Cyrus Gowdy was at least twenty years younger in the photo. It was in color, eight inches by ten, mounted in a simple frame of black plastic.
And it was a revelation.
Gowdy stood under the twenty-foot Martian with the Martianland sign in the parking lot...only the Martian was a statue of a man with a beard and a long, black coat.
And the sign did not say "Martianland."
"What the fuck is 'Gaudiland?'" said Quincy. He had to duck to keep from bumping his head on the rafters of the little house under the willow.
It was more like a big shed, actually, extending ten feet from the tree's trunk in all directions. Light filtered in through the rows of tiny windows on all sides...but the brightness didn't change the fact that the place was extremely cramped and cluttered.
Shelves ringed the tree trunk, four high, piled with big, yellowed rolls of paper and dusty paint cans and cardboard boxes. Plastic tubs formed a kind of workbench around the inside wall of the façade, heaped with old tools and parts and rags.
Scattered amid the junk were a few framed and unframed photos. The one with Gowdy by the "Gaudíland" sign had been hanging from the trunk, right at eye level, when Dunne had first come in the door.
"'Gaudiland.' 'Gaudiland.'" Giant Quincy scowled...then grinned. "Wait! I get it! It's a typo!"
"Typo?" said Dunne.
"'Gaudiland.' Sounds like 'Gowdyland.'" Quincy nodded excitedly. "It's Gowdy's park, Gowdyland...but they screwed up the sign in the photo!"
“Not ‘Gowdyland.’” Hannahlee had spread out one of the big rolls of paper and was staring at it. “Not a typo, either.”
Dunne, Quincy, and Starla crowded around her. As Dunne gazed over Hannahlee’s shoulder, he thought the top sheet of paper looked like some kind of plan for the park.
“It’s ‘Gaudíland.’” Hannahlee stressed the “i” when she said it. “As in Antonio Gaudí. The famous Spanish architect.”
“Really?” Starla leaned closer to the page.
“Well of course!” said Quincy. “I knew it all along. Wanted to see how long it’d take for the rest of you to figure it out.”
“When were these drawn?” Dunne, like Starla, had to lean closer to see the fine details, since the pencil on the plan had faded.
Hannahlee lifted the plans higher and squinted at the bottom of the sheet. “The date on them is 1980.”
“Wow.” The drawing was an elevated view, looking down from above, but Dunne still recognized some of the structures he’d seen in the park. “And Cyrus never mentioned this place?”
Hannahlee shook her head and rolled away the top sheet. The next page was a building plan for a single structure—the very “house” in which they stood, complete with willow tree.
In the information grid at the bottom of the sheet, Dunne saw the name of the building...and it wasn’t remotely Martian. “'Casa Milá,'” he said. “That’s what this place is supposed to be.”
“Something Gaudí designed?” said Hannahlee.
Dunne shrugged. “What’s next?”
Hannahlee turned to the next sheet—a drawing of “Castle Mars,” complete with tower topped with abstract flowers. “'El Capricho,'” she read. “That’s our castle.”
When Hannahlee rolled away the sheet for El Capricho to reveal the next, Dunne grinned and jabbed the paper with his finger. “I knew that wasn’t the original paint job.”
The drawing on the page showed the “Great Wall of Mars” in all its original glory. Instead of coats of monochromatic paint, the rippling wall in the sketch was surfaced in jigsaws of fractured tile imprinted with fragments of a multitude of designs.
“'Park Güell Bench,'” Dunne read from the sheet. “So much for the Great Wall of Mars.”
Hannahlee flipped to the next sheet. “The Sphere-Beast and Dragon Lion are also from Park Güell." She turned another page. "And the Martian Invasion Rockets are the Palacio Güell Chimneys.”
"Lots more pages, too." Dunne fingered the stack of sheets. "Enough for every attraction in the park, I'll bet."
"Incredible." Starla hooked a finger through the loop of her sweater's zipper pull and tugged it down a fraction of an inch. "I never would have guessed."
"Did Cyrus build this place, then?" Hannahlee slowly turned another page. "If so, why? And why have I never heard of it before?"
"Who turned it into cheesy Martianland? That's what I want to know." Dunne admired the latest plan in Hannahlee's hands—a blocky structure covered in blue and white checkerboards. "The original buildings were awesome."
"I can't even argue with that." Quincy scooped a handful of photos out of a shoebox. "These pictures of the early park kick ass."
Dunne grabbed a few photos from the shoebox and flipped through them. Quincy was absolutely right.
Some of the photos showed the original structures in the park, pre-Martianland...and some were clearly of the full-size Spanish buildings on which they were modeled. Aside from the difference in scale, the models and originals looked identical—showpieces of ingenuity and craftsmanship, each in its own right.
One in particular leaped out at him—an immense, unearthly cathedral. Its towers looked like massive pods or fingers growing toward the sky. Its walls were a forest of statues surrounded by leaves and branches cut from stone. The whole thing looked raw and organic, not at all like a typical cathedral of squared-off corners and sharp spires and uncluttered walls.
Flipping over the photo, Dunne read the name on the back:
La Sagrada Familia.