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“Great, you caught up. Did you see where it went? It was somewhere around here.”
“Todd, I have been looking for you for five hours.”
“Farah, don't be ridiculous. It was… Seven. Oh! Maybe the tree? Help me climb the tree!”
“Todd, stop. Stop! It's 5:00 a.m., and you want to climb a tree looking for a rabbit.”
“No, I want to - a- ha! ”
Todd pounces in the grass and comes up a moment later, rabbit squirming in his scratched hands. He beams as he holds it out to Farah.
“See?” he says. “Told you I could - ow! ”
He hisses and nearly drops the animal as blood wells in a cut on his hand. Farah goes for the Neosporin on instinct. “We should get that to a doctor,” she says, digging out a bandaid. “Rabbits have all kinds of diseases - ringworm, rabies, pasteurellosis, mycobacteriosis, cryptosporidiosis –”
“It’s fine,” says Todd, juggling the rabbit from arm to arm as it kicks its long legs to escape. “Dirk wouldn’t give me rabies. I think.”
“It’s not –” Farah sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose. “Whatever. Can we go back to the motel now?”
---
“Are you Dirk?” Todd asks the rabbit.
He’s lying stomach-down on the stained motel carpet, arms resting under his chin, eyes alight with a feverish blue. Upon entering the motel room, the rabbit made a beeline under the bed, and Todd has not gotten it to budge since.
“Are,” Todd repeats, more slowly. “You. Dirk. Gently.”
The rabbit’s nose twitches. It’s a very twitchy rabbit. Dirk, Todd tells himself, was twitchy, too.
“If you’re Dirk Gently,” says Todd, “raise your left ear.”
He holds his breath as the rabbit nibbles its paws and appears to consider its answer. Something begins to twitch –
“Todd, where did you put the travel toothpaste?”
“Dammit, Farah, I was just getting somewhere,” says Todd, rubbing his head where he’s just hit it on the bedframe.
“Uh-huh.” Farah dives into the suitcase, the towel around her hair falling to one side. Todd turns back to the rabbit.
“Can you do the ear thing again?” he says. “Or - or just something. Thump your feet or something.”
Farah goes back into the bathroom and shuts the door. Todd drops his voice to a whisper.
“Please?” he says.
The rabbit tilts its head and then, very slowly, raises its –
– right ear.
Todd slaps the carpet with the flat of one hand, and the rabbit scurries backwards. “What was that?” says Farah, sticking her head back out of the bathroom.
“Nothing,” says Todd. “Sorry. Nothing.”
She closes the door again. Todd sighs at the rabbit.
“You never learned your lefts or rights,” he says, “did you.”
---
Todd falls asleep to a google search history of things like “how to turn someone back from a rabbit,” “rabbit human possession,” “animal transformation soul swapping not again shit,” and “what do rabbits eat.” He wakes up to a cold breeze and the rabbit attempting to force its way out the window.
“Farah,” he says, shaking her. “Farah - wake up!”
Before he finishes the second word, Farah is out of bed with a gun trained on the door. Todd steps back with his hands raised. The rabbit squeaks and falls off the windowsill.
“What?” says Farah, whirling in a half-circle towards Todd.
“Gun - gun down, please,” says Todd. “Look!”
He points at the window, and Farah hisses through her teeth and hurries to close it. “How did that happen?” she says. “I swear I closed it - did someone get in? Is someone outside? Was –”
“It was the rabbit!” Todd points at the offending animal, who is now curled up under the threadbare desk chair. “I saw him, Farah - he opened the window, he was trying to get out!”
Farah stows her gun away in the back of her pajama pants. “The rabbit... opened… the window.”
Todd nods fervently. “It has to be Dirk,” he says. “Normal rabbits don’t open windows. We should follow him - see where he’s trying to go! Hey, Dirk, come out from there –”
“Todd,” says Farah, her voice strained, “remember when we were in Waco? And you had an attack in your sleep? And got onto the roof?”
“This is different.”
“How, exactly?”
“It wasn’t –” Todd gestures around the room. “It was –”
His shoulders drop as Farah rubs a hand across her face. “I saw him, Farah,” he insists.
Farah presses the heels of her palms into her eyes and lets out a sigh with two months of frustration behind it. “Okay,” she says, dropping her hands. “Alright. Fine. Let’s follow the rabbit then. But after this - we need to talk, Todd. I’ll take you wherever you - wherever the rabbit wants to go, but I don’t think I can do this anymore.”
“Sure,” says Todd, not really listening. “We just - just need to follow the rabbit. To follow Dirk. Then you’ll see.”
