I tried to sit and groaned in pain.
“Sounds like our patient is awake,” said a voice from the direction of the grey daylight. A girl’s voice. “Should I get him?”
“Let me,” said a man’s voice. “I must ensearch the stitches for corruption. Hast thy flashlight?”
A moment later, the wild, bearded man from last night folded himself into the entrance of the tiny cave. He shone his flashlight first at me and then into his own face. “’Tis only auld John Wald, a’here to spy thy wound.”
His manner and his warm eyes assured me more than his words. His voice was different from the desperate croak it had been last night.
Unbidden, my hands had moved to protect the wound, but he gently pushed them aside, murmuring strange words and pulling off the woolen blanket I was wrapped in to expose a gauze dressing, only slightly bloody, and smaller than I had imagined.
Under that—I winced as he tugged the gauze away—was a wound smaller than a dime and puckered with ugly black stitches.
A brief examination and he pronounced it clean. Next he looked at my face. I can’t say I wasn’t afraid; my teeth were chattering and my heart pounding, but something about him didn’t look scary. “Thou must have carps?”
“You mean … questions?” I asked.
He nodded. “We hid thee here a night and day again, but now I can bring thee from the deeps.”
He began to help me halfway upright so I could crawl with him from the cave.
The “hiding hole” from which we were crawling was too small to be called a cave. Long and narrow, it seemed to have been excavated by hand, though some care had gone into it as well. I could see bits of broken furniture that had been used to shore up the sides. The ragged man helped me negotiate the tight spaces. Even bowed down in this tight space, he had a kind of rough nobility about him. Trust John Wald. Kenny says he is the auby one.
All of a sudden, I knew this place. “Wait,” I said to the bearded man. I took his flashlight and aimed it at a much-abused tabletop buried in the wall. Some decades in the future, I didn’t know how many, Jimmy Hayes and I had dug this same tabletop out and we all stared at the carved initials in its surface. Some of them were fresh, some old. CB + RH. CH. Clive, Rose, and Curtis. They looked faded and worn, though perhaps not so much as before. And below, where before I had read the initials of Lillian Huff, Anthony Currah, and Margaret Garroway—nothing. Uncarved wood. The bigger surprise, however, came at the bottom of the list. KM and LB. Kenny Maxwell and Luka Branson. Even back in this time, whenever this was, they were not fresh.
We had carved them even further in the past.
But how far in the past was I?
“Fleet now,” said the bearded man. “There’s much to speak ere dark enshrouds us all.”
I returned his flashlight and emerged from the cave mouth into a grey day on the shores of a much stronger Manse Creek. In my time, the hole had been halfway up the creek bank. Here, now, it was five feet of sloping sand from a deeper and wider stream.
Two girls about my age sat by a campfire. They looked up as I came out.
The taller one had bright blond hair in long curls. She wore a heavy wool coat, patched and worn. The other was her opposite in every way. Her dark hair was short, framing a round face that was both soft with plumpness and hard with some inner resolve. She stood and spoke.
“Kenny Maxwell,” she said. “Welcome to 1947. I’m Margaret Garroway. Everyone calls me Peggy. This is Lilly Huff. And I guess you’ve already met John Wald. I know he looks like a rough sort, but he’s okay. He’s from the seventeenth century.”
I straightened painfully, wincing and worrying about my wound. “How do you know who I am?”
Peggy shrugged. “You’ve heard of us, haven’t you? Anthony’s been talking about you for weeks. Isn’t that what we do, talk about the kids further up and down the line?”
She put a cigarette to her lips and took a long draw on it. I tried to remember, had we figured out her age? Sixteen? Seventeen? Was she trying to act older, or was that how kids were in 1947?
Lilly looked about the same age, but she wasn’t wearing makeup, and didn’t have the same hard-bitten look. She remained seated, and now indicated a rock by the fire. “You’ve been through a lot. Care for a seat? John has cooked some fish for us. He’s something of an outdoorsman.”
I stood and blinked for a moment. How did they know this John Wald? And here she was talking about Anthony as though everything was fine. Wasn’t he missing? And shouldn’t I talk to Margaret Garroway right now about how she was supposed to go missing?
Lilly smiled, and I shrugged inwardly. They seemed to know what was going on. Best just to listen. Shivering despite the blankets, I sat, and when Lilly handed me some charred fish on a chipped, dirty plate, I wolfed it down.
The others ate as well, and I stayed quiet for a while, listening to them talk. If you didn’t trouble about every word, John Wald became comprehensible. He gestured expressively as he spoke, perhaps used to not being understood.
Lilly complimented John Wald on the fish. Peggy wondered if it was going to rain. At this, John raised an eyebrow and examined the sky before nodding.
“I’ll have to get home before that in any case,” said Lilly.
Peggy tossed her cigarette in the fire. “Not me. Mother’s gone to Auntie Nina’s again and the ogre will be brooding. I could stay out another night if I choose.”
You’re supposed to go missing, I wanted to say. But there was something forbidding and sharp in Peggy’s manner. “Where’s Anthony?” I said at last. I would have much preferred to ask about Luka, but it didn’t seem the time yet.
Peggy shrugged. “Back at home with mumsy and daddy-kins in the fierce familial embrace. Got away from the bad man, don’t you know, thanks to John Wald here.”
I was silent for a long moment, trying to sort it out. I was shot; the pain still throbbed, burning if I shifted or tensed. I was in 1947. This was the thing Luka had been dreaming of for months. I could ask what they knew about the dead baby. I could do what Jimmy had been avoiding for weeks; I could ask about Peggy’s disappearance.
But before any of those questions—and I felt like a traitor to Luka for acknowledging it, but it was true—before anything like that, came a much greater concern.
“I have to get home,” I blurted. “My parents will be going nuts.”
Lilly opened her mouth to say something, then hesitated.
“Come on, Lil,” said Peggy. “Out with it. Rip the Band-Aid off already. Tell the kid he isn’t going home.”
Six
It took a while to get the full story. Peggy and Lilly kept interrupting each other, and then John Wald had to tell part of it in his half-English gibberish. But between the three of them, they managed over the next half hour or so to tell me everything.
The trouble had started for them just about the way it had for us further into the future, with the disappearance of Anthony Currah.
“It was the man who shot you,” said Peggy, “not that we knew that at the time. He came out of the future as far as we can tell. Seems able to get into the mirror. Caught Anthony alone. Screaming something about you, and being back from Wales of all places. Forced Anthony into the basement and through the mirror. Brought him back to now—1947—and hid him in the little cave. I came home to muddy footprints leading from my mirror and—nothing.” She abruptly stood up, took out a cigarette, and turned her back, walking a few paces away.
“It was a terrible shock for poor Peg,” said Lilly in a lower voice. “To me as well. John had just come through my mirror the night before. I brought John to meet Peg when she came back to my 1937 to tell me about her mysterious footprints. Her parents—well, they’re not as … supervisory, I suppose, as most. John could hide out in the coach house for days, I reasoned. He helped us look. We scoured the countryside for days. Then it got worse. Peg came home to find her house broken into. I’ll bet you can guess the one thing that was stolen.”