Backward Glass Read online

  Curtis grabbed my shoulder and turned me to face him. “Are you in on this? Is that John Wald? What’s he doing to that man? I can’t—this is making me—”

  “Kennit,” said Wald, “what means this?”

  “Wait,” I said. “John, hold on. This is Curtis. And so is that. I just want to sort things out.”

  Prince Harming screamed again. “No! Don’t trust him. He’s tricking. He’s—killer. No! That’s what I said. It’s me!” Every half sentence he seemed to need to interrupt himself, as though he couldn’t get anything out without realizing the words weren’t right.

  The younger Curtis strengthened his grip on my shoulder. “What’s he talking about? Look, Kenny, I’ve been trying to remember. What did you do? That day when I was born?”

  Wald must have loosened his grip on Prince Harming, who now surged back, smashing the back of his head into Wald’s face.

  I’ve gone over those next two minutes a thousand times since then. I’ve asked myself if there was anything I could have done differently, any movement, any decision, any word. I think about all I did wrong. Out of some crazy sense of shame that I didn’t even understand, I never told anyone why it was that Prince Harming shot me. I had this idea that I was the person who could fix everything even though I knew nothing could be fixed, nothing changed. I wanted to be the main guy who the whole adventure was about, the boy at the center of the universe.

  Instead of just one more kid who got it all wrong.

  Wald fell down and halfway through a mirror. Prince Harming, unbalanced and bound, stumbled, then started frantically hopping away from us, looking from side to side as he retreated into the distances of the Silverlands, trying to find a specific mirror.

  “Hold onto him,” said Curtis to his wife. “If that’s me, I should help.” He shoved me into her hands and started off.

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “There’s—something wrong with you—with him.”

  The woman put her hands on my shoulders. “Kenny, let him go. He’s been needing to do something. He’s been having these horrible dreams, trying to remember what happened. That’s why we came. That’s why we’ve been looking for you. We never got a chance to find out what happened.”

  I only half paid attention, more interested in what was going on ahead. Most of what you see in the Silverlands is blackness, like you’re floating in space. So what I saw as I looked at Curtis retreating was not easy to figure out: a collection of Wald-fragments sluggishly pulling back from a mirror; the twisted face of Prince Harming looking over his shoulder as he struggled away; the retreating back of Curtis, looking like he was running into a stiff wind.

  When Curtis got to Wald, he leaned down to help the older man up. In the jumble of images, Wald must have mistaken him for Prince Harming and gave him a powerful shot in the face. Instantly, the two of them were rolling on the featureless floor of the Silverlands.

  This was it. Bad things were going to happen. I had to change them. I was in the moment. I forgot all about Wald’s advice to float above “accidents and happenstance.” I wrenched out of the woman’s grasp and propelled myself forward through the buzzing pain. The Silverlands muffled our voices. By the time words reached me, they were a jumble.

  Leave him a—get thee back—Kenny, don’t—don’t, Marg—curst and laggard air—kill you.

  As I pushed forward past two, three, four sets of mirrors, images resolved themselves in the floating silver. Curtis and Wald were struggling as best anyone could in that place. They were between two mirrors. Curtis had an arm around Wald’s throat, and Wald had Curtis by the middle, trying to lift him up. Three mirrors past them, Prince Harming hobbled on. As he reached each mirror, he looked to the right and left into the cloud of swimming shards as though searching for something.

  “Stop it!” I shouted to Wald and Curtis, but my voice just added to the cacophony of cries, and neither paid any heed. Even looking at them as I approached, I could barely tell who was saying what.

  Curtis got Wald’s head bent far enough into an image-cloud that he must actually have been through the mirror, but then pulled him back when Wald almost tumbled both of them through. Fresh snowflakes glistened on Wald’s head and beard. Where did these mirrors lead?

  Neither one wanted to harm the other. Wald had a knife in his boot that he wasn’t reaching for, and Curtis looked to be pulling his punches.

