Backward Glass (19 page)

“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 had 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.

“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.

S
i
x

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.”