Backward Glass (22 page)

Rose soon fell asleep, and Mrs. Hollerith didn’t want us upstairs, so we didn’t get any kind of last goodbye, not to her, nor to ten-year-old Curtis, who Lilly pronounced to be suffering from shock. Luka and I picked him up and carried him through the Silverlands to his own time.

Mrs. Hollerith, ten years older and not one day more pleasant, sat waiting for us on her dead daughter’s bed. “What have you done to him?” she said, standing up. I wondered how long she had been waiting. Her eyes narrowed as we brought him forward and laid him next to her. “I told you ten years ago it was to be the last I saw of you.”

“Shut up,” said Lilly. “I’ve had about enough of you. The boy’s in shock. Bundle him up and elevate his legs. Keep an eye on him for a few hours and he’ll be fine. I suspect he won’t remember much. Maybe that’s for the best.” She eyed Mrs. Hollerith a moment longer, then turned to Luka and me. “Let’s go.”

“That’s it?” said Mrs. Hollerith. “You breeze into my house once every ten years upsetting everything, carrying madmen and unconscious children, and expect me to accept it? I’m going to throw that mirror into the ravine.”

“No you won’t,” I said.

She fixed me with a glare. “Oh, and you’re going to tell me what to do?”

“No.” I returned her stare as calmly as I could. “I’m just telling you how it happens. In a couple of years you’re going to sell this place—to the Huffs—and you’ll leave this dresser here when you do. That’s how Lillian here gets to know Curtis in the first place, and that’s how we come back to save Rose and Curtis. You’ll do it because that’s the way it happens.”

We left her with her mouth hanging open.

When we stepped out of the Silverlands into 1937, Lilly’s bedroom was empty again. She told us that she and her family were probably off looking for somewhere to stay in the city.

Our next stop was the carriage house in 1947. “This is where I get off, I suppose,” said Lilly.

“You’ve got a husband and baby waiting for you, right?” said Luka.

“I do. I suppose Kenny told you. I can’t imagine what he thinks of all this, my husband I mean. The little one’s only two. Can’t expect him to have any opinions, can we, Luka?”

In the early morning light, I saw Luka do something I don’t think I’d ever witnessed before. She blushed. “Actually,” she said, “my real name’s Lucy. I just—made up that other name.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t worry about the opinion thing, though,” she said. “He’ll have a lot of them pretty soon. John, right?”

“Why, yes. How did you know?”

Luka seemed to come to some kind of decision, and she darted forward to give Lilly a quick peck on the cheek. “We better go now. Into the mirror, Kenny. Thanks for everything, Grandma. It all works out in the end.

And just like that, leaving Lilly wide-eyed and open-mouthed, Luka dragged me back into the uptime heat of the mirror and through to the Maxwells’ coal cellar. I guess I must have looked pretty shocked as well. “Have you—?”

“Known all along? Nah. A lot happened this summer, Kenny. I moved back in with my dad. First time I’ve really been with him much in years. A couple of days ago my grandma sat me down and told me how she saved a pregnant girl’s life once. With the help of a cute boy.”

I looked back at the mirror. “Lilly said I was cute?”

Luka rolled her eyes. “Well, she’s old, now. You know how the memory goes. Come on, Romeo, I promised your parents I’d get you home.”

Fo
u
r

Hear the wisdom in the walls.

When we got to 1967, John Wald was already awake and making breakfast for Rick from a huge pike he had caught in the lake with a pointed stick. We ate quickly. Luka said she had to get back before her father woke up since he was a little more on the ball than her mom.

Rick hugged us all goodbye, and for the first time in two months, I headed back home to find my mother sleeping in front of the mirror.

There was a lot of crying and hugging. Mom called for Dad and my grandmother, and they came right away.

When everyone calmed down, we reached into the mirror for John Wald. He apologized to my parents for not bringing me home sooner, and that won my mom over. She said he looked like he hadn’t eaten a good meal in more than a hundred years, at which he frowned and said it was probably more like sixty.