---
Farah insists on stopping at a pet store before they take the rabbit anywhere else. The rabbit turns up its nose at Purina Complete Rabbit Feed - “Can you see Dirk eating that?” Todd asks - and only deigns to eat cilantro after ten minutes of Farah staring it down. This hurts Todd’s hypothesis, mostly because he thinks Farah could stare Dirk into anything in about ten seconds. Maybe rabbits don’t have great vision. Maybe Dirk really hates cilantro.
“And maybe it’s not Dirk,” says Farah, when Todd voices this opinion.
Todd picks out a yellow wheel-shaped chew toy and doesn’t respond.
They eat pizza for lunch at a picnic table high enough on a hill that Farah can watch anyone approach. When Farah goes to find a restroom, Todd looks down to see the rabbit nibbling on his pizza crust. “Hey,” he says, moving it off. “Farah says you can’t have that.”
The rabbit twitches its whiskers in a way Todd could swear is a huff.
“I know you’re Dirk,” he says.
The rabbit’s right ear twitches.
“If you’re Dirk,” says Todd, “hop three times.”
The rabbit blinks its giant eyes at him and does a single, half-hearted hop.
“Good enough,” says Todd. “Can you do that in front of Farah? She thinks I’m losing it.”
The rabbit does an even more morose hop. It’s not very convincing.
“Never mind,” says Todd. “If you try that, she’s just going to take you to the vet.”
This elicits a squeak, and the rabbit hides its nose in its paws. Todd thinks of the soul-swapping machine, which is broken, or sent back in time, or something, and how they don’t have Dirk’s body, anyway. How unethical would it be to stick someone else into a rabbit, so Dirk had opposable thumbs to solve this case? It’s not exactly what Todd imagined as an assistant, but it’s not the worst.
His hands shake with the beginnings of an attack, and he sighs and reaches for his pills. Dirk wouldn’t want this body. Better to be a healthy rabbit than a human with pararibulitis.
He pours out two pills and is arrested by a furry body nuzzling up to his knee. “What?” he asks Dirk.
The rabbit noses at the pill bottle. Todd covers the label and slips it back into his pocket. “It’s nothing,” he tells it. “Headache.”
It chatters its teeth at him, and he pushes it back to the edge of the table. “Stop it, or I’ll feed you more cilantro,” he says.
Immediately, the chattering stops. Todd checks over his shoulder. Farah is nowhere in sight. “Don’t tell her,” he whispers, and breaks off a few crumbs of pizza crust for Dirk to nibble till she gets back.
---
After lunch, Farah gives in to Todd and lets the rabbit direct them. This is, predictably, a disaster, as Dirk couldn’t even drive human, and none of them can agree on how the rabbit should direct them to steer. Eventually, they just leave the car by the highway and let the rabbit run away from them in a field. Todd is half-afraid it will vanish again, but it keeps stopping and looking back, obviously waiting for them to follow.
“See?” says Todd every time. “He’s definitely human.”
“It’s definitely… something,” says Farah doubtfully, but she doesn’t turn back.
After nearly two hours of walking, they reach a fence, and Farah screeches to a halt. “I knew he was leading us somewhere!” says Todd, ducking under the fence and breaking into a jog.
“Todd - don’t you see where we are?” Farah says. She gestures around, at the wide-open field, the barn, the dilapidated house. “This is where you found the rabbit in the first place. He just took us back to his home.”
“His - but - he –”
Todd turns in a full circle, unable to quite take it in. “No…” he says, his voice trailing off. “But he… But…”
Farah follows Todd through the fence and wraps an arm around his shoulder. “Todd,” she says, in the gentlest voice she can, “sometimes a rabbit is just a rabbit. Maybe it’s time to go home.”
“It wasn’t just a rabbit,” Todd whispers.
As if on cue, a car falls out of a tree.
---
There’s a body in the car. There’s a body in the tree.
There’s also a rabbit in the car, sitting in the front seat.
Todd doesn’t know much about rabbits, but he would swear the way its ears are half-cocked means it’s smug.
---
Farah kicks down the door to the house and lets the rabbit lead the way. She’s barely said a word since the whole car thing. Todd has barely stopped talking, but he’s managed not to say “I told you so,” mostly because he thinks he might get shot.
The rabbit vanishes down a hole behind a door that shouldn’t exist, and Todd follows it to find a nightmare Wonderland. The house is hung with hellishly bright streamers; a knife is bleeding from the kitchen counter. A purple monster chases the rabbit from bedroom to infinite bedroom till Todd scoops it up and dashes into the static void outside.
He sees Amanda.
“Of course you did,” Farah sighs.
The rabbit hops upstairs next, and Todd and Farah follow. It leads them to a room covered floor-to-ceiling in crayon drawings. “Woah,” Todd breathes, tracing the tale of a prince in a fairytale world. “What do you think this means?”
