There is Magic in This City

Everyone thinks that Los Angeles is a city without seasons. Any Angeleno will tell you that this is grossly false. Our city is so widespread that sometimes it’s hard to tell. But if you pay attention, you can see how the leaves change color, how the temperature drops as the sun goes down, causing shivers up and down the spine.

If you know anything about Los Angeles, you know that our landscape is full of variety. The mountains, the woods, the concrete sprawl, the ocean. The woods in the middle of a city. The secret stairways leading you to hidden gems. It is vast and diverse and full of people’s dreams.

My childhood home sits in a small suburb next to the Hahamongna trail. I grew up around dirt roads, giant succulents, birch trees reaching the sky, rivers that flowed near the freeway and up into the San Gabriel mountains. It is a world within a world. It is magic.

It was rumored that a serial killer in the 1970s buried his victims on the trail. That their bones lay scattered up and down the mountain. No one ever found any evidence, but my older brother and I would often sneak out at night and walk the trail. We’d tell each other ghost stories and pretend to see monsters in the trees or hear the killer’s victims calling out to us.

On October 20^th, 1999, I was 10 years old, and I woke to my world drenched in fog. I looked out my window and could barely see the house next door.

I could feel my brother stirring in the bed above mine.

“Look out the window, Danny,” I said.

“Wow,” he replied, “There’s probably real monsters out there this time.”

“You think?” I asked, feeling both excited and terrified by the prospect.  

“Want to go investigate?” he asked, his head appearing before me, his teeth showing through his mischievous grin.

I didn’t really want to go investigate. I wanted to stay in the warmth of my bed, watching the mist from the safety of our home.

But I was afraid my brother would think I was a chicken.

“Sure,” I said.

We grabbed our sweaters and snuck out the back door and onto the dirt trail.

If the streets were spooky, the trail was even creepier. The tops of the trees seemed to disappear into a netherworld. I could barely see ten feet in front of me. I could barely see anything.

Suddenly there was a loud SNAP from behind us, like the breaking of a stick, and my brother screamed and took off running.

I stood, frozen in place, unable to move. I wanted to run, I wanted to hide, but it was like my legs had turned to stone.

Something grazed my back, and I turned around.

Nothing was there.

Something grazed my back again and, this time, as I turned, I saw a child staring back at me.

A boy, who looked younger than I was.

When I saw him, I knew he was a ghost. There is no explaining or rationalizing this. I just knew it.

The longer I stared at him, the less afraid I became.

I began to walk toward him. I wanted to be near him. To touch him. To ask him where he came from, how he died, what he was doing there in our woods.

I followed him down a hill and into The Wash. An area of the trail covered in catch pools, and grass, and dirt so muddy it might as well be quicksand. The Wash is where a lot of wildlife call home including coyotes, bobcats and the occasional mountain lion.

The boy beckoned me to him, wanting me to go deeper into The Wash.

There was a part of my brain that told me to stop. That told me it was dangerous. That told me if I went any further, I would disappear.

So, I stopped.

I watched as the boy kept beckoning, kept urging me to follow him.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

He stood silently. Staring. Beckoning.

“What’s your name?” I asked again.

He stopped beckoning and frowned. His face began to change. He looked angry and the fear that had gone away, crept back up my spine.

“It doesn’t matter what my name is,” a voice yelled inside my head, causing me to stumble to the ground, “It doesn’t matter what my name is,” the voice repeated, “What matters is that you will be my friend, so I am no longer alone.”

I felt cold hands grip my wrists, but when I looked down, nothing was there.

I stood up, against my will. I started walking further into The Wash, against my will.

I looked up and saw the boy, his face contorted with rage, and I knew he was pulling me closer. Pulling me toward the quicksand.

“Sonia!”

It was Danny, shouting from somewhere behind me.

I wanted to turn around, to stop, to tell him to help me, but I couldn’t.

“Sonia!” Danny shouted again.

And then, miraculously, Danny slammed into me, wrapped his arms around me and we both tumbled to the ground.

As we landed, I could feel a switch go off inside me. Whatever was controlling me was gone.

I looked up and wasn’t surprised to see the boy had disappeared.

“What the hell are you doing down here?!” Danny asked, his face concerned and angry and afraid.

"I…I…I saw-

“Sonia, mom and dad are going to kill us if they notice we’re gone! Let’s just get home, ok?”

I nodded, eager to go back to the safety of our room.

We climbed back up the hill, and I held Danny’s hand for comfort, looking back every once in a while to see if the boy was following us.

“What were you doing down there?” Danny asked me again.

“I…I think I saw a ghost,” I mumbled.

I knew I had seen a ghost, but I wasn’t sure how Danny would respond.

He stopped and looked at me and I couldn’t tell if he believed me or if he thought I was insane.

“A ghost?” he asked.

I nodded.

“What’d he look like?” he asked.

I started to answer and then stopped.

“How do you know it was a he?” I asked.

I watched as Danny’s face turned pale. He looked behind me and his gaze became distant, as if he was seeing something I couldn’t see.

“Danny? Did you see him too?” I whispered.  

He looked back at me and for a moment I felt like he was going to confess. He was going to admit that we had seen the impossible.

But then he shrugged, “Monsters aren’t really real, Sonia. You know that. Let’s just go home.”

As we walked back to the house, I knew he was lying.

But I was too frightened to ask anything else.

One night, several months later, Danny and I were watching Monster Squad. An 80s movie about monsters terrorizing the city. It was one of our favorites.

Danny looks over at me and says,

“Monsters are real, Sonia. But they aren’t ghosts or goblins. They look just like you and me.”

That was the most my brother and I ever talked about what happened. We never snuck out of the house at night again either. We never mentioned the boy. It felt forbidden. Secret. Something we never should have seen to begin with.

Sometimes, I would wake up in the middle of the night, thinking that the boy was staring at me through the window, but I was never sure if they were only dreams.

The woods of Los Angeles are deep and filled with secrets. In that space between the freeway and the river, the sounds of cars mixed with the howls of coyotes, there is a boy who waits, hoping to find a friend.