by David Lomax
“Did you know?” Curtis said in a flat voice that betrayed no emotion.
I nodded. “It wasn’t my thing to tell you.”
“Wait,” said Curtis, everything just catching up to him at once. “So who is my father? Clive?” I nodded. Tears welled up in his eyes. “I don’t know why I care,” he said. “Why do I care? What does it matter? My father—I mean, Rose’s father—he’s dead, too. Why does it matter which dead father is mine? But I just—I grew up thinking it was this way and it’s not, it’s that way.”
Luka was awake now. She sat very still and watched me with Curtis, scooching well to the side as I sat him down.
What do you do when someone’s crying? You shut up and hold them. I took him by the shoulders and pulled him into an awkward hug. In my arms he babbled away for a bit through his tears. Why had nobody told him? Didn’t they think he could understand? How many other people knew? Did the neighbors know?
At the end of all that, his crying stopped, and the next thing he said came out in the thinnest, tiniest whisper. “Rose is dead, though, Kenny. She’s dead. I was keeping a secret, too. It was the Spanish flu. She died eight years ago. I didn’t know how to tell her. How can I tell her she’s dead?”
Instinctively I put my hand up to his head and caressed his hair. “She knows, pal. She’s not stupid, your mother. She’s smart, just like you. She knows, and she wanted to talk to you about it. She was going to tell you everything before the mirror closes at the end of the year. You know it does that, right? It only opens on the years that end in seven. All she wanted was to get some time with you. And she didn’t want to spoil it.”
“How do you know all this?” said Curtis pulling away from me, sniffling and rubbing his eyes.
“I just talked to her, that’s all,” I said. “I’ve been hearing about you two for months. I wanted to come back and help. I knew things got bad around now.”
“Did you help other people as well?”
The emerging look of admiration in his face made me uncomfortable. “I tried. But you have to be careful when you try to help. Things can go bad even if you don’t mean them to.” Then it just all came out in a rush, pushed out of me by my guilt and frustration. “Listen, Curtis, I know things that are going to happen. Some really bad things. I’ve seen them all and I know it’s going to get really bad. Some of it’s my fault. But maybe it doesn’t have to happen. When you grow up, you’re going to join the army, just like you said. You’re going to meet a girl and fall in love.”
As I continued, his eyes never strayed from my face, and his mouth hung open. I told him everything, or as much as I could put together in that crazy rush. I forgot all about Wald’s advice to float above the events of the world. Wald, me, Peggy, the tragedy in the Silverlands. I tried to tell him as many ways as I could think of to avoid Peggy’s death. Don’t go back to the mirrors as an adult. If you have to go back, don’t take her with you. Tell me everything as soon as you see me, especially your names. Any of those things, I told him, could set us on a new path.
Just as I was telling him to write all of this down, we heard renewed sobs of pain from Rose upstairs. Curtis looked up. “I shouldn’t be here,” he said.
“No,” replied a voice from behind us, “you shouldn’t. I’ll take care of that.”
I turned to see Curtis, older and in his Prince Harming appearance, one burned hand holding my strings-and-spoon key, the fire of madness in his eyes all over again. He stepped all the way through the mirror, and down off the dresser, just as we heard a voice from upstairs.
“There he is, dear. Oh, there he is. It’s a boy. Oh!”
“Just in time,” said Prince Harming, and he turned toward the stairs.
Two
Then Prince Harming’s hunger’s fed.
“Wait,” I said. “What are you here for? What are you going to do?”
He turned back and looked at me, and when he spoke it was in a quiet voice, not the fierce shouts of before. “It was never your fault, Kenny. It was always me. All I need to do is never live. I kill that baby and it’s no crime. It’s suicide.”
He started up the stairs and I ran after him. “No,” I said. “You can’t change things that way. That’s not how it works.”
I grabbed his arm, but he smashed my face with his elbow. I fell back and cracked my head on the floor. I opened my eyes again just in time to see Luka run at him and get a solid kick in the stomach. Her feet left the step they were on and she flew down to land next to me. “You can’t stop me,” he said. “This is the end. I do this and everything changes. That’s what I understand. You can only change yourself. Don’t make me hurt you. This is mine to do.”
