and we don’t even know it.”
She was talking a hundred miles an hour, like she’d had a box of Cocoa Puffs and a couple of quarts of Mountain Dew for breakfast. She took a breath
and continued.
“There’s too many coincidences out there. Something’s going on—
“We weren’t supposed to find this. We’re not supposed to have it. Because it’s proof that not everything is as it seems. I mean, why can’t we photograph
it? Answer me that.”
Eddie shrugged. He looked a little cowed by Weezy’s outburst. “I dunno. Maybe the camera’s broken.”
Weezy tilted back her head and screeched at the ceiling. “Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it’s not there. Look at those pictures!
It’s staring you in the face but you don’t see it because you don’t
comfortable little worldview that we’re in control. Wel , we
She stopped, breathing hard. Eddie didn’t speak. Neither did Jack. He’d never seen Weezy like this. Sure, she got hyper at times and had al sorts of
strange theories about everything from the Kennedy assassination to Charles Manson, but this was kind of scary. Someone had pushed her hyperdrive
button.
She turned to him. “What about you, Jack? What do you say?” She held up the pyramid. “Something wrong with the camera or something wrong with
this?”
He remembered how clearly he could read his T-shirt in the last photo, yet how blurred the pyramid was, even though he’d been holding it against his
chest.
“The pyramid.” He quickly held up his hand to cut off another speech. “I’m not saying it has anything to do with secret histories—could be it’s made of
something that does tricks with light—but I don’t think it’s the camera.”
She sighed and fixed him with her big dark eyes. “Thank you, Jack. That means a lot.”
Even though he’d witnessed her mood changes before, her sudden calm jarred him. She’d dropped from pedal-to-the-metal to cruising speed in the
blink of an eye.
“I want to know what it is,” he said.
She nodded. “I’ve
“Wel , we won’t find out sitting here.”
“Right,” she said, her voice barely audible. “Let’s go see Mister Rosen.”
3
Eddie had decided that defending the Earth in
talked of beating the world-champion score of eighty mil ion points. Fat chance.
Jack and Weezy could have walked but figured bikes were faster. Neither wanted to wait any longer than necessary. Jack led the way as they pedaled
west, the morning sun warm on their backs.
Funny, he thought as they rode, how he’d lead the way around town, but Weezy tended to take the point whenever they entered the Barrens. Almost as if
something in Jack knew the Barrens were her turf and made him take a step back when the pines closed in.
As they headed for downtown, Jack noticed people in passing cars slowing to stare and point at them.
Cal ing it “downtown” was kind of a local joke. It consisted of eight stores clustered around the traffic signal at the intersection of Quakerton Road and
Route 206, a rutted, patched stretch of two-lane blacktop running from Trenton to the Atlantic City Expressway. Johnson didn’t rate a ful traffic light, just a
blinker.
As Jack had heard it, Quakerton was the town’s name until 1868, when President Andrew Johnson, maybe trying to get away from the impeachment
proceedings in Washington, spent three nights in the town’s one and only inn, now long gone. Seemed no one had liked the name Quakerton—after al ,
not a single Quaker had ever lived there—so they changed the name to Johnsonvil e. By 1900 it had been
