Backward Glass (6 page)

“Our mirror,” said Luka. “You mean … are there other mirrors?”

The girl’s eyes widened. “Have you not looked down the hallway?”

As soon as she said it, I couldn’t help but steel myself against the buzzing pain and look beyond her. They got dimmer as they stretched away, but there they were, more clouds of images, two at a time, stretching far beyond the limits of vision.

“It is the same in both directions,” said the girl. “Do not ever use them, though. You are blessed only for your own mirror. If you go through another, you may never return. Even a key will not open them.”

“A key?” I said. “The mirrors have keys?”

The girl raised an eyebrow. “How little you know. Are there no elders to teach you of the mirrors?” Before we could answer, she continued. “You do not find it. You make it, and you must have patience, too. Take a—” She stopped and her eyes darted to the image-cloud she had been heading toward. “You must not stay here,” she said. “My uncle is after me. I hid the mirror, but he will find it soon. Have you seen him? A fat man with a scar above his eye?”

“Is he Prince Harming?” I said.

Now her gaze was fixed on her image-fragments, and she talked quickly. “What? No, he is no Prince. No doubt you are talking about some part of your own story. If no one has told you, hear me now. We each have our own stories in the mirrors. My uncle has kidnapped my mother as a child. I must help her before he forces her to take him into the glass.”

“How?” said Luka. “I thought only the kids can go through.”

“Once blessed, always blessed,” said the girl. “But an adult needs a child to open the mirror first.” She hazarded a glance at us. “I wish I could tell you more. Look for an elder, one you can trust. I must go. You, too. Do not let him catch you here.”

With that, she moved uptime in the direction of 1977. The cloud of image-fragments flared for a moment as she went through, then dimmed again so as to be barely visible.

“Come on,” said Luka. “We should go, too. Besides, if you squeeze my hand anymore, my fingers’ll fall off.”

She said she couldn’t stay long, but we ended up talking for another hour in the carriage house, mostly just trading back and forth the new ideas and new words we had just been introduced to. Other mirrors? Keys that you could make? Adults going through?

“This is even better than we thought,” Luka said before she finally went back through the mirror to her own time. “Now everything’s going to happen.”

Part Two

The Curse of Prince
Harming, Spring 1977

O
ne

And then—nothing happened. Seriously. You have to realize how hard it was to use that mirror for more than your own personal ten-years-to-the past. I sneaked out of the house two or three times a week and went back to see Jimmy and Rick. Luka came sometimes as well. Now and then we saw other kids going through on their own missions, but sound carried strangely in the place between the mirrors, a place Luka started calling the Silverlands, and none of us wanted to leave our own mirrors for fear of getting lost or stumbling through one that wasn’t our own. We were usually confined to a few mangled sentences. What year are you from? What country? Once, far in the distance, I saw a kid being pushed roughly through by a grown woman, but neither turned my way. I kept in mind what the girl in the sari had said. Their stories were not mine.

Our own mirror kids still met as often as we could. Three-way meet-ups were rare, as those required some way to fool parents for a whole day. Melissa made it back to my time in late April, but I didn’t get to her time or backward to Anthony’s. I heard stories, though. In early May, Jimmy went back with Anthony to 1947 and spent a whole day with him and Margaret Garroway. He caught the two of them kissing in a barn where they sheltered from the rain, and Anthony had to admit that, yes, there was something going on. When we asked Jimmy if Margaret knew she was supposed to go missing in a few months, he blushed and said he didn’t know how to talk about “stuff like that.”

About the bigger mysteries—the baby, the disappearances, and the riddle of Prince Harming—we learned nothing. In every decade we could, there seemed to be nothing more than rumors and legends. Jimmy confirmed that the scratched message to Luka on the underside of the dresser drawer existed in his time and ten years before:
Luka, help Kenny. Trust John Wald. Kenny says he is the
auby
one. Save the baby.
And the note for me:
Help me make it not happen, Kenny. Help me stop him. Clive is dead all over again.
I had read that note so often that it had aged more in six months with me than it had in all those years inside the wall—however many they were. But what could I do? Short of going missing for a few days, I couldn’t make it further back than 1967. None of us knew what
auby
meant. Luka brought word that Keisha had found a reference to a John Wald in some eighteenth-century book on magic as a kind of mystery man in the north of England who saved children from fires and drowning, but what good was that? Why would I ever describe this or any John Wald as an
auby
one?

Jimmy grew on us. The kid had never met a shadow he wasn’t scared of, but his wide-eyed wonder and open-mouthed gullibility made it fun to tell him all kinds of things, both true and otherwise, that the future would bring. I once had him convinced that Luka was actually a clone, and that the real Lucy Branson controlled this body from the safety of her own time.

