Katherine pressed the book into my hand as she stood to leave. “Read this. It will give you more questions than answers, but I think it’s the quickest way to convince you that this is all very real.”
She reached the door and then looked back, a stern expression on her face. “And you absolutely must not hold the medallion again until you are ready. It was careless of me to leave it on the counter like that, but I had no idea that you would be able to trigger it.” She shook her head briskly. “You very nearly left us, young lady, and I’m afraid that you would not have found your way back.”
Dad and I made it to class with only a few minutes to spare. He’d chatted on the way there about a telescope that was mounted in Katherine’s attic, left by the previous owners. It was too bright in the DC area now for the thing to be of much use, but back when the house was built, he said, that wouldn’t have been the case. I nodded in the right places but barely heard his words.
I had a hard time focusing in class that day. Too many things were racing through my head for trigonometry or English lit to be of much interest. One minute I would remind myself that Katherine did have a brain tumor and her comments could be the result of too much pressure on the hippocampus or whatever. Then I’d remember the sensation of touching the medallion—the roaring sound, the scent of the field, and the warmth of his skin beneath my hand—and I would know beyond all doubt that my grandmother was telling the truth, which led to the question of how on earth she expected me to fix things. And then, two minutes later, I was back to doubting the whole experience.
When the final bell rang, I stopped by Dad’s office to give him a quick hug and then walked the half mile to the Metro station at a rapid clip, hoping that I’d make it to karate class on time for a change. I sank into an empty seat on the train and automatically put my backpack next to me to discourage unwanted company, just as Mom taught me to do when riding alone. The car was pretty empty, anyway—just a girl filing her nails and listening to her iPod and a middle-aged man with a legal file full of papers.
The trip rarely took longer than fifteen minutes this time of day, and I usually just put on my headphones and zoned out, watching the graffiti on the buildings for the first mile or so until the train submerged below ground. Some of the artwork has been there for years, with new layers piled on top of the older, faded images. Occasionally a building owner would paint over a wall, but the artists were soon back, drawn to the fresh blank canvas. Only a half dozen or so buildings remained blank for long. Some, like the tire warehouse, had built tall fences topped with razor wire around the wall that faced the tracks. The Cyrist temple we passed was also clean—a dazzling, pristine white like all of their buildings, which were repainted regularly by church members and, rumor had it, guarded by large and aggressive Dobermans.
Today, however, I was too distracted to pay much attention to the urban artscape. I carefully removed the book Katherine had given me from its ziplock bag. The cover had clearly seen better days, having been patched at least once with binding tape like the older books at the school library. It looked like a diary of some sort, and this was confirmed when I opened it and saw the handwritten pages inside.
The paper was in remarkably good shape compared to the cover. It wasn’t yellowed in the slightest. My first thought was that newer pages had been bound inside the old cover for some reason, but as I ran my fingers across the lined paper and took a closer look, that seemed unlikely. The pages were a bit too thick, for one thing—even thicker than cardstock. The weight of the book suggested that it should contain at least a hundred pages, but I did a quick count and there were only about forty individual sheets.
I tentatively bent a corner down and was surprised to see the odd paper pop back up, unwrinkled. I tried to tear a small piece from the edge, to no avail. A few quick experiments later, I had determined that you couldn’t write on the paper with ballpoint pen, pencil, or marker. Water beaded right off, even though the surface didn’t feel laminated. Chewing gum stuck momentarily, but it peeled up quickly and didn’t leave any residue. Within a few minutes, I had decided that the stuff was just plain indestructible—except for fire, perhaps, but I couldn’t try that on the Metro.
I then began to examine the writing on the pages, and I noticed that only the first quarter of the diary had been used. Each of the written pages, except for the first, appeared to begin in midsentence. There didn’t seem to be any continuity at all from one page to the next. It was most definitely an odd little book. The only thing that looked normal about the diary appeared inside the cover, in very faded ink.
Katherine Shaw
Chicago, 1890
The train was nearing my stop. I slipped the book back into the plastic bag and then paused, sensing that I was being watched. That probably wasn’t too surprising given that I had been trying to systematically mutilate a book—strange conduct, even by subway standards.
I glanced up and saw two young men, now seated at the very end of the subway car, three rows away. I didn’t recall anyone getting on at the last stop, and although I had to admit that I had been a bit preoccupied, I couldn’t shake the feeling that they had just appeared out of nowhere. They were facing me, so I could see them clearly. One of the two was a bit overweight, about my age, with dark blond hair and sallow skin that looked like he rarely ventured outdoors. The emblem on his rather worn T-shirt reminded me of an album cover, but I couldn’t place the band. His eyes darted down to his lap and he began writing on a small pad as soon as I looked in their direction.
