Backward Glass Page 9

  “Turn!” shouted that voice again, but we didn’t. Luka kept a tight grip on me as we clattered down the basement stairs. “Turn. Who is it there? ’Tis old John. List to me. I am the obie one.”

  I was too scared to react, too scared to listen. By the time we had reached the basement, I could already hear heavy footsteps on the first floor.

  “Wait,” said Luka as I was about to go into the mirror. She pulled out the string Jimmy had left in. “We don’t want that to let anyone in behind us.”

  “Come, fool!” shouted that voice from upstairs. “I’ve waited ten long years while ye blinked in silver. Come and clash with me again.”

  “In,” said Luka. She pushed me forward.

  I steeled myself for it, and— “No, wait, something’s wrong. It’s cold. The mirror’s cold.”

  Feet thudded down the basement stairs. Behind me, from within the mirror, a hand reached out blindly and impacted my shoulder, pushing me aside and off the dresser. Luka fell with me, her knee sinking into my stomach and her forearm almost breaking my nose. Both our flashlights dropped to the concrete floor. One of them shut off.

  The room was a mix of cries. “Jimmy Hayes!” a new voice cried, much easier to understand than the hoarse gibberish of the one who had broken in upstairs. “Which one here is Jimmy Hayes?”

  The door-pounder shouted something about having “found the twistit fool.”

  Luka crawled over me and managed to snare the flashlight, playing it around the room. Two tall, thin men faced each other in the almost-dark, one backing up, both screaming and impossible to make out.

  Luka got up and moved toward me. In the swinging of her flashlight, I lost track of which man was which.

  The gunshot shut everyone up.

  One sharp crack, then a hundred echoes, and our eyes blinded by the muzzle-flash. The large basement filled with the itchy smell of gunpowder.

  “That’s better,” said a ragged voice. “Someone turn on the lights.”

  I didn’t move, the shot still ringing in my ears, but Luka stepped over and pulled a string that hung from a bare bulb. I flinched from the sudden glare.

  A man in a soaked and torn black raincoat stood, backed up to the storage shelves, holding in one hand a gun and in the other the shirt-front of another man. Both looked like they had spent weeks in the woods. The gun-holder was maybe a little older than my parents, receding hair leaving a sharp widow’s peak on his forehead. Days of stubble covered his face. His hooded, haunted eyes stared the other man down with a wild fire.

  I couldn’t tell the other man’s age. A thick beard covered his face, and long, unruly hair hung past his shoulders. His shirt and jeans were torn and ragged.

  The two men both spoke at once, but the gun-holder spoke louder and shook the gun. “No! Listen to me! You know what this is, don’t you? Bang bang!” He narrowed his eyes and pulled back as though trying to see something under the man’s dirty beard. “Went the long way, did you? Couldn’t catch me? Good. Too bad you waited all that time for this. Now, what’s here?” His gaze flicked over to Luka and me, then his eyes focused more tightly on me, and his jaw hung for a moment in surprise. “It’s you. It’s you again. You’re Kenny Maxwell.”

  And who was he? Was one of these men Prince Harming?

  Neither looked anything remotely like royalty, though the bearded man certainly talked like he was from a foreign country.

  The man in the raincoat began to shake all over, and the other took advantage of the moment. He surged forward, grasped the man’s gun-hand in his own, and forced it upward. Though I was still rooted to the spot with indecision, Luka darted forward, having apparently made her own decision. The nature of that decision, however, was unclear. She reached for the gun, now pointed toward the ceiling, and covered both of the men’s hands in her own, but from one of them—I couldn’t tell which—came a sharp kick to her midsection that sent her flying to crack her head on the cement floor of the basement.

  I scurried toward her, trying at the same time to make out the voices of the struggling and cursing men in front of the mirror. One called the other a fool, while the other kept shouting, “This can end it. Leave me be.”

  Luka was blinking when I got to her, and had raised her head. She tried to sit up all the way, but fell back. I caught her. “Don’t try to get up,” I said.

  “We have to do something, Kenny,” she said. “We have to stop this before someone gets shot.”

