Backward Glass Read online

  It took Mrs. Hollerith some time to gather what we wanted, but when she had it, we set to work. Wald double-checked our prisoner’s bonds and then dragged him out to the front yard of the carriage house. For a guy born hundreds of years ago, John Wald had no problem using modern tools—if what they had in 1917 could be called modern. He sawed two lengths of wood, broke the head off the broom, and started nailing everything together according to my instructions. By noon, we had something even better than I had conceived. Light enough for me to carry, and when it was folded up, small enough to fit through the mirror. I shouldn’t make it sound more impressive than it was, a chest with a broom handle sticking straight up from its lid. At the top of the broom handle were a pair of two-by-twos that could either scissor together, or open out into a large X hovering over the chest. It was like a helicopter made by a five-year-old. When we scissored the arms together, I could use them to pick it up and carry it awkwardly under my arm. The chest held three air-filled wineskins.

  We completed it just after noon. Wald looked at the thing speculatively, tugged, banged, and rocked it to make sure it was sound. “It isn’t much nor muckle, lad. A storm will shake it asplinter.”

  I shrugged and grinned. “Let’s hope for good weather in 1967 then.”

  He nodded and glanced toward the carriage house where we could still hear Rose’s cries. Twice in the last couple of hours we had seen her hard-hearted mother come out to lean against the wall and cry.

  Now I had to think about Rick. I needed his help. How could I get a message to someone who wouldn’t be born for more than twenty years?

  “What did you mean by the ‘stony world’?” I said to Wald. “You told me there’s a way to float above the stony world. What did you mean?”

  Wald frowned and spread his hands. “‘Tis like they beasties we oft see on the creek, water-skimmers you call ’em. For them, so light, even the water is part of the stony world, what they without the mirrors are sunk into. The mirror makes us skimmers, above happenstance and accident. We can’t change the course of the river, but we can see where it’s going and pick with careful legs where now to step. We can use what we know.”

  What did I know that would help? I knew Rick’s name. I knew he was going to find out about the mirror in the madman’s diary, and that he’d actually believe what he read.

  I knew his address.

  When Mrs. Hollerith came out next, I asked her if she could give me an envelope, and I wrote a quick note:

  Dear Rick,

  The mirror is in the lake. He must have taken the shortest route from the junk house to get there, right over the Bluffs. On September 2 at 6:00 PM, the mirror will float up to the surface. You’ll probably have to swim to get it.

  Sincerely,

  Kenny

  While I was puzzling out how to arrange delivery, Lilly took a break from her patient and came out to join us in the sunlit yard.

  I studied her face, so different and yet so much the same. “Did I really never see you again?”

  She shook her head. “Things started moving fast, Kenny. That Peg did her homework. Came through with sure-fire investments to make money right away. My parents thought us batty, but she brought newspapers from a week in the future and we waited while they came true. Within two months, father had sold the farm and invested everything. They moved into the city, sent us off to nursing school.”

  “Where’s Peggy now?”

  Her smile grew sad. “I don’t know. Funny, isn’t it? The friends you make in youth—we think we’ll know them forever. I was stationed in England, Peggy in France. She found a fellow from back home, as I understand. We lost touch.” Mrs. Hollerith poked her head out of the hayloft window to request some help. Lilly stood up and stubbed out her cigarette. She nodded to the contraption Wald and I had built. “Look, Kenny, I know you don’t want to leave, but that man’s an unexploded bomb. The battle-axe is right about that. You’ve brought me here. Maybe your part is done.”

  “’Tis truth, lad,” said Wald. “’Twere my culpis first in bringing him. Let’s foot it up the years.”

  There’s not a single day that’s gone by since then that I didn’t wish I could have argued with them, but it was two adults against a kid. They weren’t asking. They were waiting for me to do what they said.

  “Okay,” I said emptily. “Let’s get going.”

  I was able to say a brief, guilty goodbye to Rose. I wasn’t even certain if she knew I was going.

  We brought the mirror down to the first floor, just as Mrs. Hollerith wanted.

