Backward Glass Read online

  “What’s going to happen to him?” I said. Outside of the mirror, two people had come along and were trying to talk to Curtis who was almost frothing at the mouth, his hands bloody from beating against the glass. He rounded on them like a cornered animal, and they backed away.

  Wald shook his head sadly. “Now? Go mad, methinks, for ten long years. They’re all as one, the mirrors. All on the sevens and all for ten years. I know that glass. Two hundred years it’s held its wall in that Welsh castle. I had to do it, Ken. D’ye see? He would ha’ drowned himself or dashed your brains.” He looked around. “Where went the other?”

  I looked back down toward our mirror and my heart clenched. “I don’t know.” Far down the Silverlands? Waiting in the coal cellar? “He saw what happened,” I said hopefully. “I don’t think he wants to kill me now.”

  “Nor should he. I saw it, too. Ye did no thing in malice.”

  “But it’s still my fault,” I said. I was on the verge of tears and collapse all at once.

  “Whisht, now,” said Wald. “Whisht. All’s done.”

  “But what do we do now?” I said. “We were supposed to get him away from Rose and now he’s gone. What do we do?”

  Wald stood up, straightened his back, and shook himself as though to cast off the hurts he had from Curtis. “Back to Rose, I think, though her mother will not thank us for coming. Still and all, with the madman loosed again, ’tis best we set a watch about the girl.”

  “Are you okay?” I said.

  “’Tis naught.” He waved away my concerns. He was limping now, I could see, hurt more by Curtis than he wanted to let on, but he led me back down the Silverlands unerringly to our own mirror. On one side, I could see glimmers of light through whatever water it was under, and on the other the dimness of my grandmother’s coal cellar. We stepped carefully through, just in case the now-crippled older Curtis was waiting for us. I didn’t think he would be, though. He had seemed a broken man when he hobbled away on his burned feet. Seeing no one there, we brought the contraption we had made back through and set it in a corner.

  “Back down then,” I said. “Let’s make it quick.” I stuck my hand into my pocket for the strings-and-spoon key to take us backward.

  And found it gone.

  Six

  Then the years will vanish fleet.

  “He took it!” I said to Wald. “My key—he must have taken it out of my pocket.”

  In the dim light leaking in from the open door to the main floor, I saw his mouth open, then close again. He had nothing to say.

  Idiotically, I turned to the mirror and pushed my hand in. It was hot. Uptime to the sixties.

  “No!” I said. I wanted to hit the mirror in frustration, but I knew my hand would just sink in. What had I done? I had given a madman the key to the mirror and locked myself out of it. I had moved myself forty years up from where a baby was going to die.

  “Can you not make some other key?” said Wald.

  “No,” I said hopelessly. “It takes time. Weeks, maybe. I left that doorstop in for a month before it turned into a key. If I do that now, it’ll be long over before we could—” I stopped. The hairs on the back of my neck rose up as I thought it through before speaking. “Before we could make it.” I looked at Wald in the darkness. “So we need time. That’s it. We need time. Come on, John. I’ve got it now. Bring the floater. We have to get Rick. I hope he got my note.”

  The contraption worked even better than I had hoped, though we still nearly died getting ashore.

  Together, Wald and I folded out the two-by-twos that functioned as its arms, an “X” set like helicopter blades above the chest filled with wineskins. We reassured ourselves that, yes, the mirror was still underwater, though even in this evening light we could see some glimmers of waves. Then, together, we shoved the chest through.

  It worked instantly. The opened two-by-twos wedged part of the thing inside the Silverlands while outside, in the lake, an air-filled chest had suddenly come through the mirror. Buoyed up, the mirror began to rise, shaking off its weeks of lake mud. It was a dizzying sight from where we stood, looking at the wave-troubled surface of the lake as it shot toward us. We stepped back as the mirror broke into daylight. Before, we had heard nothing through this mirror, but now we could discern muffled splashes.

  The mirror was still a few inches below the surface, so Wald didn’t want me to try going through, but he agreed to hold me while I stuck my hand up and waved it in 1967 for the first time in months.

