Backward Glass (5 page)

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The Rules

Luka, when she next made it to my time more than a week later, was astonished by my story, which I told her over some microwaved lasagnas she had swiped from her mother’s fridge and “nuked” just before coming through. The cold of backward time travel didn’t affect inanimate objects. Your clothes and your possessions didn’t freeze, just your skin and everything underneath.

She felt sympathetic at Rick’s disappointment. “Can you imagine? He knows all about it, and then he has to watch some wimp go instead?” As a card-carrying member of the wimp party myself, I didn’t like this judgment, but then I didn’t like what I had seen of Jimmy Hayes either. “So what’s with this diary he gave you?”

I brought it out from hiding. “It’s not just one diary. This crazy guy must have somehow got a hold of old diaries from two other people—I think it’s Rose and Curtis from the list. So he cut them all up and pasted them in here, but the paper’s old. Anyway, listen.”

I read her the first two entries, which I had puzzled out in the last week.

January 18, 1917

Dear Diary,

Am I a fool to love Clive Beckett?

Should I run through my mirror into the past and warn my six-year-old self never to smile at him or think him fine? I have given him everything, and now all he can give me is the role of the faithful girl keeping the home fires burning.

But, Diary, oh what news I have! I have already told you not to suspect me of madness when I wrote to you about my magic mirror. Now I have found it is not mine alone. Two days ago, as I was combing my hair for bed, a little boy stumbled through.

This boy’s name is Curtis, and he is a glum little thing, just nine years old. The mirror is so much more than I thought. This Curtis is from ten years onward. I asked him what he is doing in my house, in 1927, and what do you think he said? He is my brother, not even born in this year. Further, he said that another child, someone called Lillian, comes and visits him from ten years further. Am I, I asked him, Mrs. Clive Beckett in your time?

I think I am a shrewd enough judge of character to sense that there was something this little boy wasn’t telling me. He told me that, yes, I am married to Clive Beckett and we have three children and live nearby. But each answer was preceded by such stammering and looking off that I wonder if he is my brother at all.

He said that he would come again in two days and bring more news from ten years on.

How vast the world is, and strange.

That entry, along with all those pasted onto the left-hand pages of the book, was in the same hand that had written the list I had found weeks ago. The right-hand pages were in a more childish style and quite often from ten years to the day after the ones they faced.

January 18, 1927

Rose is the girl in the past. That’s my sister who died when I was two. She said I should keep a diary of what happens, but I won’t let her see it. Seems nice so I don’t want to tell her the truth. Lillian came through again. She is nicer than Rose and doesn’t ask lots of questions. I wonder if I will meet her when I am older in her time.

The last third of the book was mostly unreadable. When you could make out the writing, it was lists of words, sometimes rhyming or connected. Now and then there was a sentence, but you couldn’t string much of it together: “Shatterday shatterdate cursed on the track effect cause effect cause change it stop it switch the track and shatterdate the nightmare save the girl and catch him just in time to shattertrack shuttletrack.”

And so on. An entire page was devoted to variations on the Prince Harming skipping song, which Luka said was around even past her time. One of them was just a few words different from the rhyme I had found written on the page of an old newspaper: “Lover sweet, bloody feet, running down the lonely street. Leave tomorrow when you’re called, truth and wisdom deeply walled. Crack your head, knock you dead, then Prince Harming’s hunger’s fed.”

“You think it means something?” said Luka when I showed it to her.

“It’s about walls,” I said. “Both versions. Deep and walled, in the walls. And there was that baby. And the note.”

“And you still want to go back?” I could tell she didn’t totally believe me, but I nodded, resolute. “Okay, but not yet. I’m going with you, but it’s going to take some time to set up.”

“What is?”

“You’ll see. I’m going to make it safe. Just—until then, don’t do anything stupid, okay?”

As it turned out, I didn’t get much chance for stupid for another month. A big storm dumped a ton of snow on us in early February, and I would have had to take a shovel to dig out the giant drift against the door of the carriage house. Luka still came back, and on even-numbered nights, I’d sneak out and sit in the little area bounded by the hedges and talk to her through the dormer window. She wanted me to clear the snow away, but I was too scared of being found out.