He turned and continued up the stairs.
As soon as he got to the top, I could hear the sounds of a struggle. Lilly telling him to stay away, Mrs. Hollerith screaming at him, Rose simply screaming. There were thumps and slaps, the dull sound of punches. “Give that to me!” he screamed.
I willed myself to get up, head still spinning.
“Is that … is that … ” Curtis, little Curtis as I thought of him in my head, walked to the bottom of the stairs and looked up. “Kenny, who is that? You said I was going to burn my hands in a mirror. Who is that, Kenny?”
What happened on the day I was born? the older Curtis had asked me. “Curtis, it’s—it’s not safe here. Let me take care of this.” Whatever was about to happen, I didn’t want him to see it. Be a friend to him, she had asked. His tenth birthday was tomorrow.
I gripped the handrail and started up the stairs.
The converted hayloft was a chaos of voices and bodies. Mrs. Hollerith clutched Rose, who thrashed and screamed at this burned stranger. “It’s mine,” she screamed. “He’s mine, he’s my boy. Give him to me. Put him in my arms. He’s mine, he’s my boy.” Lilly stood on unsteady feet, a fresh gash on her forehead covering her face with a sheen of blood. She held her hands out to Prince Harming, imperious and demanding.
He clutched the baby in his raw hands, a bloody and curled thing, skin blending with the hideous fingers that cradled it. Why could he hold the baby? Was he beyond pain? Something was happening here, something I should understand, but it was going too quickly.
“It’s me,” he shouted. He looked around at us all wildly. “Every one of you has been hurt by this.” He shook the baby slightly in his hands as he said that, and my heart clutched like a fist. “All of you. I’ve done—so much wrong. I can’t bear it. It was all me. I tried to control it, to stop it. I tried to hurt other people to make it stop. But it’s not outside of me, it’s in me.” He shook the baby again, but only lightly, and I could tell that somehow he couldn’t bear to be rough with it.
“That’s not the way,” I shouted. I didn’t want to shout, but I had to if I wanted to make myself heard over Rose’s wails. “You’re trying to control again. Give it up. You can’t.”
Seeing him distracted, Lilly stepped forward and brought her hands up to the baby, but she was too gentle, and that was her undoing. Curtis leaned back, braced himself against a wardrobe, and gave her a push with his foot, sending her flying back into a large chest. He paid no further attention to her, but rather began to advance on me. “Get out of my way,” he said. “I’ll kill you if I have to, because it won’t matter. If I kill myself, none of it will have happened. I can do anything right now because in a few moments this will all be gone.”
I fell back before his fury, but I kept talking. “That’s not it,” I said. “You’ve got it wrong.”
“How else is there a dead baby?” he said, then grinned savagely at my reaction. “Oh, yes. I know about it. I talked to your friends in the future, Keisha and Melissa, before I—I didn’t mean to hurt them, though. I just wanted to make them let me back in the mirror. I got lost and I had to get you before—but I didn’t. I can’t.” His expression turned pleading and he looked from me to the baby. “D
on’t you see? It’s better if I just end this thing. I remember everything now. Almost everything.”
He had backed me into the room now, and had his own back to the stairs, as if preparing for a quick escape. Behind and below him, I could see the mirror.
Older Curtis shook the baby again for emphasis. “He’s the problem,” he said. “This one here. All this year, you’ve been living in two times at once, one with the baby dead, one with him living. Now I get to choose. Dead baby or mad Curtis.”
“That’s crazy,” I said, and immediately regretted my choice of words. “You’re not thinking about it. Both things can’t be true. You live. You have to live. If you kill that baby—but you can’t. You don’t want to. If you wanted to, you would have done it. You’re not the bad guy.” I pointed at the red-and-purple burden in his hands. “How can you go from being that to killing that?”
