Backward Glass by David Lomax Read Free Book Online

couple of minutes and looked right at me. “Took him three hours to come back. He ended up in some basement. Thought it was me playing a joke, and started yelling for me. Someone came, and he ran out of there. Spent all that time wandering around, then snuck back in a window. Course, at the time, he didn’t even know what was going on. I had to explain when he got back.” Rick dropped his cigarette and ground it into the floor. “So you think it’s all about this dead baby? Some kind of mission in the past?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “I mean—I think so. The girl from 1987, Luka. She found a message as well. It told her to help me.”
    “But how can you save the kid if you’ve already found its body?”
    I held up my hands. “I don’t know. I don’t get it. But somebody asked for my help.”
    Rick closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath, then let it out through his teeth in a long sigh. “You’re a weird kid, you know that? Okay, H. G. Wells.” He stuck his hand in the inside pocket of his jean jacket and brought out a squat leather-bound book with pages sticking out of it.
    “What is it?” I said, looking at his outstretched hand.
    “The diary. I can’t make much sense of it. There’s the mirror stuff, and some stuff about jobs he had, but the rest? Guy thinks he’s two different people or something. Take a look anyway.”
    “Why are you giving this to me?”
    He looked away. The light of the Coleman stove caught a bitter twist in his face. “Comic books. That was my big idea, you know that? I mean, I thought about stock market and crap like that as well, but I figured who wants to figure out how to invest in stocks. I figured I’d get all the other kids who could go into the mirror—we’d pass stuff up and down the line and make some money.” He shook his head. “Christ. Time travel—and I wanted to sell comic books. Go on, H. G. Wells. Take it. Save the baby. Maybe there’s a reason the damn mirror didn’t open up for me.”

S i x
    The Rules
    6. You can’t ever really change anything.
    Luka, when she next made it to my time more than a week later, was astonished by my story, which I told her over some microwaved lasagnas she had swiped from her mother’s fridge and “nuked” just before coming through. The cold of backward time travel didn’t affect inanimate objects. Your clothes and your possessions didn’t freeze, just your skin and everything underneath.
    She felt sympathetic at Rick’s disappointment. “Can you imagine? He knows all about it, and then he has to watch some wimp go instead?” As a card-carrying member of the wimp party myself, I didn’t like this judgment, but then I didn’t like what I had seen of Jimmy Hayes either. “So what’s with this diary he gave you?”
    I brought it out from hiding. “It’s not just one diary. This crazy guy must have somehow got a hold of old diaries from two other people—I think it’s Rose and Curtis from the list. So he cut them all up and pasted them in here, but the paper’s old. Anyway, listen.”
    I read her the first two entries, which I had puzzled out in the last week.
    January 18, 1917
    Dear Diary,
    Am I a fool to love Clive Beckett?
    Should I run through my mirror into the past and warn my six-year-old self never to smile at him or think him fine? I have given him everything, and now all he can give me is the role of the faithful girl keeping the home fires burning.
    But, Diary, oh what news I have! I have already told you not to suspect me of madness when I wrote to you about my magic mirror. Now I have found it is not mine alone. Two days ago, as I was combing my hair for bed, a little boy stumbled through.
    This boy’s name is Curtis, and he is a glum little thing, just nine years old. The mirror is so much more than I thought. This Curtis is from ten years onward. I asked him what he is doing in my house, in 1927, and what do you think he said? He is my brother, not even born in this year. Further, he