Backward Glass Read online

  He was between me and the creek. Down one side, across, then up the other? A mad dash through the woods? Could I even get past him, much less to the carriage house?

  But why was I worried about him?

  “Okay,” I said. One-handed, I thrust the shovel into the ground in front of me, and set about opening the box. The hinges, which I had seen brand new only a few weeks ago, were stiff with rust and dirt, and the wood was warped, but I managed to wrench it open without spilling the contents: a large heavy coin, a folded piece of paper, and an envelope addressed to me.

  “Hey, a coin,” said the man, who had taken the opportunity to step closer. I took a half step back, keeping the shovel between us. “Whoa, take it easy,” he said. “I’m just—hey, you know what that is?” His eyes narrowed. “That’s a Dead Man’s Penny. What’s a kid doing with one of those?”

  He didn’t pass the temporary barrier of the shovel. I tried to keep my hand from trembling as I unfolded the paper. Despite the tension of the moment, I felt a twinge of annoyance at Luka when I realized how little she had written. All night I had stayed up finishing mine. But the mood went away as soon as I saw it actually was hers. Her handwriting. Her voice, after all this time. Talking to me. I tried to keep my wits about me, and held the paper high enough to watch the thin man as I read.

  Dear Kenny,

  Everybody’s okay. I don’t think I can say much more than that or you won’t be able to read it. I opened your July box early and the paper was rotted so I couldn’t make much out. I think you’re okay. There was something about a John Wald. Broke my own rules and look what it got me? There is one thing I can do, though. I can give you the letter. It’s from your grandmother. She said I should put it in the box for you. She said you have to open it right away.

  Good luck. I miss you. I’m coming to get you.

  Your friend for all time,

  Luka

  PS: Okay I can’t resist two things. One, your parents know everything and they’re waiting for you to come home.

  PPS: Look at the name on the big coin. Keisha said the man who attacked her dropped it.

  “Do you even know what that is?” said the man. “A Dead Man’s Penny? It’s funny, I have one. Always carry it.” His gaze never left mine as he reached into his pocket and brought out a newer coin. I could see why he called it a penny. It was copper, but larger than any coin. I looked down at the one in the box. A woman stood, a helmet on her head, holding out a wreath. A lion at her feet faced off to the right as did she. Below her hand, a name had been engraved.

  Clive Beckett.

  “That’s funny,” said the thin man. He rubbed his fingers on the coin. “Tingly. Like electricity shooting through it.”

  I didn’t touch the coin. Fingers still trembling, I put Luka’s letter back in the box, and withdrew the envelope. Sure enough, that was my grandmother’s handwriting, same as on every birthday card and Christmas card. I shut the box and tucked it under one arm.

  “What’s that?” said the thin man. His voice was showing some strain now. “The thing is, do I know you from somewhere? You ever … I don’t know … you ever wonder about your memories from a long time ago? Hey, what am I saying. You’re a kid. You don’t even have a long time ago, right?”

  The seal on the envelope was old. It opened easily. Inside was a short letter.

  Dearest Kenny,

  I have a message I have waited twenty years to tell you. You are the little hobo boy. Come see us.

  Oh, and I’m afraid you’re going to have to run. I think a bad man is coming to get you. He has a yellow tie.

  With love always,

  Your grandmother,

  Harriet Maxwell

  “Maybe I do know you from somewhere,” said the man. “I think I can help with something. I think you’re Kenny Maxwell.” He stepped forward again, frowned, and looked at the coin in his hand. “Hey, there’s that tingling again. What does that mean? I think I used to know.”

  That was enough. I took the box from under my arm, the large coin still rattling inside it, and stepped forward, thrusting it toward him.

  He screamed. Blue sparks flashed in his hand, and he almost dropped his coin. The box insulated me from the shock of same-meeting-same, but I could feel the coin struggling inside it. Using the distraction of the blue sparks, I slammed into the man’s side and rushed past.