  “Hey!” I heard a muffled scream from beyond the mirror. “Kenny! Is that you?”

  “It’s Rick!” I said to Wald. “It’s him.”

  The shouting continued for a few more minutes. Through the glass I couldn’t make out everything, but I understood that he was asking me to hold on, and saying he’d be there soon.

  At long last, a hand grasped mine and began to pull. “He’s got me,” I said to Wald.

  Sure enough, we could see the bottom of the canoe through the watery light, and Rick Beech’s face, leaning over, a strained expression on it as he tried to pull me up. Rick was good in a canoe, and I guess it helped that 1967 gravity only asserted itself on the parts of me that were through the mirror while the rest of me stood in the Silverlands leaning over.

  Wald was right about the danger being more than just the ordinary risk of drowning. When Rick pulled me up through the mirror and the shallow covering of water, my body began to convulse. A wave washed over me and I took a sharp, involuntary gulp. My thrashing almost overturned Rick’s canoe, but Wald pushed from the Silverlands and Rick leaned back to drag me in. As soon as he had me, he threw me on my back and pressed on my stomach while I heaved and coughed out water.

  “Wald,” I finally said weakly.

  “What?”

  “In the—mirror. We have to get him out.”

  “Stay there,” he said. “Let’s get it to shore first. If this Walt guy’s any bigger than you, I don’t think I can do it. I’ll get a rope around this chest and we’ll tow it in.”

  With strong, clean strokes Rick took us to shore. We weren’t more than twenty feet out, but I would never have made it. When Rick pulled us onto a tiny scrap of sand and rocks under the bluffs, he and I got our hands around the mirror and propped it up against the cliff wall. Pushing our contraption ahead of himself, Wald walked through.

  Rick stepped back on seeing him.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “He’s our friend. He’s John Wald. He’s from the seventeenth century.”

  Rick’s mouth hung open for a moment, then he grinned and shook his head. “Jeeze, you sure know how to make an entrance, H. G. Wells. Come on, I got a fire going. You must be freezing.”

  He was right. Both Wald and I were shivering. Rick got us blankets and towels, and served us coffee from a thermos. He wanted to hear everything, but first he was dying to tell us about his own part in all this. “Can you imagine me, getting that letter last week? All summer long, Jimmy and me, we’ve been all over the place looking for that guy, looking for the mirror. Then, bang, a letter from you.”

  “You did good,” I said.

  He ruffled my hair. “Thanks, kid. Come closer to the fire. You too, Mr. Wald; it ain’t getting any warmer. I wanna know everything. What happened? You went back to the seventeenth century?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “Felt like it sometimes. But I can’t tell you that now. We have to get back.”

  “What? You just got here. What do you mean, get back? Buddy, you have to go home.”

  I shook my head. “No. I still have to do something.” As quickly as I could, I outlined for him the events of the past two months. He had a million questions, but I waved them aside. All I wanted was for him to understand a few things: how keys worked, how they were made, and why I needed one. Even with my hurrying, the story must have taken an hour to tell. All the while, I
kept looking at the mirror, waiting for my plan to work. Where was Luka? As evening began to spread out over the lake, I kept telling myself it would be okay. Curtis wasn’t born until tomorrow. There was still time.

  Rick was able to clear up one mystery for me, though, when I told him of Prince Harming’s reappearance in 1957. As he had prepared to row out onto the lake to look for me, he had come across an abandoned wetsuit, washed up on the shore. “It was water-logged, like someone had just taken it off in the middle of a swim. There’s been a bunch of break-ins at the marina this summer. He must have used it to go through, then tossed it back out.”

  After that, I didn’t let him have many more interruptions, just rocketed through until the present moment.

  “But what can I do?” Rick said when I had finished my story. “I can get Jimmy to start cooking one of these key things up, but that won’t do you any good right now.”

  “Not Jimmy,” I said. “Luka.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a little stand of trees across from that place where the tabletop is buried. You remember it? There’s a crooked maple on the outside.”