In June we finally had a four-way meeting. Melissa lied to her parents about going to a friend’s for a sleepover, then came back to Luka’s time, while Luka, having told the same kind of lie the previous day, waited in mine. Then I went back to 1967 to get Jimmy, and Luka went up to 1987 to pull Melissa through. As long as she didn’t leave the mirror in her own time, Luka could keep it open to 1977. They all slept in the carriage house that night, and I met up with them the next morning, a Sunday for me.

It was my first time meeting Melissa, but still I felt like I had my three best friends with me.

We sat on my sun-warmed driveway and Luka and I did our act of reading out the newest pages of the journal that I had puzzled out, she over-acting as Rose and me as Curtis. Some of the early pages were dull, so I chose something that began on our exact date, sixty years before.

June 7, 1917

Mother says I’m getting fat and that’s just fine by her. “Nothing like a plump, healthy girl.” She says it in a sing-song voice while she cleans or does dishes. I tell her my stomach has been hurting. I want her to take me to the doctor. He would tell her. Then we would know and we would not have to continue in this lie.

But she won’t. She is hateful in her cheerfulness.

June 9, 1927

Lillian told me a ghost story. It’s about a bad man called Prince Harming. Well, not a ghost story but a scary one. This Prince Harming lost his own soul a long time ago when he killed his brother. He did it when he was a baby, strangled the other baby in the crib or something. Now he tries to kill children because if he kills the right little boy, he can eat his soul.

Mother got angry again at nothing, so I went to the creek to the cave that used to be Rose and Clive’s and just stayed there for a long time and was sad. I scratched my initials into the wood next to theirs so at least it will make a difference to something that I was alive.

July 10, 1917

Now I see her plan. For weeks playing up my ill health. She insists I dress in heavy layers. Is she hiding it from herself or me?

In any event, yesterday she announced that I must move to the carriage house for my health. It is too dusty in the main house. We are much fallen, she says, from earlier times. There will be no more carriages or horses for Holleriths, so we might as well make use of it as a real property, and I will be her little pioneer, she says, though I simply must come over for breakfast. She has it all planned out.

Curtis came back again. Always angry. Mother hit him, he says. Caught him stealing biscuits from the pantry. He says she is forever shouting about one thing or another. I ask if it’s me she’s shouting at, but he doesn’t like to talk about me. He says I don’t visit.

I complained about all the work it was to puzzle out the old handwriting, but Luka said I should go on. “At least you’re finding some stuff out. It’s driving me crazy that we can’t get back to those times. I can’t wait for summer.”

I stood up and flapped my arms against the chill. “Yeah, but everything I find out just brings up more questions. What are these health problems? What’s she so worried about?” Luka didn’t reply at first. I looked around at her. “What?”

“Are you that dense? Seriously?”

“I’m with Kenny,” said Jimmy. “What?”

Luka shared an eye roll with Melissa. “You dummies, don’t you get it? Look, January she talks about how she’s missing Clive. End of February she’s got this ‘terrible suspicion.’ March she’s really sick. By June her mother says she’s getting fat and is ignoring something, and in July she wants to hide Rose away in the carriage house. She’s pregnant, dummy.”

I turned to face the hedgerow and thought about the dark space in the wall where I had ripped away the lath six months ago, before being driven away by the prickling in my skin.

“That is some sad stuff,” said Jimmy. “Can’t she just, you know, take care of it?”

Melissa gave him a scornful look. “In 1917? An abortion?” Jimmy winced when she said the word.

“That’s just not possible back then,” said Luka.

We went down to the creek and searched out the place Curtis called the cave. You could see there had once been something there, a space underneath three large rocks nestled into an overhang. Mud and erosion had covered the hiding place years ago. Jimmy and I got a couple of sticks and dug. We found some large pieces of broken furniture buried in the dirt that looked like they might have once been used as makeshift tunnel supports. Luka and Melissa took the top of a small table to the creek to wash the decades of muck away until we found where CB+RH were scratched deeply into the wood.

The bigger surprise came when Luka dashed another bucket of water on the tabletop and revealed further initials below CH. LH as well as AC+MG. Further below that, KM and LB.

“Great,” said Melissa after our shared moment of stunned silence. “Lillian Huff from the thirties, Margaret Garroway from the forties and Anthony Currah from the fifties. Then Kenny and Luka? Nothing for Jimmy and me?”

“That’s fine by me,” said Jimmy. “I don’t want to get stuck in no long-ago past.”

I ran my fingers over the initials. Not as deep as Clive had carved, but deeper than Curtis. I looked at Luka. “I never did this.”

“Don’t look at me. I’m five right now. In my time there’s a bridge here. These rocks are gone.”

We dug for a while more, but didn’t find anything. It was getting close to the time I should be expecting my mother home from work, so Luka took us back to her time for some Nintendo, but before we could even get the TV turned on, Melissa surprised us into seriousness.

