Backward Glass Page 17

  The wild man was on his feet first, and before I had a chance to react, he launched himself at me. I had nowhere to go. His full weight fell on me. My left arm was trapped under the bed, and my right pressed against the dresser. He thrashed frantically, trying to hit me in any way he could. His head slammed against mine, and some part of him dug into my stomach. I felt what little air I had been able to get into me rush out. A second, then third blow to my solar plexus, and I was about to throw up. All the while, his muffled screams filled my ears.

  “Leave him alone!” shouted a voice, and the man was partially heaved away. I tried to push upward, but now there were two bodies pressing on me, struggling and grunting. I tried to punch, but there was no room.

  For his part, the crazy man still struggled and screamed as though he were being burned alive. Curtis had him from behind, and was trying to pull him by his bound arms, but his face was contorted in pain.

  Then at last, John Wald arrived. He leaped from the dresser directly to the bed, grabbed the spitting wild man by the back of his collar, and lifted him bodily off me and out from underneath Curtis.

  Just as Lilly followed him through the mirror, Mrs. Hollerith burst into the room. “Curtis, what on—”

  We all froze. Even Prince Harming stilled in Wald’s grasp, his head turned toward the newest arrival. Lilly slowly withdrew her arm from the mirror. Neither Curtis nor I, half hidden by the bed, moved a muscle. We must have looked like a bunch of kids caught fighting by a teacher.

  It was me she looked at first. The stern expression on her face melted.

  “It can’t be,” she said. “You’re that boy.” Then she looked at Lilly. “And you. The one who helped. Ten years gone and you haven’t aged a day.”

  Two

  Truth and wisdom deeply walled.

  Lilly was the fastest-thinking of all of us. “What was wrong?” she said to Mrs. Hollerith. “I’m going to her now. Tell me. Ten years ago—what was wrong? Why was the delivery so hard?”

  Mrs. Hollerith’s hand went to her mouth. “It can’t—you can’t blame—I didn’t know.”

  Lilly stepped down from the dresser and toward the woman. “Tell me,” she said. “What was wrong? I can go and help her, but only if you tell me.”

  “B-breech,” the woman stammered. “Early. That and—and—”

  And with that, she fainted dead away. Lilly caught her, easing her fall.

  “Kenny, what’s going on?” said Curtis. He was looking at the man in Wald’s grip, and for once, the crazy man’s eyes were off me as he returned the stare. “Is this the bad man?” said Curtis.

  “Curtis, maybe you should—”

  “Rose told me,” said Curtis. He was almost hypnotized, unable to take his eyes of the filthy, unshaven face. The wild man had stopped struggling against Wald. He let out a whimper under his gag. “Prince Harming. She said all the mirror children had to watch for him. Like a curse. Is that it? Is that why it hurt to touch him?” He looked at Wald. “Does it hurt you to touch him?”

  “Nay, lad,” said Wald. Despite holding up his prey steadily in one hand, he spoke as calmly as if we were all sitting under a tree on a shady hill. “These deepnesses are past our wits. Leave off for now.” He pointed with his chin to where Lilly was placing a pillow under Mrs. Hollerith’s head. “Look to who needs thee, and we must through the glass.”

  Lilly spoke up in support. “Come help her, Curtis. Here, she’s just fainted. You’re going to sit with her and stroke her arm. When she wakes up, you’ll tell her we’re gone and you don’t know what happened. It’s okay.”

  “It’s you, isn’t it?” said Curtis. “Lillian.”

  “Yes. A long time since I saw you, Curtis.” There were tears in her eyes. “You look good. Can you be strong for—for your mother now?”

  His lips set in a determined line. “I’ll take care of her. I will, Lillian.”

  “I believe you,” said Lillian with a smile. Then she turned to Wald. “Maybe you should leave that man up in 1947,” she said. “We’re going to help a girl give birth. If he gets free … ”

  Wald shook his head. “He is too deep a danger to let loose. I’ll curb him better this time. My culpis, Kenny. I didna mean for that.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “Then let’s go,” said Lilly. “Breech means the baby is coming out backward. It’s dangerous for Mother and child. This isn’t going to be easy.”

