Backward Glass (18 page)

I took a deep, deep breath and stepped out from hiding.

“I do know who the crazy man is,” I said. “It’s you. Let him go.”

Their heads snapped up. Brian took the opportunity of their distraction to try to break away, but this younger Prince Harming was too quick. He twisted Brian’s arm, checking his lunge, and brought a quick fist down onto the side of his head, slamming him back against the corner of a brick. Brian slumped.

There it was. Unconscious. Head injured. The story of the hobo boy heading into its last act.
Head will hurt. Death’s a cert.

The woman immediately knelt down to Brian. “We said no one was to get hurt,” she said to the man. “Here, help me lay him out.” The man obediently bent to help her, and together they laid Brian out at the bottom of his front step. The man never took his eyes off me. I stood and watched them, ready to run if I had to.

His companion tutted and fussed at Brian’s head, took a look into his eyes, then glanced at me. “He’ll be okay. It’s a bad knock, but if we get him seen to, it’ll be fine. I’m a nurse. I know these things.”

I was barely listening. There was something about the man’s eyes that I was seeing at last, some echo of the past. Maybe it was something about the way he looked at me.
I thought you were my friend. I thought you were a hero. You said everything would be okay.

“What’s your name?” I said to him.

A smile, bitter and uncertain, twitched on his face. “You know. You know who I am.”

I took a step forward, and he actually rocked back.

“You said your name was Beckett. That’s not your last name, though, is it?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t—things weren’t easy for me. I got—messed up for a while. I wanted to start over. I wanted—I wanted my dad’s name.”

“Curtis?” I said.

“Kenny?” There was a shake in his voice, and suddenly I could see it, the little kid under all the layers of him. The good kid who sat on the creek bank with me and talked about the coming war. The kid who his mother never got to know. “I’ve been having these dreams, Kenny. I wanted to sort it out, ask what happened. I didn’t do anything bad, did I? There’s things I don’t remember.”

“Brian,” came a voice from inside the house. “Who’s at the door? Why are you taking so long?”

I made the decision so quickly, I barely noticed it going through my mind. “Go in and turn left at the end of the hall. The door in the kitchen leads to the coal cellar. The mirror’s down there. Go into the Silverlands and wait.”

The woman stood. “Kenny, we can’t just—”

“Go,” I said. “I’ll take care of things here.”

“Brian,” said the voice again. “Do you need me to come down there?”

“Come on,” said the woman, and that was enough. Curtis shook himself, grabbed her elbow, and steered them both inside.

I stepped up to the door and felt my hand going up to smooth my rumpled hair.

Time to meet my grandmother.

Fo
u
r

Let me pass, leave the lass,
don’t go down the backward glass.

When she saw her son unconscious on her front step, my grandmother got down on her knees and began to examine him.

“What happened?” she said to me, fire in her eyes.

“It was an accident,” I said. “He’ll be okay.”

“Who are you?”

I had trouble answering at first. In this decade, I had only seen my grandmother from a distance before. It was striking to look at her now in her forties, a little like what would happen if you put cut-up pictures of my dad and Aunt Judy in a jigsaw puzzle. “Look,” I said. “There isn’t much time. I have to go, but I have to explain something. I have to convince you. I’m from the future. My name is Kenny Maxwell, and I’m Brian’s son. He doesn’t know that and you can’t tell him.”

“You’re a lunatic,” she said, and went back to examining the gash on Brian’s head.

“He’ll wake up in a minute,” I said. “But he’ll have a concussion. You’ll have to take him to the hospital. Everything will be fine, but he won’t remember it all, and he’ll never know who I am.”

“Stay away from me,” she said. “I need to call an ambulance.”

“Aunt Judy can—” I stopped myself. “Judy can drive. She’s been taking lessons from her boyfriend, Mark. She’ll pull up in a minute in his DeSoto.”

She frowned at this. “I told Judy she wasn’t allowed to drive yet.”

“She went ahead and did it,” I said. “You don’t get mad at her because she gets dad—Brian—to the hospital. You have to believe me. Your name is Harriet Lenore Maxwell. You were married to John Maxwell, but he died in the war. He said you and Brian were the most important things in his world or something like that. In his last letter. You never showed that to anyone because you thought it wasn’t fair to Judy. Grandma, you have to believe. I’m Kenny. I’m Brian’s son.”

She rocked back on her heels as I spoke, and a tear began to make its way down her cheek. “Kenneth was my father’s name. That’s—impossible. You—look like him in the eyes. Who are you?”

“I know it’s impossible,” I said. “Brian marries Mary Nelson. They have just one kid. Me. I’m going to find this mirror. It’s in your coal cellar. It lets me go back in time. It’s crazy, but it’s true.” I pointed to Brian. “He has a scar on his knee. He tells everyone he got it falling off his bike, but really it was Jennifer Painter, the first girl he kissed. Ten years old, and he chased her into a scrap yard and kissed her and she tripped him. He threw a dog at a boy who was beating up Aunt Judy. Please, Grandma. Believe me. I’m your grandson. Please. You used to tell me stories about NogNog the giant and his little friend Po.”

