Backward Glass (7 page)

“Mother, you’re imagining things,” said Luka. “I’m doing homework.”

How many seconds since Jimmy had gone in? I pushed into the mirror. Still hot. I couldn’t even think about what Jimmy would do once it crashed through to him what he had done. Thirty years uptime. What was taking him so long?

“Don’t you ‘mother’ me. I’ll send you to your father’s whether he likes it or not,” said Luka’s mother. “And whoever that is up there, you better—”

It was too much for me. Hoping desperately that Jimmy was through and the mirror would open in the right direction, I stepped up and pushed my way in. I didn’t care about the cold, didn’t even let it slow me down.

The cold.

Downtime cold.

I was going home.

My T-shirt caught in a splintered bit of the frame for a moment, but I kept pushing. Inside, I paused to check that the rippling image-bits showed my carriage house, then charged out, shivering into the warm spring air.

I was so relieved to be back that I just sat on the dresser and rubbed my arms for warmth, then leaned back against the mirror to breathe a sigh of relief.

And sank back into it.

My back burned with uptime heat. I sprang away and whirled around. This wasn’t supposed to be possible. The mirror shouldn’t open for me again until eleven tonight. Even then, it should take me back, not forward.

I reached out and touched. My fingers sank in, burning as they went, freezing as I withdrew.

It was then that I saw the thread. It led from the sleeve of my T-shirt all the way into the mirror. I gave it a gentle tug and it grew taut. I remembered the tear as I caught it going in.

For want of a better object, I took out my house key and touched it to the mirror, exactly where the thread was. It clinked against the glass. I could move it right next to the thread, even let the thread in a little and pull it back out, then touch the key against the mirror again. Tap, tap. As soon as my finger touched, though, the mirror let it through.

Aside from the thread, this was the way the mirror normally worked. It wouldn’t let through any inanimate object unless part of us went through with it first. If I put the key in my fist, it would go through.

I didn’t move for a few long moments, thinking about what this must mean. Could you hold them open indefinitely like this? Could we have been going backward and forward at will all this time?

I heard my name called outside. My mother. Home for half an hour by this time.

I ripped the thread from my T-shirt. What could I tie it to? I couldn’t pull it too far or it would tear away at the other side, and what if this was the only time this would work? What if I tried to show it to the others and couldn’t make it happen again?

“Kenny!”

The key. I quickly tied the thread around it. Tension pulled it toward the mirror, but though the thread wanted to go through, the key just clinked against the glass and stayed there.

I heard my name again and fled down the stairs.

I was excited enough at my new discovery that, after my yelling-at for not being home and not leaving a note, I still risked staying up past lights out and went back to the carriage house.

Luka was waiting. “Okay,” she said, pointing to the thread, “this is amazing. Why couldn’t we have figured this out before? Do you realize how amazing? When we pass it on to the others, anyone can go as far back or forward as we like.”

I felt the same breathless excitement, but I also had a lot of questions, having had time to think. It was an odd-
numbered day, just after eleven at night. Normally, I should be able to go back to 1967, but the mirror heated our hands when we pushed in, telling us it was still connected to Luka’s time.

I wanted to ask how this could work, how it could fit with all the other rules we had discovered, but another question surprised its way out of me first.

“Where’s Jimmy?”

Luka frowned at me. “What? Didn’t he go home?”

I explained what had happened, Jimmy panicking and going uptime. “I figured he’d come back and you’d see him as he passed through. But look.” I pushed my hand in again. “If that takes me forward to your time, and it did the same for Jimmy, then he wouldn’t be able to get back home. He’d be stuck either here or at your place. What?”

Luka’s jaw was hanging open. “If he could even get back to my place.”

“What? You can always go back to your own time.”

She shook her head and pointed to the thread tied to my key at the surface of the mirror. “I don’t think so, Kenny. Not if there’s one of these things in it. Think about it. If this thread keeps the mirror open between your time and mine, how could he even get in on Melissa’s end? We always thought the odd-even day was some kind of safety thing, right? So that someone couldn’t be coming out of a mirror from the past at the same time someone was coming from the future? This must be the same.”

“We have to take it out then,” I said. “Jimmy’ll be going crazy.”

Reluctantly, Luka agreed. She went through to her time, reached out of the mirror and unsnagged the thread, then brought it back with her.

We didn’t have to wait long for Jimmy. Within a couple of minutes, he came shivering out of the mirror. “You guys! I thought I was stuck in the future forever. What happened?”

I held up the thread with my house key still attached. “We made a doorstop, Jimmy. We just changed everything.”

