Kingdom Keepers II(31)

“You know what?” the thin man said, looking right at Finn, then at Philby, then at the stack of robots. “This place gives me the creeps sometimes. Some of these things look so real…I gotta tell you.”

“Found it!” the bigger man said. He held up a box with a lot of wires running out of it. “I knew the guys had borrowed it.”

He tucked the box under his arm. The two men reached the door. The thin man stopped at the light switch.

“Hey,” he said, “did you turn on the lights when we came in? Because I didn’t.”

“I don’t think I did.”

Finn felt sweat trickling down his rib cage. He calculated the distance to the emergency door, ready to run for it.

“Well,” said the big man. He switched off the lights.





19


FINN’S FIRST DECENT look at the contents of Jez’s diary came as he, Amanda, and Philby awaited the Park’s opening. The main parking lot was a steady stream of arriving vehicles. Awning-covered shuttles were used to transport visitors to the Park entrance. The shuttles were stacked up at the back of the lot awaiting use. The three kids sat on a shuttle bench together and reviewed their personal photocopies of Jez’s journal in detail.

Finn had always pictured a girl’s diary to be line after line of neatly written cursive on well-organized pages, the contents of which held secrets about her love interests. What he saw here surprised him. Jez’s was a stream-of-consciousness collage, a collection of images, sketches of animals, and musings. There were clothing receipts pasted into the pages; pieces of postcards, stapled; a fortune cookie fortune taped to a page; there were recipes, movie ticket stubs, pieces of torn photographs; ribbons and candy wrappers. There was an arch that looked like the letter M, with a blob of ink on the right side. Surrounding and interweaving it all were lines from poems, song lyrics, comments, and what looked like quotes from conversations she’d had. It was all mixed up into a mess of heavily scribbled pen and pencil.

“Are these supposed to mean something?” Finn asked, fingering the three photocopied pages.

“They must have meant something to her,” Amanda said. “Jez took her journaling very seriously.”

“And at what point did she cut off her ear?” asked Philby. “Go van Gogh.” He won a few smiles.

“Look,” Finn said, indicating the upper right-hand corner of the photocopy. “That’s a castle and a lightning bolt.”

“That’s what I told you about,” Amanda said. “And look down here.” She pointed to what was obviously a monkey.

“Yeah, but this could be coincidence, right?” Philby said, sounding somewhat apprehensive. “Are we actually going to believe a person can see into the future?”

Finn looked over at him with a dumbfounded expression.

“Okay, okay. But it doesn’t mean everything on this page is significant,” Philby protested.

“How do we know it isn’t?” Finn asked.

“This is several nights’ worth of dreams,” Amanda said. “You can tell because some are pencil, some pen. The movie tickets and postcards—that stuff is memories, reminders.”

“But what about this decal, or whatever it is?” Finn asked.

“No idea. A stamp, maybe,” Amanda said.

The letters were reversed, the image backward.

“There’s a tiger, a gorilla, and…what’s this, a bowling pin?” Finn turned the page upside down, but couldn’t quite tell what he was looking at.

“I think they’re all clues,” Amanda said.

Philby exhaled loudly, so as to be noticed. “We all want to find her, Amanda. But if we go chasing down sketches from her diary, then that’s a lot of valuable time that could have been spent looking for her.”

“I think we can trust this,” she said.

“We need more proof,” Philby complained.

“We have a castle and a lightning bolt!” Finn pointed out.

“On opposite corners of the page. There’s also an aqueduct, some balloons, and a railroad track.”

“These are dreams, not instant replays,” Amanda told Philby. “She had visions. Glimpses. How much of your dreams, your nightmares, do you remember? Bits and pieces are what I get. Sometimes more than that, a piece of a story, but not that often. Maybe we all dream pieces of the future but just don’t happen to know it. How often do we write them down or make sketches and keep track? She left us clues, Philby.” She waved the photocopy in the air. “This is the map of her dreams. Maybe she didn’t know she was leaving it for us, but there’s no ignoring the castle and the lightning, is there? So maybe not everything on here is helpful. It probably isn’t. But we won’t know that until we check it out. Right? We’ve got to check out each thing on here, because if even one other thing on this page can help us find her—” She covered her mouth with her fist, on the verge of crying.