Backward Glass (3 page)

“Who are you?” I said.

“Are you the one?” came a gruff voice from the shadows. Was he trying to disguise his voice from me, trying to sound older than he was?

“Am I what one?”

“The one the mirror chose? This time, I mean. It’s me in ten years.”

“Who are you?” I said again. “Look, it isn’t safe up there. I’m sorry I scared you before.”

The shadowed figure above made a dismissive sound. “You didn’t scare me. This is 1977, right? Are you the one who scratched that message in my drawer?”

“What message? What drawer?” I was beginning to wonder if this was my first encounter with a junkie.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I added. “Look, my name’s Kenny Maxwell. I live here. Well, not here, but in the big house.”

There was a long silence. “You’re Kenny.” It was something halfway between a question and a statement. The kid rattled a piece of paper. “So you did write out those rules.”

“What rules? What are you talking about?”

“The note Melissa brought back. That she got in the mail.” He sounded impatient now, and the gruff was slipping out of his voice. “Do you know what’s going on? Have you gone back?”

I held out my hands to calm him down, but I didn’t step any closer. “Back where? I don’t know any Melissa.”

“Don’t know much, do you?” I didn’t answer. After a long pause he spoke again. “I’m going. It’s your note, so you can have it back, I guess. Jeez, I thought you’d have more answers. Help Kenny. What am I supposed to help you do? I guess we’ll figure it out, but I’ve stayed too long as it is. Bye.”

Bye? “Wait,” I said. I held out my hands, ready for him to rush me, but there was a quick rustle above me behind the furniture.

And then nothing.

“Do you need help or something?” I said after a moment. There was no reply. “What’s your name?”

But I knew I was alone. That way your voice is when it’s only you in a room. It was impossible, but I knew it was true. I walked up the stairs.

My dad hadn’t finished stripping the lath, so the dark space where the baby had been still dominated the back wall. To the right as you came up the stairs was the cluster of old furniture, much more carelessly placed than in my room. A bed had been ruined with a pile of chairs and two well-worn school desks. I picked a path between dressers, chests, and a pile of splintered remnants.

I wasn’t at all scared of the kid jumping out at me. He was gone, I was sure of that, however impossible it was.

It was the note that guided me. He said he was leaving it, and there it was, a new piece of paper sitting on the top of that same low dresser I had noticed before. I picked it up, but couldn’t read it in the dim light.

I looked at the mirror, then down at where I had been standing. Yes, this was the thing the kid would have ducked around. I squatted to open its four stubby drawers. Nothing. I ran my hands over a surface that looked to have been finished and refinished several times. The wood framing the mirror at the top was scroll-cut in fancy loops, but everything else was square and functional. I guessed the idea was that the lady of the house would sit in front of it to put on her makeup and jewelry. But if that was so, why did the mirror need to be so tall? It rose a little more than four feet above the dresser. Had it been tacked on later? Maybe. As near as I could tell, it didn’t have single scratch on it, and it threw back the dim light perfectly.

No kid hiding. No ghost jumping out.

“I just wanted to talk,” I said again, but my voice sounded stupid to me in the empty place, so I went back down and into the light, feeling the paper between my fingers as I went.

As soon as I got outside, I closed the door, sat down on the step, and looked at it.

The first thing that struck me was the lettering. Clean, like letters printed in a book, not punched into the paper the way a typewriter does.

The Rules

The mirror works January to December, on years ending in seven. It takes you backward from eleven until midnight. If you’re in an even-numbered decade (like the eighties or the sixties), it opens for you on an even-numbered day. Odd decade (seventies or nineties), odd days. Once you’ve gone backward, you have to wait until after midnight to return. The mirror picks one person every decade, and never picks older than sixteen. But you can turn seventeen and still use it.

There are other rules, but I didn’t say them before, so I shouldn’t this time.

Good luck,
Your friend for all time,
Kenny Maxwell

Two

The Rules

What do you do when you’re confronted with something that’s obviously crazy?

You don’t talk about it, that’s for sure.

I put the note and the orange hat with the list under my mattress, and spent the day thinking about how nuts I was for not throwing it all away and telling my dad I had seen some kid trespassing.

It was the twenty-third of January, so don’t think it wasn’t lost on me that at ten-thirty that night I was supposed to be half an hour away from … something. Odd day. Odd decade. Takes you backward.

My parents are strict early-to-bedders, so the house was quiet. I sat by my window and looked out, though
not at the hedges and the carriage house, since my window faced the street. A new snow was falling.

