tied to each end.
Holding the doorstop, I stretched out my hand to the mirror and pushed in.
Cold.
I put the doorstop down and tried again.
Hot.
Put it in my pocket.
Hot. It had to be touching my skin to change the mirror to downtime. When I tried it again, I noticed something else. When I held it in my hand near the mirror, the whole thing, string and spoons alike, felt like it was vibrating, almost living. The feeling was subtle, not like the buzz of an object meeting itself from another time, more like the trembling of a pet mouse when you hold it in your hand. When I moved it away from the mirror, the feeling diminished. But it didn’t go away.
“Oh, man,” I said aloud, and my voice startled me in the empty little house. I held the string and spoons in my hand. “I know what you are. You’re better than a doorstop. You’re a key.”
Four
Before I went through the mirror next, I stood and asked myself what Luka would do. I imagined it was her and not me who had run back to 1947 and discovered the rule of keys. I imagined she was the one chased by these mystery people from different times. Would she let herself be scared by them, stick around a couple of days watching the mirror, tell herself she was gathering information?
No way.
I broke off a chair leg, stuck the spoons and string into my pocket, and shoved my way into the mirror. The Silverlands were wider now, maybe as much as seven feet.
On the 1957 end, I could see nothing but darkness. I stuck the tip of my finger out to make sure I wouldn’t emerge into water, then pushed the rest of the way through to an immediate shout and a grab from the side, but whoever was grabbing me got a vicious swipe from my chair leg. I tumbled out of the person’s grasp, kicked, and felt a satisfying jar as my foot made contact.
There were shouts of “No, wait” and “Kenny, you don’t understand,” which I couldn’t argue with, but I wasn’t going to stop for people who chased me through time and grabbed before they talked.
After all those hours, I must have had the element of surprise, because by the time one of them had the light on, I was already out of the living room and slamming the door. I threw a kitchen chair at them to confound pursuit and escaped to the backyard. At this point, I was good enough at fence-hopping and familiar enough with the neighborhood that getting out was as good as getting away. Just in case they followed, I took a long, roundabout way back to Brian’s place.
Back in the choking dark of the coal cellar, too tired to crack my brain against new mysteries and new rules, but pleased at my escape, I fell asleep.
I went out late Monday and Tuesday, crouched down in a yard next to the Tarkington house, and held my string-and-spoons key, moving it closer and farther from the last place I had seen the mirror. The gentle half-alive buzz in my hands told me it was still there. As a bonus, I found myself growing more and more attuned to the vibrations of that key. By Wednesday morning, I could sit in the coal cellar, stretch my arm out, and use the thing to find the direction of the mirror.
I felt more in control of events than I had all summer.
Which I suppose should have been a warning.
I hadn’t seen the mysterious couple again, though two of Brian’s friends reported talking to the woman. I knew that the house was enemy territory, but I needed answers. And just as they seemed to think that there were answers in this time because I was here, I figured my best source of information must be the past. Mr. Weston in the library had continued to be helpful, but he couldn’t find much. On the Beckett front, he found one family in the Manse Creek area in the nineteenth century, their only son was the Clive who died in the war. Since then, as the area grew, there were other births, deaths, and marriages of Becketts in the local churches, but not a single Clive.
The other project I told him I was working on was the local legend of Prince Harming, and he managed to dig up a mention of the story in a small-press chapbook from just a couple of years before, but it didn’t tell me much I didn’t know. A Manse Valley bogeyman, probably made up in reaction to the stories of children disappearing or being knocked over the head. The author had been able to find people who remembered skipping to those rhymes as far back as 1908.
As interesting as all this was, it wasn’t satisfying. Finding things out wasn’t the same as doing something.
The mirror was in enemy territory. It was time to take it back.
Five o’clock on Thursday morning, having packed for travel, I got up, skulked next door to the abandoned house, and climbed up to the roof of a shed, certain the strangers were upstairs. I wondered what could get adults out of their lives like this. Me, I was trapped. And I was a kid. What better things did I have to do than travel in time? But them? Didn’t they have jobs? What were they doing, out of their time, hiding in an abandoned house, hunting for answers from a kid who didn’t know any?
That mirror wasn’t supposed to be for them. It was for us kids.
I had to wait three hours. It was a miracle I wasn’t discovered. The man whose shed I was on came out around seven to pick tomatoes, and I had to freeze in place for long, cramped minutes. An hour after that, my two came slinking out the back door. I saw the man first, peering out, but I was low on the shed roof and he didn’t see me. A moment later, he and the woman slipped out and around the side of the house. They shared a few quick words in the space between that house and its neighbor, too quiet for me to hear, then he kissed her quickly and they headed in separate directions.
The man seemed agitated and poorly rested. He was definitely the same man with the yellow tie I had seen a month ago, nervous despite his quick smile.
The woman was different. She was worried too, but it was all focused on him. Before they parted, she fixed his collar and neatened his hair.
I let ten minutes go by before coming down. This was too important to mess up. I hopped the fence and approached the back door. Unlocked. Once inside, I saw that they had been trying to be smarter. Something was in the mirror’s place, a sheet covering it, but the real mirror, my spoons-and-string told me, was upstairs. I guessed the decoy was to lure me in, maybe give me a sense of safety.
Thanks to the weak-then-strong buzzing of the doorstop-turned-key in my hand, I found the mirror easily. They had kept the ruined frame on it, and just tilted it against one wall. The first thing I did was test my key. It worked exactly as it had in 1947; when I held it, the mirror was downtime cold, but if I put it in my pocket, the glass turned hot.
From the evidence, this was the room they had been squatting in. Though they had made the bed before leaving, I could see signs of their presence. They had come through with suitcases and changes of clothing.
I wrote them a note:
“Once I’m done with the mirror, it’s going back where it belongs. You know where that is. Who are you, and why are you following me? I’d stick around, but I don’t trust you. Please stay away. I’m going back to 1917 to save the baby. Then home. Leave me alone and let me do this. Kenny.”
I left it on the bed, hefted the mirror, and went downstairs.
There was no way I was going to hop fences in broad daylight carrying a four-foot-tall mirror, so I took my chances out the front way.
What I didn’t count on was Boyd Fenton and John Timson stepping out from behind the Tarkington fence just as I reached the sidewalk. “Well, look here, Johnny,” said Fenton, “we got some kind of burglary going on.”
“Look,” I said, “I just want to go my way in peace. I’m not hurting you—or anyone, really. Mind your own business.”
Fenton snorted. “Pal, you are my business. I’m getting five bucks a day to watch this place, and a twenty-