“But it hurts,” he said to me, his eyes full of tears. “I thought I could stop you, and I couldn’t. Nothing stops it and it—hurts.”
“Hurts?” said the ten-year-old’s voice from behind his future self. “Hurts like when I touched you before? Did that hurt too? Let’s try it. Get away from my friend.”
And with that, he touched Prince Harming’s scarred and bloody hands.
I jumped forward. So did Lilly. Blue fire erupted from the place where the Curtises met. Both screamed. Older Curtis began to topple back, and I swear I saw him in my memory cradling that baby, instinctively bringing it close as he fell into his younger self and sent them both down the stairs in a tumble of sparks and limbs.
I didn’t see the baby die.
Lilly and I got to the top of the stairs at the same time and scrambled down together, but what we saw on the floor made me stop in horror while she pushed on. Little Curtis and his older self lay spread out on the floor, their hands close enough to exchange bright flashes. Both were convulsing slightly.
But it wasn’t the sight of them that stopped me, and it wasn’t either of them that Lilly rushed to.
Rose’s baby must have been flung clear of those maimed hands at the apex of his tumble. Maybe the blue fire had done it, making his hands and arms convulse even as he tried to protect the baby.
It had fallen in an odd path. Older Curtis must have grasped for it, sending it tumbling to one side, and now it lay on the low dresser, directly against the mirror, unmoving. Horrifically and impossibly dead.
Three
Holler loud, holler proud,
you shall wear a coffin shroud.
Lilly touched the baby, even snatched a locket from her neck and held it before the tiny face to see if it was breathing, but when she turned to me and shook her head, she was only confirming what I already knew. “Move them apart, Kenny,” she said, pointing to the two Curtises exchanging blue sparks on the floor, then picked up that tiny, sad weight and headed toward the stairs.
Luka groaned and sat up as I grabbed younger Curtis by his shirt and dragged him a safe distance from his older self. Just then, as though sounds were coming back into the world one by one, I heard Rose’s wail.
“Let me hold him,” she cried. “Why did he do that? Why did you let him? Let me hold my baby.”
“I have to go there,” I said. “Are you okay?” She nodded and waved me upstairs.
When I got there, Rose was holding her baby. Her mother and Lilly knelt on either side.
I didn’t understand it. I had been so sure. So had she. Curtis was her baby. Who was he then? Who was the burned man downstairs, and the boy he once was?
“Why didn’t you stop him?” she said, looking from Lilly to me. “That’s why you came here wasn’t it?”
Lilly opened her mouth, then closed it. What could she say? What could I say? Rose was right. We had come all this way, gotten lost, gotten found, met each other at different times, different ages, solved mysteries—but for what?
“Well,” said her mother at long last. “Rose, it’s terrible, but … perhaps this is for the best. Everything happens for a reason. With no father … and you unmarried … ”
Rose’s face twisted and she took a breath as though to speak, but whatever she would have said to her mother was cut off by a convulsion and a cry of pain. Her hands clutched and trembled against the baby she was cradling. When she could speak again, she beat a weak fist against the bed in frustration. “Why can’t it be done?” she said. With a worried look, Lilly left Rose’s side and went back to the bottom of the bed.
I took that moment to approach Rose. “I—I think Curtis is okay,” I said. “I mean—downstairs. My friend Luka is with him. I think he’s going to be okay.”
Another shudder of pain took her. When it was gone, her mouth was twisted in a grimace. “What does that matter to me? I was wrong about him. He’s not mine. Why should I care? All this time I thought he was mine. I thought I had been given this gift of the lonely little boy I wouldn’t get to see.” She sniffled and looked at the dead baby again. “But that wasn’t him. My baby is dead.”
She drew a ragged breath and closed her eyes. Lilly, looking more worried than ever, ran her hands over Rose’s stomach and asked Mrs. Hollerith to come to her.