  It felt a little like the last part of that “Going on a Lion Hunt” song the kids who go to camp always come back knowing. Down the creek bank, through the mud, across the creek, up the bank. At some point, the man calling himself Beckett took up the chase, while all along the large coin that bore his name clattered around in my wooden box. As I ran, my brain raced faster than my feet. Wasn’t Clive Beckett dead? Why did this man call himself Beckett and carry a coin with the name on it? He seemed more charming than the madman in the raincoat who had shot me. Was he Prince Harming? Were we wrong about that other man?

  I risked a glance behind me as I reached the overhang above the hiding hole, as John Wald called it. Beckett wasn’t running. “It’s okay,” he shouted to me. “I just want to sort it out, who the man was. I can’t remember all of it. I just want to talk.”

  I didn’t slow down.

  When I reached the hedgerow that hid the carriage house, I ran into Lilly and Peggy coming out.

  “Oh, there you are,” said Peggy. “What on earth is wrong with you?”

  I almost collapsed onto them, heaving shuddering breaths.

  “Kenny, is something wrong?” said Lilly.

  “Man,” I gasped. “Chasing. Mirror.”

  “Come on,” said Peggy.

  As they pulled me through the hedges, I looked back, but I had lost him in the woods.

  Only when we got inside the carriage house did I notice that the two of them were carrying large suitcases.

  “What is this?” I said.

  “Never mind,” said Peggy. “What are you running from? What man?”

  “Prince Harming maybe. I think it’s a man who’s supposed to be dead. I don’t know.” What to do now? We couldn’t all just jump into the mirror, could we? Physically, of course, we could. If Lilly went in, she could pull us all back to 1937. If I went, I could take us in the opposite direction to Anthony’s time. But that would leave the mirror unprotected. What if Beckett took it and sunk it in the lake just as the other man had?

  We had to do something.

  It was Peggy who took charge. “Come on, then, help us up the stairs with these. We’ll talk once we’re through in Lilly’s time. I suppose we can find something to do with you.”

  When she said “these,” I saw that she had a lot more than just the two suitcases I had seen them heaving through the door. Smaller overnight bags, a makeup case, and three pillowcases that looked stuffed with clothing and all sorts of knickknacks covered the floor.

  “No,” I said. “We have to go.”

  “Hold your horses, charley horse,” said Peggy. “Who’re you rushing? I have a lot of important things in these, and I’m not leaving them behind.”

  Leaving them behind? I shook off the strangeness of the remark. “Look, whoever’s coming, it’s probably bad,” I said. I looked to Lilly for help.

  “I think we should listen to him, Peg,” Lilly said after meeting my gaze for a moment. “Just—let’s get in what we can. Come on.”

  I grabbed one bag to show my willingness to help, and herded them up the stairs, each of them carrying a suitcase.

  The mirror and the sofa I had been sleeping on for the last three weeks were at the top of the stairs. Just being on the same floor as the thing calmed me a little. Whoever this man was, he didn’t seem to have it all together. We had the mirror and we knew the mirror. While Lilly and Peggy each lugged a suitcase into the mirror, I ran to the hayloft window. The hedges were shorter now, and over the top of them I
could see the thin man. He was standing in the yard of the main house, looking around. I ducked back down and returned to the mirror in time to see Lilly and Peg come back out.

  “What is this?” I said again, looking from one to the other. Lilly pursed her lips worriedly and looked to Peggy.

  “What do you think it is?” said Peggy, fixing me with a stare. “Aren’t you the one who told me I’m disappearing?”

  “But it’s not … it’s not until … ”

  “Not until September, right? The hell it isn’t. You think I’m going to wait around for that? I’m not disappearing, I’m escaping.”

  “But where will you … ?”

  Lilly cleared her throat and gave me a shy smile. “She’s coming to stay with me, Kenny. We’ve talked about it and made a decision. Her parents are horrible, you know? They can’t make peace and they won’t stay apart. They insist on using Peg as a sort of cattle prod to stick each other with. If she’s going to disappear anyway, I’d rather take her with me.”

  “But it’s not September,” I said.

