by Bryan Davis
“Freeze!” I raised a hand. “Don’t move a muscle!”
“Why?” Tony asked. “What’s going on?”
I stepped slowly backwards, keeping my stare fixed on the mirror. “Everyone just watch me in the reflection.”
I backed to the trunk until my heels tapped the wood. Tony swung his head away from the mirror and toward the trunk. “Don’t look,” I ordered. “It might not stay open if you do.”
“But it’s not open,” he said. “How can it stay open?”
Kelly growled, her gaze locked on the mirror. “Just do what he says, Daddy.”
“Okay. Okay.” Tony crossed his arms and stared at the reflection. “Satisfied?”
“Perfect.” I reached back, bent my knees, and lowered my hands into the trunk. If the sheets of music were still there, they would be flat at the bottom. I would have to stretch farther to get them.
“Hey!” Tony pointed at the mirror. “It’s open!”
Clara laid a palm on Tony’s cheek. “Don’t turn. Stay focused.”
Nearly squatting, I sensed paper at my fingertips. I gathered the sheets and straightened. “Okay. It’s safe to look.”
When everyone turned toward me, Tony touched the top of the trunk, then swiveled back to the mirror. The trunk in the reflection was now closed. “How’d you do that?”
“I wish I knew.” I leafed through the handwritten music compositions until I found a fairly complex piece several pages down. I mentally played the notes through the first few measures. “This is really cool, Francesca,” I said as I turned the page toward her. “Did you write this?”
She pushed aside her dark locks, revealing flushed cheeks. “I wrote all of them, but I never showed them to anyone who knew how to read music.”
“Let’s see if your music changes the mirror.” I handed the sheets to Francesca, walked to my closet, and retrieved Mom’s violin.
“An impromptu concert?” Clara asked.
“Sort of.” I set bow to string and smiled at Francesca. “Mind if I play one of your pieces?”
“Which one?”
“Choose your favorite.”
She paged through her collection, pulled out a sheet, and held it where I could see it. “Can you read it? It’s pretty messy.”
I leaned closer to the page. “Not too messy.” As I played, I glanced between the music and the mirror, watching for a change, but nothing obvious showed up. The melody, though simple at the beginning, grew in complexity, calling for difficult fingering.
Clara strolled toward the mirror and crossed her arms as she gazed at the room’s reflection. “Everything’s normal so far. The trunk’s still closed.”
I focused on the music. When I neared the end of the page, Francesca held up another, waiting for me to begin playing it before lowering the first sheet. “This is the end,” she said. “I’m still working on it.”
Following the scribbled notes, I increased the volume from piano to forte and shifted through a series of arpeggios. As I stroked the strings, I tried to concentrate on the notes and, at the same time, on thoughts of Mom and Dad. Were they still alive? If so, where were they?
The lamp in the mirror dimmed. The walls darkened. The music was doing its part. Now it was time to get a flash of light ready.
I used a foot to point at a desk drawer. Sight reading new, handwritten music was hard enough. Trying to talk at the same time was almost impossible. “Get the camera,” I grunted.
Clara rushed to the desk, pulled out the camera, and draped the strap around her neck. “What should I take a picture of?”
“Wait.” As the music reached a crescendo near the end of the page, the reflection undulated like ripples on a pond. The bedroom faded to black. New dark images formed deep within — ghostly shadows in a haze.
In the mirror, a ray of light from somewhere to the side cast a glow over the scene, bringing clarity to the dim room. A spacious chamber materialized. The outer walls curved around a circular floor. Two people skulked across polished tiles toward the source of light, a lamp on a desk in the far background.
They passed a shadowed object at the center of the circle, something that looked like a bulky cylinder on a pedestal aimed at an angle toward the ceiling.
I returned to the beginning of the page and replayed the measures, reaching for all the passion I could muster. It was working. The scene matched one of the photos from Dad’s camera.