T
w
o

It took us the last two weeks of school to work out the rules covering doorstops. The anchors had to be objects that had spent some time with one of us, stretched between string that hadn’t. We loved the new ways the decades opened up for us. Luka and I could rush home after school and go back and forth between our times depending on whose parents were home, what the weather was like, and what was on TV. She and Melissa were enjoying the same benefits, but Keisha hadn’t been back to visit Melissa in 1997 since leaving the note saying she had something to tell about Prince Harming, so she didn’t know if anybody further in the future knew how to jam a mirror open.

The mirror rules still frustrated us, though. The more I fumbled with the shatterdate book, the more Luka became obsessed with going further into the past, but the logistics of this still escaped us. Unless she wanted to go missing for a week, there was no way to get Luka further back than the fifties, and even that was difficult considering how fearful Jimmy was of the mirror.

On a day late in June, I took Luka back to 1967 so she could share her frustrations with Jimmy and Rick. They had come along with some hockey cards and wanted to convince us of yet another get-rich-quick scheme, selling these much more portable items through the decades. Luka refused even to take off the newspaper Jimmy had wrapped them in until we talked about what she wanted. “I want to go back,” she said. “I have a plan about how to do it, but you need to get Anthony in on it. It’s time for him to start helping us.”

Jimmy and Rick exchanged a look. We were all seated around a “campfire” of flashlights in the junk house eating snacks from the future. “Uh, yeah,” said Jimmy. “We been meaning to talk to you about Anthony.”

Luka and I looked between the two of them questioningly. Rick sighed, pulled up a chair, and motioned for us to do the same.

“I still say it’s nothing,” said Rick. “But—fine. Go ahead, tell them.”

Jimmy rubbed his forehead. “Last night? I tried going back to see him. It’s been almost a week and nothing. The mirror’s in the basement, so if he’s not there, usually I just bug out. But then I hear something. A lady—crying. She’s talking about, ‘My Anthony, my little boy.’ It was real heavy. Then there’s another voice and he says he wishes they had reported it sooner. And the lady, she gets out how they didn’t think much of it because Anthony’s been spending a lot of time at friends’ places lately, but now it’s a week and none of his friends have seen him. Then the man starts talking about how he should take a picture away with him, and that’s when I got out of there, ’cause all the albums are in the basement. I took a look out the window before I went, though, and sure enough there was a cop car.”

Luka shook her head in disbelief. “This isn’t right. It’s Margaret that goes missing—have you even talked to her about that yet, Jimmy? And that isn’t until September. Anthony didn’t go missing.”

“I kind of talked to Anthony about it a couple weeks ago,” Jimmy said, “and he knows all about it. It’s only ten years ago for him, right? He said he tried to bring it up, but Margaret wasn’t interested. She said everything was going to work out.”

“Anyway,” Rick said. “The Anthony thing. Jimmy and me went to the library today. We looked up newspapers from ten years ago. We even asked my grandmother. She says Anthony was just fine when they sold the place to my dad and moved to Alberta a few years back. She knows other kids have gone missing over the years, but not Anthony. So it has to turn out, right?”

“
But what about the guy?” said Jimmy. “I think we gotta tell them about the guy.”

Rick rolled his eyes. “This again. Jimmy, there’s no guy.”

“What guy?” said Luka.

“It’s nothing,” said Rick. “Jimmy says there’s been somebody hanging around here. He just got spooked is all.”

“I had a good reason,” said Jimmy. “This is some weird stuff. Rick didn’t want me to say. He says it’s just some kids or whatever. But I seen someone hanging around the neighborhood.”

“Come on,” said Rick, “you’ve been saying that for weeks. There’s no evidence anybody’s been around here but us.”

“Don’t be too sure about that,” I said. It was the first time I’d spoken for several minutes. As the rest of them argued, my eyes had turned to the package of hockey cards Jimmy had given me. They all turned their flashlights my way.

“What do you mean?” said Rick.

I didn’t answer right away. “Jimmy, where’d you get the newspaper to wrap these up?” I held the bundle he had given me up to the flashlight.

Jimmy frowned. “It was just lying around. We were sitting around waiting for you guys.”

Luka had caught on and took the bundle away from me. “Oh, man,” she said, reading the same date I had read just a minute before. “Will you look at that?”

June 3, 2007.

I held it up for them all to see, and as they read the article at the top of the page, the one that had been circled in black marker, I got a perfect view of the chill that ran through them.

Second Girl Attacked
in Cursed Suburban Home

A teenage girl is in hospital after an attack in her Manse Valley home left her with severe head injuries almost exactly ten years after a similar attack on another girl in the same house.

Keisha Blaine, who was home alone, managed to get to a phone after her attacker fled the scene, and was rushed to hospital with severe head injuries.

Police are now looking for a dark-haired caucasian man in his forties with a medium build, around 5’10”.