Crazy, right? A mirror ready to take me back or forward in time, an impossible note asking for my help, and I was scared of getting in trouble from my parents. In my heart, I knew I wasn’t that different from Jimmy Hayes.

But all snow melts if you wait long enough, and the day it did was an Easter weekend for Luka. Her mother had taken off and left her alone. We made big plans. My parents were both at work when I got home, so I didn’t even drop off at home before going to find her. Having pushed the door open past the dregs of the snow, she was out and about in 1977 for the first time in weeks, and she had a present for me.

“A rabbit’s foot?”

“Not just any rabbit’s foot, dummy. This is from the junk house over on Homestead.”

“Granny Miller’s place? Did you break in there?” I might have only been in the neighborhood a few months, but I knew that the old lady who ran the convenience store down the street was crazy. The story was that all the stuff she couldn’t sell in her store went into that place, that it had been years since people could even fit in there to live. “It’s even supposed to be haunted and stuff.”

Luka shook her head. “Nah, nothing like that. I got it right from the old lady herself a couple of years ago when she finally cleared that place out and let them demolish it.” She took my door key and clipped the dyed purple charm onto it. “I found it a few days ago and it got me thinking. Do you know what her real name is?”

“It’s not Miller?”

“Uh-uh. Miller was her first husband. But if you go down the side of the house, that’s not the name on the mailbox. And that phone booth outside her house? I ripped this out of its phonebook, just to bring you proof.”

She thrust a page at me and underscored a name with her fingernail: L. Beech, 38 Moores Road.

I took a moment under her gaze to make sense of what she was saying. “As in Rick Beech?”

“Right. As in, his grandmother owns the store and the junk house. Back then in the sixties, his dad even owned your house.” She paused, waiting for me to say something. “You’re having some kind of thought,” she said. “Out with it.”

“Rick’s twenty-eight now or something,” I said. “Right now, I mean. I wonder if he’s around the neighborhood? What if he could tell us about some mistake he’s going to make in life, and we could tell him to avoid it.”

Luka raised an eyebrow. “You’re only thinking about this now? Sometimes Kenny, I swear, for a smart kid you’re such a dunce.”

She went on to explain how she and Melissa and Keisha had tried testing the limits of our time-travel powers and advantages. Melissa thought of it first. She wanted to know who her first boyfriend was going to be, and she wanted Keisha’s help doing it. Keisha found a listing in the phonebook for Melissa’s family, but every time she called to ask future-Melissa about her life something went wrong. Melissa wasn’t home, or the phone was busy, or Keisha’s phone wasn’t working. Nothing seemed to work.

Melissa asked her to just visit. Again, everything got in the way. The bus broke down. A car accident delayed her for more than an hour. Once, when she actually made it to just across the street from Melissa’s house, and thought she saw older Melissa coming out, a car drove by, hit a puddle, and drenched Keisha with icy slush. By the time she recovered, grown-up Melissa was gone.

“It’s like you can’t mess up time,” Luka said. “Keisha says it’s God, but I asked her where exactly the time-travel mirrors come into the Bible. Melissa says it’s fate, but I don’t even think it’s that.”

“Then what?”

She shrugged. “It just didn’t happen that way. Think about the Melissa’s-first-boyfriend thing. Let’s say his name is Chris. Let’s say she didn’t like him in the end because he cheated on her. So Keisha finds that out and tells her. Is she going to go out with him?”

“Probably not.” I figured that was the answer she was looking for. Going out with people and cheating were things I had no idea about. I was about a million light years away from a girlfriend. Did Luka have a boy up there in the future? She never talked about anyone. She was two years older. I figured that meant she’d never be interested in me.

“Exactly,” said Luka. “No way. So she never goes out with that guy. She goes with Joe instead. But doesn’t that mean she would have told Keisha about Joe, not Chris? And if she told us about Joe and how he was no good, doesn’t that put her back to Chris? The point is, it just didn’t happen. If we try to make something happen when it didn’t happen—it doesn’t happen.”

When I couldn’t wrap my mind around this, Luka insisted on a demonstration. We went back to my place and got out the phonebook. There were four listings for R. Beech, so we called them one by one. The first was a woman, second was an old man. Holding up the phone so we could both hear it, we hit paydirt on the third. “Hello, is this Rick Beech, formerly of Manse Creek?” said Luka in her most formal voice.