  I glanced at Prince Harming. He had found the mirror he was looking for now, five spaces beyond where we stood. Its cluster of fragments glowed a warm red.

  He looked down the corridor toward us, saw me, and twisted his face again in anger. Without another pause, he thrust his bound hands into the mirror and screamed in abject pain. For a long moment, he held his hands there, then pulled them out. I could see smoke rising from his burned flesh. He pulled his wrists apart with another scream, and the ropes that had held him fell away.

  I had to do something. It wasn’t just a matter of changing things now. This was the man who had shot me, the man who had terrorized me and my friends through decades. This was Prince Harming, who had smashed kids’ heads in. Prince Harming of the skipping songs.

  He’ll take you down the backward glass.

  Curtis and Wald struggled at my feet, each one clearly intent on subduing the other before dealing with anything else. Careful not to get pushed to one side or the other, I stepped over them.

  Prince Harming, finding that his burned fingers were useless at untying his bonds, sat down and thrust his feet into the glowing mirror. He screamed again, but kept his feet in the mirror for long enough that when he took them out, the ropes were burning.

  I was terrified, but determined not to let it control me. I glanced back to see Curtis and Wald still at each other’s throats, though Curtis again clearly had the upper hand. His wife was hurtling toward me, getting ready to jump over them to get at me.

  I faced Prince Harming again.

  I paused between two mirrors. To one side there was a sunlit beach, on the other side, darkness. Prince Harming was fifteen feet ahead of me. I don’t know what I thought. That I could stop him? Reason with him?

  Scraps of everyone’s muffled voices still clattered in my ears.

  From this distance, I could see Prince Harming’s hands, charred black and bloody red, cooked and raw at the same time, like poorly grilled steaks with crippled fingers sticking out of them. His feet hadn’t fared as badly, and he stood to face me. His features twisted into an expression that wasn’t rage this time, just pure terror, and I realized he wasn’t looking at me but rather past me.

  Behind me, the woman had cleared the two fighting men and was almost upon me.

  The woman crashed into me and half turned me around. This close, her voice brightened and became clear. “Kenny, why won’t you listen, it’s—”

  And before she completed that sentence, so much happened that I could never undo.

  I saw Prince Harming lunge at me on his still-smoking feet.

  I grabbed the woman by her shoulders just as she was holding me and turned around, trying to use her momentum against her. If I could just get her on the same side as the crazy version of Curtis, I could retreat, get Wald, get things cleared up.

  Maybe that’s what I was thinking. I’ve gone over it so many times, I don’t even know anymore.

  Was I angry at her as well? Was I frustrated at all that had kept me from home?

  Did I do it deliberately?

  I honestly don’t know.

  I pushed. Hard. Just as I heard the last word in that sentence, I held her shoulders and pushed and what had she said? Kenny, why won’t you listen, it’s—

  “Peggy.”

  I can still see it. I guess I always will. Peggy’s face, much older than when I saw her last, so I didn’t get it until now. I had recognized Lilly’s flash of blond hair right away. Why not Peggy? Something h
ad softened in her when she found her Curtis and married him. Peggy’s eyes widening in surprise, Peggy’s mouth in a round “O,” Peggy’s hands flailing at me as she fell backward into the blackness of a mirror. I reached after her, but all I could feel was water and pain.

  Five

  Trick your feet down the street.

  I don’t know how I made it out of there alive.

  I screamed her name, and there must have been enough desperation in that scream, enough raw, crazy regret to stop Curtis and Wald.

  I flailed my hands inside the mirror and turned my head to look at the two of them. Curtis was on top, his hands limp now around Wald’s neck.

  “What … ”

  I didn’t listen, just plunged my hands again into the mirror. It was downtime, and though I had thought of it as dark, I could now see glimmers of light in its swimming fragments. I was looking up through troubled water, but nowhere could I see the older Peggy, and all I could feel was the water.

  I felt an impact from the side and was thrown clear. Prince Harming.