Now I was crying as well.

Harriet Maxwell looked from her son whose head was cradled in her lap back to me. She smiled through her tears. “You know, it’s funny. Maybe every mother does this. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be a grandma. I don’t want it right away, but I think about it. What will I knit for them? What stories will I tell? I thought of NogNog years ago. Are they good stories?”

“The best.”

“Is he really going to be okay?” she said, looking down at Brian.

“He’ll be awake before you get to the hospital.”

Her back straightened. “What do you need, Kenny?”

I closed my eyes and thought about it for a second. “The mirror in your coal cellar. Leave it there for a couple of days.” I rooted through my backpack, brought out the newspaper I had picked up in 1947, and tore off the front page. “There’s a house mentioned in this article. Can you take the mirror there? They’ve got a carriage house surrounded by a hedgerow. Sneak it in there if you can.”

She frowned, but nodded. “Is there anything else?”

“Yes.” I handed her the envelope. “But it’s complicated. I put an address on this. You have to wait until the summer of 1967 and send it to my friend Rick. He has to get it—then he can save my life. Then—this is even crazier—in 1987, you have to get a letter to my friend Luka. I don’t even know how, but she’ll get it to me. You have to tell me—”

Then I stopped for a moment. Couldn’t I just tell her to tell me that the man with the yellow tie was okay? Couldn’t I tell her to let me know his real name? Wouldn’t that stop all this running around? But in my heart, I knew it couldn’t. I had already gotten the letter. The path it led me on was the one where I discovered how keys worked. And that got me back to Rose. Lilly said she would have died.

My shoulders slumped. “You have to tell me that I’m the little hobo boy in the story you’ve been telling for years. You have to tell me to come here, because there’s a man wearing a yellow tie, and the second I get that letter, I have to run from him.”

She looked at me for the longest time before answering. “Okay, Kenny. I’ll do that.”

I remembered one more thing and smiled to myself, knowing that it would cause trouble for Luka.
Your parents know everything.
“Oh, and twenty years from now? I’m going to go missing. You’ve got to show my mom and dad that mirror in the carriage house. You’ve got to prove it to them.”

She frowned. “And how am I to do that? Do I have to go into it?”

“No. Just help them catch Luka coming out of it. Eleven at night, every even-numbered day after I go missing. She’ll come through. She’ll be mad at first, but she’ll explain everything.”

I wanted to stay longer, but I couldn’t ignore the fact that I had sent the Curtis and his wife into the Silverlands where Wald was waiting. There was too much to sort out.

A green DeSoto pulled up. “I have to go,” I said to my grandmother. “Thank you.”

I tore into the house and leaped down the stairs. Nobody in the coal cellar. I held my breath and stepped into the mirror, bracing against the uptime heat. As soon as I was in, shouts from both sides assaulted my ears.

“Let him go! I won’t ask again.”

“Hold thy troubling. Thou know’st not how scrambled are his wits.”

Wald was to my right, ten or fifteen feet away and half obscured with two intervening clouds of swimming images. He had Prince Harming with him, squirming and held like a shield in front. Immediately to my left were Curtis and his wife, easier to make out because they were so close.

My presence was doing nothing to calm the situation. Prince Harming, the mad older one, began screaming, then stopped and tried to talk. “He’s going to—” Then he interrupted himself and screamed again in frustration. “That’s what I said last time. No. I have to do it different. But I can’t, because—No!”

Curtis grabbed my shoulder and turned me to face him. “Are you in on this? Is that John Wald? What’s he doing to that man? I can’t—this is making me—”

“Kennit,” said Wald, “what means this?”

“Wait,” I said. “John, hold on. This is Curtis. And so is that. I just want to sort things out.”

Prince Harming screamed again. “No! Don’t trust him. He’s tricking. He’s—killer. No! That’s what I said. It’s me!” Every half sentence he seemed to need to interrupt himself, as though he couldn’t get anything out without realizing the words weren’t right.

The younger Curtis strengthened his grip on my shoulder. “What’s he talking about? Look, Kenny, I’ve been trying to remember. What did you do? That day when I was born?”

Wald must have loosened his grip on Prince Harming, who now surged back, smashing the back of his head into Wald’s face.

I’ve gone over those next two minutes a thousand times since then. I’ve asked myself if there was anything I could have done differently, any movement, any decision, any word. I think about all I did wrong. Out of some crazy sense of shame that I didn’t even understand, I never told anyone why it was that Prince Harming shot me. I had this idea that I was the person who could fix everything even though I knew nothing could be fixed, nothing changed. I wanted to be the main guy who the whole adventure was about, the boy at the center of the universe.

Instead of just one more kid who got it all wrong.

Wald fell down and halfway through a mirror. Prince Harming, unbalanced and bound, stumbled, then started frantically hopping away from us, looking from side to side as he retreated into the distances of the Silverlands, trying to find a specific mirror.

“Hold onto him,” said Curtis to his wife. “If that’s me, I should help.” He shoved me into her hands and started off.

