Backward Glass (2 page)

Part One

Time Travelers’ Rules, Winter 1977

One

The Rules

I don’t mean to sound morbid or callous, but there’s nothing like the discovery of a dead baby to get you noticed at a new school. And after the number of times we’ve moved, I’m the guy who would know. By the time I went for my first day at Jane Ewart Collegiate, I was already well known. “You’re in the old Hollerith place, aren’t you?” said the secretary who took me to my guidance counselor. “I read in the Saturday
Star
about what you found. That must have been awful. My grandparents used to live around the corner from there, and there were stories even back then. Anyway, I’m sure it’s a nice place now.” I thought I caught her communicating something to my counselor with her eyes, but I might have been wrong.

It was just before lunch by the time they finally gave me a timetable and sent me to math class, but there was enough time for two kids to get in trouble for trying to talk to me about where I lived. As soon as class was over, they steered me to the cafeteria where I was soon surrounded by kids my age and older, half of them trying to get my story, and the other half trying to tell me theirs. It turned out pretty much everyone knew about the Hollerith house, though nobody could actually remember anyone by that name who lived there. A kid from the twelfth grade told me his uncle had once fought off someone who’d been prowling around their house and chased the guy all the way to the carriage house.

“Remember the skipping song?” said a girl from math class. “My mom always said it had something to do with that place.”

“Skipping song?” said the senior.

Another girl chimed in. “Lover sweet, bloody feet, running down the silver street. Leave tomorrow if you’re called—truth and wisdom in the walls. Crack your head, knock you dead, then Prince Harming’s hunger’s fed.”

A hush spread out around the girl who had spoken, and I don’t think I was the only one to shiver. “I never heard that song,” said another kid from math class, turning back to me, “but I sure heard about Prince Harming. He’s a complete legend around here. My dad says he was probably just some guy who was shell-shocked from the war or something. He killed some kids or something back in the twenties.”

“It wasn’t the twenties,” said the skipping-song girl. “My dad lived around here when some girl disappeared after World War II. And he doesn’t kill people. He’s after girls; he’s some kind of perv.”

Aft
er that, everyone had to chime in. Their stories were different, but they all featured that same figure, Prince Harming. Either he wanted to crack your head open to scoop out your brains, or he wanted to catch your reflection in a magic mirror and steal your soul. Or kill you and take you down an invisible hallway. Most of them admitted they had heard the stories in the schoolyard when they were younger, but some of them got it from parents or even grandparents.

I was a curiosity like that for a few weeks, but while I was living it up on stories of that dark hole and the crystalized newsprint flaking away from the corpse of the baby, I held back that list of names and dates. Something about that piece of paper was mine and mine alone. Even when the other kids lost interest in me around Christmas, and I realized I hadn’t actually made any real friends out of my notoriety, I wasn’t tempted for a moment to bring out the note. I told myself I was just being practical. Who would believe I hadn’t just written the list myself and stained it with tea to make it look old? But it was more than that. I hadn’t shown it to my parents either. That was me on that note. It was my own private piece of impossible. It wasn’t asking for anyone else’s help, just mine.
Help me make it not happen, Kenny. Help me stop him. Clive is dead all over again.

In any case, my dad certainly wouldn’t have wanted to hear anything more about the carriage house. The only definite thing that had come out of the police investigation into the dead baby from the carriage house wall was that the little building itself was closed pending a further investigation into its building code violations.

The same cop who shut the carriage house down came by, trying to stay friendly with my dad, and let us know the case was going into the cold file. “Coroner—couldn’t set a date of death. Without that, there’s a million ways it could have gone. He says that baby could be anywhere from thirty to a hundred and thirty.”

“Surely you could narrow down a list of potential parents,” said my mom.

The detective shook his head. “Kidding me? You know how many owners this place has had? I did a search.” He got out his notes. “Guy called Hollerith built it in 1889. One wife, one daughter, one son. Old money. German or something. War breaks out, the first; he joins up on our side, but gets killed in a training accident before he ships. Widow sells it in the late twenties. Guy called Huff—wife Joan, daughter Lillian
—buys, but only lives here a couple of years before moving out and leaving it empty. Eventually it’s bought by a family, name of Garroway. Garroway’s daughter, Margaret, went missing in 1947, age seventeen. Looks promising, right? No go. She would have had to have had that kid real young, then figured out how to take apart the wall to put it in. We’ve got a bunch of people that can tell us that wall was around long before forty-seven. Which gets us to the creepiest part of the whole thing. You take a look at the newspaper covering that—you know, the baby? Dateline 1947. Couple of days
after
the Garroway girl went missing. Best suspect? Not so good.”

I sat motionless through the mention of the names
from my list. My mother hadn’t wanted me around for any discussion of the baby, but I flat refused to stay away. This was all right in the middle of my dead-baby popularity at school.

The detective went on to explain that Margaret Garroway had only one surviving relative, her father, now in his eighties in a retirement home. “And that guy—numero uno when she disappeared, but no proof. Says she was rake-thin all the way up to when she went.”

“So not the Garroway girl,” said my mother. “Who came next?”

The detective shrugged. “Truth is, could have been anyone, anytime. That carriage house was too easy to get into, too hidden. Another funny thing, though. The newspaper was odd enough, from ’47 like I said, even though the coroner figures the body’s older than that. The baby was also wrapped in cloth, swaddled like. Coroner says we gotta start looking later. Says the polyesters in the cloth weren’t even made until the mid-sixties. So I say, first you tell me forty-seven. Then you tell me the body’s at least fifty years old. Now you’re telling me fifteen?” He waved his hands. “Crazy as nothing.”

Then it all went away. When my dad shut up the carriage house, it was like he was closing off the story itself. He started tearing up carpets in the main house and running the floorboards through a planer. Any mention of the other property would be met with his warning to stay away. My mom was happy to back him up on this.