The other guy was tall, several years older, and very handsome, with longish black hair. I felt a slow flush spread to my cheeks as I recognized the dark eyes that I had seen when I touched the medallion. My hands tingled slightly as I remembered the warmth of his skin beneath them, the feeling of his hand at my waist, and the warmth that had rushed through my body at his touch. I couldn’t imagine how he had stepped out of my hallucination and into the Metro, but I was absolutely certain that this was the same guy.
He looked a bit older now than when I’d seen him earlier, and his expression was an odd mix of sadness, fear, and the same longing that I remembered from my vision. He gripped the seat cushion and didn’t look away, even when the other guy elbowed him sharply. I was the one who finally broke our locked gaze.
The train began to slow almost immediately after I glanced away, and I quickly looked up again. The doors hadn’t opened yet, and only a second had passed, but both of them were gone. I walked toward the bench where they had been seated and put out my hand, half expecting to encounter a solid form—or lose a finger—but the space was empty. I was almost convinced that I had simply imagined them, but two indentations in the orange vinyl subway cushion were gradually smoothing out, just as they always did when a rider left. I brushed my fingers along the edge of the cushion that the tall young man had clutched so tightly and found that it was still warm from his hand.
3
I arrived at karate class a few minutes late and slid into my usual place beside Charlayne. For the next hour we practiced our routines, and the physical activity pushed the events of the past few days from my mind—almost. I was usually able to take Charlayne, probably because I’d had an additional year of classes, but I was flipped twice that afternoon and soon would have a nice, colorful bruise on my right thigh from a rather wicked clip by Charlayne’s foot.
We kept on task until class ended. As we headed out the door, Charlayne turned toward me. “So? What’s up? You haven’t answered any of my texts…”
I still wasn’t sure how much I really could explain without Charlayne thinking I had totally lost my mind. So I opted for a lame shared joke. “Let me explain… No, there is too much. Let me sum up.”
Charlayne rolled her eyes. I could quote The Princess Bride pretty much start to finish. “Okay then, sum up, Inigo Montoya. What happened?”
I knew Charlayne well enough to be certain that she’d get the full story out of me eventually. If she thought I was keeping even a hint of a secret, she wouldn’t rest until she’d convinced me to cough up every juicy detail.
“Okay, here goes. My grandmother is dying, she’s leaving me a big house, a lot of money and my dad and I are going to move in with her for the year. I’ve inherited a special ability from her that she needs to teach me how to use in order to save the world as we know it. Or something like that. And I very nearly shared a kiss with what I think may be a ghost who disappeared into thin air on the Metro.”
“You nearly kissed someone on the subway? Was he cute?” Leave it to Charlayne to zero in on the kiss. Having three older brothers meant that there was a constant stream of guys at her house, and she kept several of them dangling on a string at all times. It was her goal in life to ensure that I lived up to my personal romantic potential, but so far her matchmaking efforts had been unmitigated disasters.
“Yes, he was cute,” I answered. “And I didn’t almost kiss him on the subway. It was in my grandmother’s kitchen—or in a wheat field somewhere. Both, I think.”
There was a long pause, while Charlayne just stared at me. “Okay. I know you well enough to know you wouldn’t lie to me, Kate. So that leaves insanity, heavy drugs…” She paused. “Or you’re telling the truth. I’m going to need more than the ‘let me sum up’ version to figure this one out.”
“We can figure it out together then, because I’m not entirely sure myself.” I pulled the diary out of my backpack. “I’m really hoping this will help.”
Mom wasn’t the slightest bit surprised that we wolfed down pizza, then grabbed sodas and headed back up to my room. That’s what we always do when Charlayne stays over. She also wouldn’t have been too surprised to see us hunched over books, since we often do homework together. She might, however, have been a bit confused if she had peeked in and seen us side by side, holding a lit match to a single page of what appeared to be a very old diary.
I blew out the match. “Okay. You can’t burn it either.”
“But the fire does make it smell kind of funny,” Charlayne noted. “And the cover—you can burn the cover, write on it, whatever. That’s weird. Why wouldn’t they make the cover at least as strong as the pages inside? The cover is supposed to protect the book.”
“True.” I thought for a moment. “But… have you ever slipped a different book jacket around something that you wanted to read in order to make your mom or your teacher think it was something you were supposed to be reading?”
“Well, yes. But…”
“Maybe the writer was trying to make other people believe this was just a plain diary. Look at the date inside the cover: 1890. This doesn’t look to me like something that should have been around in 1890.”
“Doesn’t look to me like something that should be around today,” Charlayne said. “Can’t you just call your grandmother and ask?”
“I could. But she did say that this would probably give me more questions than answers. I get the feeling she wants me to dig around a bit and see if I can figure it out on my own.”