“Is it a curse?” she said, as Luka served us all sodas in her basement.

“Is what a curse?” said Jimmy.

“You know, how everybody says this neighborhood is haunted. I know that girl you met called us the blessed, but seriously? Margaret Garroway going missing in September? And a really long time ago some little boy went crazy and cracked a girl’s head open. Maybe it’s the mirror. Maybe Prince Harming lives in the mirror. Keisha left me a note a couple of nights ago saying she found something out about him, but she hasn’t been back.”

“Aw, that’s just a story anyway,” said Jimmy. “Like the boogie man. Or Santa’s evil brother.”

We all turned to look at him.

“What, your mom never told you about Opposite Christmas, when Nefidious Claus comes to take the presents away if you were bad?” We continued to stare. Jimmy’s head sank. “Man, I had the worst childhood.”

“Why cursed?” said Luka. “Look at the fun we get to have. Anything can be bad or good. And like Jimmy says—Prince Harming is just a story to frighten kids.”

“Here,” I said. They all turned to me and frowned. “It’s a story here. I’ve lived in a bunch of neighborhoods, and I never heard about this Prince Harming before. And what that girl said? She said we all have our own stories in the mirror. She was running away from her own uncle, and he didn’t sound too nice. Just because they’re stories doesn’t mean they’re not real, and you know it. The mirrors are around here, and so is Prince Harming. Everybody talks about him, all the way back to Rose. There’s even that skipping rhyme.”

“Lover sweet, bloody feet,” Melissa chanted.

Jimmy continued it from where he lay on a couch by himself. “Loudly yelling down the street.”

Then it was Luka’s turn. “Holler loud, curtsey proud, you shall wear a coffin shroud.”

Jimmy finished it. “Go to mass, go to class, you’ll go down the backward glass.”

Melissa turned to him, mouth open. “What did you say?”

“What, go to mass? Are you Catholic? I didn’t mean nothing by it.”

“Not that,” said Melissa. “The whole last bit together.”

Jimmy frowned. “Go to class, go to mass, you’ll go down the backward glass. Oh, wow. Backward glass. Like the mirror?”

We all stayed silent for a long moment to let this sink in. Our mirror? Our private story? Our secret tunnel? Connected to something in the real world, something other kids knew about? It was like reading the name of your imaginary friend in the newspaper.

I broke the long silence. “Mine’s different.” I opened the double diary Rick had given me. Inside, at the page with the skipping rhyme, I had tucked the piece of an old newspaper with the first variation I had found a few weeks after moving in. “‘Lover sweet, bloody feet, running down the silver street. Leave tomorrow when you’re called, truth and wisdom in the walls. Crack your head, knock you dead, then Prince Harming’s hunger’s fed.’ Then there’s this one from the book: ‘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. Head will hurt, death’s a cert. A dead man’s sentence should be curt.’ There’s a bunch of these in here.”

“Silver street?” said Luka. “As in the Silverlands?” Her name for that growing space between the mirrors had caught on. Jimmy reported that even Margaret and Anthony were using it. “We should be figuring this stuff out,” said Luka. “We just have to—” Her head snapped up. “Oh crap.”

“What?” said Jimmy. “Is someone breaking in?”

“Worse,” said Luka. “That was my mom’s car door. All of you—upstairs, now!”

She snatched chip bags and glasses out of our hands and began pushing us in the direction of the stairs.

“Go,” she shouted several times.

Jimmy and Melissa crashed through Luka’s bedroom door together, but it was Melissa’s hand that touched the mirror first.

Melissa had just a moment to shrug apologetically at us before she pushed out of sight.

“Lucy Branson, what is all that noise?”

Jimmy hesitated before the mirror. I knew what he was thinking. If he pushed it in now, the mirror would be hot. Until Melissa pushed through the ever-expanding Silverlands and cleared the mirror, it was open uptime to 1997.

“Go,” Luka mouthed.

“Do you have people in here?” Her mother’s voice was quieter now, but full of menace.

Jimmy looked like a thousand volts of pure terror was sizzling through his fearful body. “Oh, man,” he whispered, barely audible. “Oh, man, Kenny, we gotta go.”

Further into the future? With my mother coming home soon? And Cindy Branson possibly guarding her daughter’s mirror. “Just wait,” I mouthed. “She’ll clear the mirror in a second.” It couldn’t take much longer.

Jimmy gave me a look that might have had some kind of apology hidden under the fear, then pushed into the mirror and was gone. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Luka squaring her shoulders and straightening her back the way she did before doing something scary. I realized it probably hadn’t even registered with her why Jimmy and I had been hesitating. She didn’t look at me anymore, just faced outward as we heard her mother’s feet on the stairs.

“What’s going on up there? You know my rule. You better not have a boy in your room. Is that it? Being a little tramp? Going to make the whole neighborhood hate me even more?”