hamster Arnold got for his eighth birthday. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about the poor little beast, it was just that he was always too busy daydreaming. Well, this time it was his problem. Alison grabbed her book-bag, took out the binder and textbooks and headed out the door.
The sun was already low over the marshes to the west as she walked. A seagull soared overhead, cawing. When they first moved out here in the dead of winter last year, Alison thought living at the beach year-round sounded cool. But now most of the magic had worn off. She still missed her friends and the fun she used to have in Baltimore. It was true that the Wallops Island Interplanetary Base and the fusion plant drew people from all over the world to live and work in the area, but it still felt like a hick town to her. And Arnold was having a really rough time of it—not that things had ever been easy for him, even back home in Pikesville.
The high school was deserted as dusk closed in, but Alison saw a light was still on in the library, which had a separate emergency door. She frowned a little when she pushed and found it open—with all the yelling they did about security, how could they just leave an outside door unlocked?
“Hello?” she called as she walked in. An orange cat that had been sleeping on the counter mewed and jumped down, padding back among the dimly lit shelves. Seeing no one else around, Alison decided to follow the cat. The books weren’t organized on any system she could see, and the selection seemed really strange for a school library. Plus, there didn’t seem to be anything on recent history. She was just making her mind up to come back when the librarian was on duty when she saw a flickering shadow out of the corner of her eye.
“Hello?” she called. Between the shelves she saw a gap in the back wall that looked just wide enough to squeeze through.
This is stupid. There’s nobody here. I need to get back home. But light was spilling out of the gap, and curiosity won out. This was the building’s outer wall, so how could there be a corridor leading further back? Because that’s what Alison saw, once she stepped in. A blank corridor, with gray cinderblock walls, a hard-surfaced floor painted a dark red, and a ceiling made of the same kind of acoustic tiles you saw in every classroom. There were no light fixtures that she could see, but the hallway was well lit. It had the familiar, slightly sour smell of school stairwells. There was nothing remarkable about it, except that she should be standing in the middle of Hallie Whealton Smith Drive. And she noticed as she walked that she didn’t cast a shadow.
“Hello?” she called again. Her voice sounded oddly flat, as if she was walking outside. There were no doors in the walls, and when she looked over her shoulder she couldn’t see where she had entered. Spinning back around she couldn’t see an end to the corridor ahead of her, either. She gulped, said a bad word and began to run back the way she had come, but the corridor seemed to stretch on ahead of her endlessly and changelessly, like the exercises in drawing the “vanishing point” her old art teacher Mrs. Blum had made the class do. And then she tripped and went sprawling. The fall on the hard floor should have broken her nose, or at least bloodied it, but she landed squarely atop something warm and furry, which squealed in protest. Then things got really 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
