The journal had been blank. But now, the first page contained an entry.

  Written in shimmery green ink it read: “Welcome! This is Dreamland! Enjoy your stay.”

  “Dreamland?” Tyler asked.

  Jake shook his head slowly. “I’m so lost.”

  I could hear my heartbeat all over and I got that prickly feeling we were being watched again.

  “It’s magic,” Ava said in awe.

  Tyler sank floor. “Great. Just great. The magic journal is talking to us.”

  Ava’s eyes were gleaming. “It’s some sort of magic relic! Quick we need to ask it more questions. Simple.”

  Not simple actually. How do you talk to an inanimate object. (Or, was it truly inanimate?)

  “Anyone got a pen?” Ava asked. Oh, that’s how. I thought.

  Tyler, for reasons unknown, had a pencil in his jeans pocket.

  We all sat down on the cool concrete of the range’s ground floor. I gave the journal to Ava because this seemed like her moment to shine.

  “What should I say?” she asked.

  “Ask what Dreamland is,” Jake said.

  Ava wrote the question down on the page, right under the magical entry the journal had produced. Slowly an answer began to form on the page, right under Tyler’s question.

  “Holy shit!”

  “Magic. Told ya.”

  “What’s it say?”

  Ava frowned and turned back to the fully formed response on the page. “It says ‘Dreamland is a place where you can be yourself all day everyday!’”

  Jake groaned. “This is some fucking Disney channel shit.”

  “Ok Ava, ask how we get outta here,” Tyler said.

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  Ava srawled her question on the page. This time the journal’s answer didn’t come so quickly.

  “Now it says...” Her face paled and she slid the journal over to the rest of us.

  My stomach dropped. ‘You can’t leave. He’s been lonely.’

  I shook my head in wonder. This was bad. The journal had been our only hope at getting out of here and now it turned out that it wasn’t only going to be no help at all but it was actually going to prevent us from leaving.

  Ava stared at the page, as if willing the words to change, and then blinked long and hard. And then continued to repeat that process with no sign of stopping. Jake groaned in disgust and glared around at the range. Tyler was sitting all slumped over and looked defeated.

  I felt the urge to make things better. Maybe it was the older sibling in me.

  I held out my hand to Ava. “Can I borrow the pencil?”

  She handed to me, glad to be rid of it.

  I wrote with shaking hands: “What do you want from us?”

  The journal responded promptly: ‘I want to show you how what I can do!’

  The word ‘you’ was in red ink that looked suspiciously like- But no, it was just red ink, I told myself. Nevertheless, my pulse quickened.

  I gulped and wrote: ‘We just want to go home.’ My handwriting was barely legible because of how quick I was going.

  ‘Right.’ The journal responded. Then it drew a crude winky face.

  What the?

  “What’s it saying?” Jake said.

  “Hold on,” I muttered. I scribbled down: ‘We really want to go home!’

  This time the journal took it’s time responding. It took so long that I thought maybe we’d used up all its magic juice or whatever. Don’t ask me how that kind of stuff works.

  Finally it said: ‘Go out into the grass.’

  I showed it to the others.

  Ava’s eyes scanned the page over and over. “This is scary,” she finally said.

  “What do we do?” Tyler asked.

  “Well, if some creepy ass journal is telling me to go right, I say go left,” Jake barked.

  That’s the type of logic that is obviously stupid but also impossible to argue against.

  “Come on, let’s just play along,” Tyler urged. “I think all it wants to do is show us some stuff and then we’re home free. What’s the worst that could happen?”

  “Um, WE ALL DIE!” Jake said. “How are you just going to go along with whatever some disembodied journal tells you to do? Obviously, it’s trying to lure us into a false sense of calm before it kills us all!”

  I thought we already died, is what I wanted to say, just to get back at Jake for his earlier Purgatory argument. But I knew it was just the fear that was making me want to be snarky. And arguing was probably the worst thing to be doing right now.

  “We don’t have any other leads,” I said. The boys’ heads snapped towards me, and I shifted uncomfortably on the floor. “The best thing to do is to just go along with what it’s saying and be cautious.” What other choice did we have but to do what it asked. It was either that or sit around and do nothing.

  Ava licked her lips. “If this is an evil supernatural artifact, following along with it is super dangerous. It could curse us or something... at least that’s what I read online.”

  So, I’d been right to think she was a conspiracy theorist.

  “But what else are we supposed to do?” Tyler said.

  The question hung in the air.

  Finally, Tyler pushed himself onto his feet. “Come on guys.”