Luka had to go but promised she’d come back. Wald said he wanted to go with her, but with him it would be my last goodbye.

He stood at the mirror with Luka and turned to face me. “Fare thee well, Kennit,” he said. “A twisty path thou didst thread in the glass, and did what good thou couldst. You learned to float above. Stay thee here, now. Cross not the glass again.”

He gave me a final embrace and Luka took him uptime.

My parents tried their best to get me to talk and be normal. My grandmother told what should have been the very amusing story of her back-and-forth questioning of her sanity in the months and years following our encounter. She said she had written down everything I said to her, but never showed it to anyone, and kept telling the hobo boy story so she wouldn’t forget. My father then told the story of Grandma coming over just as they were growing frantic about my disappearance and considering calling the police. “I almost sent her to a home that very day,” he said, giving her a side-armed hug.

Eventually, sensing my need to be alone, my mother pronounced a quiet time.

My attic bedroom was, predictably, much neater than I had left it, since sometimes cleaning is the only thing that can take my mother’s mind away from worries. I lay in my bed and looked at the sea of old furniture, a lot of which I had now seen when it was much newer.

I began to cry.

Sixty years into the past a baby had been torn from his mother’s grasp by his own brother, then fallen in an arc like a bloody football and ended his life against a mirror that would not let him inside.

And now I was home. Really home. I had been in this house countless times in the past weeks, but I hadn’t been home.

Sleep, when I cried myself into it, lasted until noon the next day, and if there were any dreams, I don’t remember them.

My only highlights in the bewildering first days of school, when I suddenly had to be a normal kid again, were visits from Luka. Those required a lot of negotiation. Conceding that the mirror was indestructible, and even that we had done some good inside it, my mother still had my dad put a lock on the closet in their bedroom, and agreed to give Luka a key provided that she respected their rules: she could visit if she asked in advance, and I was never to be allowed in the mirror.

I wanted to object, but my dad sat me down and explained in excruciating detail just how much pain my two-month absence had caused. Since they had discovered the truth of the mirror, either my mom, my dad, or my grandmother had sat watch every minute of every day waiting for my return.

So I contented myself with living vicariously through Luka. Using they key she had made, she started spending a lot of time in the past. The mirror was unguarded all the way to 1947, so as long as Luka’s dad wasn’t watching her too closely, she could risk trips well into the past. Sometimes she’d even go further and bring back news, some bad, some good.

Young Curtis remembered nothing of the night he was born. Even his memories of the mirror were muddled. In early October, he made his first friend his own age, a girl from two doors down, and tried to take her into the mirror. When she couldn’t pass in, he grew angry and smashed her head repeatedly into its unbreakable surface. She never recovered completely.

Rose did better than anyone might have expected. By the time Luka actually met her, Curtis was six weeks old and Rose was devoted to him. She never talked of the other baby.

Of the older Curtis who had run out into the night, she could find out nothing, though there were stories of a wild man living in the woods, stealing chickens, sleeping in barns. Even fearless Luka didn’t stray far on the rare nights when she went as far back as 1917.

For almost four months I kept to my parents’ new rules, and I guess it would have stayed that way if it hadn’t been for you and the fact that there’s always one more rule.

Five

Running down the silver street.

My mother had never been crazy about keeping the mirror in the house, but I think she comforted herself with the fact that I was under pretty constant supervision. Grandma moved in with us following the madness of that summer. My dad fixed up the library for her. Between the three adults, I hardly had a moment alone in the house.

So when Mom got an invitation to her office Christmas party on the same weekend Grandma was going to visit a sick friend, she didn’t like it one bit, but somehow my dad convinced her they should go. Two days before Christmas, a week and a half before my year was to end, I found myself alone at night for the first time in months.

I tried to be good. I sat in my room and got an early start on my Christmas vacation homework, willing myself to ignore the time-travel mirror downstairs. A couple of times I thought I might have heard Luka passing through one way or the other, but she had been given a stern lecture by my dad about just exactly how forbidden it was for her to stop over here tonight, and I had heard her make a solemn promise, so I knew there was no chance of company.