He replied immediately, almost before she had finished speaking. “Luka? Is it you? This is the call, isn’t it, the one you told me about?” She tried to say something, but he rushed on. “Look, there isn’t much time and there’s so much I want to tell you. Is Kenny there? Kenny, listen. The baby. It isn’t him. You have to go to 1917. Rose is the key. You already know Wald’s okay, but so is—”

The phone and the lights went dead at the same time.

Seven

The Rules

A transformer had exploded somewhere in the city, dropping over us a fifteen-mile cloak of darkness beginning at Manse Creek and extending exactly to Wellesley Street, the address at which we had called Rick Beech. Eight car accidents and the transformer explosion itself sent eleven people to the hospital. One died.

“Did we do that?” I asked Luka that night. She had gone off to the carriage house half an hour after the lights went out so as to avoid my parents when they came home. The power outage had dominated both dinnertime conversation and the evening news. By the time I snuck out to the carriage house, I had all the statistics memorized.

“No way,” said Luka. “You can’t change anything. That power-out was going to happen anyway. Look, here’s your pepper spray. You won’t need it, but I’m giving it to you anyway. You flip this and press here.
Don’t
spray me in the face. Two flashlights each and a surveyor’s map from sixty-five.”

“So why are we going, then?” I didn’t take the pepper spray or the surveyor’s map.

She read my expression right away. “Look, I don’t know,” she said. “I know what you’re thinking. We have to go back. We have to save someone. Someone wants our help.”

“But you say we can’t change anything. So why are we going?” I didn’t want to be stubborn. The truth was that I was desperate to go. But why?

Luka rolled her eyes. “You’re thinking too much. If we can change things, we caused the power-out and killed people. If we can’t change things, we can’t save anyone, so why bother? Look, Kenny, if you think too much, you never do anything. I can’t get into the mirror to go back without you going first. Are you coming or not?”

It was hard to argue against her. I steeled myself against the cold, grabbed Luka’s hand, and pushed my way in.

Something was different right away. Normally you took a step in that molasses space in between the two sides of the mirror, your eyes shut tight against the heat or cold, and then you were through on the other side. A second step this time, and I wasn’t out.

Luka squeezed my hand. “It’s okay. Stop for a second. Don’t move.”

If I held myself as still as I could, the cold of downtime travel matched with the uptime heat behind me and settled into a kind of buzzing, the kind you get when you lick a nine-volt battery.

“When you get used to it, you can open your eyes,” said Luka.

In front of me was a cloud of floating image-fragments, as though the mirror had been shattered in the act of reflecting a scene and kept holding the same view. An image of the floor of the carriage house floated past me. There was a piece of paper there. A note?

“It’s getting bigger,” said Luka. “The space in between the mirrors. Look behind you, but move really slow so it doesn’t hurt. If you wait long enough, you get used to it.”

Another cloud of images showed the carriage house as we had just left it.

“It makes it safer,” said Luka. “This way you can look and figure out if anyone’s there before you go through. Come on, let’s go.”

As soon as we were through, I shone the flashlight about the carriage house. No trap. No ambush. Just the same silent, junk-filled space, barn-like in the crisp winter air.

I pulled Luka
through. “Weird,” she whispered. “I’ve never gone from a place to exactly the same place before. It’s like we haven’t gone through at all.”

“Look at the wall,” I said, and turned my beam on it. The wreckage and gaping holes she had been looking at all day in my time were gone, replaced by a seamless but battered back wall. There was a dead baby inside there.

Remembering the image-fragment I had seen in the mirror, I shone my flashlight at the floor, and there was the note I had seen. Luka and I read it together, though it was addressed to me.

“I guess you’re not coming back. I understand. Bet it all wigged you out pretty bad. I got Jimmy to go back two more times, but it’s getting harder to convince him. Sorry about everything. Rick Beech.”

“This is good,” said Luka, stuffing the note in my backpack. “Come on.”

I hadn’t thought much beyond coming back through the mirror, but Luka clearly had a plan. She took me outside and around to the front of the main house. There were no lights. Some stubborn muddy patches of snow still hung on in the shelter of the house, but there was a spring scent in the air and a wet bounce in the ground.

