by David Lomax
While I took the door off its hinges, I thought I should find out from “Connor from 2017” exactly what was going on and what kind of help Luka needed, but he kept me so busy with questions of his own that I never got to ask mine. How many channels did we have on TV? Had I ever touched a computer? How many phones did we have in the house? Had I ever heard of solar power?
Peevishly, I fired back, “What about you? Do you have a base on the moon?”
“No point. I went uptime with Luka, though, and we saw the Mars landing. That’ll be cool.”
So that was who she had been with. I guessed maybe this was Luka’s new future boy, probably her boyfriend. My feelings of inferiority were even more magnified when I got the closet door off. He was probably two years older than me, about three inches taller, and possessed a frame that was both gangly and muscular. Behind him was the mirror, removed from its dresser again and leaning against my dad’s work uniforms. It was the first time I had seen it in weeks. As wrong as it was, I was itching for the slow molasses of the Silverlands. Uptime heat or downtime cold, it didn’t matter. I wanted to be uncomfortable again.
“Aw, jeez, thanks,” the newcomer said. “I was sweating like a sonofa—” He checked himself, looked sheepish, and continued. “I was sweating bad. Look, I’m sorry about this. Luka told me to leave you out of everything because she didn’t want you getting in trouble. But—” He stopped himself and looked at a large-faced digital wristwatch with four or five buttons around its edge. “Man, she’s been alone out there for more than an hour. Look, will you come back with me?”
“Fine,” I said. “But this better not take long.”
“You should bundle up,” said the new kid. “We’re going outside.”
When I got my strings-and-spoon key out of my coat pocket, Connor gave a low whistle. “Wow. The classic.”
“Pardon?”
“Nah, it’s just—I’ve heard about it, that’s all. That was the first key.”
I shrugged the comment aside. “Let’s get going.”
The cold was as bone-chilling as it ever had been, worse because of how wide the Silverlands had become. When I was going in every day, I had hardly noticed the change, but now it must have been fifteen feet from one mirror to the next. We didn’t see a single person on our journey back.
In 1917, the dresser was back on the second floor of the carriage house. Even in the dark, I noticed the finished wall right away. I guessed Mrs. Hollerith had put that up as quickly as she could.
Enough of our journey had been either painful or necessarily silent that the new kid and I had barely talked. Now I wanted answers. “So where’s Luka?” I said as we stamped our feet and beat our arms for warmth.
Connor turned on a flashlight and aimed it downstairs. “Like I said, we have to go outside. I don’t know how much I should tell you. She’ll be pretty mad that I brought you, especially if she ends up getting shut out of your mirror for the last week of the year. I hate it when she’s mad at me.”
I held up the diary but didn’t give it to him. “You said she’s in trouble. Which way?”
Connor grinned. “The hiding hole.”
He led me out of the carriage house and into the snow-covered winter-bare wood at the back of the property, and on the walk he gave me a scattered account of what had led him to this point. His other adventures in the glass had been all over the place, mostly in the future, but this one had drawn him far into the past. “It started a few years ago, I guess, but I didn’t realize what it all meant until last week. When I was nine years old, Dana took me to a retirement home.”
“Dana?”
He looked at me as though I were slow. “My older sister. I didn’t know why she wanted me to go there at first. All my grandparents still lived in their own houses, but she said it wasn’t them. It was someone way older, my great-grandmother. I hadn’t seen her much at all in my life. She had been in that place since before I was born. At first, she didn’t even seem to remember me, but then when my sister introduced me to her, last name and everything, she grins really wide and asks me how old I’ll be in 2017. I tell her I’ll turn seventeen. Grin gets wider. ‘Well, you’ll be the one, then,’ she says. She looks at Dana and says, ‘Don’t feel bad it isn’t you, dear. It’s a lot of trouble in there.’
“I was just going to put it down to, old people are weird. Then she stares right at me. You know, one of those laser-beam stares? And she says, ‘Connor, I have a message for you to carry, but I’m old and I can’t remember which one of them it’s for. I can’t remember which one does it. Maybe it’s you. Here’s the message. Remember it as well as you can. He can still save her. He’ll just have to get there before her and wait. Curtis can still save Peggy.’”