  “I have an idea about that,” said Peggy. “Mother went off again last night. Might not come back for a month. All it takes is for Father to not report me gone for a few weeks. Maybe he’ll think I’ve gone with her.” Her mouth twisted bitterly. “Maybe he won’t even notice.”

  “Kenny!” came a shout from outside. “I just want to talk.”

  Peggy narrowed her eyes at me. “Do you know who this man is?”

  I shook my head. “He’s using the name of someone who died thirty years ago.”

  “Come with us,” Lilly said. “I don’t know what we’ll do, Kenny, but it turns out Peg’s thought this through. She’s found a few investments my parents can make that will bring them some money. We both want to be nurses, and what with the war coming as Peg knows it is, she says there’ll be work for us. I don’t know how we’ll fit you in, but we must.”

  “No.”

  It’s funny about yes and no. I think I figured out that day that you make yourself who you are by what you choose to say those two words to, and maybe no is the one that really makes you. I had been saying yes just about all year long. Yes to going into the mirror. Yes to other kids’ plans.

  Peggy had already begun her migration. She got Lilly to shove her hand in, opening the mirror up, and began moving the large suitcases inside. “Come on, kid, there’s no time for this. I guess Lilly’s right.”

  “No,” I said. “What if he sinks this mirror in the lake? Then I won’t just be cut off from 1967, I won’t even be able to get back to now. I’m not going any further back. I’ll go see Anthony and at least be closer to home. Just go. There’s no time.”

  Lilly opened her mouth to say something, but Peggy cut her off. “He’s right, Lil. Say goodbye.”

  Lilly closed her eyes and nodded. “Goodbye, Kenny. We’ll watch for you. We’ll miss you.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “But you have to go.”

  I was practically pushing them through. At our best forward thrust, it took a good six seconds to make it through the slowly expanding Silverlands and out the other side, and that was without heavy suitcases. Just as Lilly’s trailing foot went through, the door to the carriage house opened.

  The thin man stepped forward, staring right up the stairs as though he had known I would be there. “Please stop running,” he said. His neat clothing was mud-splattered from his trip through the creek. He held up his hands as though to show he was harmless. “I’m not chasing you. I just want to make sense of it. You’re the boy from the future, aren’t you?”

  I didn’t say anything. It was all I could do not to run into the mirror after the girls.

  “I have so many questions,” said the man. He sounded so reasonable, I started to have doubts. Was I wrong about him? He stepped farther into the dusty light, but tentatively.

  “Don’t come any closer,” I said. “What’s your real name? What are you doing here?”

  He raised a hand and ran it through his hair. “It’s all real, isn’t it?” he said. “I know it is, but it’s hard to keep that in my head sometimes. I can’t remember it all. Ten years this way and that, right? Kenny, it’s me. It’s so strange to see you after all this time. It’s bringing back memories. Was—there a baby?” He reached a trembling hand up and wiped his brow. “I have so many questions. So much happened. What don’t I remember, Kenny? You know it’s me, right? Look at me. Kenny, don’t go away this time. Everything worked out okay. You always seemed so sad, but it worked out okay.”

  I grabbed my backpack and tensed myself to climb up onto the dresser and push into the mirror. Would I get through in time? Six seconds. Was he a mirror kid? Could he follow me?

  Clive Beckett. CB. Rose Hollerith’s boyfriend? Clive Beckett was Prince Harming? How old must he be? When was he born?

  He took a step forward. That was all the encouragement I needed. I almost threw myself at the mirror. “No, Kenny!” he shouted. “Wait. I want to tell you how it all turns—”

  His words were muffled by the Silverlands. I pushed in harder than ever, ignoring the pain. It wasn’t like I’d be stopping to check if anyone was in Anthony’s basement before I stumbled in. I strained against the hot molasses of uptime travel, expecting any second to feel a hand on my collar or the punch of a bullet against my back.

  My plan was to jump out in 1957 and head for the stairs. Halfway up, I could assess whether or not I needed to make an escape.

  What I didn’t think about was falling.

  Three

  I didn’t fall far, but it hurt like hell and taught me a lesson I had somehow gone seven months without learning: just because the mirror has up and down the right way when you go in, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be the same on the other side.

