Backward Glass (14 page)

Three

Think fast, I told myself. They had come through the mirror. They could only have come from the past. If I went through …

“Honey,” said the woman’s voice, “maybe I should go down. We don’t want a repeat performance of last time.”

“Okay. I’ll be right up here if you need me.”

“That’s fine. Kenny? I’m coming down to talk to you. It’s me—”

If I had stayed just a moment longer, I would have heard her name, but by the time her foot creaked on the top step, I was already pushing my way into the mirror. I’ve always wondered what would have been different if I had just heard her name.

I took the doorstop with me as I went. As desperate as I was to get out of there and close the mirror before anyone followed me, I paused in the Silverlands to make sure I wouldn’t be stepping out into a long fall or a watery grave. I couldn’t see anything, but when I stuck my hand through, I felt only air, and, crouching, I could touch the familiar wooden floor of the carriage house. I wrapped the string around my hand, wished for luck, and pushed the rest of the way out into a humid 1947 night.

Assuring myself that no one was in the carriage house, I felt my way down the darkened stairs, and made my way to the front door, just in time to see a flashlight emerge from the mirror. Either they were able to get into the mirror without me or they had pushed in before I left. I wanted to run straight to the trees at the edge of the creek, either lose myself in there or run along the path that led to the bluffs. Manse Valley was wide. While they were searching, I could work my way back to the mirror.

But no. It was dark. That would keep me safe enough. In the meantime, I had to know what was going on. I willed myself to hold still outside the carriage house door, pressed against the wall.

“Kenny?” said the woman’s voice again. She had come through the mirror. So they both had access? “This is all going to be a little shocking to you, I think. Are you there? We think you know a lot about what happened in the past that we don’t. We can help each other.”

Then the man’s voice. “He’s not coming. Probably gone by now.”

“The place down by the creek?”

“Who knows? You must know it better than anyone.”

The woman shrugged. “Ancient history. To him, it’s just a while ago.”

Where had I heard that voice before? It was just on the edge of my brain, but catching it was like grabbing a fistful of water.

The man’s voice: “Should we stay? Look around?”

“I don’t think there’s any point. We couldn’t find John Wald. There’s too many places to hide. I wish he’d just talk to us.”

“Too afraid he’s going to get knocked over the head.”

“Don’t joke about that. We have to find out what happened. That poor little girl.”

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t joking. Let’s get back, then. We don’t even know for sure he went into the mirror. This could be the wildest of goose chases, taking us away from what’s important. I want to know what he was doing up there in 1957.”

“What should we do about the mirror?”

“Let’s just leave it.”

“Okay. We’re lucky, aren’t we? That it owes me a trip forward and you a trip back?”

“Lucky. Yeah, that’s what I’d call us.”

And silence. It was tempting. I could call out to them before they left. Run if they tried to come after me. But had I heard they’d been hunting for Wald? That didn’t inspire confidence.

I waited for a long time before going back into the carriage house. Eventually, boredom took over, and I wandered outside of the hedges that bounded the little property and took a look at the main house. Peggy had been missing for almost a month. Was her mother back home? Did her father even realize his daughter was gone?

I shivered despite the humidity.

It owes me a trip forward and you a trip back.

So they were from two different times?

It must have been after three in the morning when I went back into the carriage house and approached the mirror. Could they be waiting in the Silverlands? If they were, it was dark enough that they wouldn’t see my approach. Having left my backpack in the coal cellar in 1957, I didn’t have a flashlight to brandish as a club, so, feeling foolish, I took Anthony’s length of string and wrapped it around my hand, working it so the two spoons ended up on the outside, a makeshift and ridiculous set of brass knuckles.

I edged around the side of the mirror. I’d stick my head in first, open my eyes as soon as I could, and try to see if anyone was in the Silverlands. If it was empty, I’d go right in and survey the abandoned house, but then I wasn’t sure what I’d do. Tumble out and hope that the element of surprise would get me past? Wait until they left? I was determined about one thing: I wasn’t letting myself get stuck one more mirror into the past. If they tried to grab me, I’d kick, bite, and scream, anything to get on my feet and running.

I took a few deep breaths to get myself worked up, running through an internal pep talk all the while, then rounded on the mirror and stuck my face in.

The mirror was cold
.

Cold, as in downtime, the past, heading to 1937. Not hot as it should have been if I was going up. That was
wrong. I was out of my time. Whenever I went into the
mirror, it should be uptime hot. I didn’t get to go further back. That was against the rules.