  Wald went first this time after I opened the mirror. He dragged the crazy man after him. Lilly and I gave him a moment to get down off the dresser in 1917 and followed.

  The first thing we heard was a cry of pain from Rose.

  Wald had thrown his captive to the floor and, with a warning foot on the man’s stomach, was lifting Rose in a blood-stained gown onto her bed.

  Seeing the blood, Lilly immediately took charge. “I’m sure you’ve seen some births,” Lilly said to Wald, “so you’re going to have to help me.”

  Within a few minutes, Wald had tied Prince Harming, now docile, but still shooting fiery glares at me, to a chair downstairs, and set me to watching him from a distance.

  “That’s good,” said Lilly to me. “You might have orchestrated this, but the birth of a baby is no place for a boy. Call John if that man so much as blinks the wrong way.”

  She didn’t talk to me much after that, just busied herself with trying to save Rose’s life.

  I spent the next few hours listening to Rose’s groans and sobs, and to Lilly’s directions to both Wald and Rose. All the while, I never took my eyes off the prisoner. He eventually dozed, though he’d wake up now and then to glare at me.

  “I didn’t kill anyone,” I said at one point. “And I’m not going to.”

  I don’t know why I felt it necessary to justify myself. He looked even crazier than he had two months ago when he shot me. His hair was matted and dirty, his sunken cheeks covered in a scrubby beard, and his skin burned by sun and wind.

  “You’ve got it wrong,” I said. “I never killed anyone. You’re the one all the kids tell stories about. You smashed kids’ heads in. There was some kid you brain-damaged. You sent them into comas. Not me. You.”

  He looked away, as though my words held no interest. Or maybe he just didn’t understand. When his eyes locked on mine, it was like there was fogged glass between us, like his madness kept him isolated from the world.

  “Is your name Beckett?” I said, wanting something to take me away from the groans upstairs and my own cluttered thoughts.

  His eyes narrowed, then he shook his head. Saying no? In disgust? I couldn’t tell. He grunted, champed his jaws on the wide gag John Wald had put in his mouth, then looked at me questioningly. I had been thinking of removing it anyway. It seemed cruel to keep it in, and what harm was there to let him speak?

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll take it off. But no tricks. You don’t know what I can do with that mirror. I know all the rules now. If I want to, I can toss you into a million years ago, and forget you existed.”

  His reaction to my ridiculous lie was strange. His eyes widened and his brows contracted as though in surprise and a kind of deep sadness all at once, then he lapsed back into dull hatred.

  Swallowing my fear, I stepped forward. His hands and feet were still bound together, and the rope that tied him to the chair hadn’t moved. The gag was disgusting. I couldn’t even tell what sort of garment the stained, spit-soaked rag had once been part of.

  He snapped at my fingers when I removed it, but I think it was more instinct than intention. I dropped the gag and retreated to my chair.

  I was halfway through asking him his name, when he interrupted me, almost spitting out his words. “Kill yourself. Now.”

  The boldness of the command took me aback momentarily. “Why—why should I do that?”

  His lip curled in disgust. “Said you were my frie
nd. Wanted all to work out for everyone. This is the way. Kill yourself.” He shook his head. “You won’t, will you? Even if I could show you it’s the only way.” I opened my mouth to reply, but he cut me off. “Go on, tell me you can’t. Tell me what happened has already happened, even if it’s still to come. Go on.” He spat beside himself. “I thought you were some kind of hero. Now I’d as soon kill you as look at you.”

  At that, he lapsed into a silence of hours, most of which he spent staring fire at me.

  Eventually, Wald came down and said that he and I should make a meal.

  “Kill him,” the madman said to Wald, jerking his head to indicate me.

  “Speak’st thou now?” said Wald. “Better silence. More to speak is more to lang regret.”

  With the sparse food available, we muddled through a kitchen that was futuristic to Wald and antique to me, and managed to make oatmeal topped with sugar. Wald insisted on feeding his captive, and I was allowed up to see Rose while she sipped the sugar water that was all Lilly would allow.

