David Lomax: Backward Glass

The last third of the book was mostly unreadable. When you could make out the writing, it was lists of words, sometimes rhyming or connected. Now and then there was a sentence, but you couldn’t string much of it together: “Shatterday shatterdate cursed on the track effect cause effect cause change it stop it switch the track and shatterdate the nightmare save the girl and catch him just in time to shattertrack shuttletrack.”

And so on. An entire page was devoted to variations on the Prince Harming skipping song, which Luka said was around even past her time. One of them was just a few words different from the rhyme I had found written on the page of an old newspaper: “Lover sweet, bloody feet, running down the lonely street. Leave tomorrow when you’re called, truth and wisdom deeply walled. Crack your head, knock you dead, then Prince Harming’s hunger’s fed.”

“You think it means something?” said Luka when I showed it to her.

“It’s about walls,” I said. “Both versions. Deep and walled, in the walls. And there was that baby. And the note.”

“And you still want to go back?” I could tell she didn’t totally believe me, but I nodded, resolute. “Okay, but not yet. I’m going with you, but it’s going to take some time to set up.”

“What is?”

“You’ll see. I’m going to make it safe. Just—until then, don’t do anything stupid, okay?”

As it turned out, I didn’t get much chance for stupid for another month. A big storm dumped a ton of snow on us in early February, and I would have had to take a shovel to dig out the giant drift against the door of the carriage house. Luka still came back, and on even-numbered nights, I’d sneak out and sit in the little area bounded by the hedges and talk to her through the dormer window. She wanted me to clear the snow away, but I was too scared of being found out.

Crazy, right? A mirror ready to take me back or forward in time, an impossible note asking for my help, and I was scared of getting in trouble from my parents. In my heart, I knew I wasn’t that different from Jimmy Hayes.

But all snow melts if you wait long enough, and the day it did was an Easter weekend for Luka. Her mother had taken off and left her alone. We made big plans. My parents were both at work when I got home, so I didn’t even drop off at home before going to find her. Having pushed the door open past the dregs of the snow, she was out and about in 1977 for the first time in weeks, and she had a present for me.

“A rabbit’s foot?”

“Not just any rabbit’s foot, dummy. This is from the junk house over on Homestead.”

“Granny Miller’s place? Did you break in there?” I might have only been in the neighborhood a few months, but I knew that the old lady who ran the convenience store down the street was crazy. The story was that all the stuff she couldn’t sell in her store went into that place, that it had been years since people could even fit in there to live. “It’s even supposed to be haunted and stuff.”

Luka shook her head. “Nah, nothing like that. I got it right from the old lady herself a couple of years ago when she finally cleared that place out and let them demolish it.” She took my door key and clipped the dyed purple charm onto it. “I found it a few days ago and it got me thinking. Do you know what her real name is?”

“It’s not Miller?”

“Uh-uh. Miller was her first husband. But if you go down the side of the house, that’s not the name on the mailbox. And that phone booth outside her house? I ripped this out of its phonebook, just to bring you proof.”

She thrust a page at me and underscored a name with her fingernail: L. Beech, 38 Moores Road.

I took a moment under her gaze to make sense of what she was saying. “As in Rick Beech?”

“Right. As in, his grandmother owns the store and the junk house. Back then in the sixties, his dad even owned your house.” She paused, waiting for me to say something. “You’re having some kind of thought,” she said. “Out with it.”

“Rick’s twenty-eight now or something,” I said. “Right now, I mean. I wonder if he’s around the neighborhood? What if he could tell us about some mistake he’s going to make in life, and we could tell him to avoid it.”

Luka raised an eyebrow. “You’re only thinking about this now? Sometimes Kenny, I swear, for a smart kid you’re such a dunce.”

She went on to explain how she and Melissa and Keisha had tried testing the limits of our time-travel powers and advantages. Melissa thought of it first. She wanted to know who her first boyfriend was going to be, and she wanted Keisha’s help doing it. Keisha found a listing in the phonebook for Melissa’s family, but every time she called to ask future-Melissa about her life something went wrong. Melissa wasn’t home, or the phone was busy, or Keisha’s phone wasn’t working. Nothing seemed to work.

Melissa asked her to just visit. Again, everything got in the way. The bus broke down. A car accident delayed her for more than an hour. Once, when she actually made it to just across the street from Melissa’s house, and thought she saw older Melissa coming out, a car drove by, hit a puddle, and drenched Keisha with icy slush. By the time she recovered, grown-up Melissa was gone.

“It’s like you can’t mess up time,” Luka said. “Keisha says it’s God, but I asked her where exactly the time-travel mirrors come into the Bible. Melissa says it’s fate, but I don’t even think it’s that.”

“Then what?”

She shrugged. “It just didn’t happen that way. Think about the Melissa’s-first-boyfriend thing. Let’s say his name is Chris. Let’s say she didn’t like him in the end because he cheated on her. So Keisha finds that out and tells her. Is she going to go out with him?”

“Probably not.” I figured that was the answer she was looking for. Going out with people and cheating were things I had no idea about. I was about a million light years away from a girlfriend. Did Luka have a boy up there in the future? She never talked about anyone. She was two years older. I figured that meant she’d never be interested in me.

“Exactly,” said Luka. “No way. So she never goes out with that guy. She goes with Joe instead. But doesn’t that mean she would have told Keisha about Joe, not Chris? And if she told us about Joe and how he was no good, doesn’t that put her back to Chris? The point is, it just didn’t happen. If we try to make something happen when it didn’t happen—it doesn’t happen.”

When I couldn’t wrap my mind around this, Luka insisted on a demonstration. We went back to my place and got out the phonebook. There were four listings for R. Beech, so we called them one by one. The first was a woman, second was an old man. Holding up the phone so we could both hear it, we hit paydirt on the third. “Hello, is this Rick Beech, formerly of Manse Creek?” said Luka in her most formal voice.

He replied immediately, almost before she had finished speaking. “Luka? Is it you? This is the call, isn’t it, the one you told me about?” She tried to say something, but he rushed on. “Look, there isn’t much time and there’s so much I want to tell you. Is Kenny there? Kenny, listen. The baby. It isn’t him. You have to go to 1917. Rose is the key. You already know Wald’s okay, but so is—”

The phone and the lights went dead at the same time.

The Rules

7. When you go downtime from your own mirror, you can take the kid from the future with you.

A transformer had exploded somewhere in the city, dropping over us a fifteen-mile cloak of darkness beginning at Manse Creek and extending exactly to Wellesley Street, the address at which we had called Rick Beech. Eight car accidents and the transformer explosion itself sent eleven people to the hospital. One died.