David Lomax: Backward Glass

I shook my head. “Not that. There’s something weird. When I get close to the wall here, I get this electricity shooting through me—like when you rub a balloon on your hair, but stronger.”

His frown deepened. “Can’t be. Place doesn’t even have power. Everything’s dead.”

He came up the stairs cautiously and moved me back with a gentle hand. The farther I got from that point in the wall, the more the prickling subsided.

“I don’t feel it,” said my dad. He reached for the strip of lath I had been working on and tugged the board smoothly away, twisting at just the right points so it came off in one easy piece, which he tossed over the side. He did the same for two more pieces; then, “What’s that? Did somebody—?” He reached into the space behind the lath, where something black and smaller than a loaf of bread nestled. “Did somebody throw their garbage in here? Their lunch or something?”

He pulled it out, a blackened bundle, crusty flakes drifting from it as it came out of the hole. A folded square of ancient paper fell away. I picked it up, eyes still on the parcel in my father’s hands.

“Is that newspaper covering it?” I said. I could almost make out words, blacker ink set in folds and crevices. The piece in my hand was different, though, a page torn from a book.

He picked at it. “Yeah. Somebody’s old fish dinner?” He held it to his nose. “Doesn’t even smell. Imagine how long it’s been there.” He shook his head and grinned. “That’s why I love doing this stuff, you know? You find bits of people’s stories in the dust. History class, but way better. Who was the guy, Kenny? What was he doing here? Was he a worker? The owner?”

As he talked, he kept picking at the bundle, and finally found an edge that he could pull. More black flakes drifted away. “There. I’ve got it. Oh, Christ,” he said. “Oh, Christ.” Suddenly cradling the thing with more care, he sat down heavily. “Oh, Christ, Kenny, get your mother. Tell her to call—the police or something. Just tell her to come. Tell her to come and see.” His voice had a heaviness I had never heard before, something deep and shuddering. “Oh, Jesus, Kenny, look at the little thing.”

“What is it?” I said, though I had by this time looked and seen exactly what it was. The little blackened, mummified foot sticking out of the crystallized newspapers couldn’t be anything else. I wanted my dad to tell me it was a doll.

He bounced it just slightly in his hands, judging. “Oh, Jesus, Kenny. It’s so tiny. Couldn’t have been a day old. Get your mother.”

As I stumbled down the stairs and out into the tiny yard, I unfolded the piece of paper that had fallen into my hand. Blinded by daylight, and desperate to reach my mother, I couldn’t read the words at first, but when I did, I felt a tingling less physical than the electricity under my T-shirt a few minutes before, but no less real. It was a list of names and dates printed in a neat old-fashioned style.

1917

Rose Hollerith

January 29, 1901

1927

Curtis Hollerith

September 2, 1917

1937

Lillian Huff

February 3, 1920

1947

Margaret

January 2, 1930

1957

Anthony Currah

March 27, 1940

1967

Jimmy Hayes

January 22, 1951

1977

Kenny Maxwell

June 19, 1962

1987

Lucy Branson

October 12, 1970

1997

Melissa Peat

January 15, 1982

2007

Keisha Blaine

March 2, 1992

2017

C.M.?

2000?

My name. My birthday. On a browned and crinkly piece of paper put in the wall—how many years before I was born?

I stuffed the paper into a pocket, and amid the excitement of my mother’s moans, my dad’s stricken face, and the three calls to the police that it took to bring a squad car, I didn’t think about it again until late that night. On my bed at the center of the wide, low attic, I took it out and read the list again. Only then did I notice, scrawled at the bottom, the faint and urgent message that had waited for me all those years in that wall.

Help me make it not happen, Kenny. Help me stop him. Clive is dead all over again.

The Rules

1. Going backward, it only opens from eleven until midnight, only in the years that end in seven.

I don’t mean to sound morbid or callous, but there’s nothing like the discovery of a dead baby to get you noticed at a new school. And after the number of times we’ve moved, I’m the guy who would know. By the time I went for my first day at Jane Ewart Collegiate, I was already well known. “You’re in the old Hollerith place, aren’t you?” said the secretary who took me to my guidance counselor. “I read in the Saturday Star about what you found. That must have been awful. My grandparents used to live around the corner from there, and there were stories even back then. Anyway, I’m sure it’s a nice place now.” I thought I caught her communicating something to my counselor with her eyes, but I might have been wrong.

It was just before lunch by the time they finally gave me a timetable and sent me to math class, but there was enough time for two kids to get in trouble for trying to talk to me about where I lived. As soon as class was over, they steered me to the cafeteria where I was soon surrounded by kids my age and older, half of them trying to get my story, and the other half trying to tell me theirs. It turned out pretty much everyone knew about the Hollerith house, though nobody could actually remember anyone by that name who lived there. A kid from the twelfth grade told me his uncle had once fought off someone who’d been prowling around their house and chased the guy all the way to the carriage house.

“Remember the skipping song?” said a girl from math class. “My mom always said it had something to do with that place.”

“Skipping song?” said the senior.

Another girl chimed in. “Lover sweet, bloody feet, running down the silver street. Leave tomorrow if you’re called—truth and wisdom in the walls. Crack your head, knock you dead, then Prince Harming’s hunger’s fed.”

A hush spread out around the girl who had spoken, and I don’t think I was the only one to shiver. “I never heard that song,” said another kid from math class, turning back to me, “but I sure heard about Prince Harming. He’s a complete legend around here. My dad says he was probably just some guy who was shell-shocked from the war or something. He killed some kids or something back in the twenties.”

“It wasn’t the twenties,” said the skipping-song girl. “My dad lived around here when some girl disappeared after World War II. And he doesn’t kill people. He’s after girls; he’s some kind of perv.”

After that, everyone had to chime in. Their stories were different, but they all featured that same figure, Prince Harming. Either he wanted to crack your head open to scoop out your brains, or he wanted to catch your reflection in a magic mirror and steal your soul. Or kill you and take you down an invisible hallway. Most of them admitted they had heard the stories in the schoolyard when they were younger, but some of them got it from parents or even grandparents.

I was a curiosity like that for a few weeks, but while I was living it up on stories of that dark hole and the crystalized newsprint flaking away from the corpse of the baby, I held back that list of names and dates. Something about that piece of paper was mine and mine alone. Even when the other kids lost interest in me around Christmas, and I realized I hadn’t actually made any real friends out of my notoriety, I wasn’t tempted for a moment to bring out the note. I told myself I was just being practical. Who would believe I hadn’t just written the list myself and stained it with tea to make it look old? But it was more than that. I hadn’t shown it to my parents either. That was me on that note. It was my own private piece of impossible. It wasn’t asking for anyone else’s help, just mine. Help me make it not happen, Kenny. Help me stop him. Clive is dead all over again.