Panicked, I pulled my face out and stumbled back. I tripped on a chair leg and fell onto the sofa where I had spent so many nights as Peggy’s secret guest the month before.

I lay there in silence for a moment, thinking about this new development.

The mirror was cold.

This was impossible. Against the rules.

I lay on the sofa and looked at the mirror for the longest time. It was supposed to take me home, or at least in that direction.

I felt stupid wearing my improvised spoon knuckles, so I unwrapped the string and put Anthony’s doorstop on the floor beside me. It was all I had. I was reduced from my backpack full of boxes, flashlights, a map, and a dwindling supply of money, to two spoons and piece of string. If I went back to 1937, would I find that Lilly’s mirror also opened only backward for me? Would it open only backward for Peggy as well?

I don’t know how long I lay there and looked at the stupid mirror, but I found no answers there. What was there to do in the end but go in? John Wald was missing in this time, maybe scared off by the interlopers or perhaps just steering clear while Peggy’s parents searched for her. I had no other friends in this time; my dad was seven.

I got up and with a weary sigh pushed my hand into the mirror.

Which was hot.

I jerked back.

What the hell was going on? For the first time all year, I was beginning to get angry at the mirror. How did it go all these months operating on the same rules, and then suddenly go back and forth. What had I done differently?

Other than keep a doorstop in it for a month.

Frowning, I bent down and picked up the string and spoons. For a month, these had kept a mirror open leading back from 1957 to 1947, Anthony’s passage. We had never done anything like that before, because it blocked access to the kids one jump further up and down. I held the doorstop up to the dim starlight leaking in the hayloft window, but it hadn’t changed in any way. Ordinary white household string, six feet of it, a tarnished spoon tied to each end.

Holding the doorstop, I stretched out my hand to the mirror and pushed in.

Cold.

I put the doorstop down and tried again.

Hot.

Put it in my pocket.

Hot. It had to be touching my skin to change the mirror to downtime. When I tried it again, I noticed something else. When I held it in my hand near the mirror, the whole thing, string and spoons alike, felt like it was vibrating, almost living. The feeling was subtle, not like the buzz of an object meeting itself from another time, more like the trembling of a pet mouse when you hold it in your hand. When I moved it away from the mirror, the feeling diminished. But it didn’t go away.

“Oh, man,” I said aloud, and my voice startled me in the empty little house. I held the string and spoons in my hand. “I know what you are. You’re better than a doorstop. You’re a key.”

Fo
u
r

Before I went through the mirror next, I stood and asked myself what Luka would do. I imagined it was her and not me who had run back to 1947 and discovered the rule of keys. I imagined she was the one chased by these mystery people from different times. Would she let herself be scared by them, stick around a couple of days watching the mirror, tell herself she was gathering information?

No way.

I broke off a chair leg, stuck the spoons and string into my pocket, and shoved my way into the mirror. The Silverlands were wider now, maybe as much as seven feet.

On the 1957 end, I could see nothing but darkness. I stuck the tip of my finger out to make sure I wouldn’t emerge into water, then pushed the rest of the way through to an immediate shout and a grab from the side, but whoever was grabbing me got a vicious swipe from my chair leg. I tumbled out of the person’s grasp, kicked, and felt a satisfying jar as my foot made contact.

There were shouts of “No, wait” and “Kenny, you don’t understand,” which I couldn’t argue with, but I wasn’t going to stop for people who chased me through time and grabbed before they talked.

After all those hours, I must have had the element of surprise, because by the time one of them had the light on, I was already out of the living room and slamming the door. I threw a kitchen chair at them to confound pursuit and escaped to the backyard. At this point, I was good enough at fence-hopping and familiar enough with the neighborhood that getting out was as good as getting away. Just in case they followed, I took a long, roundabout way back to Brian’s place.

Back in the choking dark of the coal cellar, too tired to crack my brain against new mysteries and new rules, but pleased at my escape, I fell asleep.

I went out late Monday and Tuesday, crouched down in a yard next to the Tarkington house, and held my string-and-spoons key, moving it closer and farther from the last place I had seen the mirror. The gentle half-alive buzz in my hands told me it was still there. As a bonus, I found myself growing more and more attuned to the vibrations of that key. By Wednesday morning, I could sit in the coal cellar, stretch my arm out, and use the thing to find the direction of the mirror.

I felt more in control of events than I had all summer.

Which I suppose should have been a warning.