  Wald loosened Prince Harming’s bonds and gave first his hands and then his feet a few minutes of freedom to restore his circulation, then tied him up again, this time with some rope between his feet so he could hobble.

  I pushed through first and left the contraption in the Silverlands while I checked 1927. No one was visible, so I motioned for Wald. The next two decades were similarly empty, though there were reminders in 1947 that time was pressing on. The carriage house was a wreck, furniture scattered all around. Even the dresser containing the mirror had been moved, and I had to shift some stacked chairs before I could get out. Then there was the newspaper. Someone had left a bunch of them on a table that they had set in the middle of the floor with several chairs placed around it as though for a meeting.

  On the front page was a picture of Peggy Garroway, and the headline “Local Girl Missing: Manse Valley Haunted House Claims Latest Victim?”

  Wald came struggling through the mirror with his prisoner. I folded the newspaper up and stuck it in my bag.

  The coal cellar in 1957 was empty except for a note on the bottom step: “Hobo boy, are you okay? Just wondering.”

  Wald stood a moment, frowning as I read the note. “Time to test thy craft, Ken.”

  I stuck my hand into the mirror to open it for Wald, and then said, “Can you go in ahead? I have to say goodbye here. I won’t take long.”

  He smiled warmly. “Aye, lad. I’ve had a heaping share a’ those farewells. Foot it fleet.”

  I said I’d be as fast as I could, and looked at my watch. They should all be home. As soon as Wald was in the mirror with Prince Harming, I wormed up the coal chute. I figured I’d just say a quick thanks. I wasn’t sure what to do about the mirror. On one hand, I knew it had to end up back in the carriage house by the nineteen sixties so Rick could discover it. But maybe I was supposed to make that happen. I could give Brian the address and ask him to deliver it, but surely that hadn’t happened. After all, when my dad bought the house in 1976, it wasn’t like he had been there before.

  If it hadn’t been for the raised voices at the Maxwells’ front door, I would have had no warning that anything was wrong.

  “Look, we know you’re hiding him,” said a man’s voice. “If not, why don’t you let us in?”

  “Why would I let you in?” said Brian, keeping his voice low. “Who are you anyway?”

  “This is the Maxwell residence, isn’t it?” said the man. “Come on, kid, let me see if he’s there.”

  “Look,” said Brian, “my mother’s just up the stairs, and she don’t want weirdos hanging about.”

  “If you’re threatening me with your mother,” said the man, “then why are you speaking soft so she won’t hear? Kid, if I decide I’m coming in there to look for that boy, you’re not exactly going to stop me. You think a teenage kid is going to hold back a guy who survived the Dieppe Raid?”

  “Now I know you’re full of it. You’re, what, thirty? Dieppe was fifteen years ago, reject. You weren’t there.”

  A woman’s voice spoke up—“Now, dear … ”—but she wasn’t enough to stop the scuffle I heard next.

  I peeked around the corner. The younger Prince Harming had my father in an armlock, his cheek pressed hard against the wall. “Was I there now?” he said. “Fifteen years to you, maybe; for me it was five.”


  “Let him go, darling,” said the woman.

  “And then what? Let’s just take him inside—stop fighting, kid, unless you want a broken arm—and find Kenny. We can’t keep pussyfooting around. I want to know. I think he hid things from you back then. Why is he running from us? I think he even knows who the crazy man is.”

  I took a deep, deep breath and stepped out from hiding.

  “I do know who the crazy man is,” I said. “It’s you. Let him go.”

  Their heads snapped up. Brian took the opportunity of their distraction to try to break away, but this younger Prince Harming was too quick. He twisted Brian’s arm, checking his lunge, and brought a quick fist down onto the side of his head, slamming him back against the corner of a brick. Brian slumped.

  There it was. Unconscious. Head injured. The story of the hobo boy heading into its last act. Head will hurt. Death’s a cert.