“I can’t hate him, though,” said Rose to me. “He was being brave. I should—I should forgive him. He didn’t want to do anything wrong. He’s a dear little boy. But—oh, Kenny, why couldn’t you stop it? Why couldn’t you—” Another convulsion took her words away, and the hand that clutched mine almost drew blood. “It’s—it’s funny,” she said around her gasps and sobs. “Remember I said I was going to call him Clive? I suppose I will after all. Clive after his father.” She shut her eyes against the pain. “I suppose I’ll never even know where Curtis comes from.”
“Don’t be too sure about that,” said Lilly from the foot of the bed. Her eyes were bright again with new tears. “You’re not done yet, girl. Oh, Rose, you’re not done. It’s twins. That’s what your mother tried to tell us. Curtis is a twin.”
This time they didn’t send me away. Even Mrs. Hollerith was too frantic to object to my presence. My only job was to sit and comfort Rose, who had already endured more than anyone should. It was amazing to me that someone deprived of food for so long could push as hard as they were telling her she must or crush someone’s hand as hard as she did mine. Her other hand, curled around the dead baby that I was already thinking of as Clive, petted him with feathery caresses.
Less than five minutes after his brother’s death, Curtis Hollerith made his first appearance in the world, yelling and screaming the way his brother never did.
Not long after the second baby was born, Mrs. Hollerith remembered my existence and sent me downstairs. Luka had managed to heft little Curtis onto the couch and was staring glumly into the mirror. The boy’s breathing was regular, and his hands showed no damage from the blue fire. Lying there, he could be any ten-year-old kid. I wondered how much of this night he would remember. Enough that it would trouble him later, I was sure. Half-remembered images that would bring him and Peggy back to look for me, that would bring her to her death.
“I thought we could save him,” Luka said.
Something strange was happening upstairs. I could hear coos and sighs from Lilly and Mrs. Hollerith, and from Rose sobs that were turning from despair to joy. “We did in a way. If I hadn’t gotten Lilly back here, I don’t even think baby Curtis would have lived.”
Luka groaned. “Time travel gives me a headache.” I suddenly realized that older Curtis wasn’t there. “Out the door,” said Luka, reading my expression. “He got up a couple of minutes ago. I was ready to take him on again, but he backed off. Said nothing matters because as soon as it all gets fixed, he won’t exist anymore.”
“Did you tell him—” I nodded my head upstairs.
“No. What if he tried again?”
“So where is he now?”
She shrugged. “I watched him run t
o the woods. I wasn’t about to follow.”
I looked toward the door. It was a cool night in 1917. I tried to imagine the pain of running in those woods with bare, burned feet.
“Come on,” I said.
“Kenny, no,” Luka said. “Are you crazy? Look, I came here to bring you home. Your family is waiting for you.”
I stood for a long moment in tortured indecision, looking between the girl I had been pining for all this time and the door out into the dark, where this man was, this man who was the boy sleeping there on the couch and who was also the baby upstairs. I thought of the tiny hands I had seen for just a moment at his birth, dark and bloody in the lantern light, each tiny finger a perfect new miracle. Just a few hours ago, I had seen those hands, so much older, shoved into fire and crippled forever.
“Just down to the creek,” I said. “He’ll be there. He’ll be in his cave.”
Reluctantly, Luka went with me. I called up to Lilly that we were going out for a breath of fresh air, but I didn’t even know if she heard. Luka had come with a backpack stuffed with supplies, and we lit our way with modern flashlights. We followed a few bloody footprints at first, and Luka spotted a handprint on the bark of a silver birch, but soon we lost his trail, and by the time we reached the creek, he could have been anywhere.
Ready to run at a moment’s notice, I shone my flashlight beam inside the narrow, hand-dug cave, but the man I had destroyed was nowhere to be seen. He had been there, though; on the ground outside the cave was the strings-and-spoon key he had stolen from me. I picked it up.
Luka and I made a tiny island of light in a deep, star-filled, creek-babbling, chirping, and tweeting night. A mosquito bit me.
Luka put a hand on my shoulder. “You’ll never find him. Not if he doesn’t want to be found. You have to let this go, Kenny. Your mom and dad are waiting for you. You did it. You came back for Rose. She’s got her baby.”