But I couldn’t give up on it. Despite the new lock and boarded-up windows, I often squeezed through the hedges that cut the carriage house off into its own little postage stamp of land, sat on a pile of lumber, and enjoyed the silence. After Christmas, nobody at school talked much to me anymore. On the first day back, I went for lunch at the same table I had been guided to on my first day. The girl who had sung the skipping song raised her eyebrow at me and went back to her pizza slice. A couple of minutes later, her friend showed up, carrying a tray. “Is there any chance you could let me sit there?” she said. “We were going to study for a science test.”

“I’m good at science,” I said.

“You’re in grade nine,” she said. “This is grade ten science.” She looked her tray and shifted as though it were heavy. “Most of the grade nines sit over by the back doors.”

I looked over at the three kids from my math class who were seated just a few feet away, but all of them were studiously involved in a card game.

The note mentioning my name, which I always kept in my back pocket, carefully transferring it whenever I switched jeans, burned for attention. “I found something in that carriage house,” I said, scooching over to make room for her to join me at the table. I bumped into a card player who pushed back, but there was still enough room for her. “It’s a note with dates on it, and somebody asking for help.”

“Just find another table, okay?” said the skipping-song girl. “Nobody wants to hear you make up more stories about your haunted house anymore.”

One of the card players giggled. Nobody met my eyes except the girl with the tray. After another moment of silence, I got up and took my lunch over to the garbage. Only one bite taken from my peanut butter sandwich, but I threw it and my whole apple away.

I then realized something that would come to me again and again that year, the year I found the backward glass and went inside: if the note was meant for me, then it was mine alone. Nobody else, not my parents, not the police, and not the kids at school, could be expected to care about it. The urgency of that note, the
Help me make it not happen, Kenny
—that was meant for me. Nobody else was supposed to be obsessed about it but me.

Which is how I ended up there, on a Sunday near the end of January, after three weeks of eating my lunches alone, looking at footprints in the snow leading out of the tiny door. I was all alone in the forbidden yard. My dad was rehanging doors and my mother reading a mystery novel.

I examined the tracks. They went up to the front door, which was hanging slightly ajar.

Heart pounding, I closed it again, and looked back at the footprints.

One set.

Leading away.

I stepped back. Had the guy gone in a window? There were only two on the ground floor, boarded up tight. The hayloft window was clear, but it was fifteen feet up and there were no ladder marks in the snow, nor any easy handholds for climbing.

I called out a couple of hellos.

Nothing.

The creepiness that had made my hair stand on end began to give way to annoyance. This was my place.

I looked back toward the main house, but it couldn’t be seen through the high, unruly hedges.

I pushed the door to the carriage house open and stepped in, holding it open behind me to admit the weak January light.

“You’re crossing a police line,” I said, trying to sound bold and official.

Nothing.

I waited, letting my eyes adjust. No one.

The lower floor was bare now, the musty old couch long since left by the curb, but upstairs the jumble of disused tables and desks remained. I walked up in the dusty light and looked around. My eyes kept wanting to come back to the dark hole left by the last panels my dad had torn away.
Help me make it not happen, Kenny. Help me stop him. Clive is dead all over again.

Nobody there. An odd, low dresser with a full-length mirror stood near the back. Was there dust scuffed away from its surface? Maybe with a flashlight I could have been sure.

This was stupid, I told myself. My dad forgot to lock the door. Somebody came up and went inside, then it snowed while he was there, and then he walked away again.

But the snow had fallen yesterday, and I had seen it untrammeled last night.

I walked back downstairs and dragged my feet to the door.

Snap. Rustle.

The sound came from the hedgerow. “I hope you know you’re trespassing,” I said.

No reply. I looked into the thick hedges, snow-blind after the dim mysteries of the carriage house. But I could still tell height, and this was a kid, no taller than me.

I strode forward, shielding my eyes. “You’re not allowed to come here,” I said, maybe a little louder and harsher than I had intended, but I was trying to build up steam. “Cops closed it off.”

The figure withdrew to the other side of the hedge and took off toward the creek.

“Stop!” I hesitated for a moment, then ran to the boxwood shrubs my dad had planted, the easiest part of the hedge to slip through.

The guy was a good runner. He sprinted ahead of me, dodging trees and jumping bushes. When he reached the creek, I got a better look. A dirty white jacket, too thin for January. A foolish-looking orange woolen hat with one of those knit balls bobbing on top.

It’s funny how you can switch from feeling one way to something totally different. I had wanted to catch this kid and give him a shake, tell him he better get off our property or else.

Then, in the middle of running—I was lonely. Just like that.

“Hey, wait,” I shouted, gasping. “I just want to talk.”

The kid veered away from the creek again. We were coming up on the fences that separated us from the subdivision, and it was either climb a fence, go back to our house, or descend to the muddier ground near the trickle of water that was Manse Creek. He headed to the house.

I tried to cut him off, but he was too fast, and I was breathing hard.

Then I got it. He was doubling back to the carriage house. I’d been tricked. I put on a burst of speed, but then slowed. Why hurry? There was only one way out.

I switched to an out-of-breath jog, keeping him in sight through the winter-bare saplings that dotted the ground. He twisted sideways and slipped through the hedge, losing his hat on the way. I saw a hand flash back through and grab for it, so I put on another burst of speed.

The hand disappeared, leaving the orange hat caught in the hedge. I snatched it when I got there.

Before I had even begun to worm my way through, I heard the door slam. I rounded the front of the little house, pushed open the door, and stepped through.

The dark was almost total, cut only by the dimness making its way through the hayloft window. I was worried that the guy might be right beside me, but then I heard a scrape from the second floor.