Backward Glass by David Lomax Read Free Book Online Page A

said that another child, someone called Lillian, comes and visits him from ten years further. Am I, I asked him, Mrs. Clive Beckett in your time?
    I think I am a shrewd enough judge of character to sense that there was something this little boy wasn’t telling me. He told me that, yes, I am married to Clive Beckett and we have three children and live nearby. But each answer was preceded by such stammering and looking off that I wonder if he is my brother at all.
    He said that he would come again in two days and bring more news from ten years on.
    How vast the world is, and strange.
    That entry, along with all those pasted onto the left-hand pages of the book, was in the same hand that had written the list I had found weeks ago. The right-hand pages were in a more childish style and quite often from ten years to the day after the ones they faced.
    January 18, 1927
    Rose is the girl in the past. That’s my sister who died when I was two. She said I should keep a diary of what happens, but I won’t let her see it. Seems nice so I don’t want to tell her the truth. Lillian came through again. She is nicer than Rose and doesn’t ask lots of questions. I wonder if I will meet her when I am older in her time.
    The last third of the book was mostly unreadable. When you could make out the writing, it was lists of words, sometimes rhyming or connected. Now and then there was a sentence, but you couldn’t string much of it together: “Shatterday shatterdate cursed on the track effect cause effect cause change it stop it switch the track and shatterdate the nightmare save the girl and catch him just in time to shattertrack shuttletrack.”
    And so on. An entire page was devoted to variations on the Prince Harming skipping song, which Luka said was around even past her time. One of them was just a few words different from the rhyme I had found written on the page of an old newspaper: “Lover sweet, bloody feet, running down the lonely street. Leave tomorrow when you’re called, truth and wisdom deeply walled. Crack your head, knock you dead, then Prince Harming’s hunger’s fed.”
    “You think it means something?” said Luka when I showed it to her.
    “It’s about walls,” I said. “Both versions. Deep and walled, in the walls. And there was that baby. And the note.”
    “And you still want to go back?” I could tell she didn’t totally believe me, but I nodded, resolute. “Okay, but not yet. I’m going with you, but it’s going to take some time to set up.”
    “What is?”
    “You’ll see. I’m going to make it safe. Just—until then, don’t do anything stupid, okay?”
    As it turned out, I didn’t get much chance for stupid for another month. A big storm dumped a ton of snow on us in early February, and I would have had to take a shovel to dig out the giant drift against the door of the carriage house. Luka still came back, and on even-numbered nights, I’d sneak out and sit in the little area bounded by the hedges and talk to her through the dormer window. She wanted me to clear the snow away, but I was too scared of being found out.
    Crazy, right? A mirror ready to take me back or forward in time, an impossible note asking for my help, and I was scared of getting in trouble from my parents. In my heart, I knew I wasn’t that different from Jimmy Hayes.
    But all snow melts if you wait long enough, and the day it did was an Easter weekend for Luka. Her mother had taken off and left her alone. We made big plans. My parents were both at work when I got home, so I didn’t even drop off at home before going to find her. Having pushed the door open past the dregs of the snow, she was out and about in 1977 for the first time in weeks, and she had a present for me.
    “A rabbit’s foot?”
    “Not just any rabbit’s foot, dummy. This is from the junk house over on Homestead.”
    “Granny Miller’s place? Did you break in there?” I might have only been in the neighborhood a few months, but I knew that the