I felt like I was wearing my Speedy Gonzales T-shirt. “She said Curtis and Peggy?”
“Yeah. Didn’t mean a thing to me. I asked Dana about it, and all she would say is that I’d understand it someday. Then last week, Eric—that’s my older brother—he gives me this pile of old journals. I mean, really old, like forty years. They had been caught in a fire we had a while ago, and there was a lot of stuff I couldn’t make out, but I could definitely see those two names. That got me remembering that visit to the retirement home. I asked Dana about it, and she says it was just something that—something my dad asked her to do.”
“So you asked Luka about it.”
“So I asked Luka about it. She got crazy excited.”
“And?”
“And … ” He found the spot he was looking for, slid down the creek bank, and gestured for me to come along. “That led us to this mess.”
I slid down and followed his pointing finger with my gaze. We were back at Clive Beckett’s tiny hand-dug cave, and outside of it, sitting on an upturned crate, was the most ruined and lost Prince Harming I had seen yet.
Four months had not been kind. His cheeks were sunken and his arms, under layers of rags, were twig-thin. “Don’t look,” he said to me, and his eyes still burned with a manic fire. “Don’t look at me. No one looks at me. If no one looks at you, you don’t exist. Brother killer. Shouldn’t exist. Wiped away. Shouldn’t exist. Nobody look.”
He didn’t seem like much of a danger anymore. “Curtis, you didn’t mean to—”
He stood up and screamed, causing us both to step back. “Don’t use the name! Doesn’t deserve it. Killed a brother. A baby.” After a moment of standing there twitching, he sat back down again. “A little baby. Stood outside the door and heard them talking about it. A little baby. Clive. The better one. Named after the father. So just the bad one lived. Killed a baby.”
Behind him, someone unfolded from the tiny entrance to the cave. “No, you didn’t,” said Luka. “I’ve been trying to tell you that. Hi, Kenny. Sorry I got you into all this again, but maybe you can help me talk some sense into him. I’ve been trying, but he won’t listen. We need the diary. The shatterdate book. Did you bring it?”
I took it out of my pocket. When he saw it, Curtis cocked his head to one side. “I did that,” he said. “Long ago.”
“I know,” said Luka. “You were trying to make sense of it, weren’t you? When you were ten. Did you steal your mother’s diary to do it?”
He nodded, his eyes still fixed on the beaten-up old book. “Wanted to know what—couldn’t remember. After hurting the little girl. Whose boy? Kept—waking up from the nightmare where—killed the little boy that was—was me—and then no more me. Used the mirror to visit Rose, she told that it was all a bad dream. She showed me the little boy that was me. She said everything was all right now. But—didn’t believe her. Thought she was lying. Bad man was going to come and get me.”
Luka stepped out from behind Curtis and took the book from Connor’s outstretched hand. “You started trying to find out about the bad man, didn’t you? You wrote down the little skipping rhymes.”
His eyes sta
yed on the book as he mumbled out the version of the rhyme I had always found hardest to understand. “Treacle sweet, bloody feet, loudly yelling down the street. Holler loud, holler proud, you shall wear a coffin shroud.” He bit his lip for a moment, remembering, then said the next one. “Trick your feet down the street, then the years will vanish fleet. Head will hurt, death’s a cert, a dead man’s sentence should be curt. Let me pass, leave the lass, don’t go down the backward glass.”
When he said the bit about leaving the lass, his voice trembled and his eyes filled up with tears.
“That one’s about you, isn’t it?” said Luka. “‘A dead man’s sentence should be curt.’ You’re Curt. And the other one. Holler loud. As in Hollerith.”
“But how?” I said. “How is that old skipping rhyme about him? It goes back further than this.”
