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.