Bizarrely, an almost identical attack happened to Melissa Peat on June 5 ten years ago. Peat, fifteen at the time, had injuries severe enough to put her in a coma.

Peat’s attacker, also described as a dark-haired man in his forties, was never found.

“I am never leaving my house again,” said Jimmy and looked around at us for support. “Come on, you guys. This is Prince Harming. He’s cracking their heads open. That’s what we’ve been hearing from way back. He’s probably the one who made the mirror so he can get kids out of their time when nobody’s going to miss them.”

“And that explains why he attacked Melissa and Keisha right in their homes, does it?” Luka snapped. For all her bravado, though, she looked around furtively. Our ring of flashlights suddenly seemed small in the abandoned house.

“Point is he’s been here,” said Jimmy. “Someone has. Any of you guys bring that paper back? I didn’t think so. How do we know he’s not here right now? June 3. That was around when Keisha was supposed to come through, right? She was supposed to be bringing something about Prince Harming. Then what? Crack-bang is what. Then he goes for Melissa. And Anthony’s missing in 1957. And we know Margaret Garroway goes in September 1947. And a baby gets killed. It’s time to quit this, you guys. Pretty soon we’ll be the only ones left. And this paper, it was right here.” He looked accusingly at Rick. “You said there wasn’t a guy. Well, who left the paper, then?”

That shut us all up, and for a few long moments we sat in our circle of flashlights and listened to the small noises of the June night outside. Wind in the trees. A car passing by. Four or five streets away, a dog barked.

“Question is,” said Luka, “who is it who was here? Look at this paper. It’s not like it’s new.”

I took the paper from her and felt it in my hands. She was right. I could see how Jimmy could have just absently picked it up and used it for wrapping. It looked like it had been sitting around for years. “And what about this? Look what’s written here.”

We had only looked at the article at first, not noticing the words written on the old paper in what might have been fresh pen: “Better watch out. He’s lurking around. C. M.”

“C. M.?” I said. “I know those initials. They’re from my list, the list of mirror kids. C. M. is from 2017. Jimmy, this isn’t from Prince Harming, it’s from someone like us.”

“Yeah, sure it is,” Jimmy said. “Someone just like us, only he doesn’t ever talk to us and he leaves notes laying around. How do we know C. M. isn’t Prince Harming? How do we know it isn’t a trap?”

“What trap?” said Luka. “What kind of trap are you being lured into when somebody warns you to watch out? Isn’t that the opposite of a trap?”

“Look, none of this is getting us anywhere,” Rick said. He took the paper from Luka’s hands. “We have to be careful is all. We know Anthony ends up okay. We don’t know about Melissa or Keisha or Margaret, though. So nobody travels alone if we can avoid it. Look out the mirror before you walk out. Start being smart.” He glanced over at me. “Anyway, we can’t quit yet, Jimmy. What about our big plan? What about … you know?”

Jimmy grinned. “Aw, yeah. You mean about Kenny’s—”

“Shut up, Jimmy,” said both Rick and Luka at the same time.

He shut up.

“What is this?” I said. “What’s going on?”

Luka shook her head. “Rick’s right. We’re just not making any decisions right yet. We made a plan for one more meet-up at least. Wednesday for you. June 19.”

“Hey, that’s my birthday,” I said.

Everybody looked away at the same time. Even with the flashlights all still trained on the newspaper, I was pretty sure I saw a couple of grins. They wouldn’t say anything more, though, and it was late so we broke for the night.

Just as I was about to head through the mirror after Luka, Rick put a hand on my shoulder and with a jerk of his head indicated I should stay for a moment. Then he asked Jimmy to go wait for him at the front door. He nodded toward the mirror as Luka’s trailing hand disappeared inside it.

“I see you looking, H. G. Wells,” he said with a wry smile. “I see you worrying, too.”

I shrugged. “I don’t—what am I worrying about?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Eight years older one way, two years younger the other way.” He held up his hand to hold off whatever dumb thing I would have said. “All I’m saying, Kenny, is there’s always a way if you want a way.”

I let out a heavy sigh, blowing away with it whatever useless denial I had been about to make. “How?” I said.

Rick grinned. “No idea. We’ll figure it out, though. It’s what we call a summer project. Now go on. She’ll be wait
ing for you. Nobody goes alone anymore, remember?”

When Luka and I got back to the carriage house, she never asked what had delayed me. She insisted on walking to within sight of my front door and watching me go in. She wouldn’t say why, but we were both creeped out by the Prince Harming rhymes. You’ll go down the backward glass. A dead man’s sentence should be curt. Bloody feet. Silver street. Crack your head. Knock you dead. I shuddered as I climbed into bed. Here it was the end of June, and yet September seemed far too close.