  I looked at the two men. They were evenly matched, like opponents who had fought each other more than once before, each well aware of the other’s strengths. When the better-spoken man who had first fired the gun tried to shove his knee at the other, or hook his foot around the wild man’s leg, the other man would shift or turn just enough to avoid the trick. For his part, the long-haired man kept straining at the gun, trying and failing twice to smash his forehead into the other man’s face.

  It was the gunman who turned to me first. “Help me, Kenny,” he said. “This man wants to kill us all. Pull him off me and I can get us away. It’s me. I’m your friend.”

  “Nay, hark not,” said the wilder man, shaking his greasy grey hair out of his face. “Hear me, Kennit. Here is where thy troubles begin. Help me.”

  I looked back to Luka, but for all that she had seemed certain a moment before, she now shook her head. Two struggling madmen blocked us from the mirror that led home. What were we to do?

  As my indecision stretched out, the gun-holder with the widow’s peak seemed to be winning. “This is all it takes,” he said between clenched teeth. “I can change everything back.”

  “Fool,” gasped the long-haired man. “Nothing can change.” Then his eyes darted back to me. “Kennit, help me. He’ll shoot you. Help me. I’m the obie one. That’s what she said. Rose. Said you’d know what it meant. I’m your obie one. Me, old John Wald.”

  It must have made sense to Luka at the same time as it did to me. She grasped my arm and I turned to her. The scratched note on the underside of the dresser drawer. Trust John Wald. Kenny says he is the auby one. And the rhyme, “truth and wisdom deeply walled.” Or deeply Wald? And Jimmy’s words just last night, which Luka mouthed now. “We need an Obi-Wan.” I finished the sentence with her.

  Not obie one. Not auby one. Obi-Wan.

  That was enough. I wrenched away from her, her own feeble strength shoving me on my way, though I had made my decision too late. I got to the struggling pair just as, with a ferocious rush of strength, the gun-wielder spun John Wald around and threw him at me. We collapsed back in a clutter of limbs and landed on Luka. By the time we had all struggled out from the tangle of our own bodies, the man with the widow’s peak was standing directly above us, his gun leveled.

  “Stay where you are,” he said to John Wald, who eyed the gun warily. “This is him. Don’t you see? This is him. If I kill him, none of it ever happens. I live, she lives, everyone lives! It’s all his fault.”

  “What’s his fault?” said Luka, struggling to put some part of herself between me and that gun.

  The gun-wielder’s eyes narrowed on her. “You’re his accomplice. But you don’t matter. It’s him who did it.”

  “Wait it,” pleaded Wald, sitting up as much as he dared. “Will ye hear no reason?”

  “Shut up,” said the other. He turned to me. “This is it,” he said. “If I kill you, it’s all over. Do you see that? You started it all.” He took his left hand from the gun and roughly wiped tears from his dirt-streaked face. “You were there. Every time. Always you. Pretending to be my friend.”

  “Kenny wouldn’t do that,” said Luka. “He’s never even met you before, right Kenny?”

  “Never met me?” said the man with a snort. “Wouldn’t do that? When I was little, Kenny was, for just a while, my only friend.” His hand grew firmer on the gun and he stood straighter. “Weren’t you, Kenny? He said he’d h
elp me. But you know all he did? Or had you done it already? Did you know, even then, that you had done it?”

  “What?” said Luka. “Done what?”

  He looked at her disdainfully. “Kenny Maxwell killed my wife,” he said, and fired his gun.

  Five

  The thing about getting shot is that you don’t exactly follow what happens next. It didn’t even register at first that he had shot me.

  The gun went off, and I felt a giant’s fist punch me in the side. Luka later told me that she had seen in his eyes that he was about to do it, and tried to push me out of the way. At first I thought the pain in my side was somehow her fault, like she had punched me.

  There was shouting above me and another gunshot, all the sounds retreating as though I had slipped into a deep grave. I found myself looking at the concrete floor as a film of milky white curtained my eyes. “But … ” I was trying to say. “But … ” I don’t even know what the rest of that sentence would have been. I started breathing in tiny gasps to minimize the agony building in my side.

