David Lomax - Backward Glass

“Did we do that?” I asked Luka that night. She had gone off to the carriage house half an hour after the lights went out so as to avoid my parents when they came home. The power outage had dominated both dinnertime conversation and the evening news. By the time I snuck out to the carriage house, I had all the statistics memorized.

“No way,” said Luka. “You can’t change anything. That power-out was going to happen anyway. Look, here’s your pepper spray. You won’t need it, but I’m giving it to you anyway. You flip this and press here. Don’t spray me in the face. Two flashlights each and a surveyor’s map from sixty-five.”

“So why are we going, then?” I didn’t take the pepper spray or the surveyor’s map.

She read my expression right away. “Look, I don’t know,” she said. “I know what you’re thinking. We have to go back. We have to save someone. Someone wants our help.”

“But you say we can’t change anything. So why are we going?” I didn’t want to be stubborn. The truth was that I was desperate to go. But why?

Luka rolled her eyes. “You’re thinking too much. If we can change things, we caused the power-out and killed people. If we can’t change things, we can’t save anyone, so why bother? Look, Kenny, if you think too much, you never do anything. I can’t get into the mirror to go back without you going first. Are you coming or not?”

It was hard to argue against her. I steeled myself against the cold, grabbed Luka’s hand, and pushed my way in.

Something was different right away. Normally you took a step in that molasses space in between the two sides of the mirror, your eyes shut tight against the heat or cold, and then you were through on the other side. A second step this time, and I wasn’t out.

Luka squeezed my hand. “It’s okay. Stop for a second. Don’t move.”

If I held myself as still as I could, the cold of downtime travel matched with the uptime heat behind me and settled into a kind of buzzing, the kind you get when you lick a nine-volt battery.

“When you get used to it, you can open your eyes,” said Luka.

In front of me was a cloud of floating image-fragments, as though the mirror had been shattered in the act of reflecting a scene and kept holding the same view. An image of the floor of the carriage house floated past me. There was a piece of paper there. A note?

“It’s getting bigger,” said Luka. “The space in between the mirrors. Look behind you, but move really slow so it doesn’t hurt. If you wait long enough, you get used to it.”

Another cloud of images showed the carriage house as we had just left it.

“It makes it safer,” said Luka. “This way you can look and figure out if anyone’s there before you go through. Come on, let’s go.”

As soon as we were through, I shone the flashlight about the carriage house. No trap. No ambush. Just the same silent, junk-filled space, barn-like in the crisp winter air.

I pulled Luka through. “Weird,” she whispered. “I’ve never gone from a place to exactly the same place before. It’s like we haven’t gone through at all.”

“Look at the wall,” I said, and turned my beam on it. The wreckage and gaping holes she had been looking at all day in my time were gone, replaced by a seamless but battered back wall. There was a dead baby inside there.

Remembering the image-fragment I had seen in the mirror, I shone my flashlight at the floor, and there was the note I had seen. Luka and I read it together, though it was addressed to me.

“I guess you’re not coming back. I understand. Bet it all wigged you out pretty bad. I got Jimmy to go back two more times, but it’s getting harder to convince him. Sorry about everything. Rick Beech.”

“This is good,” said Luka, stuffing the note in my backpack. “Come on.”

I hadn’t thought much beyond coming back through the mirror, but Luka clearly had a plan. She took me outside and around to the front of the main house. There were no lights. Some stubborn muddy patches of snow still hung on in the shelter of the house, but there was a spring scent in the air and a wet bounce in the ground.

Luka picked up a pebble and cocked her arm to throw. I caught her hand. “He won’t have the attic,” I said. “Second floor. That one.”

It took three pebbles before Jimmy came to the window. Even in the dark I could tell his eyes were wide with fear. “Come on down,” I said.

“Two against one? No way.”

Luka sighed. “We’re not here to get you. We want to talk. We’ve got a plan.”

Jimmy squinted. “Hey, you’re a girl.”

“I hear that a lot.”

It took some convincing, but he came down. He stayed by his door for a long time, studying us. “So you’re the girl from way in the future?” he said at last to Luka.

“No,” she said. “You’re the boy from way in the past.”

Jimmy frowned and I saw his lips moving as he worked that one out.

“Never mind that,” Luka said. “We’ve got a plan. You say it’s not safe in the carriage house because Pete Masterson and all them go there. There’s a fix for that. You just have to listen.”

As soon as she laid it out, I loved the plan. Jimmy was equal parts terrified and confused. He had trouble getting his mind around the way we knew about people and places from his time. Between the two of us, Luka and I finally managed to convince him to go to the carriage house and help us pry the mirror from its frame with some screwdrivers Luka had brought along. Once it was out, I tested it; my hand still went in, still felt the uptime heat.

“Rick and me—we were just gonna make some money,” Jimmy said as we took the mirror out toward the street. “He said we’d just use it for money.”

“That’s not what Rick said in the future,” I said. “I called him. He knew things about people from way in the past. Rose, and someone called Wald. He knew things. That means we must have found them out.”

Jimmy shook his head, but Luka interrupted him. “Look, all you have to do now is go get Rick. We’ll meet you there.”

I saw Jimmy look longingly at his bedroom window, but in the end, he did what Luka said.

How can I explain what that walk was like? Midnight, ten years in the past. Somewhere in the world, I was four years old right now. It was a comfort that at least we had the mirror with us, though carrying the thing took a lot of getting used to. If your bare flesh touched its surface, you’d sink in, so we wore gloves and let it mostly lean its solid back against our arms. It was about four feet high and two wide, and no heavier or lighter than it ought to be now that it was out of its frame and off its dresser. To the two cars that slowed down as they passed us, we must just have looked like two lunatic kids carrying a perfectly ordinary mirror down Manse Creek Avenue at about one in the morning.

We walked in the general direction of the lake, mostly on the side of the road. Luka pointed out houses that had later been knocked down and ones that had yet to be built.

When we turned onto Homestead and could see the place Luka called the storage shack, Rick was waiting on the doorstep with Jimmy.

He stood as we approached and ran a hand through his hair. “Holy crap,” he said. “When Jimmy—I almost didn’t think he was serious. Hey, can we just forget about what happened the last time? I was an idiot.”

Luka interrupted. “Kenny wouldn’t have come back if he wasn’t ready to forgive and forget.”

I didn’t say anything for a moment. All of their eyes were on me, even Jimmy’s. I felt like whatever I said, it should be the right thing. Forgive and forget was good, but it wasn’t enough. “We called you in the future—in my time. It didn’t work out, but you tried to tell us things about what happened in the past, something about the baby that died. You were with us. You were one of us.”