through the glass of the door, throwing himself against it time and time again. Then a voice, shouting, strangely accented, “Come out! Come out, ye twisted fool. I’ll no be snared in years again.”
“Time for us to go,” said Luka. She grabbed my hand and pulled me the rest of the way down. My last sight of the door before she pulled me around the corner to the basement stairs was of it buckling and splintering under the onslaught, and of a wild and desperate face.
“Turn!” shouted that voice again, but we didn’t. Luka kept a tight grip on me as we clattered down the basement stairs. “Turn. Who is it there? ’Tis old John. List to me. I am the obie one.”
I was too scared to react, too scared to listen. By the time we had reached the basement, I could already hear heavy footsteps on the first floor.
“Wait,” said Luka as I was about to go into the mirror. She pulled out the string Jimmy had left in. “We don’t want that to let anyone in behind us.”
“Come, fool!” shouted that voice from upstairs. “I’ve waited ten long years while ye blinked in silver. Come and clash with me again.”
“In,” said Luka. She pushed me forward.
I steeled myself for it, and— “No, wait, something’s wrong. It’s cold. The mirror’s cold.”
Feet thudded down the basement stairs. Behind me, from within the mirror, a hand reached out blindly and impacted my shoulder, pushing me aside and off the dresser. Luka fell with me, her knee sinking into my stomach and her forearm almost breaking my nose. Both our flashlights dropped to the concrete floor. One of them shut off.
The room was a mix of cries. “Jimmy Hayes!” a new voice cried, much easier to understand than the hoarse gibberish of the one who had broken in upstairs. “Which one here is Jimmy Hayes?”
The door-pounder shouted something about having “found the twistit fool.”
Luka crawled over me and managed to snare the flashlight, playing it around the room. Two tall, thin men faced each other in the almost-dark, one backing up, both screaming and impossible to make out.
Luka got up and moved toward me. In the swinging of her flashlight, I lost track of which man was which.
The gunshot shut everyone up.
One sharp crack, then a hundred echoes, and our eyes blinded by the muzzle-flash. The large basement filled with the itchy smell of gunpowder.
“That’s better,” said a ragged voice. “Someone turn on the lights.”
I didn’t move, the shot still ringing in my ears, but Luka stepped over and pulled a string that hung from a bare bulb. I flinched from the sudden glare.
A man in a soaked and torn black raincoat stood, backed up to the storage shelves, holding in one hand a gun and in the other the shirt-front of another man. Both looked like they had spent weeks in the woods. The gun-holder was maybe a little older than my parents, receding hair leaving a sharp widow’s peak on his forehead. Days of stubble covered his face. His hooded, haunted eyes stared the other man down with a wild fire.
I couldn’t tell the other man’s age. A thick beard covered his face, and long, unruly hair hung past his shoulders. His shirt and jeans were torn and ragged.
The two men both spoke at once, but the gun-holder spoke louder and shook the gun. “No! Listen to me! You know what this is, don’t you? Bang bang!” He narrowed his eyes and pulled back as though trying to see something under the man’s dirty beard. “Went the long way, did you? Couldn’t catch me? Good. Too bad you waited all that time for this. Now, what’s here?” His gaze flicked over to Luka and me, then his eyes focused more tightly on me, and his jaw hung for a moment in surprise. “It’s you. It’s you again. You’re Kenny Maxwell.”
And who was he? Was one of these men Prince Harming?
Neither looked anything remotely like royalty, though the bearded man certainly talked like he was from a foreign country.
The man in the raincoat began to shake all over, and the other took advantage of the moment. He surged forward, grasped the man’s gun-hand in his own, and forced it upward. Though I was still rooted to the spot with indecision, Luka darted forward, having apparently made her own decision. The nature of that decision, however, was unclear. She reached for the gun, now pointed toward the ceiling, and covered both of the men’s hands in her own, but from one of them—I couldn’t tell which—came a sharp kick to her midsection that sent her flying to crack her head on the cement floor of the basement.
I scurried toward her, trying at the same time to make out the voices of the struggling and cursing men in front of the mirror. One called the other a fool, while the other kept shouting, “This can end it. Leave me be.”
Luka was blinking when I got to her, and had raised her head. She tried to sit up all the way, but fell back. I caught her. “Don’t try to get up,” I said.
“We have to do something, Kenny,” she said. “We have to stop this before someone gets shot.”
I looked at the two men. They were evenly matched, like opponents who had fought each other more than once before, each well aware of the other’s strengths. When the better-spoken man who had first fired the gun tried to shove his knee at the other, or hook his foot around the wild man’s leg, the other man would shift or turn just enough to avoid the trick. For his part, the long-haired man kept straining at the gun, trying and failing twice to smash his forehead into the other man’s face.
It was the gunman who turned to me first. “Help me, Kenny,” he said. “This man wants to kill us all. Pull him off me and I can get us away. It’s me. I’m your friend.”
“Nay, hark not,” said the wilder man, shaking his greasy grey hair out of his face. “Hear me, Kennit. Here is where thy troubles begin. Help me.”
I looked back to Luka, but for all that she had seemed certain a moment before, she now shook her head. Two struggling madmen blocked us from the mirror that led home. What were we to do?
As my indecision stretched out, the gun-holder with the widow’s peak seemed to be winning. “This is all it takes,” he said between clenched teeth. “I can change everything back.”
“Fool,” gasped the long-haired man. “Nothing can change.” Then his eyes darted back to me. “Kennit, help me. He’ll shoot you. Help me. I’m the obie one. That’s what she said. Rose. Said you’d know what it meant. I’m your obie one. Me, old John Wald.”
It must have made sense to Luka at the same time as it did to me. She grasped my arm and I turned to her. The scratched note on the underside of the dresser drawer.
Not obie one. Not
That was enough. I wrenched away from her, her own feeble strength shoving me on my way, though I had made my decision too late. I got to the struggling pair just as, with a ferocious rush of strength, the gun- wielder spun John Wald around and threw him at me. We collapsed back in a clutter of limbs and landed on Luka. By the time we had all struggled out from the tangle of our own bodies, the man with the widow’s peak was standing directly above us, his gun leveled.
“Stay where you are,” he said to John Wald, who eyed the gun warily. “This is him. Don’t you see? This is him. If I kill him, none of it ever happens. I live, she lives, everyone lives! It’s all his fault.”
“What’s his fault?” said Luka, struggling to put some part of herself between me and that gun.
The gun-wielder’s eyes narrowed on her. “You’re his accomplice. But you don’t matter. It’s him who did it.”
“Wait it,” pleaded Wald, sitting up as much as he dared. “Will ye hear no reason?”
“Shut up,” said the other. He turned to me. “This is it,” he said. “If I kill you, it’s all over. Do you see that? You started it all.” He took his left hand from the gun and roughly wiped tears from his dirt-streaked face. “You were there. Every time. Always you. Pretending to be my friend.”
“Kenny wouldn’t do that,” said Luka. “He’s never even met you before, right Kenny?”
“Never met me?” said the man with a snort. “Wouldn’t do that? When I was little, Kenny was, for just a while, my only friend.” His hand grew firmer on the gun and he stood straighter. “Weren’t you, Kenny? He said he’d help me. But you know all he did? Or had you done it already? Did you know, even then, that you had done it?”