  I think time must have sped up for me then. I didn’t lose consciousness, but events started happening at a faster pace. There were more bangs and scuffles and shouts. Twice someone tripped over me. Groaning made the pain worse.

  Rolling onto my back, I saw the raincoated man with the gun straining to turn it toward me, wresting against John Wald. “Leave off, ye mad fool,” shouted the bearded man. “Tha canst not hold off what’s done.”

  “Let me kill him,” said the man with the gun. “Then it all gets better.”

  He kneed Wald in the crotch and pushed him as he doubled over. The barrel of the gun strained closer to me. Part of me wanted to close my eyes so I wouldn’t see it coming, but before I could decide, another figure launched itself at the man, more like a jaguar than a person.

  Luka.

  She grabbed his gun hand and heaved herself up at the shooter. She didn’t speak. She must have been too angry or desperate or scared for that. She just smashed her face toward his.

  With his other arm, the man with the gun smashed her against the wall, but when he did, a splatter of blood came with her, and I could see that she’d bitten his cheek in her rage.

  The bearded man rose up again, overcoming his pain. My shooter still had his gun, but he looked scared now. Before Wald could grab him, he snarled in frustration and backed into the mirror.

  In the midst of my pain and the odd coldness flooding my body, I had a moment to be shocked at this. An adult going into the mirror.

  What about the rules?

  Strong hands rolled me over. I heard a man’s voice, talking softer now, but I couldn’t understand a word.

  I tried to pay attention, but fingers started examining my wound, and I felt like throwing up. I began to tense and buck. The hands withdrew and instead turned me on my side so I could heave the contents of my stomach onto the concrete floor.

  I heard Luka’s voice again. “I have to go. That was—he went forward. I have to see if Jimmy and Rick are okay.”

  “Wait it,” said the bearded man. “Boil some water and search me out a needle. I’ll go along to aid thy friends, but we must first stitch this wound.”

  He probed my side again, and all I could get through the agony were confused impressions. More gibberish talk from the bearded man, impatience from Luka. More pain in my side. Some lost time. Minutes? An hour?

  “I have to go,” said Luka’s voice. “Tell him I’m sorry, but I have to go. You have Anthony now. He can help.”

  A different voice. Anthony? “I think you should wait for John. What are you going to do against that guy by yourself?”

  “Something.”

  More talk. Maybe more time passing.

  I was picked up with what might have been gentleness, though I only felt pain. The veil of white that had descended across my vision had begun to thin, so I could see as we turned to the mirror.

  “No,” I said feebly. “No, it’s going to—”

  Burn was what I thought, but it didn’t. I didn’t see in the mirror who was carrying me, but I saw the glass come toward me. I flinched and felt the chill of downtime travel.

  We were going further into the past.

  There followed an endless series of bounces and jostles. I could feel the wetness of my blood around the agony of my wound. I could make out the foreign man’s voice, and the boy’s.

  If that journey was five minutes, an hour, or a year and a day, I couldn’t have told you. Sometimes we were in light, but mostly not. Where were my parents? Were they going to find out that I was gone? Had those gunshots been loud enough for them to hear in 1977? Would my dad hold my shoulders when they took the bullet out like in the movies?

  The giant who was holding me stopped and began to put me down. I tried to speak, but a voice said, “Hush now. Old John Wald’ll stash us sound in the fool’s mucky hiding hole. Hush.”

  My dreams were about pain. Spears and knives stuck in my side, usually from behind so I couldn’t get them out. Luka was there, telling me about the bad man from the mirror, and how he wanted to crack my head open, but I kept trying to tell her that we had it wrong, what he really wanted to do was shoot me to stop his wife from dying.

  I woke in a muddy hole with dim, grey light leaking in from beneath my feet. I could smell smoke.

  I tried to sit and groaned in pain.

  “Sounds like our patient is awake,” said a voice from the direction of the grey daylight. A girl’s voice. “Should I get him?”