The two forms wore long trench coats with pulled-up collars as they walked away from the front of the mirror. The more curvaceous shape of the smaller person revealed her gender as she carried a violin case in hand. Near the top edge, copies of their hunched forms reflected their moves, but the copies walked upside-down, as if projected on the ceiling like an inverted movie.
When they reached the desk, they each took a seat in rolling swivel chairs. When they turned toward each other, their profiles came into view.
Clara raised a hand to her mouth. “Your parents.”
I pulled the bow across the D string to play the final note and nodded at her. “Turn on the flash and take a shot of the mirror. Let’s see if we can go there. But hang tight to the camera. The last time I did this, I got a jolt.”
“Will do.” After flipping the switch on the flash unit, Clara sidestepped to the center of the room and focused the camera. When the ready light came on, she pressed the shutter button. The camera flashed. The mirror reflected the light and shot back a radiant bolt that sizzled into the flash attachment, ripping the camera from Clara’s hands. It fell to her chest and bounced at the end of the strap.
The mirror’s image seemed to zoom in on Mom and Dad, sharply clarifying as it filled the glass with the upper half of their bodies. At the desk, Dad pecked at a laptop keyboard while Mom looked on.
I tucked the violin under my arm and set a hand on the mirror. It remained hard, impenetrable. As I caressed the surface near Mom’s cheek, she turned toward me and sighed. “I’ll try again, but it seems hopeless. I just don’t have enough power.”
Dad made a final tap on the keyboard and swiveled toward her. “We have to keep trying. No one else can stop Interfinity from coming.”
“But if Nathan figures out how to use the Quattro camera and my violin, we might be able to do it together.”
“It’s too late for that. We have to push forward.” Dad stood and reached for her hand. “The scope is in position. Give it all you’ve got. This could be our last chance.”
As a frenzied mix of sounds began to play from somewhere in the background, she took his hand and rose from her chair, still clutching the violin case. Hand in hand they walked to the middle of the chamber. The mirror’s eye followed them, panning back as if controlled by a cameraman.
When they stopped near the center of the circle, Mom withdrew the violin from its case and set it under her chin. As she placed the bow over the strings, she looked up. Her pupils danced with chaotic colors that intermeshed with her brown irises, and a gentle smile graced her lips as if a long-loved memory had found its way home.
Then, with a sudden burst of strokes, she played a series of high eighth notes that seemed void of melody, but, with her gaze still trained on something above, she soon brought the musical chaos into order, creating a glorious rendition of her birdsong piece, much fuller and more vibrant than her younger self had so recently played.
After several seconds, the colors in her eyes dispersed, and the black pigment in her pupils transformed into brilliant white. The whiteness expanded and flowed from her eyes, like twin lasers shooting into the twilight. As she played on, the lasers strengthened, becoming so bright they bathed her skin in a ghostly pallor.
Dad circled behind her. “Do you see it, Francesca?”
Nodding and breathing heavily, she increased to fortissimo, sending the loudest, most lovely notes yet into the upper reaches of the chamber. A bow hair broke away and flew wildly. Her fingers blurred, and her eyes blazed like the sun.
As a loud cracking sound b
lended into the musical flow, my fingers began to sink into the image. The glass felt like cool jelly, becoming thinner every second.
Dad’s voice again rose above the din. “Keep it up, Francesca. You can do it.”
I pushed through the mirror up to my shoulder. “I’m going in,” I said, extending the violin toward Kelly. But just as she took it, Mom heaved a groan and crumpled to the floor. With a loud pop, her eyes flashed a ring of sizzling fire in all directions. The ring crashed against the mirror, sending me flying back into a pair of strong arms.
Tony lifted me upright. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.” I shook the mental cobwebs away and leaped to the mirror. I laid a hand on the surface, now rigid again. “I was so close.”
In the reflection, Dad sat on the floor cradling Mom. “What did you see?”
