Chapter 19 Ghosts and Guardians #2
Curiosity might be dangerous. But sending your kid into the world knowing there are monsters you can’t explain?
That was its own kind of gamble.
After Mateo left, an odd hush filled the apartment, a hush so clean and brittle it was almost a kind of music. I drifted, ghostlike, through the rooms, restless.
I was unable to shake the sensation that the thin walls of my world had grown thinner overnight, that something watched through the plaster, whispering in a dialect of static and longing. The coffee in my mug had gone cold, but I drank it anyway.
Eventually, inevitably, I wound up sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, Ava’s old journal open in my lap.
The spine was cracked, and the corners chewed, by age, by careless years, by hands that had never quite settled.
I ran my fingers over the cover, stained midnight blue and peeling where Ava had pasted on a sticker of a crescent moon, back when we were both obsessed with the idea that we could remake ourselves with enough glitter and glue.
I thumbed through the pages, each one haunted by Ava’s handwriting: angular and impatient, all caps when she was angry, loopy and sprawling when she was bored.
She’d filled it with everything: drawings, confessions, ticket stubs, even pressed leaves from her first autumn in New York.
A time capsule, or maybe a bomb, just waiting for someone to crack it open.
A Polaroid fell out from somewhere near the middle, skidding across my thigh.
I caught it before it fluttered under the couch.
It was from Coney Island, nine years ago: Ava and I stood in front of the Cyclone, arms draped around each other, both sun-kissed and tousled by the wind, grinning like carefree fools.
Beside us, six-year-old Hazel bounced on her toes, her laughter ringing out as she tugged at Ava’s shirt, while two-year-old Mateo clutched a melting ice cream cone, his wide eyes filled with wonder at the towering roller coaster.
Ava had scrawled “SEEK THE WONDER” on the bottom margin, the handwriting already beginning to fade.
I remembered the day perfectly, the way the ocean air stuck to our skin, the way Ava smoked clove cigarettes and talked about the “energy grid” of the city as if she could see its veins.
“Josie, you ever get the feeling we’re just living on top of something bigger?” she’d asked, gesturing with a plastic fork as we split fried dough on the boardwalk. “Like, there’s a whole other world running underneath this one, and every so often it leaks through. Doesn’t that give you chills?”
I’d laughed, insisted the only thing I could feel leaking through was the fry oil clogging my arteries. But now, in the morning light, the question didn’t seem so funny.
I paged forward, skimming for meaning. Ava had been a champion of the half-finished, every page a mix of crossed-out spells, song lyrics, and diagrams of the city’s subway lines tangled with astrological symbols.
There were lists of strange occurrences: “L train ghost again,” “flashing blue light in alley,” “the crows at St. Agnes.” I recognized the handwriting of her obsession in every scribble.
Ava had never been content with the surface of things.
She wanted to dig and dig until she hit bedrock, or something worse.
I’d always admired that, even as I tried to keep us both from falling too far.
I landed on a page where her handwriting was particularly frantic, the pen marks indented so deeply I could feel them through the paper. It was a rant, half diary, half warning, about “ley lines” and “locus points,” and the inevitability of secrets wanting to be found.
She’d drawn a diagram of the city, overlaid with lines and circles that made no sense unless you already believed.
I remembered her explaining that these were “energy nodes,” places where the world got thin, and things could slip between.
She’d said it with such intensity that even now, so many years later, I could almost hear her voice: “You gotta pay attention, Josie. The signs are everywhere, if you just keep looking.”
I set the journal aside for a moment and stared out the window. A raven stood on the fire escape, glossy and motionless, black against the dull sky. It wasn’t pecking or pacing. Just watching.
Its head tilted once. Slow. Deliberate.
I told myself it was just a bird. I didn’t entirely believe it.
Ava used to say that ravens were messengers, omens of change, or warnings. “They’re the only birds smart enough to play tricks on you,” she’d claimed, once bringing home a feather as proof. “If you ever see one staring at you for too long, it means you pissed off someone important.”
I’d rolled my eyes then, but now I closed the curtain halfway, just in case. Sometimes the old superstitions slipped under your skin and stayed there.
I pulled the journal back into my lap, searching for something that wasn’t just paranoia and old wounds. I wanted to believe there was a message, a thread, some reason Ava’s ghost rattled around my head when everything else in my life had gone so dull.
I stopped on an entry dated just a few days before Ava died. The ink was smeared, as if she’d written it in a hurry, or with tears in her eyes.
“Ulysses came in again,” she’d written. “He brought the blue stone, said it was a ‘gift,’ but I know better. His eyes are like mirrors: you see yourself, but it’s never you. He knows about the others. I think he’s testing me. I think he wants me to be afraid.”
The rest of the page was a jumble, but underneath, she’d written: “If you keep asking questions, you have to be ready for the answers. Even if they hurt.”
I closed my eyes, the journal heavy in my hands, and let the silence settle.
The last time I’d seen Ava, she’d been wired tight, jumping at shadows, checking over her shoulder.
She’d hugged me too hard and told me to “keep my head on a swivel.” Like we were kids again, scanning the playground for trouble. I’d rolled my eyes then.
Now it didn’t feel like a joke. It felt like instructions.
Was that what happened when you finally dug too deep? Was there a moment when the world’s hidden machinery turned on you, and the only thing left was the memory of someone telling you to watch your back?
The raven outside cawed once, sharp and sudden. I nearly dropped the journal in surprise.
I dragged myself to my feet and paced the apartment, the journal pressed to my chest like a relic. A dozen questions rattled inside me, all unfinished and too loud. I felt like I was missing the shape of something huge, the way you could see a shadow on the wall but not the thing casting it.
At some point, I found myself back in front of the window. The raven was gone, replaced by the hollow ache of an empty sky. I opened the journal again, desperate for more, and began flipping pages at random, hoping for a clue.
Finally, I landed on a dog-eared entry near the back, the penmanship raw and jagged, as if Ava had written it while running out of time.
“If they find this, I’m already gone. But Josie, don’t trust him. And don’t stop digging.”