  “No!” He shoved his hands through the cluster of watery shards and screamed himself hoarse, more from brokenhearted frustration, I thought, than from pain.

  Then the other Curtis was upon us. He stamped on my hand and my chest in his eagerness to get past me, and for a few moments, I was too busy dealing with my pain and trying to get out of their way to know what they were doing.

  By the time I had rolled away and risen to my knees, an odd tableau had asserted itself. Wald and Curtis were locked together again, but not fighting this time. “Ye cannot go,” shouted Wald as he strained, arms wrapped around the other man’s waist, to keep him from going through the mirror. “’Twill be the death a’ thee.”

  “Let me,” said Curtis. “Let me go. She must be there. She needs me. Let me go.”

  As they struggled, Prince Harming stood unsteadily on his burned feet and looked at me. I shrank from him, but he shook his head as if to say there was no need. All the wildfire and anger was gone now, as though his fury and reason for living had turned into water and splashed to the floor. He was closer to me than the other two, and when he spoke I could hear him clearly.

  “I saw it this time,” he said. He looked at his hands and then at me. “I saw it. I didn’t before. You didn’t mean to, did you?”

  “I didn’t,” I said. The enormity of what I had done was only now coming through. It was Peggy. The woman I couldn’t place. Peggy who had gone back in time to find a better life. Who had gone to nursing school with her best friend Lilly. Who met and married a soldier named Curtis Beckett. She hadn’t been killed by Prince Harming. She had been killed by me.

  He nodded. “All these years. I went mad. I thought you had done it—deliberately. Knew it was her. When I was little and I met you—it seemed like you knew everything. Then—what I saw. On that night.” He looked back at the struggling figures of Wald and his own younger self, but did nothing to interfere. “And this.” He looked at me again, all hate drained away. “It wasn’t you. I couldn’t make it not happen by killing you. It wasn’t you. It was me. She died because she met me.” He shook his shaggy head.

  I didn’t know what to say. I was still too stunned by what I had done. I had killed his wife after all, just as he said I would. He warned me, but I didn’t believe. If I had just told someone. Peggy, Anthony, Lilly. If Peggy had known, surely she wouldn’t have come.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He shook his head again. “I was telling you to kill yourself. It’s me who should kill myself.” He turned and looked at his younger self grappling with John Wald, and suddenly his face shifted again into bottomless rage. He reached down past John to grab the younger Curtis, but as he did, a flash of blue light erupted in the air between them. The older Curtis—I had to stop thinking of him as Prince Harming—screamed and withdrew his mutilated hands. The younger one flinched from the pain of the blue sparks, and Wald took the opportunity to flip him over and pin his hands behind his back.

  Older Curtis stepped back and held his hands up, then looked at me. “That pain. Like when I was younger. I remember now.” He breathed raggedly and squinted his eyes as though not entirely seeing me. “I didn’t remember until now.”

  The younger version of him wasn’t listening. Wald had him pinned well enough that he could barely move, but he continued to shout. “Let me go. I can get her.”

  “You can’t,” said the older one, but he said it so quietly I think I was the only one who heard. “You won’t and you can’t.” He looked at me. “I have to die. That would do it. She would be better if she never met me, if I never existed.”

  He turned and began to limp away through the thick air of the Silverlands. I wanted to call after him, but what was there to say? He had been right.

  “Kenny,” shouted younger Curtis, jolting me from my thoughts. “Tell him to get off. I have to save her.”

  I looked at the retreating back of the man I had been thinking of as Prince Harming, now burned and broken. I wanted to stop him. What was he going to do next? I didn’t want him to kill himself. I wanted to stop it, to make it right.

  Behind me, his younger self was rocking back and forth under Wald, who looked at me, strain evident in his eyes. “I cannot lose him, Kennit. He’ll quell his own life. Help me, lad.”

  “No,” shouted Curtis. “I won’t. John, let me go. I can get her.”

  I knelt down beside him. All our faces were wet with tears. “You can’t,” I said. “She’s gone into water. If you go in there, you’ll drown. You can’t save her. If John lets you go, you’ll die as well.”