With her eyes still emanating a faint glow, she replied in a dreamlike whisper. “I stood at the edge of a chasm and gazed down into an endless void. A shimmering golden rope was fastened around a rocky projection at my feet. As taut as the strings on my violin, the rope seemed to span the celestial wound, but I couldn’t be sure since it disappeared in the darkness.”
“Anything else?”
She nodded. “I plucked the rope. It produced a perfect tone, an E, loud and lovely, and shook the ground, so much that I could no longer stand. As I lowered myself to sit, I noticed three other golden ropes. When the shaking ceased, I plucked the others and found that they were the A, D, and G strings. I tried to play the song by running as quickly as I could between the strings, but after only two measures, I became too weary to keep the timing.” She blew out a long breath and shook her head. “I don’t think I can try again, not without Nathan to help me.”
Dad added his own sigh. “Then I guess there’s no way we can do it.”
She shifted in his arms and gazed at him hopefully. “He’ll find the email — ”
“It won’t be enough. I thought he’d come with us, so I didn’t put much information in it. It would be a miracle if he figured it out.”
“There’s still the girl, the interpreter.” Mom turned her gaze back to the ceiling. “And there’s always his supplicant. A Sancta can be mysterious and elusive, but she might be willing to help.”
Dad tilted his head upward. “And Patar might show up.”
“But would he help or hinder?” Mom asked.
“We’d be better off shoving that vision stalker and his brother back through the hole they came from and plugging it with a cosmic cork. Patar might help, but he’s likely to scare Nathan away.”
She took his chin in her hand and turned his head, setting his eyes directly in front of hers. “Our son will not be frightened. He will choose wisely. He has the same warrior spirit you have.”
Dad’s expression turned grim. “If Nathan starts punching through space-time walls, Mictar will get wind of it and follow the trail. Even a portal view might expose our whereabouts.”
I pulled back from the mirror. A portal view?
Mom swiveled her head to the side and whispered, “I hear footsteps.”
Dad lifted her to her feet. “Let’s go.” The scene darkened, then slowly illuminated again, growing brighter and brighter as the objects in the bedroom reappeared.
I slapped the mirror. “No! Don’t go away!”
Kelly rose and extended the violin. “Can you try again?”
“I wouldn’t if I were you,” Clara said. “You heard Solomon. It sounds like all this hopping from world to world and poking around the cosmos and whatnot is putting them in danger.”
Tony crossed his arms over his chest. “It sounds like he might already be in danger, like someone was coming.”
“I heard.” I backed away and flopped into the desk chair. What else could I do? Without another clue to go on, every option seemed like it ended at a brick wall. But at least now there was hope. At least Mom and Dad were alive, though the vision didn’t explain the presence of their corpses.
I glanced at the digital clock on the desk. Still before noon. About twelve hours in that other world equaled less than an hour here. I looked at Kelly. “You got any ideas about what’s going on?”
“Crazy ideas.” She smoothed out her safari shirt. “With the whole clothes-swapping thing and clones of us getting murdered, maybe we really did travel through time.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. We made too many changes in the past without affecting the present. I mean, we have my ten-year-old mother in my bedroom. If she stays with us, then I couldn’t have been born. Time travel doesn’t make sense.”
“Neither does jumping into another world with someone else’s clothes on,” Kelly said.
“I can’t argue with that.”
“What about their mention of a supplicant?” Clara asked. “And a Sancta?”
“I think they’re the same person, and Mom said she, so I’m wondering if she’s the girl in red.”
“And this Patar fellow who might scare you?”
“No clue except that the name reminds me of Mictar.” I got up, took the violin from Kelly, and put it away. “It looks like our only plan is to find the email Dad mentioned.”
“But was that your father?” Kelly asked as she reseated herself at the desk. “There was more than one Nathan. Maybe that was the other Nathan’s father. Maybe the other Nathan is the one they were talking about.”
“There’s a way to find out for sure. If the email my father talked about is here on Earth Red, then only Solomon Red could have put it there. If we find it, then the couple we just saw are my real parents.”