After failing for a good half hour to figure out any of my math problems, I gave up and headed downstairs for some cookies and milk. I stayed down in the kitchen to eat, enjoying that room’s better lighting and the comforting sound of the fridge running. When my mother called to check on me, I just about crushed my milk glass in my hand I was so on edge. I assured her that everything was fine. No, Luka hadn’t come through. No, I hadn’t gone near their closet. Yes, I knew the number and would call if there were any problems.

I washed my glass and cleaned up my crumbs. Nothing to do but clump back up the stairs.

I guess that’s when you heard me.

Just as I walked past my parents’ bedroom, I heard a knock and a muffled “Hello?”

I froze. I didn’t know that voice. Another knock. Another “Hello?” but this time a little louder. “Listen, I need some help here. I need the diary. The one with stuff from Curtis and Rose.”

I put my hand on the handle of my parents’ door, then jumped as the guy spoke up again.

“It’s not even me that needs it. It’s Luka. She needs help with Prince Harming.”

That did it. I opened the door and walked to the closet. “Who are you?”

“Oh, man, thank you. Are you Kenny? I’m Connor. From 2017.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Look, can you open the door?”

“It’s locked.”

“I know that, D—Kenny. Luka sent me to get the diary.”

I looked at the closet door. Hinges on the outside. “Give me a few minutes,” I said, and headed down to the basement for a hammer and an awl.

While I took the door off its hinges, I thought I should find out from “Connor from 2017” exactly what was going on and what kind of help Luka needed, but he kept me so busy with questions of his own that I never got to ask mine. How many channels did we have on TV? Had I ever touched a computer? How many phones did we have in the house? Had I ever heard of solar power?

Peevishly, I fired back, “What about you? Do you have a base on the moon?”

“No point. I went uptime with Luka, though, and we saw the Mars landing. That’ll be cool.”

So that was who she had been with. I guessed maybe this was Luka’s new future boy, probably her boyfriend. My feelings of inferiority were even more magnified when I got the closet door off. He was probably two years older than me, about three inches taller, and possessed a frame that was both gangly and muscular. Behind him was the mirror, removed from its dresser again and leaning against my dad’s work uniforms. It was the first time I had seen it in weeks. As wrong as it was, I was itching for the slow molasses of the Silverlands. Uptime heat or downtime cold, it didn’t matter. I wanted to be uncomfortable again.

“Aw, jeez, thanks,” the newcomer said. “I was sweating like a sonofa—” He checked himself, looked sheepish, and continued. “I was sweating bad. Look, I’m sorry about this. Luka told me to leave you out of everything because she didn’t want you getting in trouble. But—” He stopped himself and looked at a large-faced digital wristwatch with four or five buttons around its edge. “Man, she’s been alone out there for more than an hour. Look, will you come back with me?”

“Fine,” I said. “But this better not take long.”

“You should bundle up,” said the new kid. “We’re going outside.”

When I got my strings-and-spoon key out of my coat pocket, Connor gave a low whistle. “Wow. The classic.”

“Pardon?”

“Nah, it’s just—I’ve heard about it, that’s all. That was the first key.”

I shrugged the comment aside. “Let’s get going.”

The cold was as bone-chilling as it ever had been, worse because of how wide the Silverlands had become. When I was going in every day, I had hardly noticed the change, but now it must have been fifteen feet from one mirror to the next. We didn’t see a single person on our journey back.

In 1917, the dresser was back on the second floor of the carriage house. Even in the dark, I noticed the finished wall right away. I guessed Mrs. Hollerith had put that up as quickly as she could.

Enough of our journey had been either painful or necessarily silent that the new kid and I had barely talked. Now I wanted answers. “So where’s Luka?” I said as we stamped our feet and beat our arms for warmth.