  “Let me,” said a man’s voice. “I must ensearch the stitches for corruption. Hast thy flashlight?”

  A moment later, the wild, bearded man from last night folded himself into the entrance of the tiny cave. He shone his flashlight first at me and then into his own face. “’Tis only auld John Wald, a’here to spy thy wound.”

  His manner and his warm eyes assured me more than his words. His voice was different from the desperate croak it had been last night.

  Unbidden, my hands had moved to protect the wound, but he gently pushed them aside, murmuring strange words and pulling off the woolen blanket I was wrapped in to expose a gauze dressing, only slightly bloody, and smaller than I had imagined.

  Under that—I winced as he tugged the gauze away—was a wound smaller than a dime and puckered with ugly black stitches.

  A brief examination and he pronounced it clean. Next he looked at my face. I can’t say I wasn’t afraid; my teeth were chattering and my heart pounding, but something about him didn’t look scary. “Thou must have carps?”

  “You mean … questions?” I asked.

  He nodded. “We hid thee here a night and day again, but now I can bring thee from the deeps.”

  He began to help me halfway upright so I could crawl with him from the cave.

  The “hiding hole” from which we were crawling was too small to be called a cave. Long and narrow, it seemed to have been excavated by hand, though some care had gone into it as well. I could see bits of broken furniture that had been used to shore up the sides. The ragged man helped me negotiate the tight spaces. Even bowed down in this tight space, he had a kind of rough nobility about him. Trust John Wald. Kenny says he is the auby one.

  All of a sudden, I knew this place. “Wait,” I said to the bearded man. I took his flashlight and aimed it at a much-abused tabletop buried in the wall. Some decades in the future, I didn’t know how many, Jimmy Hayes and I had dug this same tabletop out and we all stared at the carved initials in its surface. Some of them were fresh, some old. CB + RH. CH. Clive, Rose, and Curtis. They looked faded and worn, though perhaps not so much as before. And below, where before I had read the initials of Lillian Huff, Anthony Currah, and Margaret Garroway—nothing. Uncarved wood. The bigger surprise, however, came at the bottom of the list. KM and LB. Kenny Maxwell and Luka Branson. Even back in this time, wheneve
r this was, they were not fresh.

  We had carved them even further in the past.

  But how far in the past was I?

  “Fleet now,” said the bearded man. “There’s much to speak ere dark enshrouds us all.”

  I returned his flashlight and emerged from the cave mouth into a grey day on the shores of a much stronger Manse Creek. In my time, the hole had been halfway up the creek bank. Here, now, it was five feet of sloping sand from a deeper and wider stream.

  Two girls about my age sat by a campfire. They looked up as I came out.

  The taller one had bright blond hair in long curls. She wore a heavy wool coat, patched and worn. The other was her opposite in every way. Her dark hair was short, framing a round face that was both soft with plumpness and hard with some inner resolve. She stood and spoke.

  “Kenny Maxwell,” she said. “Welcome to 1947. I’m Margaret Garroway. Everyone calls me Peggy. This is Lilly Huff. And I guess you’ve already met John Wald. I know he looks like a rough sort, but he’s okay. He’s from the seventeenth century.”

  I straightened painfully, wincing and worrying about my wound. “How do you know who I am?”

  Peggy shrugged. “You’ve heard of us, haven’t you? Anthony’s been talking about you for weeks. Isn’t that what we do, talk about the kids further up and down the line?”

  She put a cigarette to her lips and took a long draw on it. I tried to remember, had we figured out her age? Sixteen? Seventeen? Was she trying to act older, or was that how kids were in 1947?

  Lilly looked about the same age, but she wasn’t wearing makeup, and didn’t have the same hard-bitten look. She remained seated, and now indicated a rock by the fire. “You’ve been through a lot. Care for a seat? John has cooked some fish for us. He’s something of an outdoorsman.”

  I stood and blinked for a moment. How did they know this John Wald? And here she was talking about Anthony as though everything was fine. Wasn’t he missing? And shouldn’t I talk to Margaret Garroway right now about how she was supposed to go missing?