Luka picked up a pebble and cocked her arm to throw. I caught her hand. “He won’t have the attic,” I said. “Second floor. That one.”

It took three pebbles before Jimmy came to the window. Even in the dark I could tell his eyes were wide with fear. “Come on down,” I said.

“Two against one? No way.”

Luka sighed. “We’re not here to get you. We want to talk. We’ve got a plan.”

Jimmy squinted. “Hey, you’re a girl.”

“I hear that a lot.”

It took some convincing, but he came down. He stayed by his door for a long time, studying us. “So you’re the girl from way in the future?” he said at last to Luka.

“No,” she said. “You’re the boy from way in the past.”

Jimmy frowned and I saw his lips moving as he worked that one out.

“Never mind that,” Luka said. “We’ve got a plan. You say it’s not safe in the carriage house because Pete Masterson and all them go there. There’s a fix for that. You just have to listen.”

As soon as she laid it out, I loved the plan. Jimmy was equal parts terrified and confused. He had trouble getting his mind around the way we knew about people and places from his time. Between the two of us, Luka and I finally managed to convince him to go to the carriage house and help us pry the mirror from its frame with some screwdrivers Luka had brought along. Once it was out, I tested it; my hand still went in, still felt the uptime heat.

“Rick and me—we were just gonna make some money,” Jimmy said as we took the mirror out toward the street. “He said we’d just use it for money.”

“That’s not what Rick said in the future,” I said. “I called him. He knew things about people from way in the past. Rose, and someone called Wald. He knew things. That means we must have found them out.”

Jimmy shook his head, but Luka interrupted him. “Look, all you have to do now is go get Rick. We’ll meet you there.”

I saw Jimmy look longingly at his bedroom window, but in the end, he did what Luka said.

How can I explain what that walk was like? Midnight, ten years in the past. Somewhere in the world, I was four years old right now. It was a comfort that at least we had the mirror with us, though carrying the thing took a lot of getting used to. If your bare flesh touched its surface, you’d sink in, so we wore gloves and let it mostly lean its solid back against our arms. It was about four feet high and two wide, and no heavier or lighter than it ought to be now that it was out of its frame and off its dresser. To the two cars that slowed down as they passed us, we must just have looked like two lunatic kids carrying a perfectly ordinary mirror down Manse Creek Avenue at about one in the morning.

We walked in the general direction of the lake, mostly on the side of the road. Luka pointed out houses that had later been knocked down and ones that had yet to be built.

When we turned onto Homestead and could see the place Luka called the storage shack, Rick was waiting on the doorstep with Jimmy.

He stood as we approached and ran a hand through his hair. “Holy crap,” he said. “When Jimmy—I almost didn’t think he was serious. Hey, can we just forget about what happened the last time? I was an idiot.”

Luka interrupted. “Kenny wouldn’t have come back if he wasn’t ready to forgive and forget.”

I didn’t say anything for a moment. All of their eyes were on me, even Jimmy’s. I felt like whatever I said, it should be the right thing. Forgive and forget was good, but it wasn’t enough. “We called you in the future—in my time. It didn’t work out, but you tried to tell us things about what happened in the past, something about the baby that died. You were with us. You were one of us.”

Rick raised an eyebrow at all this, but didn’t say a thing. He just nodded, opened the door to his grandmother’s junk house, and motioned us in.

The place was a dump. It had clearly once been intended for people to live in, a tiny bungalow with two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living room. No indoor bathroom. The bedrooms felt like they were designed for midgets.

Every space was filled with junk. Faded boxes advertised toys, gadgets, household utensils, things I couldn’t even guess about. The kitchen counter was covered with rubber overshoes and something that called itself a waterproof scarf. Other rooms held cigar cutters, pipe maintenance kits, junior golf kits, ladies’ massagers, mustache trimmers, and a million old magazines.

“It’s a family joke,” said Rick. “My dad begs her to get rid of it. She always says next summer she’s gonna clear it all out and sell it. For the last ten years at least.”

As we carried the mirror in through the crowded kitchen, I yelped in pain and danced back. The mirror would have dropped if Rick hadn’t leaned in and grabbed it. “What’s going on?” he said.