I hadn’t seen the mysterious couple again, though two of Brian’s friends reported talking to the woman. I knew that the house was enemy territory, but I needed answers. And just as they seemed to think that there were answers in this time because I was here, I figured my best source of information must be the past. Mr. Weston in the library had continued to be helpful, but he couldn’t find much. On the Beckett front, he found one family in the Manse Creek area in the nineteenth century, their only son was the Clive who died in the war. Since then, as the area grew, there were other births, deaths, and marriages of Becketts in the local churches, but not a single Clive.

The other project I told him I was working on was the local legend of Prince Harming, and he managed to dig up a mention of the story in a small-press chapbook from just a couple of years before, but it didn’t tell me much I didn’t know. A Manse Valley bogeyman, probably made up in reaction to the stories of children disappearing or being knocked over the head. The author had been able to find people who remembered skipping to those rhymes as far back as 1908.

As interesting as all this was, it wasn’t satisfying. Finding things out wasn’t the same as doing something.

The mirror was in enemy territory. It was time to take it back.

Five o’clock on Thursday morning, having packed for travel, I got up, skulked next door to the abandoned house, and climbed up to the roof of a shed, certain the strangers were upstairs. I wondered what could get adults out of their lives like this. Me, I was trapped. And I was a kid. What better things did I have to do than travel in time? But them? Didn’t they have jobs? What were they doing, out of their time, hiding in an abandoned house, hunting for answers from a kid who didn’t know any?

That mirror wasn’t supposed to be for them. It was for us kids.

I had to wait three hours. It was a miracle I wasn’t discovered. The man whose shed I was on came out around seven to pick tomatoes, and I had to freeze in place for long, cramped minutes. An hour after that, my two came slinking out the back door. I saw the man first, peering out, but I was low on the shed roof and he didn’t see me. A moment later, he and the woman slipped out and around the side of the house. They shared a few quick words in the space between that house and its neighbor, too quiet for me to hear, then he kissed her quickly and they headed in separate directions.

The man seemed agitated and poorly rested. He was definitely the same man with the yellow tie I had seen a month ago, nervous despite his quick smile.

The woman was different. She was worried too, but it was all focused on him. Before they parted, she fixed his collar and neatened his hair.

I let ten minutes go by before coming down. This was too important to mess up. I hopped the fence and approached the back door. Unlocked. Once inside, I saw that they had been trying to be smarter. Something was in the mirror’s place, a sheet covering it, but the real mirror, my spoons-and-string told me, was upstairs. I guessed the decoy was to lure me in, maybe give me a sense of safety.

Thanks to the weak-then-strong buzzing of the doorstop-turned-key in my hand, I found the mirror easily. They had kept the ruined frame on it, and just tilted it against one wall. The first thing I did was test my key. It worked exactly as it had in 1947; when I held it, the mirror was downtime cold, but if I put it in my pocket, the glass turned hot.

From the evidence, this was the room they had been squatting in. Though they had made the bed before leaving, I could see signs of their presence. They had come through with suitcases and changes of clothing.

I wrote them a note:

“Once I’m done with the mirror, it’s going back where it belongs. You know where that is. Who are you, and why are you following me? I’d stick around, but I don’t trust you. Please stay away. I’m going back to 1917 to save the baby. Then home. Leave me alone and let me do this. Kenny.”

I left it on the bed, hefted the mirror, and went downstairs.

There was no way I was going to hop fences in broad daylight carrying a four-foot-tall mirror, so I took my chances out the front way.

What I didn’t count on was Boyd Fenton and John Timson stepping out from behind the Tarkington fence just as I reached the sidewalk. “Well, look here, Johnny,” said Fenton, “we got some kind of burglary going on.”

“Look,” I said, “I just want to go my way in peace. I’m not hurting you—or anyone, really. Mind your own business.”

Fenton snorted. “Pal, you are my business. I’m getting five bucks a day to watch this place, and a twenty-dollar bonus if I catch you.”

“And how are you going to do that?”

Timson’s hands had been behind his back. Now he took out the baseball bat he was hiding. “Threats, probably,” he said. “But anything’s possible.”

“You’d be surprised,” I said. I took the spoons and string from my pocket and wrapped them around my hand.

Fenton laughed. “Look, Johnny, the little nosebleed’s got silver-spoon knuckles. What are you gonna do, reject, tap us to death?”

When you’ve dealt with bullies a lot, you fight twenty different battles in your head for every one you concede in the real world. You come up with a million fool-proof strategies you never have the guts to try out in person. And if you have a time-travel mirror whose rules you’ve figured out, you can add about ten more to that million.

I snaked my hand out as quickly as I could and tugged the end of the bat toward the mirror. It sunk inside.

