Backward Glass (10 page)

Part Three

The Mirror in the Lake, Summer 1947

O
ne

And so began my summer of exile.

I slept on the sofa beside the mirror, fifteen years before I was born.

I was trapped. The mirror was in the lake. Lilly, Peggy, and John Wald took me to the carriage house to the mirror. They took me to 1957 where Anthony met us in his basement. Jimmy had described him as a husky overconfident kid, but he was sunken now, his eyes darting all around. He was desperate that we be quiet in case his mother heard us, and seemed happy when I took Lilly and John into the Silverlands in the direction of 1967.

We couldn’t go through. The mirror and its cloud of image-fragments were dark. If I hadn’t been warned of what lay beyond, I might easily have died. John and Lilly held my shoulders as I tested it. The hand I stuck inside cramped agonizingly as the uptime heat gave way to chill water.

Then they brought me back. To 1957 where Anthony apologized and said we couldn’t stay. To 1947 where Peggy said she’d bring blankets out to the carriage house and sneak me food when she could. John Wald retired for the evening to a shelter he’d built in the woods. Lilly and Peggy went back to their homes. I asked Lilly to leave a doorstop open to her time, just in case Prince Harming, whoever he was, tried to come back from the future. He seemed to be the only one of us who had the secret of getting into a mirror that lay in water.

Most evenings, Peggy would head back to Lilly’s time, pulling out the doorstop, so John Wald and I could go forward into Anthony’s basement. From there, we would try the passage to 1967, but every time we went, the mirror was underwater. In daylight we could make out what we thought might be glimmers of sun through the water, but neither of us wanted to trust what it might be.

Over the days, I learned John Wald’s strange story. He took me for walks in the woods, and in between teaching me how to build a simple shelter and make a meal from leaves and berries, he talked about his life and his long-ago year in the backward glass. By the middle of July, I could make pepperweed tea, dandelion salad, and a bland snack mix of nuts, seeds, and chewy stalks. I guessed he made a pretty decent wise old man, though I had been hoping for a little more wisdom about the way the Force worked and how to handle a lightsaber.

I grew used to his talk. Lilly, who came often and tried to make my exile bearable, brought dictionaries, Shakespearean English, Scots-English, and we used them to puzzle out his words.

He didn’t know exactly when he was born, sometime in the 1600s in a small village in the south of Scotland. He was the son of a blacksmith. His mirror, the same one that all of us used to travel back and forth between our decades, hung in the manor house of the local baron. It wasn’t until May of his year that John saw a child come through the mirror, then found that he too could enter it. His opportunities were few, but he took them where he could. In the end, he was tripped up by the mirror’s rules. Fed too much beer at a year-end celebration by a strange, scarred servant he didn’t know, he came back to the mirror too late and found himself trapped ten years in his own past.

Fifteen years old, and all alone in the world, he still managed to make his way. He tried to change his future, as many of the mirror kids do, by approaching his younger self, but a horse kicked him in the head, and so he learned his lesson and didn’t try again. In the next few years, he fell in love with a girl in a neighboring village and ended up married with two children. Ten years onward, he saw his own self at the year-end feast, and realized that he, John Wald at twenty-five, was the strange servant who had kept his younger self out of the mirror. What else could he do? He had built a life. He didn’t want to lose it.

Knowing he was trapping himself in the past, he became a willing participant in his own fate.

“But didn’t it turn out?” I said. “You got to have your family, right?”

He shook his head and told me more. Eight years after his year of the glass, the plague came to his small corner of the world. His children died, then his wife, pregnant with
a third. “Her last words to me were, ‘John, will ye jig my belly? I haven’t felt it move in an age.’
”

He was quiet for a couple of days after that, but then one morning he took me out to pick what he called partridge berries and told me the rest. He had gone mad after the plague year. “We all did, those of us as lived. The world was dying ’round us.”

He stopped and knelt by a clutch of low plants bearing red berries. “Here now. Pick these. We’ll make a tea of it for pain.”

“How did you end up here?” I said. It was the main question on my mind. “This is—hundreds of years from your time.”