Farah, who’s taking comprehensive photographs of every picture with pursed lips and extremely exact angles, says, “I can very honestly say that I have absolutely no idea.”
In the center of the room is a bed that folds down from the wall. The rabbit hops up on the bed and sniffs around a wet circle in the center. “Gross,” says Todd. “Get away from there.”
He attempts to scooch away the rabbit, but it hops closer to the headboard. “Hey, be careful,” says Todd. “Sometimes these things fold u–”
The bed starts to move, the rabbit sliding precariously towards the crack. It squeaks and claws at the sheets, its rabbit eyes bulging in terror. Without thinking, Todd leaps towards it, trying to form a human buffer between bed and wall.
The bed snaps closed…
(There’s an instant, in-between, where the rabbit is curled up against Todd’s chest. Todd can feel the rabbit’s heartbeat, twice as fast as a human’s. And then, in that in-between, the heartbeats expand, gradually slowing, as the warm body against Todd begins to grow and grow and grow –)
…and two humans surface somewhere else.
“What the hell?” says Todd, shaking his head free of water as he clambers out of a pool. “What was - Dirk?”
“Hallo, Todd!” says Dirk, beaming broadly as he pops out of the water, ears twitching but otherwise fully human again. “Did you miss me?”
Todd shouts and jumps into Dirk’s arms. He wants to punch him. He wants to kiss him. He wants to maybe be somewhere less wet and slippery while all this is happening. He hugs Dirk tighter and thanks the universe and everything in it that something in his life has finally gone right.
“Don’t smother me, Todd, I’ve only had lungs again for five minutes,” says Dirk, squirming to get out of Todd’s arms again. “Normal lungs, at least. God, rabbits are awful, all those whiskers - incredible eyesight, though, can quite literally see in all directions at once - and the ears! Don’t get me started on the ears –”
“Dirk,” says Todd, still too enraptured at having found Dirk to mind the difficulty of breaking into Dirk’s conversation, “ why were you a rabbit? And why aren’t you, anymore? Where were you, anyway? We looked everywhere! And why - why –”
His voice cracks, and he winces, but Dirk catches it and breaks off. “Why… what?” he asks, suddenly unsure.
Todd condenses the seven hours in the field, the sleepless night, and the delusional morning into the simplest question he can: “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Ah,” says Dirk in resignation, his eyes dropping to the ground. “Yes, well. Er.”
An awkward silence falls, and Todd regrets asking. “Do you actually know left from right?” he says with a forced smirk.
“Obviously,” Dirk huffs.
“What’s your left, then?”
Dirk raises his left hand halfway, drops it, raises his right, and then throws both of them up in the air. “This is ridiculous,” he says. “What sort of functional adult doesn’t know lefts from rights?”
Todd shakes his head. “This explains so much about your driving.”
“My driving is excellent, thank you very much.”
The silence that follows this is less taut, and after a moment, Dirk says, “When I was in Bl - in there, I didn’t know… where you were. I thought maybe they’d gotten you, too. And I had plenty of time to imagine…”
Todd sits down on the ledge of the pool they somehow emerged from completely dry, an obviously magical thing that he’s going to have to deal with in about five minutes. But he has time for this first. Dirk bites his lip and then perches on the edge of the stone a few feet away.
“When Mona did… whatever she did, and I ended up in that field –”
“Mona?” Todd interrupts.
“Shush!” says Dirk, and Todd grumbles but complies. “When I saw you in that field,” Dirk continues, “once I got over you both being alive - I didn’t want you to get involved. You’ve seen how my life is normally, and with Blackwing in the mix…”
He shudders. Dirk told Todd about three things about Blackwing, and Todd is starting to realize how much he left out. Todd clears his throat. “So you thought you’d just solve the whole case by yourself,” he says, “on the run from multiple government agencies, as a rabbit –”
“There’s nothing wrong with rabbits, Todd,” says Dirk testily. “They’ve got speed, incredible hearing, the aforementioned eyesight –”
“Opposable thumbs?” says Todd, raising his eyebrows.
Dirk huffs towards the cavern wall, and the vines drift apart and then fall together again. Dirk opens his mouth to continue arguing, frowns, and moves towards the wall instead.
“You haven’t even told me,” says Todd, “what’s the case?”
“Ah! That is the question! Very excellent questions, you’re really on it with the questions today. And the answer, my long-lost assistant, is…”
Dirk pulls back the vines with a dramatic flourish to reveal crayon drawings that very nearly match the ones on the walls of the mysterious house, and says grandly, “Find the boy!”
Todd thinks it shows remarkable restraint that he waits an entire ten seconds before bursting out, “What?”