  I cried out with the shock, but my yell was quickly cut short as I thumped sideways into rocky mud and then rolled down to splash face-first into water. I got up, choking and soaked.

  I was in a rainstorm. In a river. No, it was too shallow for that.

  I looked around and saw the mirror, perched halfway down a familiar turn in Manse Creek a quarter of a mile from the Hollerith place. Fat raindrops drummed the water around me. I felt like I had swallowed half the creek.

  I grabbed my sodden backpack before it floated down the creek, stood in a half crouch and watched the mirror, wedged into the mud of the bank above me.

  No one came out.

  Was he standing there in the Silverlands, waiting until I came closer? I edged to the side, sloshing my way through the creek and up onto the muddy bank and continued to watch the mirror.

  Anthony had really done it. He hadn’t taken the mirror out of its frame, but had instead ripped the frame itself off the dresser. I wondered if he had actually tried breaking it, and just thinking that made me angry. I would never do that to him.

  The rain showed no signs of abating, and no one seemed to be coming out, so I trudged forward, picked up the mirror, and headed upstream. It was harder to carry than the cold night Luka and I had taken it to the junk house, but I found as long as I kept my hands on the edges and the nontraveling back, I could struggle it along.

  By the time I got to the old hand-excavated cave, I was scratched all over and soaked to the bone. The frame around the mirror hadn’t fared well on the trip, but the glass itself was as flawless as ever.

  The collapse of the hand-dug cave had begun, but there was enough left to provide me shelter from the rain. I guess it’s okay for me to admit that right after I got in there, propped the mirror over the entrance, facing outward, and moved my backpack to the driest extreme I could find, I leaned against the feathery roots that made up the side of the cave and began to cry.

  I was twenty years from home. No Anthony and no doorstop, so I wasn’t going back, and without someone fishing the mirror out of the lake in 1967, I wasn’t going for
ward either. I had no friend in this time. How would I get by? Thirty dollars remained in the bottom of my backpack, some in coins not yet minted. My other possessions included two changes of clothing, five wooden boxes, a map of the city, a penknife, a so-called Dead Man’s Penny, and a Coke in a green glass bottle.

  That last item was about the most useful at that point, and so I spent a good half hour crying into my Coke the way some people cry into their beer. I cried about my mother and father, teenagers right now, not even aware they would get together someday and have a kid who would disappear. I cried about a lost life I never appreciated. I cried about the way the whole world of time travel had receded from me. I wasn’t a mirror kid anymore. I was a stranger, unknown to anyone, more odd and out of place than anyone on the planet.

  Crying that way in front of anyone is embarrassing, but if you do it all alone, no chance of being seen, it does some good. Once the last sobs and tears had worked their way out, I was exhausted, but at least it was done.

  For a while afterward, I didn’t move, just let my cheek rest against the dirt and roots, and my mind wander the labyrinth of my problems.

  Rules of time travel. Ways of getting around them. Clive Beckett. Prince Harming. Dead wife. Me a murderer. Luka’s box, buried in the past, further back even than 1947. Mirror kids getting concussions. The mirror itself, an unanswerable mystery that just stared stupidly back at you.

  Eventually the rain slowed enough that I could move to the mouth of the hole and read Luka’s letter again.

  I liked the closing. Good luck. I miss you. I’m coming to get you. Because she knew, didn’t she? If that thing was buried further in the past, she knew she was coming to get me. Somehow, in the next few weeks, or maybe months, Luka was going to get further back than now and leave that box.

  She was coming for me. Shivering, muddy, soaked to the bone, I held on to that thought. What was the first thing I would say when I saw her. Would I kiss her? Could I do that?

  Sometime in the late afternoon, the rain stopped. I stood and stretched. A lot of time had passed since I tumbled out of the mirror Anthony threw away. It would be dinner time at the Currah household. That was good for what I wanted. I left my backpack inside the hole in the creek bank, propped the mirror over the entrance, and headed back to the Hollerith place.