Luka shrugged. “Rose, probably. She only saw the kid from 1907 a few times, but all it would take was once, right? She teaches the kid the rhyme, that kid teaches other people … ”
“Oh, wow,” I said. “Then someone else teaches it to Rose when she’s little.”
“The point is,” said Luka to Curtis, “you wrote that one. Didn’t you? A dead man’s sentence should be curt. You’re saying you should be dead.”
“Killed the brother,” he said. “Led the—the girl. Loved her. Married. Then—then gone. Drowned and gone. Let me pass. Leave the lass. Don’t go down the backward glass.”
Luka handed the book to me. “You remember Kenny, right? Kenny was your friend.”
Curtis nodded. “Wanted to kill you, but wasn’t your fault. Saw you. You tried to save her.”
“So if Kenny was your friend, you should listen to him.” She looked at me. “I tried to convince him, but he won’t listen. October 27. Tell him what it says. Rose’s side.”
I flipped through the book to a page near the end that I had puzzled out just a month before.
At first, I thought I could never forgive him. Ten-year-old Curtis, that is. But it wasn’t his fault. He was trying to be good. I tried to forget about it. I tried to content myself in the baby I did have, my Curtis. As exhausted as I am in the nights, I sometimes try to stay awake just to watch him sleep. I think it is the only time I ever see him still.
I wonder what the other one would have been like. I am not supposed to. Mother says I must forget the other. Sometimes she tells me there was only one, but I know better.
I think he would have been the opposite to his brother. Probably as sweet and silent as Curtis is loud and boisterous. Mother says you cannot tell a baby from just those few minutes I had with him, but I could tell something. I never even heard him cry, and he did not struggle or kick the way Curtis did.
I knew that entry and had read it many times. It gave me some comfort. I couldn’t see Rose again, but at least I got to know how much in love with her baby she was.
It wasn’t easy for me to read the last few sentences above Curtis’s sobs. “No!” he said. “That one should have lived. The good brother.”
“You don’t get it, do you?” said Luka, and I could see she was talking both to me and to Curtis. “Think about it. ‘I never heard him cry.’ She basically said he didn’t move.”
Curtis nodded. “Didn’t move. Little, still, good brother.” He looked at me, his eyes pleading for understanding. “Didn’t want to kill the brother.”
“You didn’t,” said Luka.
“Wait,” I said, “are you saying—”
“Yes. My grandmother told me. Lilly. I went to see her, Kenny, and we talked about this. She said she never figured it out at the time. Not until years later. She wasn’t trained in delivering babies. If she was, she would have known.”
“Known what?” The question came from Curtis, who stood now and looked at Luka. “What?” He held his hands out, and for the first time I saw how horribly they had healed. His fingers were thick masses of scar tissue, the palms cracked. “Known what?”
“Oh, sure,” said Luka. “You’ll talk to him about it. What I’ve been telling you for the past two hours, that’s what.”
“That you didn’t kill him,” I said. “You didn’t kill him because your brother was already dead. He wasn’t still, Curtis. He was stillborn.” And before he could say anything else, I turned to Luka. “But that’s not all, is it? You didn’t just come to tell him that. You’ve figured out how to save Peggy, haven’t you?”
Six
Let me pass. Save the lass.
We all stood still for a long moment after I said it, Curtis moving his lips silently over the words.
“Stillborn?” he said at last. “The brother? Didn’t get killed?”
“No,” I said. “Didn’t get killed. Curtis, I think that’s right. It didn’t move, did it? I mean he. He didn’t move. Sometimes a baby is born that way. It’s nobody’s fault.”
“Didn’t get killed.” Then he shook his head. “But died.”
“I know,” I said. “And that was sad. Really sad. But not anybody’s fault. All you were trying to do was save your Peggy.”
He wiped tears away from his cheeks with his ruined hands. “Didn’t kill it. And the Rose mother sad, but said no, not your fault. A bad man did it. But who was the bad man?” He looked at the diary still in my hands. “Tried to find out. And down and down the backward glass. Tried to be strong. A soldier. Met the nurse. And fell in love, Kenny. But the nightmares. A bad man killed a baby. Kenny’s our friend. He knows. He’ll find the bad man. He’ll know. Who’s the bad man?”
