John Darnielle - Wolf in White Van

“Wait, really?” This was news.

“Yeah,” he said. “ Tigger. From the Winnie-the-Pooh books. From when I was a kid.”

I played one of your games through once. I wanted to ask, but there was something special in not knowing.

“Anyway, sorry I never said anything. I guess I figured since you never let on you knew me maybe you just didn’t want to talk.”

“It was pretty hard to talk to me then,” I said.

“Aww, man,” he said. “Are you OK, though? I saw some news story.”

“Recently?”

“Yeah, yeah. Recently.”

I’d been wondering; now I knew. “Yeah,” I said. “It looked bad but it’s OK now, I guess. Blew over after a while. Just in the past couple of days. Still getting my head around it.”

As we spoke I kept digging around in my mind trying to place his last name, but Teague was just Teague. I wouldn’t have heard his last name since roll call in some unremembered class over twenty years ago.

“Keith Jones,” I said when it came to me.

“Man, don’t call me that, nobody calls me that,” he said. We wrote each other’s numbers down, but in my heart I knew this was it.

Inside the shack the first thing you learn is that the astrologer is dead. You see the body of a man in a strange costume is how the turn begins: He is lying on the floor, his face twisted into a grimace. Smart players will spend the next turn searching for protective clothing and masks; overeager players will get sick when they leave this scene, and they’ll stay sick for a while. The air inside the shack is unbreathably thick with the smell of blood and candle wax and lamp oil and empty insect bodies. Charts and notebooks lie open around the corpse in a constellation; if you marked its points and drew a line connecting them, you’d have a shape that would later help open a door deep within the Trace, but nobody will ever notice this, or learn the name of the door, which you have to say when you open it or you end up in a blind corridor that traps you for at least four turns, which would probably outrage any players who made it that far. But who knows. What it would be like to make it that far is sheer conjecture.

Players who’ve got their protective gear on are free to look around and loot the place, but of course the whole point is the charts. You have to read them, and then you have to remember what you’ve read, or keep your game organized enough to go back and consult them later. You should, anyway; that’s the good they can do. But even if you just read through your turn passively, READ CHARTS tries to pay you back for your effort. HOUSE OF SCORPIO SCORPIO HOUSE STONE SARDONIX COLOR GOLD , it starts. IF SCORPIO ENTERING SOUTH DOOR HIGH LIGHT ALL OTHER DOORS WEST LIGHT, ALL OTHER SCORPIO DOORS WEST LIGHT WEST . I feel my own freedom remembering this turn, what it means to find a place where the world’s shut out for good at last, where all signs point back at one another and the overall pattern’s clear if you look hard enough. HOUSE OF NEPTUNE MARSH BEAST, RIVER BEAST, CLOUD-COVER GOOD, DRY COVER AVOID/AVOID. HOUSE OF LIBRA FISH NAME SECRET, SAY W/ EYE CONTACT AT ALL DOORS IN HOUSE OF LIBRA, ALL ADMITTANCE GAIN, ALL DOORS. HOUSE OF GEMINI GEMINI HOUSE STONE CHRYSOPRASE COLOR GREEN , the chambers in the Trace outnumbering stars in the sky and all the sands on all the beaches: IF GEMINI ENTERING FROM NORTH BEAR ORCHID, MY RESEARCH INDICATES and then three lines about various kinds of orchids and where they’re from, cribbed from who knows where and saved here, forever. There are twelve charts in all; it’s one of the longest turns in the game, and I probably overdid it a little, but every time I have to triple-crease the several sheets that make up the move, I smile.

If you go north after escaping Las Vegas you can skip the astrologer shack. The jagged route east will take you to a state fairgrounds; there’s lots to do there. But most people look at the straight line on the map and follow it like a beacon, and then they get their fortunes told. I’ve had people get a little angry about the sequence once or twice, people who after receiving “You Have Arrived At The Small Shack of a Local Astrologer” feel like they deserve a little more action for their money. But when they get inside the shack their tone shifts. There’s power in thinking you’re about to meet somebody who knows what’s next for you, and there’s another level of power in seeing that person’s body on the floor, having to get the information from him somehow now that he’s no longer in any condition to give it. This latter power is the greater power, full of dark, worldly secrets that you have to go out of your way to find out about, and I consider it something to be avoided, but I force everybody’s hand all the same; if you want to avoid the astrologer you have to put in extra work. Some do manage to shrug off my cues and go around, or go past without looking, or even get so far as approaching the door but get scared off instead of intrigued by the smell. I can see how they’d think they were being warned instead of lured, but the ones who don’t go in are in some way strangers to me.

Most players just drift off eventually. Their focus wanders; their interests shift. Maybe they finish their games stealthily, like Teague had, like who-knows-who-else had over the years. Chris Haynes was different. He’d been different in his gameplay from the day of his first move; his letters appeared as the fruit of long, careful consideration, small, smooth, dense bursts of thought in flowing script, punctuation adhering to some internal rhythm that was easy to pick up on and easy to follow, grammar not quite holding together but always moving the play forward. “ Sean, everybody says that’s your name so OK ,” one started.

I’ve been in Lordsburg for two turns, total ghost town now, time for me to re-hit the path. If the active ingredients in the roots of the flowers around here haven’t been weakened by radiation exposure, which technically I don’t think they should have been because (A) the river, and (B) they’re flowering normally, I refer you to the text of three turns back, “a few flowers poke up near the bank of the river,” not big flowers or spectacular flowers just flowers, then my health should be back to 85 % because I have been eating every root I see. Even better, flowering root plants mean it’s April? Late March, latest? So I can head north. I’m going to head north. As of last turn my choice was between a companion from an occupied schoolyard (no) or trying to wrangle a golf cart. I’m going golf cart. Let me know how it plays out

and then his initials, a cipher, something I could imagine him working out in grade school and holding on to all his life. CH . Write it again until every one’s exactly the same. Get so you can carve it into a desktop with a paper clip in one class period. A C whose high line arced but whose bottom line was straight, nearly the outline of a human eye but with a gap at the right, and then that tiny H inside it like an alien pupil. CH. Several times a month. CH.

I wonder if I’d remember Chris as fondly as I do if he hadn’t quit the game, but he did quit, formally, which as I say is not usually how it happens. Usually, people just seem to drift in their attention; long gaps form between their turns, and then at some point they don’t renew their subscriptions and I stop hearing from them. “Growing out of it” is the phrase that comes to mind, but this is an obviously problematic view for me, so I try not to analyze it much further than the bare facts. Something happens over time, and people stop playing. General rule. Except for Chris, who let me know why.

I got up last night at 2 am thinking about how to repair my rifle, I don’t even have a rifle except in the Trace , his final move began.