Eric thumbed through the pages of the second journal as he approached the small cemetery parking lot. It looked like more of the same nonsense to him. “I’m sorry,” he told Aiden, who was walking beside him with the other notebook, “but it all looks like insane ramblings to me.”
“Of course it does. It’s supposed to.”
It was supposed to look like this? “So, what, there’s some kind of code or something?”
“There is, actually.”
“This guy was a real paranoid nut,” said Paul. “You know that, right?”
Aiden shrugged. “Maybe. But he still knew what he was doing.” To Eric, he said, “You can skip all the stuff that sounds crazy.”
“That’s pretty much everything I can read.”
“Sounds about right. The whole point of the journal was to make it look like he was mentally disturbed. Even if someone found it, they wouldn’t take it seriously.” Aiden leafed through the pages of the first journal and pointed to the strange shorthand notes that Eric hadn’t been able to read before. “This is the actual journal.”
Eric looked from one to the other. “So how do we read them?”
Aiden didn’t answer for a moment. He looked a little closer at the pages in front of him. “Well, I’m not entirely sure, to be honest. Glen never told me how to break the code.”
“Well that’s handy,” said Paul. “So now what?”
Aiden didn’t seem to have an answer. He was still looking back and forth between the two journals. “I’m probably going to need some time.”
“Time is something we might not have,” Paul reminded him. “That cowboy could show up any minute.”
As they left Sterling Geldrin’s gravesite and set out across the expansive cemetery toward the vehicles, Eric had told Aiden about his experience in the woods after they were separated and about his conversation with Pink Shirt. He explained the aura plasma and how it had been used to spy on them all day.
Aiden was less visibly shaken by the idea of being watched than by the news that Glen was a former member of the very organization that murdered him. “Normer, huh?” Aiden had asked. “Funny, I never knew his last name. Thought I never would.”
Now Aiden was looking around nervously. “If that guy’s been spying on us while we’ve been here, he probably knows by now that the rock’s a dead end. He’ll be wanting the journal.”
It was true. And Eric found it difficult to believe for a moment that they weren’t still being watched. According to Pink Shirt, it only took a tiny drop of aura plasma to spy on their conversations. It could be hidden anywhere. And the cowboy would definitely want to keep an eye on them, in case he couldn’t figure out what AG meant. If he’d really thought that he was done with them, he would have killed Eric when he had the chance.
“Let’s get out of here,” agreed Paul. He was looking around now, too. It was surprising that they hadn’t already been attacked again.
“Definitely,” said Aiden. He opened the driver’s side door of the New Yorker and started to get in, but he paused and looked back. “But I still don’t know where we’re going yet.”
“Good,” said Eric. “Let’s not have someone waiting for us when we get there.”
“You go with the kid,” Paul told Eric. “See what you two can figure out. I know I’m not going to be any help. I’ll follow you.”
Eric nodded. “Good idea. We’ll keep moving. Make it harder for someone to surprise us.”
As Aiden pulled away from the cemetery and pointed the old New Yorker north, Eric began studying the two coded journals. It was a little hard to think with the loud rumbling of the Chrysler around him. “You need a new muffler, I think.”
Aiden shrugged. “It probably needs new everything. I was a little surprised it still started when I went to get it out of storage.”
They followed Boxlar out of town and turned onto Kerney Road, which would take them out toward the highway. Aiden clearly meant to circle around town in hopes of avoiding any unnecessary exposure, but being out in the country didn’t seem like the best idea to Eric. If the cowboy found them, he’d only have to run them off the road with his formidable pickup.
He focused his attention on the journals. There were very little words on these pages. With few exceptions it was little more than a series of meaningless slashes and curves and the occasional dot. He had no idea how he was supposed to get anything from it.
Retrieving Karen’s phone from his pocket again, he asked Isabelle if she had any ideas.
I CAN’T MAKE ANY SENSE OF IT. BUT I CAN’T REALLY SEE IT. IT’S JUST A BUNCH OF RANDOM MARKS
Eric had to agree. It looked a little like shorthand, but…
IT’S DEFINITELY NOT SHORTHAND. I PICKED UP A LITTLE OF THAT FROM ANOTHER PRISONER IN ALTRUSK’S HOUSE BACK WHEN I WAS FIRST TRAPPED THERE.
That narrowed it down slightly, he supposed.
SORRY
“Don’t worry about it.”
Aiden glanced over at him. “What?”
Eric shook his head. “Isabelle.”
“Oh. I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to him doing that.”
“I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to you talking about me in third person all the time.”
Aiden looked embarrassed. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay.”
Aiden stopped at a stop sign and turned left. They were driving around randomly. It was all they could do until they figured out Glen’s code. Or until the cowboy turned up to collect the journals. “I don’t suppose code-breaking is one of Isabelle’s skills.”
“Afraid not.”
“Bummer.”