Connor turned on a flashlight and aimed it downstairs. “Like I said, we have to go outside. I don’t know how much I should tell you. She’ll be pretty mad that I brought you, especially if she ends up getting shut out of your mirror for the last week of the year. I hate it when she’s mad at me.”

I held up the diary but didn’t give it to him. “You said she’s in trouble. Which way?”

Connor grinned. “The hiding hole.”

He led me out of the carriage house and into the snow-covered winter-bare wood at the back of the property, and on the walk he gave me a scattered account of what had led him to this point. His other adventures in the glass had been all over the place, mostly in the future, but this one had drawn him far into the past. “It started a few years ago, I guess, but I didn’t realize what it all meant until last week. When I was nine years old, Dana took me to a retirement home.”

“Dana?”

He looked at me as though I were slow. “My older sister. I didn’t know why she wanted me to go there at first. All my grandparents still lived in their own houses, but she said it wasn’t them. It was someone way older, my great-grandmother. I hadn’t seen her much at all in my life. She had been in that place since before I was born. At first, she didn’t even seem to remember me, but then when my sister introduced me to her, last name and everything, she grins really wide and asks me how old I’ll be in 2017. I tell her I’ll turn seventeen. Grin gets wider. ‘Well, you’ll be the one, then,’ she says. She looks at Dana and says, ‘Don’t feel bad it isn’t you, dear. It’s a lot of trouble in there.’

“I was just going to put it down to, old people are weird. Then she stares right at me. You know, one of those laser-beam stares? And she says, ‘Connor, I have a message for you to carry, but I’m old and I can’t remember which one of them it’s for. I can’t remember which one does it. Maybe it’s you. Here’s the message. Remember it as well as you can. He can still save her. He’ll just have to get there before her and wait. Curtis can still save Peggy.’”

I felt like I was wearing my Speedy Gonzales T-shirt. “She said Curtis and Peggy?”

“Yeah. Didn’t mean a thing to me. I asked Dana about it, and all she would say is that I’d understand it someday. Then last week, Eric—that’s my older brother—he gives me this pile of old journals. I mean, really old, like forty years. They had been caught in a fire we had a while ago, and there was a lot of stuff I couldn’t make out, but I could definitely see those two names. That got me remembering that visit to the retirement home. I asked Dana about it, and she says it was just something that—something my dad asked her to do.”

“So you asked Luka about it.”

“So I asked Luka about it. She got crazy excited.”

“And?”

“And … ” He found the spot he was looking for, slid down the creek bank, and gestured for me to come along. “That led us to this mess.”

I slid down and followed his pointing finger with my gaze. We were back at Clive Beckett’s tiny hand-dug cave, and outside of it, sitting on an upturned crate, was the most ruined and lost Prince Harming I had seen yet.

Four months had not been kind. His cheeks were sunken and his arms, under layers of rags, were twig-thin. “Don’t look,” he said to me, and his eyes still burned with a manic fire. “Don’t look at me. No one looks at me. If no one looks at you, you don’t exist. Brother killer. Shouldn’t exist. Wiped away. Shouldn’t exist. Nobody look.”

He didn’t seem like much of a danger anymore. “Curtis, you didn’t mean to—”

He stood up and screamed, causing us both to step back. “Don’t use the name! Doesn’t deserve it. Killed a brother. A baby.” After a moment of standing there twitching, he sat back down again. “A little baby. Stood outside the door and heard them talking about it. A little baby. Clive. The better one. Named after the father. So just the bad one lived. Killed a baby.”

Behind him, someone unfolded from the tiny entrance to the cave. “No, you didn’t,” said Luka. “I’ve been trying to tell you that. Hi, Kenny. Sorry I got you into all this again, but maybe you can help me talk some sense into him. I’ve been trying, but he won’t listen. We need the diary. The shatterdate book. Did you bring it?”

I took it out of my pocket. When he saw it, Curtis cocked his head to one side. “I did that,” he said. “Long ago.”

“I know,” said Luka. “You were trying to make sense of it, weren’t you? When you were ten. Did you steal your mother’s diary to do it?”