I continued the argument I had been having with myself for hours, one voice insisting that there was a rational explanation for all of this, the other pointing out all the irrational and unexplainable elements. Whenever that hopeful voice, the one that wanted something magical in the carriage house, finished with its best arguments, rational me would simply shrug his shoulders and say,
Then why aren’t you out there? It’s because you don’t want to be disappointed, isn’t it?

And that was it. All these weeks I had been keeping the list secret, telling myself stories about what it was, how I fit into it all. I didn’t believe in ghosts that needed to be saved or set free, but I wanted to. If I went out there, and nothing happened, my ticket into the story I had been living in my head would turn out to be a forgery I had made myself. But if I stayed here, I would always have the ticket to look at.

I stayed.

Eventually I fell asleep.

School the next day was hell. Every moment irritated me. Normally, I just did as I was told, and tried to finish my work quickly.

But not today. I failed a math quiz, fumbled at marking another kid’s when we were supposed to take it up, stumbled when I was called on, and actually grumbled slightly when Mrs. Bains told us to take out our grammar exercise books. Why hadn’t I gone out there? An odd-numbered night.
It takes you backward. It opens for you.

Once home, I had time to myself. My mother got off work at five, and my dad after that.

I dropped off my backpack and squeezed through the hedges. There were no new footprints. The door was still unlocked. I spent my hour and a half of freedom rummaging through the old furniture, but there was nothing there. When I figured I was in danger of Mom getting home, I took some balled-up newspapers from the wall and headed up to my room.

Nothing interesting. It was amazing how few pictures they had in those old newspapers, and how long they took to say anything. One of them had a variation on the local Prince Harming skipping rhymes scratched in faded pencil in a margin: “Lover sweet, bloody feet, running down the silver street. Leave tomorrow when you’re called, hear the wisdom in the walls. Crack your head, knock you dead, then Prince Harming’s hunger’s fed.” I tore that part of the paper off and stuck it under my mattress. Why did it matter to me? Why did I shiver every time I heard that name? The kids at school had thought it all had something to do with my house, but for them it was just a game. They didn’t have a note signed,
Your friend for all time, Kenny Maxwell.

A call for supper. Interrogation about my day. Merciful escape back to my room. Homework. My dad calling lights out. Tossing. Turning. Sleep.

Tink. Clatter.

I looked to the ceiling and rubbed my eyes.

Something hitting one of my skylight windows and falling down the roof.

I went to the window and opened it. “Hello? Who’s throwing that?”

A figure came into sight. “Who do you think, retard? Where’s my hat?”

My mouth hung open. “You’re a girl.” The hat had hidden a huge mane of curly hair, and she wasn’t trying to disguise her voice now.

She folded her arms. “And you’re an airhead. Are you going to give me my hat, or what?”

“Who are you?” I said.

“I’m Luka.”

I frowned. “Luka?” It didn’t even sound like a real name.

Luka threw up her hands in annoyance. “My real name’s Lucy, but my mom took me to
Star Wars
on my seventh birthday, and I kind of made her change it. It’s not my fault. I was a spazzy kid. Go figure. Are you coming down or what?”

I had no idea what she was talking about, no idea what half of her words even meant. Airhead. Go figure. Spazzy.
Star Wars
. But one thing she said stood out. “Lucy?” I said. “Lucy Branson?” She nodded. “I’ll give you your hat if you tell me where you disappeared to,” I said.

That stopped her. “But—didn’t you say you’re Kenny? Didn’t you—oh, I get it. You didn’t do it yet.”

“Do what?”

“Write the note, genius. Okay, fine. Come down. I’ll explain. But you’ll never believe it.”

Three

The Rules

Getting downstairs was easy. If I was careful and stuck to the floorboards my dad had fixed, I could blend in with the creaks and pops of the old house settling down for the night.

I surrendered the hat as soon as I got outside and Luka put it on.

It couldn’t have been more than a couple degrees below freezing, and there wasn’t much wind. We stood for a long moment.

“Who are you?” I said, but before she spoke, I added, “Not just your name. What’s going on?” When I asked that, something stiffened in my spine. I was still scared, not of this kid, but of something out there in the night. But that didn’t matter. That was my name on the note I had found. Someone was asking me for help.

She dropped her hands to her sides and looked at me directly. “My name is Luka Branson. I was born October 12, 1970. I live at 428 Larkfield Drive. I’m sixteen years old.”

My heart thudded painfully. “How is that possible?”

“I don’t know. We’re just starting to figure it out. It goes every ten years. A few days ago I met the girl from 1997, ten years up from my time. She got those rules from you.” I opened my mouth, but she held up her hand. “Come on. There’s something I want to show you.”

She grabbed the shoulder of my coat and pulled. I let myself be dragged through the hedge.