Fenton took a half step back and made a tiny, quiet choking sound. I think Timson would have fallen back as well, but he was holding onto the bat. My arm went into the mirror up to my elbow, and though he got tense and almost began to tug back, he didn’t let go.

I did, and quickly pulled my arm out of the mirror, closing it.

As I had hoped it would, the part of the bat that was outside of the mirror pulled away, its top half lopped off in the Silverlands.

“Now,” I said, “want me to try that with your hands, or do you want to get lost?”

Timson’s face turned dark and he twisted to look at Fenton. “That was a two-dollar Louisville Slugger.”

Fenton, still staring at the mirror, said nothing.

Timson shook his head and turned to me. “I better be getting all the reward money for this,” he said, and launched himself at me.

I shoved the mirror toward the onrushing Timson, smashing it into his face, then grabbed it back, tucked it under my arm, turned, and ran to the backyard.

Next to the Tarkingtons was someone with a real love for berry bushes, and I held the mirror high as I thrashed my way through. Their fence was low. I tossed the mirror over and took a flying leap.

Almost made it, too.

Timson caught my ankle as I went over. I kicked him free, then tumbled sideways over the fence.

I went in so fast I was halfway to 1947 before the Silverlands slowed me down. I steadied myself against the cold, then stepped back uptime, to warm it out of me. When I turned to the swimming images in the 1957 exit, I could make out a patch of petunias the mirror had fallen into, and above them, sky. It was strange to be standing in the Silverlands, looking out and up at the same time.

John Timson’s face appeared in front of me, above the mirror. Without stopping to think about it, I pushed my hand out of the mirror and punched him in the face.

Then I wondered all over again what Luka would do. I had never seen her shy away from a fight, but I’d never seen her actually beat someone up. She found other ways of doing things. She talked to people. She cajoled. Sometimes she lied.

Maybe there was a way to be like Luka.

I reached for Timson’s shirt. He jerked back, but not fast enough. I grabbed a fistful, and dragged it back into the mirror. It was easy, since in the world of 1957, he was leaning over and gravity was on my side. As I pulled him closer, I pushed my face out.

“Come into the mirror, John Timson,” I said. “Come in and be with us forever. We’ve been waiting for you, John Timson. And we’re hungry.”

Timson cried out, a strangled kind of scream, and pulled away.

From my vantage point in the Silverlands, all I could see were his feet as he jumped the fence. I waited a moment, not wanting to take the chance of Timson or Fenton having a change of heart, then pulled myself out. With the different up-down orientation, I had to put out my two arms, brace myself against the dirt and petunias, and heave with all my might, gritting my teeth against the uptime heat.

Once out, I shook myself off, picked up the mirror, and clambered two fences to Brian’s house.

I checked my watch. The Maxwells would have left for work. I took the mirror down to the coal cellar, and planned for what was next. A quick check uptime told me the 1967 mirror was still submerged.

I steeled myself against the pain that came when you mixed mirror-heat and water, and stuck my hand through to feel around. Sand and mud. I felt a slimy bit of weed and yanked it through, but what good was that? In the last couple of months, I had come up with a hundred schemes for getting back out of that mirror, but none was any good. I could have put a scuba suit on and gone through, but what if John Wald was right, and it wasn’t a breathing thing, just the shock of the water mixing with the mirror-heat?

So there was still no hope of getting through into the future. Not yet.

I had an appointment in the past.

I went back into the coal cellar and left a note for Brian, asking him to leave the mirror and promising I’d be back. Then, making sure I had everything, I held my key and headed into the mirror.

It was the longest, coldest downtime journey I had taken. Out into the carriage house, turn around, hold out the key, and back in. Out into what must have been Lilly’s room in 1937, turn around, hold the key, and back in. Out into the same room in 1927, nobody around in the midmorning, but I could hear sounds from the hallway, so back in again.

Hold on, I said in my head to the baby my father had taken out of the wall, here I come.

I stopped in the Silverlands and watched 1917 before bursting out into it. Just as I had expected from Rose’s diary, the mirror was back in the carriage house where her mother had sent her to live. Half-finished lath on the wall. A neatly made single bed. A pile of books.

A crying girl huddled in a corner.

Time to be like Luka again.

Without another thought, I stepped out of the mirror.

Rose’s head sprang up and her eyes grew round with surprise. “Who on earth are you?” she said as I stepped down off her dresser.

“I’m Kenny Maxwell,” I said, trying to channel my inner Skywalker. “I’m here to rescue you.”