Backward Glass

Woodbury, Minnesota

Copyright Information

Backward Glass
© 2013 by David Lomax.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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First e-book edition © 2013

E-book ISBN: 9780738741345

Book design by Bob Gaul
Cover design by Lisa Novak
Cover image © Alex Stoddard

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To my wife, Christina,
without whom none of it is possible.

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

—William Ernest Henley

The R
u
les

1. Going backward, it only opens from eleven until midnight, only in the years that end in seven.
   
2. From an even-numbered decade, you can go back on even-numbered days. Same for odds.
   
3. Once you’ve gone back, you have to wait until midnight. After that, you can go home again anytime.
   
4. When you go uptime to your home, you can bring the chosen kid from the past with you.
   
5. The mirror only picks one kid every decade. It never picks anyone older than sixteen.
   
6. You can’t ever really change anything.
   
7. When you go downtime from your own mirror, you can take the kid from the future with you.
   

Prologue

Here’s what you need to know: You’re my son and you’re something like negative twenty-two, because that’s how long it will be before you’re born. I have a story to tell you. Most of it happened right here in Scarborough, forty, fifty, even sixty years ago, but it happened to me. Last year. 1977. The year I turned fifteen.

I wish I could begin on that cold day in January when I met her, but I should tell you about the dead baby and the list with my name on it. A year and a half ago, my parents moved us into this house, the one the long-termers in the neighborhood call “the old Hollerith place,” far enough out of Toronto for me to call it the boonies.

That’s what we do. My dad moves us into a place to fix it up, and then after puttering around with it for a few months, he wants to move again.

This was the worst change yet. Two months into the ninth grade and thirty days to pack up. I spent weeks grousing, sleeping, arguing, dragging my feet.

Still, when we drove up in the moving van on the first of December, and I got my first look at the old Hollerith place my dad had been raving about, I quit complaining. I didn’t want to, but I could see what he saw in it—a grand old falling-apart house with a lot of history bearing down on it. It even had a second building on the property, screened off by high hedges.

As we piled out of the car, my dad saw the direction of my gaze. “It’s a coach house,” he said. “Or a carriage house. It’s part of the property. It’s ours.”

My mother laid a light hand on my shoulder. “The people who lived here were well off once,” she said. “Kept their horse and carriage there. Who knows what happened? At one point, they turned it into a proper house and rented it out. The real estate agent admitted to your dad that it hasn’t been much of anything for a while now. The neighborhood kids have been going in there and drinking and whatnot.”

Inside the main house, up past the squeaky porch and through a well-worn door, I got that kind of combination disappointment-thrill that you only have when you’re trying your hardest to hate things that turn out to be cool. My bedroom was the attic.

And with that, my two months of held-up resentment boiled away. First, a mysterious extra house at the back of the property, and now an attic bedroom. I could be Greg Brady up there, the lord at the top of the house. As I trudged up the old-fashioned too-steep stairs, then tugged to pull my staircase down, I could already imagine the calls from the first floor that I’d be able to deny having heard, the arguments I could escape.

The room was even better in person, though I guess not everyone would have thought that way. My dad had come the day before with some bus-driver friends from work and moved in most of our furniture. My bed, dresser, and bookcase now made a small island in an ocean of history. Scattered far into the dusty shadows were tables, credenzas, roll-top desks, sofas, and piles of dining room chairs.

“Oh, my God,” said my mother behind me. “When he told me there were a few sticks of furniture here and there, I didn’t expect a bonfire in the waiting. I’m sorry, Kenny. We won’t keep you in this. There’s an old nursery downstairs we could repaint.”

“But it’s—” I gave up. “It’s fine, Mom. I like this room. I want this one.”

And just like that, I was committed. Two turns of emotional judo, and she was the one doing me a favor. I was halfway down the stairs before I realized what had happened.

The hedge around the carriage house had grown tall and untended, and the effect was that you couldn’t see the squat building at all until you had squeezed past onto its scrubby yard. The outline of the wide entrance that once admitted horse and carriage was still visible as a ghost of newer bricks inset with a low door that didn’t even seem to have a latch. Clouds of dust billowed from a hayloft window.

From head to toe my dad was dark grey, out of which his eyes and teeth shone with a mad gleam. I shook my head. “Mom’s never letting you back in the house like that.”

He shook right back, shedding clouds from his curls and wild beard, but not getting noticeably lighter. “She can hose me down when I’m done.”

My dad gave me what he called, “The nickel tour. A dime would be a rip-off.” The main floor was all one space, half kitchen, half living room. The hayloft, accessible through a bare, rail-less stair was, like my room back at the house, both for sleeping and junk storage. It hadn’t seen electrical service in years, and the gas was shut off for safety reasons. The roof was collapsing, the floor unsafe, and the place filled with mold. “Late 1800s this place must have been built. Same as the main house. The outside walls show a lot of care. But all this?” He pointed with a crowbar at the wall we were to demolish. “Maybe twenties or just before. In a hurry, too. We can do it much better.”

He gave me a pair of gardening gloves and sent me up-stairs with a hammer and a chisel, and instructions to get underneath the wall panels any way I could and just start ripping.

I got good at hammering the chisel in and working it around until I could pry an edge out. That’s when I’d get to smash away with the hammer for a while, weakening the plaster’s hold until I could pull the board out whole. Underneath, the bricks of the exterior wall were motley and old, but they felt solid. I finished as high as my shoulders on one of the short walls, and started on the more difficult long back wall.

Then the prickling started under my T-shirt.

I remember that shirt. It featured Speedy Gonzales, my favorite cartoon a few years before, and was now old enough to be on my mom’s “tear-it-up-for-dusters” list.

Suddenly, it felt like I had bugs crawling on my chest, or like I had put my hands on those electricity balls at the science center. I gasped and started scratching and feeling around, then began coughing on the plaster dust I had sucked in.

“What’s wrong?” my dad called up. I waved him away, and held my breath until the coughing fit stopped.

The prickling stopped as well. I sat up and inched back toward the wall.

Prickling again.

I turned to my dad, who was still frowning in puzzlement from below. “Lung full of dust? I’ll get masks this afternoon. Your mother would kill me if she saw these conditions.”

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.

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.