He tugged at a berry. “I found work digging graves and hauling dead. I stayed there, fitting my soul-broke body into the place it had grown up. And in that mad world, I came into a madder plan. I would wait until that cursed glass opened once more, but this time I’d go down and down the years, each time getting a child to take me through, ten years, ten years, ten years again.”

Mostly Wald’s old face—how old? Fifty? Sixty?—seemed crinkled more with kindness and sorrow, but now a wild fire jumped in him.

“I wanted the maker, see? There must, I thought, be some old wizard ahind the making of that glass. I’d place my hands athwart his reeky neck and twist the breath within him.”

“So—what happened?”

Satisfied that we had enough berries, he straightened and stretched his back. “Time zones, you call ’em,” he said. I gave him a blank look so he went on. “You’ve seen that space between the mirrors, and you know it’s long and full? In there I met a girl from the long-to-be, traveling back as I intended. We sat one night and talked, and she told me an answer to the thing I had always wondered. Did you ever not wonder, Kennit? What clock the mirror keeps? It’s always an hour before midnight it opens, you know, wherever in the world. This girl from another mirror told me about time zones. Think on it—back in my day, there was no agreed-upon time the world about. Noon was when the sun was overhead.”

“I don’t get it.”

“See’st it not?” he said. “All along, I had been scheming to follow that mirror back to its making. Now I saw I had it back-and-front. That glass isn’t made in the long-ago, Kennit. It’s from the long-to-be.”

I stopped, stunned. “It’s from the future?”

“How can it be otherwise? It keeps its days to a tune not yet sung in my day.”

“So you—decided not to go into the past to find its maker? You’re going into the future?”

He put a gentle hand on my shoulder and started me walking again. “Nowt for me there, a plague-burned world. I’ve used my days in climbing up the years. Three times I’ve had to take the slow road. I almost missed the glass in Rose’s year, for they made me go to that long war in Europe, the one they said would end all wars. Then that mad fool got me coppered by the guard for grasping Peg as then they thought. Madness.” He rubbed his thick-bearded chin. “To think that even now I’m clapped in irons ten miles off, yet talking to ye here and ten years older.”

When we got back to the carriage house, he pressed the leather pouch of berries into my hand. “Tingle tree it’s also called,” he said. “For pain.”

“But I don’t—I thought this was for you. My wound’s almost healed.”

“Not for thee, Kennit. You’ll find use for it in time.” He rubbed his brow with one dirt-covered hand. “We cannot change what’s been, Kennit. We know that, aye?” I nodded. “But there is a way to—to make what is. Yesterdays or tomorrows. There is a way to float above the—the stony world of minutes and hours. I cannot say it other ways. Keep the tingle tree. Find use for it in time.”

And with no more explanation than that, he was gone, off to his forest shelter.

In my first few weeks there, I pressed my hosts—Lilly, Peg, and Anthony—about details regarding Prince Harming, but they didn’t know much more than I had already learned from them. None of them had believed the local legends meant anything at all, though they had all heard variations on the rhyme. Peg wouldn’t talk about it at all, and Lilly said she hoped it was all done with now. They had seen the dresser drawer with its message carved for Kenny and Luka, and in some way, it seemed like they thought this must make anything about Kenny and Luka none of their business. Anthony was the least useful of all. Despite his terrifying encounter with the madman who had shot me, he barely seemed to believe in all of it. Peg was all he was interested in, not that she treated him with all that much tenderness.

Still, I spent a lot of my nights in the carriage house staring at that mirror, wondering if someone was coming through again to kill me.

On days when Wald was hunting alone, I took out the July box Luka had given me and wrote a long account of my time in 1947. Though I hadn’t yet admitted to my hosts in this time why Prince Harming had shot me, I mused about it in my letter to Luka. I also told her about Peggy and Lilly, the one so snappish and mean, the other so kind.

“Am I that bad?” said Peggy one afternoon, surprising me as I wrote. I had just described a conversation I had seen with Anthony the night before. It was sad sometimes to watch them talk. Anthony was fattening up again after his ordeal in the cave, but if he had ever been brash and confident the way Jimmy described, that part of him was not rebounding. His eyes still darted furtively about any room, and he constantly pulled at his fingers while he spoke. Half of what Peggy said to him was composed of commands to “ease up” and “cool down.”