  She was pale and soaked with sweat, but gave me a weak half smile as I sat beside her. “Are you sure it isn’t tonight I die?”

  I nodded. “I’m sure. If that’s any help.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She sighed. “It’s not you that should be sorry. It’s that Clive Beckett.” She stopped for a moment, gasped in pain, then waited a moment as some wave in her subsided. “Dying and leaving me to this. Well. It’s not so long, and I’ll be with him.”

  “Don’t think like that,” I said. “You’re going to have Curtis, soon. He’ll live.”

  A keening snarl rose up from the wild man below.

  Rose ignored it and reached a trembling, sweaty hand to grasp mine. “Funny, isn’t it?” she said. Another wave of pain rolled through her, this one longer and more intense. “All this year, I’ve been hearing about all of you in the future. The stories about Peggy’s love affair with Anthony—” Another pause for pain. “Kenny and Luka. About Kenny and his friends and their adventures, Kenny trapped in the past. I knew you before you came. About you and Luka and what happened between you.” She gave a short gasp, then clenched her teeth together, breathing in short, sharp hisses. Lilly soon hurried me back downstairs.

  Lilly took occasional cigarette breaks over the next few hours, and on one of those I asked her why we didn’t find a hospital or a doctor. “We can’t move her,” she said. “She’s had bleeding, and the labor has started. As to bringing someone here, how would we explain ourselves? A madman tied up on one floor, a seventeenth-century blacksmith assisting a nurse from the future on the next.” She shook her head sadly. “Terrible as it is, I think we’re her best hope. I didn’t do training in obstetrics. I was a war nurse. But I’ve had your note for ten years. I knew I would do this. I’ve been preparing, and I have thirty more years of medical science than whatever country doctor we could find. Anyway, in 1917, nobody reserves the best treatment for unwed mothers. They’ll spare the baby if it comes to it, at the cost of the mother’s life.”

  More waiting, more cries. Some sleep. Then I woke in a convulsion of panic when I heard a scream of terror and a crash of cutlery and broken glass.

  Standing not five feet from me in the doorway of the little house was Mrs. Hollerith, ten years younger than I’d seen her last, holding a tipped tray and staring at a bloody-handed John Wald halfway down the stairs.

  Three

  Head will hurt. Death’s a cert.

  “What … ” said Mrs. Hollerith. “What—what—”

  “Oh, what do you think?” said Lilly, descending the stairs. “Your daughter’s giving birth, you fool. Your daughter, whom you knew fine well was pregnant, is having her baby a month too soon.”

  Francine Hollerith’s mouth opened and closed.

  “What was your plan?” said Lilly. She reached Mrs. Hollerith and dropped her voice to a furious whisper. “Did you want her to die in childbirth so your problem would go away? If that’s the case, you were doing a fine job. With luck, I’ll save her. Is that a problem?”

  Mrs. Hollerith’s face settled into an expression I don’t have a name for. Something like a cold acceptance of the new way things were. “Fine,” she said. “And who are all of—”

  She was interrupted with a scream. Prince Harming must have fallen asleep some time after I did, but he was awake again. “Kill him!” he screamed to Francine Hollerith. “Kill him! Help me and kill him. He’s going to kill my wife. Everything from him’s a lie. Let me loose and I’ll do it.”

  Mrs. Hollerith stepped back and held her tray like a shield.

  I spread my hands. “I’m not going to kill anyone. I just came here to help.”

  Wald leaped down the last few stairs, picked up Prince Harming’s discarded gag, and struggled it back into his mouth over the madman’s screamed protests.

  Mrs. Hollerith looked from one of us to another. “Well, let me see my daughter,” she said at last, and strode to the stairs, pushing past Lilly as she went up. Then she turned for a last word. “And get this madman out of here.”

  Behind his gag, Prince Harming gave a heartbroken wail.

  “Why is he getting worse now?” I said. “I thought he had started to calm down.”

  “Sees it coming,” said Wald. “Whate’er this thing, he feels its shadow.” He took Prince Harming by the shoulders and looked into his eyes. “List me now, witling. Thou wishest to stave some doom, is’t so?”

