbit’s cruelty to hide each of his clues inside one of his maddening movies, so the Mountaineers began formulating a plan to assign different sections of the videos to different recruits, in order to make scanning them more manageable.

The plan proved unnecessary. Mike had software that allowed him to play video at an increased speed and was able to quickly scan it, finding the hidden clue within five minutes. It was the word “THE.”

The Mountaineers were gaining a rather visceral dislike for King Rabbit, and I couldn’t blame them. But King Rabbit wasn’t finished messing with their heads.

Below the first clue’s “Her” link was this:

Illustrator Helen Wilde did not die in 1966.

The Mountaineers speculated that this must be a reference to “the reality that was,” because all online references indicated that Helen Wilde had most certainly passed away in 1966.

They were keen to find out exactly what that meant, but in the meantime King Rabbit posted a third surreptitiously photographed image of Deirdre, accompanied by a cryptic caption.

King Rabbit:Born of your burned ancestors. What joy, what blessed escape, that bore them all beyond and brought them back to here.

This time, the location stamp for the image was the New York Financial District. King Rabbit then provided the picture again on i********: with a new clue.

King Rabbit:What burdens you have carried on your backs. The changes you have seen. Not only into salt, but walls and ways and pearls. Until they traded land and life. Until your time had come. When old water crashed against new shores.

When you crossed the waters to the lower land, did The People see the final sun? It was now New Amsterdam, and you’re now 3 of 9 and one. Waiting on a sea of stone, who carved out all your bodies then laid you out to send us off to other shores?

The Mountaineers traded several theories, but none seemed to lead them in the right direction. And then Endri shared this:

Endri:KR posted an i********: Story this morning with what looks like a hint to this leg of the fragment. It’s coy, patronizing, and creepy, as is usual for him.

In case it wasn’t clear, I hate the Rabbit King.

And it seemed Deirdre herself had become aware of her stateside stalker.

Deirdre: August 25th, 2016Okay, so now I think the boredom has morphed into something like paranoia. It’s been a funny week. I’ve been exploring further afield. Amazing trip to Coney Island and then the beach. Treated myself to a high-end cupcake instead of the usual processed junk version. But I digress . . .

I was in the East Village yesterday, casually debating with myself about which tattoo parlour I should let give me a tramp stamp (NB – this will NEVER happen!) I’d spent the best part of the morning trying to get Mr. Wallace on the phone. All to no avail of course. I’m beginning to think he’s just up and vanished. So still no answer on how long I can stay in the house or if there’s any other estate stuff I should be aware of. So I decided to distract myself with my ongoing fantasy about getting the worst tattoo possible.

I’d been looking at this one shop off St Mark’s when I noticed this guy stopped just up the street. At first, I thought nothing of it – this is New York, people stop and stare every second. But for some reason this guy got my attention. Something about him made me look twice. And when I did I went ice cold. It may have been my imagination, it may be just me being here without a set of mates and talking to myself too much, it could even have been a cupcake-induced sugar-high hallucination. But I swear it was the same man I saw outside my flat in Kentish Town.