I dug frantically in my pocket and brought out the rabbit’s foot Luka had given me. In the darkness of the junk house, a web of fine blue sparks danced in the fur. “Felt like I had a live wire in my pants,” I said, staring at the others.

Jimmy had shrunk back to the entrance of the house. Rick and Luka put down the mirror and leaned in. She touched it. “Tingly.”

“It was burning before,” I said.

I reached out to hand it to Rick, but then clutched it tighter. “Wait,” I said. Holding the keychain out, I turned in a circle. Weaker, weaker, weaker, and then when I turned back toward Rick, stronger. I took a step. Stronger still. There was no movement, but I kept thinking the rabbit’s foot was struggling in my grip. Another step and I was surprised it didn’t jump out of my hand.

Rick reached out, touched it, and recoiled.

“It’s getting stronger,” I said. “Move the mirror away.”

“It can’t be that,” Luka said. “I’ve been in and out of the mirror a bunch of times with that thing.” But she moved it anyway, giving me room to step forward again, closer to the kitchen counter.

I don’t know why I wanted to get closer. I had a half memory in my head of something like this, but couldn’t bring it to the surface. I took another step, finding I had to switch hands because my right was almost numb from the strange electricity.

“Kenny?” said Luka.

“Yeah.”

“Why is that box moving?”

I had been concentrating so much on the sizzling object in my hand, I hadn’t even noticed, but now I did. A cardboard box on the counter. Smaller than a loaf of bread and so covered in dust that you couldn’t see what the once-colorful pictures and writing were advertising. Its movement was slight, like there was a mouse inside making halfhearted escape attempts.

Rick picked the box up and blew the dust away, though when he did, I had to step back because the tingling in my hand grew to a genuine pain.

Luka directed her flashlight beam at the box. “Holy crap.”

“You got that right,” Rick said. He read from the box: “Lucky-for-you rabbit’s foot. Genuine talisman of good fortune from ancient times. Only left hind feet. Just thirty-five cents.”

Luka took the box from Rick, broke the seal, and opened it up. You could pick it out easily. One foot, packed in with the rest and dancing with blue sparks. Luka steeled herself and put her hand around it, then held it up to me.

I yelped and dropped mine, the shock so intense. Luka did the same.

They landed close together. An electric blue tentacle darted out of the keychain I had been holding and struck the one from the box. It wasn’t a spark. It wasn’t quick or thin or jagged enough. It was more like an arm made up of silvery blue ripples, and it lingered for a good two or three seconds. Along its length, flickering back and forth like eels, were ghost images of the rabbit’s foot, for all the world like one thing remembering its life, another imagining what was yet to come.

Then, with a final crack, the glowing connection moved the two keychains apart and collapsed.

“Holy crap,” said Luka into the ringing silence of the room.

“What the hell was that?” said Rick, looking at the two good-luck charms. “Is this one … are they … ?”

“The same rabbit’s foot,” said Luka. “Your grandmother gave it to me. They’re the same thing.” She kicked the one she had given me a safe distance away, then asked me to put the other one back in its box.

“So … it does this because it can’t be in two places at once?” I said.

Luka shrugged. “What am I, a scientist? Come on, it’s getting late.”

We found a place for the mirror in the larger bedroom, then Rick wanted to sit in the hallway between piles of horrible oil paintings and boxes of mason jars and talk for a while, mostly about setting up some rules. “For the house, I mean. If you’re seen coming and going in daytime, it’s gonna be trouble. I’ll make copies of the key and leave them in front of the mirror.”

We agreed to all of this. Rick would have talked more, but Jimmy started getting increasingly nervous, and even Luka began to yawn.

The goodbye was awkward. “You guys—you guys’ll come back, right?” said Rick.

We promised we would.

I had intended this time just to power through the three steps it now took to cross the slow, buzzing space between the mirrors, but the moment we were inside, I heard a gasp from my right, and I turned my head and opened my eyes before I knew what I was doing. Luka must have done the same, because we both winced and cried out in pain at the same time.

Or maybe it was surprise.

Just more than an arm’s length away stood a girl, brown-skinned and wrapped in a colorful cloth. Around her swirled another cloud of images, like ours but dimmer.

After a moment of silence on both sides, the girl broke out into a wide grin. “Greetings,” she said in a musical accent. “I have not yet met any of the blessed from your mirror.”