  The woman immediately knelt down to Brian. “We said no one was to get hurt,” she said to the man. “Here, help me lay him out.” The man obediently bent to help her, and together they laid Brian out at the bottom of his front step. The man never took his eyes off me. I stood and watched them, ready to run if I had to.

  His companion tutted and fussed at Brian’s head, took a look into his eyes, then glanced at me. “He’ll be okay. It’s a bad knock, but if we get him seen to, it’ll be fine. I’m a nurse. I know these things.”

  I was barely listening. There was something about the man’s eyes that I was seeing at last, some echo of the past. Maybe it was something about the way he looked at me. I thought you were my friend. I thought you were a hero. You said everything would be okay.

  “What’s your name?” I said to him.

  A smile, bitter and uncertain, twitched on his face. “You know. You know who I am.”

  I took a step forward, and he actually rocked back.

  “You said your name was Beckett. That’s not your last name, though, is it?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t—things weren’t easy for me. I got—messed up for a while. I wanted to start over. I wanted—I wanted my dad’s name.”

  “Curtis?” I said.

  “Kenny?” There was a shake in his voice, and suddenly I could see it, the little kid under all the layers of him. The good kid who sat on the creek bank with me and talked about the coming war. The kid who his mother never got to know. “I’ve been having these dreams, Kenny. I wanted to sort it out, ask what happened. I didn’t do anything bad, did I? There’s things I don’t remember.”

  “Brian,” came a voice from inside the house. “Who’s at the door? Why are you taking so long?”

  I made the decision so quickly, I barely noticed it going through my mind. “Go in and turn left at the end of the hall. The door in the kitchen leads to the coal cellar. The mirror’s down there. Go into the Silverlands and wait.”

  The woman stood. “Kenny, we can’t just—”

  “Go,” I said. “I’ll take care of things here.”

  “Brian,” said the voice again. “Do you need me to come down there?”

  “Come on,” said the woman, and that was enough. Curtis shook himself, grabbed her elbow, and steered them both inside.

  I stepped up to the door and felt my hand going up to smooth my rumpled hair.

  Time to meet my grandmother.

  Four

  Let me pass, leave the lass,

  don’t go down the backward glass.

  When she saw her son unconscious on her front step, my grandmother got down on her knees and began to examine him.

  “What happened?” she said to me, fire in her eyes.

  “It was an accident,” I said. “He’ll be okay.”

  “Who are you?”

  I had trouble answering at first. In this decade, I had only seen my grandmother from a distance before. It was striking to look at her now in her forties, a little like what would happen if you put cut-up pictures of my dad and Aunt Judy in a jigsaw puzzle. “Look,” I said. “There isn’t much time. I have to go, but I have to explain something. I have to convince you. I’m from the future. My name is Kenny Maxwell, and I’m Brian’s son. He doesn’t know that and you can’t tell him.”

  “You’re a lunatic,” she said, and went back to examining the gash on Brian’s head.

  “He’ll wake up in a minute,” I said. “But he’ll have a concussion. You’ll have to take him to the hospital. Everything will be fine, but he won’t remember it all, and he’ll never know who I am.”

  “Stay away from me,” she said. “I need to call an ambulance.”

  “Aunt Judy can—” I stopped myself. “Judy can drive. She’s been taking lessons from her boyfriend, Mark. She’ll pull up in a minute in his DeSoto.”

  She frowned at this. “I told Judy she wasn’t allowed to drive yet.”

  “She went ahead and did it,” I said. “You don’t get mad at her because she gets dad—Brian—to the hospital. You have to believe me. Your name is Harriet Lenore Maxwell. You were married to John Maxwell, but he died in the war. He said you and Brian were the most important things in his world or something like that. In his last letter. You never showed that to anyone because you thought it wasn’t fair to Judy. Grandma, you have to believe. I’m Kenny. I’m Brian’s son.”

  She rocked back on her heels as I spoke, and a tear began to make its way down her cheek. “Kenneth was my father’s name. That’s—impossible. You—look like him in the eyes. Who are you?”