“See that?” she said, pointing to the winter-brittle tangle of tall weeds that choked the carriage house’s tiny front yard. “That’s a swimming pool. And right there?” She pointed to the far corner of the hedge. “That’s where Larkfield curves out to Manse Creek Road.”

“There’s no Larkfield going onto Manse Creek,” I said.

She looked at me like I was an idiot. “Don’t you get it? Time travel. I’m from 1987.”

I shook my head.

She looked into my eyes. “Come on,” she said. “I really thought you’d know more stuff than this.”

As she dragged me farther from my house, I looked back, worried.

She must have read my mind. “Look, if you got out okay, you’re not going to get caught now. Even if you do, just say you went out for a walk.”

I couldn’t imagine just how badly that would go, but I figured she was right about the first part, so I let her take me down to the creek.

“This used to be a bridge,” she said, pointing to a bend where both banks were about eight feet high. “I mean, it will be. It’s confusing, right? I keep thinking I’m in one of those Mad Max movies, you know? After the world’s been destroyed. I go to these places, and some of the trees look the same. Like that one. Tom Berditti’s dad put a tire swing on it a couple of years ago. But now it’s not there. Yet, I mean.”

She walked me down the creek, pointing to things I couldn’t see, things that wouldn’t be here for years—a whole subdivision, paths to and from the creek, bus stops for routes I had never heard of, and things she called “super mailboxes.”

She was entranced with the world of the past. I was more interested in her.

“How did you get here?” I asked as we walked out onto Lawrence.

“You know that,” she said. “The mirror.”

“But how?”

“That bus stop looks so new! In my time, it’s all beat up. When did they put it in?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care. It was here when we moved in. Look, how did you know about the mirror? Does it just take you back? Does it go forward as well? How does this work? I don’t care about this stuff about the neighborhood. I want to go to the mirror.”

She threw up her hands, then tapped her watch. “Fine. I was just killing time anyway. I can’t show you anything until midnight.”

When we got inside the carriage house, there were two minutes to go. Luka took out a flashlight and guided me upstairs through the maze of junk to the low dresser where I found the note. She looked at me and pursed her lips. “Look, I can sit around talking at you all night, or I can show you. What do you want?”

Blood pounded in my ears. “Show me.”

With that she grinned, shone her flashlight at the mirror, and touched it with her other hand. For just a moment, her palm lay on the surface, fingers splayed. “It’s hot,” she said. “You have to be ready. Cold when you go down, hot when you go up.” She beckoned. “Take the flashlight in your other hand. You have to hold my hand all the way through. There’s a space in between going in and coming out. Are you coming?”

“I’ll be able to get back, won’t I?”

She rolled her eyes. “Real adventurer, aren’t you? Yes, you’ll be able to get back. When you’re in the wrong time, you can always go back. After midnight, I mean. I haven’t figured everything out yet, but I know that. Melissa took me through with her last night.”

I knew I had to go through. My name on a list. My name on a note. “How is all this connected?” I said, fixing her with my gaze. “Do you know about the dead baby? The one in the wall? Do you know about Prince Harming?”

She shrugged. “Kind of. There’s some story in the neighborhood about a guy who kills kids or smashes their heads in or something. But that’s all the past. All I can do right now is take you to my time.” She saw that I was about to ask more questions and held up her hand. “Look, I’m from the future, all right? You’re the one from the past. I came back to get answers from you, not sit around explaining things. Are you coming or not?”

I had already made my decision when I left my room. I took the flashlight, grasped her hand, and let myself be dragged along as she stepped up onto the low surface of the dresser and, with some effort, pushed through the mirror. I could see her, like a fun-house effect, going from two girls, to one-and-a-half, to one, to just a double arm, shortening as it pulled me in.

If she hadn’t warned me about the heat, I might have let go. As it was, I flinched. On the skin of my wrist I could feel first the freezing surface of the mirror, then the pore-opening fire of whatever lay beyond. It was like sticking your hand into burning Play-Doh.

Up to my elbow disappeared. The tugging from the other side grew stronger. I felt Luka’s other hand encircle my wrist, and almost stumbled as I got both my feet onto the surface of the dresser and ducked my head.

As my eyes moved toward the mirror, I turned my head and closed them. The cold mirror flattened my ear at first, then my head went through a heat that felt like it would burn my eyebrows off. I had taken a breath and closed my mouth, and now I imagined I was in some kind of burning, molten silver. We moved through that hot blindness for just a step—

Then I was falling—out of the other side of the mirror and into something soft that went “Ow!” and punched me hard in the shoulder.

I opened my eyes to darkness, then brought the flashlight around to Luka’s face.

She put a finger to her lips. “Don’t talk loud or you’ll wake my mom up. Welcome to 1987.”