  The madman cocked his head to one side, then nodded.

  “Well and good,” said Wald. He turned to me. “I said we’d riddle this one in time. Mayhaps ’tis now.” He met Prince Harming’s wild gaze again, hands still grasping the straining shoulders. “Now list again. I will not let ye kill young Kennit, hear? If there is some doom to stave, we might yet aid thee.” He spoke slowly, as though to a child. “We must have words, na? Peace and words. I’ll loose the clout that stops thy voice. Speak thy bit.”

  With that, he took the gag away again, and Prince Harming took a deep breath before speaking. “Not kill then,” he said. “Tie him up. Tie and hold him here.”

  Wald shook his head. “No talk of that. Kennit’s a friend. Talk of what thou wouldst prevent.”

  Prince Harming gave a small snarl and spoke through clenched teeth. “Listen. Murderer. No friend. Said he was. Pushed her and she’s dead and wouldn’t let me follow. Pretends to be friend. Tie him or stop him or you kill her like it was your own hands. Said he was a friend!”

  His words grew faster, more furious, and with a reluctant shrug, Wald replaced his gag.

  “He names thee killer,” he said, turning to me. “I know it is not so. Why thinks he that?”

  “That’s not the question,” said Mrs. Hollerith coming down the stairs. “The question is why have you brought a lunatic into a birthing house?”

  Wald and I looked at each other. “We were … rushed,” I said. “He’s dangerous. We couldn’t let him run loose.”

  She shook her head. “Well, it won’t do. D’you hear me? I won’t have my daughter upset by that. Get him out.” Wald, looking as sheepish as I probably did, opened his mouth to speak, but she didn’t let him. “I’m serious. She’s sleeping now, poor thing, though it’s a miracle she can in this madhouse. Go upstairs, and fetch that dresser down. I don’t know where you come from inside that thing, but I want you to take this screaming idiot back into it.” She smiled thinly at the shock on our faces. “Oh, you thought I didn’t know, did you? Well, a mother’s not so stupid as you might think.”

  Prince Harming’s cries had acquired a mournful sound, like a locked-up puppy, but she never looked at him as she spoke.

  “But I want to help,” I said. “I came all this way to help.”

  “And you have,” said Lilly from the top of the stairs. “You brought me.” She walked down wea
rily and addressed herself to Mrs. Hollerith. “She wouldn’t have survived. You’d have found her dead.” Rose’s mother absorbed this in silence. Even Prince Harming quieted at Lilly’s appearance. “I think she’s right, though, John. I think you and Kenny have to get him out of here.”

  But the baby, I wanted to say. The baby in the wall.

  Was I wrong about everything? Rose said the baby was Curtis. Curtis was alive.

  I looked at Wald. “Where do we take him?”

  He rubbed his bearded face. “It clackers my wits.” He counted on his fingers. “Curtis, nay. Lilly, nay. Peggy, nay—a watch will be set now her vanishment is noted. Anthony?”

  I shook my head. “No. It’s not even in his house anymore, and I’m not dumping this man on—it just wouldn’t work.”

  “Past that, the water,” he said. “If indeed the glass is still a’drowned.”

  “I think it is,” I said. “But maybe I’ve figured out how to get it out. Something Curtis said about submarines got me thinking. Maybe we can get him up to Rick and Jimmy’s time.” I turned to Mrs. Hollerith. “Can you get—I don’t know—a small chest? And—a broom handle?” I tapped my forehead with my hand as I thought it out. “And a couple of two-by-fours and some nails? And something airtight that’ll float.”

  She looked at me like I was as mad as our prisoner. “A wineskin?”

  “That should do. If you can get that and give us some time, I think I can get us out of here.”

  She sighed, shook her head, and left.

  It didn’t take long to explain my idea to Wald and Lilly. As soon as Wald understood, he clapped me on the back. “’Twill out and up, then Kennit. ’Twill out and up.”

  Lilly shook her head. “He’s right. That should work. Why didn’t we think of that ten years ago?”

  I grinned. “I just did.”

  She opened her mouth, then closed it again and smiled warmly. “I suppose you did.”