weird.
CHAPTER 3
Alison’s stomach heaved as her mind tried to make sense of what her eyes had just told her. Everything, including her own body, had turned inside out and exploded, but not really. She thought of a poster of an M.C. Escher painting Mrs. Blum had hanging in her classroom, of a staircase in the air that spiraled around and led nowhere.
Whatever she’d just seen was much stranger than that, but she was definitely somewhere. Just not anywhere familiar. And she didn’t know the oddly dressed, redheaded woman standing looking at her with a slightly sheepish grin.
“Hello, Alison,” she said in a low, rich voice that sounded like music—a cello, maybe, an instrument Mom had also tried and failed to teach her to play. “Sorry for the confusion, but I wasn’t expecting you till tomorrow.”
“Who are you, and where is this?” Alison said, gesturing at the wooden-floored room filled with high, tall bookshelves.
“I’m Gloria, the new school librarian. Didn’t Arnold tell you about me?”
Alison pointed an accusing finger at the woman. “Your library is bigger on the inside than on the outside.” She clutched her head, which was starting to ache in time to the beating of her heart, and groaned. “I think I need a doctor.”
“You don’t need a doctor, dear,” Gloria said, stepping closer to her and doing something with her hands in front of Alison’s face, too fast for her to see clearly. The headache receded as quickly as it had begun.
“But you haven’t answered my question. Where are we?”
“Why, in Chincoteague, of course.”
“That’s not the point. There’s no library or bookstore like this on the island. And I should know, I’ve been to all of them.”
“Well, technically, we’re sort of alongside Chincoteague. Your version of Chincoteague, that is.”
“My version? Look, I came here for help finding books for my AP History paper on how the High Ones stopped the Cold War, not to listen to a lot of weird riddles.” She paused, and added, half under her breath, “No wonder Arnold likes you.”
“I have some history books over here, on this shelf,” Gloria said, pointing with a lacquered fingernail. The nail was covered with more than just one color of polish—there was actually an intricate design of some sort on it.
How had this fruitcake ever gotten hired by that humorless old fart of a school superintendent, Mr. Wentworth? Alison remembered with a shudder the grilling she and Arnold had gotten when Dad enrolled them here in January.
“So your dad’s a newspaper reporter, eh?” He had pronounced the words as if they were a synonym for terrorist.
“Not anymore,” Arnold had said helpfully, while Alison tried unsuccessfully to shush him, “he got fired for writing articles disruptive to the Cosmic Harmony.” Arnold was always saying stuff like that. But Mr. Wentworth had had to enroll them both anyway. It was the law.
Well, whatever weird magic this Gloria creature had worked on her, she was here now, and she had the most amazing collection of books Alison had ever seen outside her father’s attic. But it didn’t take long for her to see there was nothing in the “history” section she could use for her class. The word history needed quotes around it because it wasn’t proper history, it was some weird kind of science fiction written straight-faced as if it were fact. In one book World War I had ended early and they still called it the Great War because there was no World War II, so the British and French Empires still existed and America kept mostly to itself, except for bombing the Japanese to smithereens when they tried to take over the Philippines. In another, which was printed on cheap paper like newsprint, the world was still recovering from a nuclear war America and the Soviet Union had fought over Cuba. In a third, America had gotten to Mars in 1976 all by ourselves, without any help from the High Ones. Alison gaped as she flipped the pages through gorgeous color photographs of white-suited astronauts walking through a rust-red desert, then flipped back to the title page with a sinking feeling about what she knew would be missing there.
She stood up and shook the book under Gloria’s nose. “This doesn’t have a SCOD sticker in it.”
“Really?”
“Really. I doubt any of these books do. But this one could get you in real trouble, you know, for disrupting the Cosmic Harmony.”
“I don’t see how a wee little book like that could hurt something so grand, do you?”
“Don’t give me that! You’re as bad as my dad! Which reminds me, I’d better get home and put his supper on the table!” And with that, Alison shoved the book in her book-bag and ran out the door, ignoring Gloria calling out to her to wait.
She expected to come out on Smith Drive, or maybe on Main Street. But nothing looked familiar. It was a lot darker than she expected, with a crescent moon floating behind a thin screen of clouds high in the sky. The familiar bright orange streetlights were gone, replaced by evenly spaced poles topped by pale, wavering blue flames that danced inside clear glass globes. They reminded her of the gas range they had back home in Pikesville, but since when was natural gas used for streetlights?
Alison began to walk without any idea where she was going. Was she even in Chincoteague anymore? The air smelled right, with the familiar salt tang and the faint sulfurous hint of marsh mud, and she could hear a seagull cawing just like the one that had passed overhead when she was hurrying to the middle school. But it was a lot colder than it had been when she’d left home, and how could that be?
Out of habit she was retracing her steps back home. But how could she be doing that, if these weren’t the old familiar streets? The street signs looked different, too, but squinting up at one, which was cream colored with black cursive letters that looked hand-painted, Alison was surprised to find herself at the corner of Poplar Street and Pension Street, less than half a block from the house. But everything looked so different, as in a dream. She scratched her head and set off walking, eyes firmly glued to the sidewalk so she could ignore all the strangeness around her. If I can just get home, everything will be normal again. But she felt how ridiculous this thought was even while thinking it, not least because even the sidewalk was strange, being made of weathered wooden boards instead of normal concrete.
Suddenly she bumped right into somebody. “Hey, watch where you’re going!” said a familiar voice. Alison looked up and started to stammer an apology, and relief flooded her—it was Shaniqua Thomas, the closest thing to a friend she’d made in this godforsaken town. It had helped break the ice that Shaniqua was black and also in the AP class, both things that made her an outsider even though her family had roots on the Eastern Shore going back three hundred fifty years. Of course, simply by their existence the High Ones had shown people that there was only one human race and we all had a lot more in common with each other than we did with three-meter-tall blue starfish with more useful appendages than a Swiss Army knife, but somehow not everybody had got the message yet.
“Shaniqua, hi! Am I glad to see you! Something really strange is happening and I haven’t even got an outline for my history paper yet ’cause I went to the school library to get some books for it but all the freaky new librarian there had was science fiction and did you hear there was another terrorist attack at the Capitol so it’ll take, like, forever to get into school tomorrow and what are you doing dressed like an American Heritage doll?”
Because she was. Dressed like an American Heritage doll, that is, in a long skirt that looked like it was made from a heavy green curtain, and were those actually white gloves she was wearing? And she was eyeing Alison strangely, and when she opened her mouth she was speaking in a weird accent, familiar Eastern Shore twang crossed with Beatles.
“My name is Sharon, and who are you?” Alison stared at her in shock. Shaniqua hated practical jokes and the people who played them. Her big brother Tavon was always hiding her homework, tying her shoelaces together, and short-sheeting her bed. So Alison couldn’t imagine how she could be playing a prank now. She waited for her