It was a bummer. Eric flipped through the pages. There were obvious parallels between the two journals. There were the same number of pages, and in the same basic places. But the markings were completely different. “You said you needed both to be able to read it, right?”
“That’s what Glen told me when he gave me the first one and told me to hide it somewhere safe.”
“That was the one you pulled out of the motel wall, right?”
Aiden nodded. “I never saw the second one until I dug it up today. He told me I wouldn’t see it unless I desperately needed it.” He glanced over at the two journals. “I kind of thought it would make more sense once I saw it.”
“I don’t see anything here that makes any sense.” Except for a few scattered letters intermixed with the markings, nothing on any of these pages was even remotely legible. “But if you needed both journals then they must go together somehow.”
Aiden cocked his head suddenly. “Wait… Say that again.”
“Say what again?”
Aiden shook his head and held out his hand. “Never mind. Let me see those.”
Eric handed the two small journals to him and watched as he held them side-by-side against the steering wheel. For a moment, he seemed to stare at them, cocking his head slightly to the side and squinting.
“I’ll be a son of a…”
“What?”
Aiden blinked and gave his head a quick shake, as if he suddenly had a bad headache. Then he handed Eric back the notebooks. “Glen used to have this book of stereoscopic photographs. Two pictures side-by-side of the same scene, but from slightly different angles. He showed me that if you crossed your eyes and made the images overlap each other, you’d see a three-dimensional image without any kind of special glasses.”
Eric nodded. He was familiar with stereographs. “Similar to those old Magic Eye pictures.”
“Yeah. I thought it was kind of neat, but I never got as much joy out of them as he did. I thought it was kind of silly, actually.”
Eric looked down at the journal pages in front of him. “Wait… You mean these pages are stereographs?”
“Try it for yourself.”
Eric held the two notebooks up in front of his face and let his eyes cross a little. It took a moment to make them line up, but eventually the two pages fused. The random marks lined up to form letters and a message appeared before his eyes. “I’ll be damned…”
It was so absurdly simple that he hardly believed it. The marks were just parts of letters. Put the pages over each other and they formed words. It was a little difficult to read, but a single, succinct sentence had materialized from the chaos:
The key to the secret lies in ruins.
It was right there, the answer they’d been looking for, right in the very first sentence.
“That means…”
“Yep!” exclaimed Aiden suddenly and a little louder than necessary, given that Eric was sitting right next to him. “Back to the asylum.”
Eric looked over at him, baffled. The asylum? How did he come to that conclusion?
But then he met Aiden’s gaze and realized what he was doing. Of course. If the cowboy’s aura plasma was still with them, listening in on this conversation…
“Back to the asylum,” Eric agreed. “Quickly. Before that lard-ass bastard beats us there.”
Aiden stifled a laugh and then said in a convincingly serious tone, “Hopefully we’re not too late.”
Ideally, the cowboy, if he was listening, was now on his way to the asylum to head them off. Meanwhile, Aiden sped west, toward the highway.
The key to the secret lies in ruins. Only one of the places Eric had been today were in such a state of disrepair that it could be described as in ruin.
And it was the last place he wanted to go.
Aiden mumbled something to himself and Eric looked up at him, curious.
“Sorry,” he said, catching Eric’s eye. “Just… Glen. He lied to me.”
Aiden had insisted several times today that the Hosler lot was not a part of all this, and maybe it wasn’t. But clearly Glen had made it a part of all this.
But why?
According to both Aiden and Pink Shirt, Glen Normer was obsessed with finding some kind of profound secret hidden in the unseen structures of Creek Bend. He searched the country, looking for clues, and finally narrowed it down to this city. He put all the pieces together. He located all the unseen locations. He even found the rail car and whatever was hidden there. But then he just…hid it again?
It didn’t make any sense.
If he had the “key to the secret,” then why didn’t he use it? Why would he hide it in the most dangerous place he could find? He even left a trail for Aiden to follow, as if he knew he was never going to finish it.
Eric looked out the window. A wide pasture was spread out before him, dotted with brown and white dairy cows. The world looked so normal out there. How could it be so confusing in here?
Something caught his eye, a flash of gold on the side of the road, as if something metallic had just risen from the ditch.
“Did you see that?”
“See what?”
Eric turned and looked back behind them. Paul was back there in his truck, following at a safe distance. He didn’t look alarmed.
He searched the road around him.
“What’s going on?” Aiden asked.
Had he only imagined it?
Once more, he turned and looked behind them. At that moment, a massive column of familiar, gleaming liquid appeared, rising right up out of the asphalt like a golden geyser, right into the path of Paul’s truck.
Eric cursed, terrified.
Paul veered and slammed on the brakes. He missed the aura plasma, but the truck left the road, jumped the ditch, and plowed through the fence.
Before either of them could react, something slammed hard into the underside of the New Yorker and they were thrown into the air.
Everything became disjointed.
The world rolled around them.
The roof of the car crashed into the pavement and compressed inward.
There was an awful grinding noise.
And the world swam out of focus.