Nightstruck - Jenna Black Page 0,33

of the light or of my imagination. The railing did not look the same now as it had this morning. Period.

The realization made my head spin and my pulse race.

With shaking hands I raised my phone and took another picture of the railing. I was thinking that maybe I could show the two pictures to Dad tonight when he came home, though I wasn’t sure I could wait that long to get confirmation of what my eyes were telling me. Maybe I’d just send the two pictures to Piper and ask her what she saw.

But apparently seeing a phallic symbol with my own two eyes after confirming earlier that it was a fleur-de-lis wasn’t enough weirdness for one night, because when I pulled up the photo I had just taken …

There was the fleur-de-lis, right smack in the middle of the railing where it was supposed to be.

It has to be the wrong photo, I told myself, but I knew it wasn’t, even as I flipped to the previous photo on my phone and saw the daytime shot. One was clearly taken during the day, and one was clearly taken at night. I rubbed my eyes and looked at the railing again, but that phallic symbol remained firmly in place. Mocking me.

I tried taking a photo again. When I looked at the camera view, I saw the phallic symbol, but when I actually snapped the picture, the fleur-de-lis was back.

I felt near hyperventilating and was probably white as a ghost. A kind-faced lady walking by looked like she was thinking of asking me if I was all right, but then she saw Bob and kept moving. Bob doesn’t even have to bare his teeth to make people think twice about getting close to him. I considered asking the lady to look at the railing and tell me what she saw, but if I was going crazy, the last person I’d want to confirm it for me was some stranger who just happened to be passing by.

The cold was starting to get to me, and I was hovering on the edge of panic. There was nothing more I could do while standing out here staring at the railing, so I somehow managed to gather myself enough to make my way home.

CHAPTER NINE

Once home, I made myself a big mug of hot cocoa in the vain hope that it would somehow soothe me. I was spooked enough that I seriously considered adding a splash or three of something from Dad’s liquor stash, but my head was feeling swimmy enough already.

I kept looking back and forth at all the photos I’d taken. All the photos that looked pretty much exactly the same, and with about as boring a subject as you could ever hope to see. If I was going crazy, or if it was all some hallucination caused by a brain tumor, wouldn’t the nighttime photo look identical to the real thing?

Somewhere in the midst of my brooding and staring, I realized I had moved past the stage of wanting to keep the weirdness in my life a secret. Whatever was happening, whether it was something going terribly wrong with me or terribly wrong with the city, I wanted to know. And until I had outside confirmation one way or another, I would keep bouncing back and forth between being convinced I was crazy and being convinced Philadelphia had entered the Twilight Zone.

I found myself constantly looking at my watch, willing Dad to get home at a semi-reasonable hour just once, but that was wishful thinking. If only the photo had turned out … At least then I’d have been able to share it with Piper and talk this whole thing over with her on the phone while I waited for Dad. My stomach was churning, and my head felt all thick and achy with anxiety. I couldn’t sit still, and I couldn’t come close to concentrating well enough to do my homework.

I wanted to know the truth about that stupid railing so badly that I briefly revisited the idea of stopping some stranger on the street to ask them what they saw. Then I wondered why it had to be a stranger.

I knew most of my neighbors by name, and I went through them one by one, considering who was most likely to be home, who was most likely to help me, and who was most likely not to haul me straight to the hospital if it turned out the phallic