  “With the big knot way up high like a face? Yeah, I know it.”

  “I need you to go dig up a box that’s buried there. It’s right under that knot, about three feet from the tree. It’s got a plaque on it that says July. Inside there’s a note I wrote to Luka. Put another note in there. Tell her how to make a key. Tell her I need her to come back with one today, right now.”

  Rick ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t know, future boy. Can that even work?”

  “Why don’t you ask me that question?” came a voice from behind us.

  “Luka!”

  I almost bowled her over in the eagerness of my embrace. “Whoa, ease up there, tiger,” she said, grabbing my shoulders and holding me at arm’s length. “Hey, you’re not so pasty once you’ve had a bit of summer on you.”

  I don’t have the words to properly describe what I was feeling right at that moment. Had her eyes been that bright when I saw them before? I grabbed her and crushed her to me again. “Oh, Christ, I missed you.”

  Rick put his long arms around us both. “Amen to that,” he said. “I love a good summer project.”

  Luka pulled back again. I think she might have been blinking away a few tears. “Okay, you big crybabies.” She looked right at me. “I got the note. I’m here. It was a close thing, though.”

  “Why? The note was in the July box, right? Didn’t you get that a month ago?”

  She held up her hand so we could see the string wrapped around it, a small washer tied on either end. “I kept messing up. I was too impatient. The first one I tried, I took it out after a week to see if it would work, but no luck. Then I had to start all over again. The second one I kept in for ten days and still nothing. By that time, I was down to the wire. That was exactly two weeks ago, so I just took it out. Anyway, here I am, just when you said, so what’s the mission, Captain Solo?”

  I sniffed and wiped my own eyes. Luka. Luka who I’d been denied all this time. I sniffed again. “Same old mission,” I said. “Rose Hollerith. 1917. You up for it?”

  “Try to keep me away,” she said. “So we have to go right now?”

  I looked at the warm fire Rick built, buffeted now by a breeze from the lake. How good it would be to just lie down by that fire as John Wald had, rest for a while, and then go home. I shook my head at the thought. “Yeah,” I said. “Right away, before I change my mind.”

  “Wait,” said Rick. “How is this working? I haven’t even buried the note yet.”

  “Time travel,” we said in unison, then grinned at how quickly we were in synch again.

  “So bury it,” I said. “We have to get going.”

  “What about him?” said Rick, pointing to the other side of the fire. John Wald was asleep, curled up with his back to the flames.

  “That’s John Wald?” said Luka.

  “Yeah. We should let him sleep. He’s been through a lot. I think his leg might be broken.” There was something else, too. His solution, his saving of Curtis’s life. I couldn’t see any other way we could have done it. He was right. But I didn’t want those kinds of decisions on this last leg of the journey. I didn’t want anything so harsh. I wanted to follow Wald’s own advice, to float above the stony world.

  Rick’s eyes narrowed. “So you just want to go right back into it? Even though—you know—nothing changes? Even though whatever you do, that baby still ends up dead?”

  “Not want to,” I said. “I have to. Even if I can’t change a thing. Even if nothing—” I stopped, caught in the half-formed thought. “Even if nothing we do makes a difference, at least we can want to make a difference. That’s what I get now. It matters what you want to do.”

  Rick smiled warmly. “You got heart, future boy. I’ll say that for you. You know what you’re making me think about? Last year this English teacher gave us a poem. I don’t remember it much, but it ends up with ‘I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.’ I get you, Kenny. It’s like you’re saying if we know the future or whatever, if we know what’s going to happen, we can’t be the masters of our fate.”

  I finished for him. “But we can still be the captains of our souls.”

  Part Six

  The Baby in the Wall,

  September and

  Everything After

  One

  Crack your head, knock you dead.

  1957 coal cellar, empty. 1947 carriage house, empty. 1937 Lilly’s bedroom, empty. 1927 Rose’s bedroom, empty and preserved. 1917 carriage house—screams and cries. That was our one-minute journey fifty years into the past.