“Nobody,” I said. “Nobody’s the bad man, Curtis. Curtis is a good man.” I looked at Luka. “How does this fit together? How did this Dana, Connor’s sister, how did she know to take him to his great-grandmother?”
Luka shrugged and looked away. There was something she was hiding from me. “Kenny, that was Lilly. She’s old when Connor meets her. It took me a bit to work out what she meant. But you’ve got it, haven’t you?”
“Yeah. Get there before her.” I stepped forward, and though Curtis shied away, I put my hand on his shoulder. “Lilly sent us with a message for you. You can save Peggy. But you’ll have to go the long path.”
I don’t know how, but with the help of Connor and Luka I managed to convince him. Less than an hour after I left my home time, the four of us stood in the Silverlands between 1957 and 1967 and prepared to say goodbye to Curtis for the last time.
When we took him at first to the mirror, far past our own, where Peggy had been lost, I thought we might need to restrain him again the way John Wald and I had done four months ago, but he slumped at the sight of its swimming image-fragments. “Lost her,” he said. “Brought her and lost her.” His sunken eyes were wide with the need to confess as he looked at me. “Think how that feels. Brought her here. Because of the nightmares. About the baby. Then lost her. And blamed you.”
“But maybe you didn’t lose her,” I said. I put a hand on his shoulder and turned him around to face the 1957 end of the same mirror. “This is ten years before.” Just as it had been back in September, the mirror was on a beach. I wondered how it got there, what crazy series of events had brought it to this sandy beach lit by a noon-day sun. It must be, I realized, some other place in the world, someplace warm in another time zone.
“To save her?” said Curtis. “And how? Going through here—no way back.”
“Look at it,” I said. “That mirror is on the beach, out of the water. That’s in 1957. But in 1967 it’s in the water. So go through to 1957 and—and then you have to wait. Wait until September 1967.”
Curtis grinned, almost cackled. “And not let it go in. Not let it go in the water.”
“No,” said Luka, her patience wearing thin. It was the third time we had explained it. “No. We know it goes in the water. We can see it’s still in there. You’ve got to go with the way things are, but just—make them better than we thought they wer
e.”
“Not … to change?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “That’s not the way to do it with the mirrors. If you try to make sure it doesn’t go in the water, we know it will anyway, so maybe that means you’ll lose the mirror or not be there or something. There’s a way to—float above the events we know are going to happen. Think. You can wait with the mirror for ten years and guard it. Then the day before—before I push her through—then you put it in the water.” Curtis recoiled, but I continued quickly before he could object. “A little water. A few feet deep. And you wait for her. You know the date. One day before your birthday. About six o’clock our time. Just wait. Have a life jacket there.”
Luka interrupted. “A doctor, even. You could have anything. If you do this, you’ve got ten years to get a whole team together. Everything you do can be to save her. Look at the 1967 mirror. As long as you try to make it look just like that, dark and in the water—there’s no reason this shouldn’t work.”
“And save her?” said Curtis, his eyes wide and wondering.
“And save her,” I said. “And live again. And be Curtis. Because you didn’t kill anyone, and if you do it right, you can save her. Nobody has to be sad. Nobody has to lose anyone.”
Curtis turned to the cloud of images that showed the sunlit beach. “I have to go now, don’t I?”
And without another word, he did. Just turned and pushed his way out of the mirror, a rag-covered, scarred, and ruined man, stepping onto a beach in an unknown part of the world. When he was out, he turned back as though to say something to us, but his face fell when he saw only himself. Something must have caught his attention, because he turned his head and his face broke into a broad smile. He raised his scar-covered hand to wave and stepped out of the range of the mirror.
We watched for a while, but he didn’t come back. All we could see were sun-sparkled waves lapping the shore.
“Hard to go back to winter after that,” said Connor.
“We’d better, though,” said Luka. “Come on, Kenny. I don’t want you in too much trouble.”