“Not necessarily. Maybe both fathers did the same thing. Hid a message for their son in an email, I mean.”
I nodded. “I suppose that’s possible.”
“Is there anything else we might have missed?” Clara asked. “A puzzle piece we might have overlooked?”
“Here’s one piece.” I pulled the newspaper from my back pocket and showed the article to Clara. “Do you know anything about this murder back in nineteen-seventy-eight?”
Clara’s eyes darted as she read the page. “No. Nothing like this ever happened.”
“How can you be sure?”
She touched the page. “I attended this concert. Your mother’s teacher, Dr. Malenkov, and his wife were the violinists in one of the quartets, so I remember it well. Since my late husband was a percussionist, I was quite involved in the orchestra social circle. Eventually that’s how I first met your mother, when she joined the CSO as its concertmaster at the age of twenty-one.”
I creased the newspaper, laid it on the bed, and searched the article for more information. Since Dr. Malenkov never returned from the concert, maybe he really was one of the victims. Could he and his wife have been replacements for the pieces of Rosetta in my dream?
“Maybe.” I shifted to the desk and touched Kelly’s shoulder. “I have to search all the emails. Probably a job for Clara and me.”
“Sure.” Kelly rose from the chair. “It’s lunch time. You and Clara can be the bloodhounds while the rest of us get some grub for everyone.” She looked at her father. “Right, Daddy?”
“Right.” Tony tore his stare away from the mirror. “We have a lot of tuna-banana salad left over and buffalo wings marinated in vinegar and mayonnaise.”
Kelly reached for her father’s hand and Francesca’s. “C’mon. We’re going on a safari hunt in the freezer.”
As the trio walked down the hall, Tony’s voice echoed, “I think we have some eels still frozen from the fishing trip. What do you think? Serve the eels with some of my special rattlesnake sauce?”
“No! Don’t you dare!”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
After bringing in a chair from another bedroom, I sat with Clara at the desk and scanned the contents of Dad’s email inbox. A message from Dr. Malenkov focused on his visit to Chicago, expressing his concern about attending the shareholders’ meeting given that he had no dealings with the company. Since he hadn’t s
een Francesca in so long, he just wanted to hear her play. Another email from him asked if her favorite flowers were still white roses. No hidden messages were obvious in Dad’s responses.
Clara pointed at an icon on the screen. “It looks like there’s something in the draft folder.”
I clicked on it. “One message. It’s addressed to Dr. Malenkov. Never sent.”
We both leaned close and read it silently.
Nathan, in case you happen to find this, read carefully. I can’t risk explaining everything. The mirrors lead to alternate worlds that are shifted from each other time-wise. Dr. Simon maintains a steady state for now, but danger of a rift is spiking. We must find a hole in the cosmic fabric and seal it, or Interfinity will result. We will need your help to produce the musical key. Tell no one that we have discovered how to heal the wounds.
My heart thumped. We had found the email, locked away in the draft folder where it couldn’t be intercepted during transmission. The message didn’t prove that my real parents were still alive, but it boosted my hopes.
“Very interesting,” Clara said. “We have alternate realities that are out of phase with each other time-wise.”
“So we didn’t travel through time. We went to another world.”
“Okay, but how do you explain the presence of your dead bodies here in our world?”
“Maybe everyone has an exact copy existing in the other world. Our copies died over there and somehow got transported over here.” I looked at the mirror and sighed. “It’s weird. I haven’t even thought of them as real people. I only saw them in the mirror, like it was a movie or something.”
“They were real,” Clara said. “I felt for pulses in their lifeless wrists. I mopped their hair back from their ashen faces and stared at the scorched pits where their eyes used to be.”
As I imagined my own eyes getting incinerated as well as Kelly’s, nausea churned. I hung my head and whispered, “Yeah. This is all getting way too real.”
“And how did this happen?” She tugged on the sleeve of my safari shirt. “These aren’t your clothes. Or, then again, maybe they are yours. Maybe you’re really the Nathan from the other world.”