  “I know it’s impossible,” I said. “Brian marries Mary Nelson. They have just one kid. Me. I’m going to find this mirror. It’s in your coal cellar. It lets me go back in time. It’s crazy, but it’s true.” I pointed to Brian. “He has a scar on his knee. He tells everyone he got it falling off his bike, but really it was Jennifer Painter, the first girl he kissed. Ten years old, and he chased her into a scrap yard and kissed her and she tripped him. He threw a dog at a boy who was beating up Aunt Judy. Please, Grandma. Believe me. I’m your grandson. Please. You used to tell me stories about NogNog the giant and his little friend Po.”

  Now I was crying as well.

  Harriet Maxwell looked from her son whose head was cradled in her lap back to me. She smiled through her tears. “You know, it’s funny. Maybe every mother does this. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be a grandma. I don’t want it right away, but I think about it. What will I knit for them? What stories will I tell? I thought of NogNog years ago. Are they good stories?”

  “The best.”

  “Is he really going to be okay?” she said, looking down at Brian.

  “He’ll be awake before you get to the hospital.”

  Her back straightened. “What do you need, Kenny?”

  I closed my eyes and thought about it for a second. “The mirror in your coal cellar. Leave it there for a couple of days.” I rooted through my backpack, brought out the newspaper I had picked up in 1947, and tore off the front page. “There’s a house mentioned in this article. Can you take the mirror there? They’ve got a carriage house surrounded by a hedgerow. Sneak it in there if you can.”

  She frowned, but nodded. “Is there anything else?”

  “Yes.” I handed her the envelope. “But it’s complicated. I put an address on this. You have to wait until the summer of 1967 and send it to my friend Rick. He has to get it—then he can save my life. Then—this is even crazier—in 1987, you have to get a letter to my friend Luka. I don’t even know how, but she’ll get it to me. You have to tell me—”

  Then I stopped for a moment. Couldn’t I just tell her to tell me that the man with the yellow tie was okay? Couldn’t I tell her to let me know his real name? Wouldn’t that stop all this running around? But in my heart, I knew it couldn’t. I had already gotten the letter. The path it led me on was the one where I discovered how keys worked. And that got me back to
Rose. Lilly said she would have died.

  My shoulders slumped. “You have to tell me that I’m the little hobo boy in the story you’ve been telling for years. You have to tell me to come here, because there’s a man wearing a yellow tie, and the second I get that letter, I have to run from him.”

  She looked at me for the longest time before answering. “Okay, Kenny. I’ll do that.”

  I remembered one more thing and smiled to myself, knowing that it would cause trouble for Luka. Your parents know everything. “Oh, and twenty years from now? I’m going to go missing. You’ve got to show my mom and dad that mirror in the carriage house. You’ve got to prove it to them.”

  She frowned. “And how am I to do that? Do I have to go into it?”

  “No. Just help them catch Luka coming out of it. Eleven at night, every even-numbered day after I go missing. She’ll come through. She’ll be mad at first, but she’ll explain everything.”

  I wanted to stay longer, but I couldn’t ignore the fact that I had sent the Curtis and his wife into the Silverlands where Wald was waiting. There was too much to sort out.

  A green DeSoto pulled up. “I have to go,” I said to my grandmother. “Thank you.”

  I tore into the house and leaped down the stairs. Nobody in the coal cellar. I held my breath and stepped into the mirror, bracing against the uptime heat. As soon as I was in, shouts from both sides assaulted my ears.

  “Let him go! I won’t ask again.”

  “Hold thy troubling. Thou know’st not how scrambled are his wits.”

  Wald was to my right, ten or fifteen feet away and half obscured with two intervening clouds of swimming images. He had Prince Harming with him, squirming and held like a shield in front. Immediately to my left were Curtis and his wife, easier to make out because they were so close.

  My presence was doing nothing to calm the situation. Prince Harming, the mad older one, began screaming, then stopped and tried to talk. “He’s going to—” Then he interrupted himself and screamed again in frustration. “That’s what I said last time. No. I have to do it different. But I can’t, because—No!”