He nodded, his eyes still fixed on the beaten-up old book. “Wanted to know what—couldn’t remember. After hurting the little girl. Whose boy? Kept—waking up from the nightmare where—killed the little boy that was—was me—and then no more me. Used the mirror to visit Rose, she told that it was all a bad dream. She showed me the little boy that was me. She said everything was all right now. But—didn’t believe her. Thought she was lying. Bad man was going to come and get me.”

Luka stepped out from behind Curtis and took the book from Connor’s outstretched hand. “You started trying to find out about the bad man, didn’t you? You wrote down the little skipping rhymes.”

His eyes stayed on the book as he mumbled out the version of the rhyme I had always found hardest to understand. “Treacle sweet, bloody feet, loudly yelling down the street. Holler loud, holler proud, you shall wear a coffin shroud.” He bit his lip for a moment, remembering, then said the next one. “Trick your feet down the street, then the years will vanish fleet. Head will hurt, death’s a cert, a dead man’s sentence should be curt. Let me pass, leave the lass, don’t go down the backward glass.”

When he said the bit about leaving the lass, his voice trembled and his eyes filled up with tears.

“That one’s about you, isn’t it?” said Luka. “‘A dead man’s sentence should be curt.’ You’re Curt. And the other one. Holler loud. As in Hollerith.”

“But how?” I said. “How is that old skipping rhyme about him? It goes back further than this.”

Luka shrugged. “Rose, probably. She only saw the kid from 1907 a few times, but all it would take was once, right? She teaches the kid the rhyme, that kid teaches other people … ”

“Oh, wow,” I said. “Then someone else teaches it to Rose when she’s little.”

“The point is,” said Luka to Curtis, “you wrote that one. Didn’t you? A dead man’s sentence should be curt. You’re saying you should be dead.”

“Killed the brother,” he said. “Led the—the girl. Loved her. Married. Then—then gone. Drowned and gone. Let me pass. Leave the lass. Don’t go down the backward glass.”

Luka handed the book to me. “You remember Kenny, right? Kenny was your friend.”

Curtis nodded. “Wanted to kill you, but wasn’t your fault. Saw you. You tried to save her.”

“So if Kenny was your friend, you should listen to him.” She looked at me. “I tried to convince him, but he won’t listen. October 27. Tell him what it says. Rose’s side.”

I flipped through the book to a page near the end that I had puzzled out just a month before.

At first, I thought I could never forgive him. Ten-year-old Curtis, that is. But it wasn’t his fault. He was trying to be good. I tried to forget about it. I tried to content myself in the baby I did have, my Curtis. As exhausted as I am in the nights, I sometimes try to stay awake just to watch him sleep. I think it is the only time I ever see him still.

I wonder what the other one would have been like. I am not supposed to. Mother says I must forget the other. Sometimes she tells me there was only one, but I know better.

I think he would have been the opposite to his brother. Probably as sweet and silent as Curtis is loud and boisterous. Mother says you cannot tell a baby from just those few minutes I had with him, but I could tell something. I never even heard him cry, and he did not struggle or kick the way Curtis did.

I knew that entry and had read it many times. It gave me some comfort. I couldn’t see Rose again, but at least I got to know how much in love with her baby she was.

It wasn’t easy for me to read the last few sentences above Curtis’s sobs. “No!” he said. “That one should have lived. The good brother.”

“You don’t get it, do you?” said Luka, and I could see she was talking both to me and to Curtis. “Think about it. ‘I never heard him cry.’ She basically said he didn’t move.”

Curtis nodded. “Didn’t move. Little, still, good brother.” He looked at me, his eyes pleading for understanding. “Didn’t want to kill the brother.”

“You didn’t,” said Luka.

“Wait,” I said, “are you saying—”

“Yes. My grandmother told me. Lilly. I went to see her, Kenny, and we talked about this. She said she never figured it out at the time. Not until years later. She wasn’t trained in delivering babies. If she was, she would have known.”