“You don’t understand,” I said. “There’s—something wrong with you—with him.”

The woman put her hands on my shoulders. “Kenny, let him go. He’s been needing to do something. He’s been having these horrible dreams, trying to remember what happened. That’s why we came. That’s why we’ve been looking for you. We never got a chance to find out what happened.”

I only half paid attention, more interested in what was going on ahead. Most of what you see in the Silverlands is blackness, like you’re floating in space. So what I saw as I looked at Curtis retreating was not easy to figure out: a collection of Wald-fragments sluggishly pulling back from a mirror; the twisted face of Prince Harming looking over his shoulder as he struggled away; the retreating back of Curtis, looking like he was running into a stiff wind.

When Curtis got to Wald, he leaned down to help the older man up. In the jumble of images, Wald must have mistaken him for Prince Harming and gave him a powerful shot in the face. Instantly, the two of them were rolling on the featureless floor of the Silverlands.

This was it. Bad things were going to happen. I had to change them. I was in the moment. I forgot all about Wald’s advice to float above “accidents and happenstance.” I wrenched out of the woman’s grasp and propelled myself forward through the buzzing pain. The Silverlands muffled our voices. By the time words reached me, they were a jumble.

Leave him a—get thee back—Kenny, don’t—don’t, Marg—curst and laggard air—kill you.

As I pushed forward past two, three, four sets of mirrors, images resolved themselves in the floating silver. Curtis and Wald were struggling as best anyone could in that place. They were between two mirrors. Curtis had an arm around Wald’s throat, and Wald had Curtis by the middle, trying to lift him up. Three mirrors past them, Prince Harming hobbled on. As he reached each mirror, he looked to the right and left into the cloud of swimming shards as though searching for something.

“Stop it!” I shouted to Wald and Curtis, but my voice just added to the cacophony of cries, and neither paid any heed. Even looking at them as I approached, I could barely tell who was saying what.

Curtis got Wald’s head bent far enough into an image-cloud that he must actually have been through the mirror, but then pulled him back when Wald almost tumbled both of them through. Fresh snowflakes glistened on Wald’s head and beard. Where did these mirrors lead?

Neither one wanted to harm the other. Wald had a knife in his boot that he wasn’t reaching for, and Curtis looked to be pulling his punches.

I glanced at Prince Harming. He had found the mirror he was looking for now, five spaces beyond where we stood. Its cluster of fragments glowed a warm red.

He looked down the corridor toward us, saw me, and twisted his face again in anger. Without another pause, he thrust his bound hands into the mirror and screamed in abject pain. For a long moment, he held his hands there, then pulled them out. I could see smoke rising from his burned flesh. He pulled his wrists apart with another scream, and the ropes that had held him fell away.

I had to do something. It wasn’t just a matter of changing things now. This was the man who had shot me, the man who had terrorized me and my friends through decades. This was Prince Harming, who had smashed kids’ heads in. Prince Harming of the skipping songs.

He’ll take you down the backward glass.

Curtis and Wald struggled at my feet, each one clearly intent on subduing the other before dealing with anything else. Careful not to get pushed to one side or the other, I stepped over them.

Prince Harming, finding that his burned fingers were useless at untying his bonds, sat down and thrust his feet into the glowing mirror. He screamed again, but kept his feet in the mirror for long enough that when he took them out, the ropes were burning.

I was terrified, but determined not to let it control me. I glanced back to see Curtis and Wald still at each other’s throats, though Curtis again clearly had the upper hand. His wife was hurtling toward me, getting ready to jump over them to get at me.

I faced Prince Harming again.

I paused between two mirrors. To one side there was a sunlit beach, on the other side, darkness. Prince Harming was fifteen feet ahead of me. I don’t know what I thought. That I could stop him? Reason with him?

Scraps of everyone’s muffled voices still clattered in my ears.

From this distance, I could see Prince Harming’s hands, charred black and bloody red, cooked and raw at the same time, like poorly grilled steaks with crippled fingers sticking out of them. His feet hadn’t fared as badly, and he stood to face me. His features twisted into an expression that wasn’t rage this time, just pure terror, and I realized he wasn’t looking at me but rather past me.

Behind me, the woman had cleared the two fighting men and was almost upon me.

The woman crashed into me and half turned me around. This close, her voice brightened and became clear. “Kenny, why won’t you listen, it’s—”

And before she completed that sentence, so much happened that I could never undo.

I saw Prince Harming lunge at me on his still-smoking feet.

I grabbed the woman by her shoulders just as she was holding me and turned around, trying to use her momentum against her. If I could just get her on the same side as the crazy version of Curtis, I could retreat, get Wald, get things cleared up.

Maybe that’s what I was thinking. I’ve gone over it so many times, I don’t even know anymore.

Was I angry at her as well? Was I frustrated at all that had kept me from home?

Did I do it deliberately?

I honestly don’t know.

I pushed. Hard. Just as I heard the last word in that sentence, I held her shoulders and pushed and what had she said? Kenny, why won’t you listen, it’s—