What I didn’t think about was falling.
Three
I didn’t fall far, but it hurt like hell and taught me a lesson I had somehow gone seven months without learning: just because the mirror has up and down the right way when you go in, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be the same on the other side.
I cried out with the shock, but my yell was quickly cut short as I thumped sideways into rocky mud and then rolled down to splash face-first into water. I got up, choking and soaked.
I was in a rainstorm. In a river. No, it was too shallow for that.
I looked around and saw the mirror, perched halfway down a familiar turn in Manse Creek a quarter of a mile from the Hollerith place. Fat raindrops drummed the water around me. I felt like I had swallowed half the creek.
I grabbed my sodden backpack before it floated down the creek, stood in a half crouch and watched the mirror, wedged into the mud of the bank above me.
No one came out.
Was he standing there in the Silverlands, waiting until I came closer? I edged to the side, sloshing my way through the creek and up onto the muddy bank and continued to watch the mirror.
Anthony had really done it. He hadn’t taken the mirror out of its frame, but had instead ripped the frame itself off the dresser. I wondered if he had actually tried breaking it, and just thinking that made me angry. I would never do that to him.
The rain showed no signs of abating, and no one seemed to be coming out, so I trudged forward, picked up the mirror, and headed upstream. It was harder to carry than the cold night Luka and I had taken it to the junk house, but I found as long as I kept my hands on the edges and the nontraveling back, I could struggle it along.
By the time I got to the old hand-excavated cave, I was scratched all over and soaked to the bone. The frame around the mirror hadn’t fared well on the trip, but the glass itself was as flawless as ever.
The collapse of the hand-dug cave had begun, but there was enough left to provide me shelter from the rain. I guess it’s okay for me to admit that right after I got in there, propped the mirror over the entrance, facing outward, and moved my backpack to the driest extreme I could find, I leaned against the feathery roots that made up the side of the cave and began to cry.
I was twenty years from home. No Anthony and no doorstop, so I wasn’t going back, and without someone fishing the mirror out of the lake in 1967, I wasn’t going forward either. I had no friend in this time. How would I get by? Thirty dollars remained in the bottom of my backpack, some in coins not yet minted. My other possessions included two changes of clothing, five wooden boxes, a map of the city, a penknife, a so-called Dead Man’s Penny, and a Coke in a green glass bottle.
That last item was about the most useful at that point, and so I spent a good half hour crying into my Coke the way some people cry into their beer. I cried about my mother and father, teenagers right now, not even aware they would get together someday and have a kid who would disappear. I cried about a lost life I never appreciated. I cried about the way the whole world of time travel had receded from me. I wasn’t a mirror kid anymore. I was a stranger, unknown to anyone, more odd and out of place than anyone on the planet.
Crying that way in front of anyone is embarrassing, but if you do it all alone, no chance of being seen, it does some good. Once the last sobs and tears had worked their way out, I was exhausted, but at least it was done.
For a while afterward, I didn’t move, just let my cheek rest against the dirt and roots, and my mind wander the labyrinth of my problems.
Rules of time travel. Ways of getting around them. Clive Beckett. Prince Harming. Dead wife. Me a murderer. Luka’s box, buried in the past, further back even than 1947. Mirror kids getting concussions. The mirror itself, an unanswerable mystery that just stared stupidly back at you.
Eventually the rain slowed enough that I could move to the mouth of the hole and read Luka’s letter again.
I liked the closing. Good luck. I miss you. I’m coming to get you. Because she knew, didn’t she? If that thing was buried further in the past, she knew she was coming to get me. Somehow, in the next few weeks, or maybe months, Luka was going to get further back than now and leave that box.
She was coming for me. Shivering, muddy, soaked to the bone, I held on to that thought. What was the first thing I would say when I saw her. Would I kiss her? Could I do that?
Sometime in the late afternoon, the rain stopped. I stood and stretched. A lot of time had passed since I tumbled out of the mirror Anthony threw away. It would be dinner time at the Currah household. That was good for what I wanted. I left my backpack inside the hole in the creek bank, propped the mirror over the entrance, and headed back to the Hollerith place.
The old house was looking better than it would in the future. The lawns were cut, the hedges trimmed, and every bit of exposed wood stained or painted. I gave three hard knocks and waited.
“Hi, Mrs. Currah,” I said when Anthony’s mother opened the door. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I really need to see Anthony.”
She gave me a Do I know you? frown, then said, “I’m sorry, dear, Anthony’s—well, he’s not ready for visitors right now. Maybe you could call tomorrow.”
I found it difficult to be disrespectful to someone’s parent, but I had to. “I know he’s upset about his girlfriend,” I said, loud enough that I hoped Anthony would hear. “But I’m sure he doesn’t want to let down his friends.”
Surprise, annoyance, and maybe a little suspicion crossed Mrs. Currah’s face before it lapsed into an impassive expression. “I think you must be mistaken, dear,” she said. “Anthony doesn’t have a girlfriend. Maybe—are you thinking Anthony Chuff over on Bennett? I’ve never seen you before.”
“No, I mean Anthony Currah,” I said, getting even louder. “He’s got a girlfriend, all right. I could tell you all about her if you like. We’re good friends.”
Before I could say anything else, Anthony shoved his mother aside, burst through the door, and grabbed my arm.
“I’ll take care of this, Ma,” he said. “Kenny’s a kid from school is all.”
“Anthony, what’s all this about?”
“It’s okay, Ma,” he said, guiding me away from the house as he spoke. “Kenny and me, we like to joke around, don’t we, Ken?”
“I don’t know about joking,” I said. “Sometimes your friends really count on you, and they end up getting covered in mud, you know? Hey, do you think your mom knows about those magazines under your mattress?”
My voice was still loud, but his was a hiss. “Hey, cool it, man. That’s against the code. You don’t talk about girls to a guy’s mom.”
“Oh?” I said. I let him drag me off. “And is trying to drown someone in mud cool with the code? Is leaving John Wald stuck in the past cool with the code?”
“I told you I was done,” said Anthony. “I wanted that thing out of my house.”
But I wasn’t finished. “Is leaving us by ourselves when Prince Harming comes back cool with the code?”
“What?” he said. “Prince Harming came back?” All the anger drained out of him in an instant.
“Not through the mirror. I don’t think so, anyway. It was a younger him. He wasn’t the same, but he was. Look, I’ll tell you everything. Sneak out tonight and meet me by the cave.”
“No,” he said. “I’m done. I’m not coming back. This is crazy, and if we don’t stop, you won’t be the only one who can’t get back home. We’re lucky it hasn’t happened lots of times before now.”
“You’re not done,” I said. “You can do whatever you like after tonight, but you’re going in one last time, to put a doorstop in for John. I’ll even take the mirror away. You’ll never see it again.”