  “You pushed her,” he said. “You knew, didn’t you? All this time, you knew this was going to happen. You pushed her. When I was a kid—you knew.” He stopped struggling as the realizations hit him all at once. “You knew I’d grow up to meet her. You knew who she was. You knew you were going to kill her. You knew everything, and you could have changed it, but you watched it happen and you killed her.” He screamed those last words as he again tried to rock Wald off him.

  “Kennit,” Wald hissed at me, and beckoned me closer with his head while holding Curtis down. “Go up a ways, there, farther from our own glass. Find one for me. A mirror. It’s up ahead. It spies out upon an auld stone castle wall. Find it, Kennit.”

  Uncomprehending, I stepped past them and farther down the hall of mirrors. I passed the cloud of images glowing orange and red. It was, on both sides, a mirror inside a fire, the one Prince Harming had burned his hands in. After that came one inside a dusty old junk shop on one side and a bedroom on the other. Were there ten years between these mirrors as there were between our own? I almost tripped over a strip of cloth connecting the mirrors. A doorstop? Were the rules always the same? Next I passed more mirrors in bedrooms, one in a museum, and one in the middle of a forest. How many stories were here, how many kids in their backward glasses, how many haunted houses with legends about missing children? Here was a mirror looking out from under a waterfall, and there one that looked like it had been bricked up inside a tiny space with, in both of its decades, two skeletons looking like they had died inside waiting to escape.

  “Fleet, lad,” shouted Wald, and I pushed on.

  I found the mirror he wanted, looking out on a stone castle wall. I called to him, and through the clouds of image-shards, I saw him drag Curtis to his feet, an arm twisted behind his back. The younger man was wild with rage and grief. Somehow, though, Curtis hit Wald with his free hand, stamped on his feet, kicked him, and tried to throw them both to the side, Wald steadfastly ignored every blow and kept marching him toward me.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Saving the fool’s life,” Wald replied. One of his eyes was swollen closed already, his lips and nose bloody, but that iron grip of his still held.

  “Why?” Curtis screamed at me as Wald bore him forward.
“You were our friend. We trusted you. There has to be some way to stop it. Kenny, you have to stop it. You have to.” His voice rose to a fever pitch.

  “Hold!” shouted Wald even louder, and he tightened his arm around the younger man’s neck. “Will ye hear?” Curtis stilled for a moment in his grasp. “You cannot fetch her from the glass.”

  “No,” shouted Curtis. “You’re wrong. I can get her. I’ll hold my breath and go through. I’ll find her. I’m going after her. Let me go.”

  “And if I do?” said Wald, still straining to hold Curtis. “You’ll dive into that watered glass? Though it’s death for you to do it?”

  “What are you doing?” I said to Wald. “What are you going to do?”

  “Yes!” shouted Curtis. “I have to. Let me go.”

  “Aye, lad,” said Wald, a terrible sadness in his voice. “I will.” His eyes met mine, and I saw in them the sort of decision I’m sure I could never make.

  Almost faster than my eye could follow, Wald took his arm from around the man’s throat, shifted his own weight, and flung Curtis through the mirror. Curtis might have managed to grasp the edges and keep from going through, but Wald hooked a foot to trip him, and gave him a second shove.

  On the far side of the mirror, I saw Curtis sprawl forward into the stone wall. He immediately sprang back up and turned to the mirror, throwing himself at it.

  As he crashed into it, Wald, never taking his eyes from Curtis, spoke to me. “There’s another rule, Kennit, for that list you’re making. You cannot come back through a glass that’s not your own. Ten years back and ten years on, that mirror is, but not for us.”

  “What did you do? What have you done?”

  He lowered his eyes. “Trapped him. I couldn’t hold him long. He was too much for me, too young and strong. If I let him go, he would have killed himself. Or you.”

  We stood and watched him. His voice came thickly through to us, crying for us to reach out and let him in as he beat on the mirror with his fists.