“I do,” said Finn. He and the other DHI kids, upon acceptance by Disney, had been computer-modeled by Disney Imagineers. Their movements were recorded to create the DHIs. The empty cages off to their left suggested the obvious.
“Animals,” Philby said, immediately understanding the setup. “They motion-modeled animals here to create DHIs.”
“Wayne told me they were doing that,” Finn said. “Animal hosts.” The cameras were all set low to the ground. Then there were the cages and—he realized as he stepped closer—paw marks seen faintly on the green-paper floor covering.
“Check it out,” Philby said again, this time directing Finn’s attention to five photographs thumbtacked to the wall nearby. There were several monkeys, a baby elephant, a pair of tigers, and a gorilla.
“Got it!” Finn said, pointing to a flatbed scanner hooked up to a computer. He touched the computer’s space bar and the machine woke up.
Philby laid Jez’s diary on the scanner bed and began scanning the pages. As he printed them out, Finn received a text message.
panda: 2 guys out front!!!
“Visitors!” Finn whispered to Philby.
Finn: got it! thanx
The lab’s only door was a long way away. There was one EMERGENCY ONLY door to the right of the green-screen area, but it had an alarm, and Finn had no desire to draw the wrath of Security upon him and Philby before they managed to even get into the Park.
“We can hide!” Philby said in a harsh whisper. He pointed to an area where dozens of parts and partial bodies of the Audio-Animatronics figures had been heaped into a kind of junk pile. Many of the human robots had faces that looked phenomenally real.
Finn grabbed the printouts, and the boys jumped into the junk pile, worming their way down into the parts so that only their shoulders and faces showed. They blended in with the robotic human parts.
Two men entered the room, both wearing dark blue coveralls. Neither seemed surprised to find the lights turned on—something Philby had done upon entering.
“It’s always something,” the thinner of the two said. “I could have told you the sound system was going to go out at some point. They should have rewired the Asia system when they installed Expedition Everest. Not my fault.”
The men scrounged around on the workbenches, apparently looking for parts.
“Finding the break in the wire, if there is one, is going to be a bear,” said the heavier man.
“Don’t mention bears,” said the other one. He pointed to an Audio-Animatronics figure of a standing bear cub designed for the Country Bear Jamboree. “This one will get jealous.”
Both men laughed—harder than the joke deserved.
The thin one suddenly turned and headed directly for the junk pile where the boys were hidden. “Didn’t we loan these guys our acoustic coupler?”
“It’s the tester we’re looking for. Forget the coupler.”
The thin man picked up a piece of one of the robots. He was about two feet away from Finn, who held his breath in an attempt not to be noticed.
“You know what?” the thin man said, looking right at Finn, then at Philby, then at the stack of robots. “This place gives me the creeps sometimes. Some of these things look so real…I gotta tell you.”
“Found it!” the bigger man said. He held up a box with a lot of wires running out of it. “I knew the guys had borrowed it.”
He tucked the box under his arm. The two men reached the door. The thin man stopped at the light switch.
“Hey,” he said, “did you turn on the lights when we came in? Because I didn’t.”
“I don’t think I did.”
Finn felt sweat trickling down his rib cage. He calculated the distance to the emergency door, ready to run for it.
“Well,” said the big man. He switched off the lights.
19
FINN’S FIRST DECENT look at the contents of Jez’s diary came as he, Amanda, and Philby awaited the Park’s opening. The main parking lot was a steady stream of arriving vehicles. Awning-covered shuttles were used to transport visitors to the Park entrance. The shuttles were stacked up at the back of the lot awaiting use. The three kids sat on a shuttle bench together and reviewed their personal photocopies of Jez’s journal in detail.
Finn had always pictured a girl’s diary to be line after line of neatly written cursive on well-organized pages, the contents of which held secrets about her love interests. What he saw here surprised him. Jez’s was a stream-of-consciousness collage, a collection of images, sketches of animals, and musings. There were clothing receipts pasted into the pages; pieces of postcards, stapled; a fortune cookie fortune taped to a page; there were recipes, movie ticket stubs, pieces of torn photographs; ribbons and candy wrappers. There was an arch that looked like the letter M, with a blob of ink on the right side. Surrounding and interweaving it all were lines from poems, song lyrics, comments, and what looked like quotes from conversations she’d had. It was all mixed up into a mess of heavily scribbled pen and pencil.
“Are these supposed to mean something?” Finn asked, fingering the three photocopied pages.
“They must have meant something to her,” Amanda said. “Jez took her journaling very seriously.”
“And at what point did she cut off her ear?” asked Philby. “Go van Gogh.” He won a few smiles.
“Look,” Finn said, indicating the upper right-hand corner of the photocopy. “That’s a castle and a lightning bolt.”
“That’s what I told you about,” Amanda said. “And look down here.” She pointed to what was obviously a monkey.
“Yeah, but this could be coincidence, right?” Philby said, sounding somewhat apprehensive. “Are we actually going to believe a person can see into the future?”
Finn looked over at him with a dumbfounded expression.
“Okay, okay. But it doesn’t mean everything on this page is significant,” Philby protested.
“How do we know it isn’t?” Finn asked.
“This is several nights’ worth of dreams,” Amanda said. “You can tell because some are pencil, some pen. The movie tickets and postcards—that stuff is memories, reminders.”
“But what about this decal, or whatever it is?” Finn asked.
“No idea. A stamp, maybe,” Amanda said.
The letters were reversed, the image backward.
“There’s a tiger, a gorilla, and…what’s this, a bowling pin?” Finn turned the page upside down, but couldn’t quite tell what he was looking at.
“I think they’re all clues,” Amanda said.
Philby exhaled loudly, so as to be noticed. “We all want to find her, Amanda. But if we go chasing down sketches from her diary, then that’s a lot of valuable time that could have been spent looking for her.”
“I think we can trust this,” she said.
“We need more proof,” Philby complained.
“We have a castle and a lightning bolt!” Finn pointed out.
“On opposite corners of the page. There’s also an aqueduct, some balloons, and a railroad track.”
“These are dreams, not instant replays,” Amanda told Philby. “She had visions. Glimpses. How much of your dreams, your nightmares, do you remember? Bits and pieces are what I get. Sometimes more than that, a piece of a story, but not that often. Maybe we all dream pieces of the future but just don’t happen to know it. How often do we write them down or make sketches and keep track? She left us clues, Philby.” She waved the photocopy in the air. “This is the map of her dreams. Maybe she didn’t know she was leaving it for us, but there’s no ignoring the castle and the lightning, is there? So maybe not everything on here is helpful. It probably isn’t. But we won’t know that until we check it out. Right? We’ve got to check out each thing on here, because if even one other thing on this page can help us find her—” She covered her mouth with her fist, on the verge of crying.
“I’m just saying we don’t have much time. I’m nodding out like every other minute. We fall asleep and we may stay asleep forever. That’s what Wayne said. I just want us to use our time efficiently, that’s all.” He studied the sheet. “For instance, who’s Rob?” In several places on the cluttered page Jez had written, Change Rob.