  The sound of Rose’s wails made their way into the Silverlands, so by the time we stepped out, we had a good idea of what we were going into.

  The mirror and its dresser were still downstairs, but close enough that I emerged within Lilly’s field of vision as she stood at Rose’s bedside. She saw me, then Luka, and gave a slight frown. Mrs. Hollerith had her back to me, and I retreated to the couch before she saw me.

  “Another breath, dear,” said Lilly. “Just keep it up.”

  In whispers, I told Luka everything of the summer. Everything. I confessed to how I hadn’t told Lilly and Peggy of Prince Harming’s accusation, how I had asked my grandmother to send the note warning me of the man in the yellow tie even though I knew by then he didn’t mean me harm.

  “You were trying for the best,” said Luka.

  “But none of it mattered,” I said. “He said I was going to kill his wife and I did.”

  “You didn’t mean to.”

  I gave up thinking and talking for a while and just listened to the noises above. About an hour after we got there, Lilly started sounding increasingly worried. I heard the term “breech” again, along with “prolapsed umbilical” and “oxygen starvation.”

  There was a brief upset when Mrs. Hollerith found out we were there, but Lilly sent me to fetch clean sheets and Luka to pump water, so she let it go.

  After that, it was more of what Lilly called hurry-up-and-hold-your-breath.

  I was an anthill of emotions, every feeling inside me running in a different direction. Here was Luka next to me, warm and real and somehow outshining every other thing in the world. And there was Rose upstairs, moaning and crying. And Peggy, bitter, sharp-edged Peggy, who had seemed, in the few moments I had seen her, so tender with Curtis—lost now, forever. Sleep, when it came while I rested on Luka’s shoulder, was the shallow kind, where dreams come as fragmented and rearranged memories. Me pushing Peggy. Her grabbing and taking me along to her watery death. Curtis burning his hands in the fiery mirror, then reaching out to me, touching my face with his charred fingers.

  Then I was woken by a scream, one more urgent, more filled with heartbreak than I had ever heard. “Get him out
. He can’t be here. He can’t see this. Not like this. Get him out.”

  I shot awake to a tiny moment of silence followed by, “Rose? What’s going on? I took care of Mother like Lilly said. She’s been awfully upset. I knew I should stay away—but what’s happening?”

  I stood up. Luka was still asleep. I realized with a guilty thrill that we had fallen asleep with our arms around each other.

  “Curtis,” came Lilly’s voice, “Rose is ill. I’m helping her. You should just let her be. It’s a trying time for her.”

  “Why is there all that blood?” said Curtis. “Where is Mother? Mother now, I mean. I took care of her in my time. But where is she now?”

  “She went to the house to get some things, Curtis. Please, dear, give Rose some privacy. Her mother will be back soon, and you’ve done such a good job this year of making sure she didn’t see you.”

  I got to the middle of the stairs just in time to see everything dawn on Curtis’s face at once. “She’s not my mother, though, is she? Is she, Rose? Mother isn’t my mother. You’re my mother, aren’t you?”

  “Not like this,” Rose sobbed quietly. “I was going to tell you, but not like this. Not now.”

  I walked slowly and quietly toward him, recognizing that this had to stop but that I was also intruding. “Hey, Curtis,” I said. “It’s me. Let’s go downstairs. We should leave Rose. She’s going to be okay.”

  All the way down the stairs, I kept talking to him as gently as I could. Mrs. Hollerith came in carrying some steaming wet cloths. He stared at the sight of her. She frowned and almost stopped to speak to us, but Lilly called her from above. She dismissed us with a snort of derision and went on.

  “Who’s the new one?” I heard her gruffly ask Lilly a moment later.

  In the hesitation that followed, I could imagine a look passing between Lilly and Rose, a lightning flash of communication and caution. “Just another girl come through the mirror,” said Lilly. Mrs. Hollerith snorted and said something about taking the mirror to the dump as soon as she could and how Grand Central Station was no place to have a baby.