WITCHES and FREAKS

April 5th

I can't believe our luck. I really can't. We found the last key! The things on the bottom weren't keyholes at all! We opened the box!

The last key was inside the cave. I can't believe how lucky we were. I can't even believe it. It was AMAZING! I was in there digging out a little space in the corner for the tiny trash can we bought, and my finger hit metal and I picked it up and it was a key! I took the box and ran back to the house as fast as I could. It was getting dark so I tripped and now I have a scrape on my knee, but it was so worth it! School has been really boring the last couple of days and this is super exciting, I can't even believe it!

So I got back to the house and found Bastian in his room, but Verge was there too. I almost didn't care that he was there, but I managed to calm myself down enough to drag Bastian out without Verge following us. And we went to the cellar where all of the pictures are on the walls, and we looked at them again. Except they were ALL GONE when we looked. They were just gone, like they had never been there. And we looked at the box and it had one symbol painted on the top, which looked like a diamond and a circle on top of each other. And it was in invisible ink just like the pictures had been. It looks like this: [Insert Picture]

So Bastian took the box and put the key in, and it turned like it was nothing. And the box clicked and just opened itself right there. And inside of it is something we both really appreciate. It's a book. It has all sorts of weird stuff in it. All of it is in a language we don't know, and I can't even recognize the letters. Neither can Bastian. We're going to ask Verge about it in a really offhand way once things calm down in a couple of days because if anyone would know it's him, but until then we're going to look at the weird things drawn all over the book. It's like someone went insane while they were writing in it and suddenly decided to cover it in glyphs and runes and all sorts of weird things, and all sorts of ink splatters are everywhere like the person who was writing it tried to fight somebody off with the pen they were using. And some of these splotches make it look like they were fighting their own hand. It looks incredible. Whoever made it had a real sense of humor and knew what they were doing, because this whole thing is just too cool. I don't know why it was buried behind the wall though. What harm is there in a book? It would be like if I put this journal into that space behind the loose brick.

Or maybe there's something in the words we can't decode that the person who wrote them is trying to keep a secret. Maybe there was something else inside the box at some point and it was stolen before we ever found its hiding place. Maybe there was something else in there altogether. Maybe the book is just a cover so no one would know anything was taken. Ha, book cover. I'm good. But really, this is so interesting. I can't wait to find out what it means! But I don't have a lot of time to write today since we spent the whole day looking at the book and trying to puzzle it out, so I'm going to end it here and go to bed before Mom yells more.

The Day of Red Roses draws near.