I folded my paper over quickly, but was at a loss for what to say. How much had she read?

“Don’t fret yourself, kid,” she said. “I guess I’m a little hard on him. Here, I brought you lunch.”

I took the sandwich plate and glass of milk she offered, and studied her as she slumped on the couch near the mirror and took out a cigarette. She was a good-looking girl, though I guess I didn’t notice it that much. Her sharp words and thin-lipped disapproval of almost everything distracted me from her deep, heavy-lidded eyes. From the carriage house, on the few days when her mother was around, I could hear little but yelling between her parents; then, when her mother left, the place was like a graveyard.

You never think about how your own parents are until you start paying attention to other families. Mine didn’t see eye-to-eye on everything, particularly the constant house-hopping, and I went through long periods in my life wondering if they wished they hadn’t bothered having a kid, but I’d take a year of the worst days in my house over a week in the Garroway place.

“You’re going to disappear,” I said. Just like that, it came out of me.

She flashed a thin smile and drew lightly on her cigarette. “Been carrying that one around for a while?”

“It’s true,” I said. “In September. It’s—everyone in the neighborhood knows by my time. It was in the newspapers and everything. September first. They never found you.”

“Never did, eh?”

A long moment passed. She smoked. I looked at my sandwich.

I tried another way. “Jimmy Hayes said Anthony said he talked to you about it already, and you didn’t want to talk about it.”

She waved a hand. “It’s 1947, kid. Anthony’s just ten years up. That was the first thing he talked to me about. His folks bought the place from my dad.”

“So … what’s going to happen?”

She shrugged. “Whatever it is, it’s going to happen.” She turned and looked right at me. “Kid, some things aren’t for you to worry about. If I’m going missing, that’s my bees-wax. I know you and the Nancy Drews up in the future think we’re some kind of charity case in the past, some sort of adventure mystery for you to come and solve, but we’re not, okay? We have our own lives, our own ideas, and our own plans.” She reached forward and stubbed her cigarette out on my sandwich plate. “I’m not your summer project, Kenny. Think about your own problems.”

With that, she got up and walked down the stairs and out of the carriage house.

Even with my new determination not to end up like Wald, my burning need to just
get out of that time
, I don’t know how I would have got moving if Peggy hadn’t chosen the next day to break up with Anthony. Lilly said later that the signs were all there if you knew how to look. I hadn’t even, I figured, been within hand-holding distance of my first girlfriend yet, so I didn’t know what the signs were, much less how to look for them. I wasn’t on the same road as those signs.

Lilly used a doorstop to come forward that night, then took it out in time for Anthony to come backward from his time. Peggy’s mother had come back home that day, and her parents were loudly drunk, so it was no problem for her to sneak a feast out to us in the carriage house.

After dinner, Wald took Lilly and me out to instruct us on the making of owl calls, though I guess his real purpose was to give Peg some time with Anthony. None of it came as a surprise to Wald. I guess he must have seen his share of through-the-mirror first loves over his uptime centuries.

Our first clue that something was wrong came in the form of sobs as we approached the carriage house. In the noisy summer dark, Anthony’s crying rang out above the crickets and the nightjars, inconsolable and, well, embarrassing.

I tensed at first, fearing a return of the crazy gunman, but Wald put a reassuring hand on my shoulder and told me it was only the “cracking a’ that confracted heart.”

We waited a few minutes in the dark, but when we saw a light in the main house, we hurried in and Lilly broke the news that Anthony would have to be quieter or else duck through to another time. We turned Peggy’s kerosene lamp low and stood in an uncomfortable silence.

“Fine then,” Anthony said, his voice dripping with bitterness. “I’ll just go back into that mirror and never come out again. I’ll stay in my year. I won’t ever come back. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? That’s what you want.”

Peggy murmured that she wanted no such thing. She just thought they ought to “cool it a little.”

“Look,” she said, in as gentle a tone as I had heard her use. “In your time I’m in my twenties. Probably married. I’ll be thirty when you’re done school. Ask John if he ever sees anything like this work out. I … I just don’t want you to get hurt. Is that so bad?”