“Are you okay?” I said.
“’Tis naught.” He waved away my concerns. He was limping now, I could see, hurt more by Curtis than he wanted to let on, but he led me back down the Silverlands unerringly to our own mirror. On one side, I could see glimmers of light through whatever water it was under, and on the other the dimness of my grandmother’s coal cellar. We stepped carefully through, just in case the now-crippled older Curtis was waiting for us. I didn’t think he would be, though. He had seemed a broken man when he hobbled away on his burned feet. Seeing no one there, we brought the contraption we had made back through and set it in a corner.
“Back down then,” I said. “Let’s make it quick.” I stuck my hand into my pocket for the strings-and-spoon key to take us backward.
And found it gone.
Six
Then the years will vanish fleet.
“He took it!” I said to Wald. “My key—he must have taken it out of my pocket.”
In the dim light leaking in from the open door to the main floor, I saw his mouth open, then close again. He had nothing to say.
Idiotically, I turned to the mirror and pushed my hand in. It was hot. Uptime to the sixties.
“No!” I said. I wanted to hit the mirror in frustration, but I knew my hand would just sink in. What had I done? I had given a madman the key to the mirror and locked myself out of it. I had moved myself forty years up from where a baby was going to die.
“Can you not make some other key?” said Wald.
“No,” I said hopelessly. “It takes time. Weeks, maybe. I left that doorstop in for a month before it turned into a key. If I do that now, it’ll be long over before we could—” I stopped. The hairs on the back of my neck rose up as I thought it through before speaking. “Before we could make it.” I looked at Wald in the darkness. “So we need time. That’s it. We need time. Come on, John. I’ve got it now. Bring the floater. We have to get Rick. I hope he got my note.”
The contraption worked even better than I had hoped, though we still nearly died getting ashore.
Together, Wald and I folded out the two-by-twos that functioned as its arms, an “X” set like helicopter blades above the chest filled with wineskins. We reassured ourselves that, yes, the mirror was still underwater, though even in this evening light we could see some glimmers of waves. Then, together, we shoved the chest through.
It worked instantly. The opened two-by-twos wedged part of the thing inside the Silverlands while outside, in the lake, an air-filled chest had suddenly come through the mirror. Buoyed up, the mirror began to rise, shaking off its weeks of lake mud. It was a dizzying sight from where we stood, looking at the wave-troubled surface of the lake as it shot toward us. We stepped back as the mirror broke into daylight. Before, we had heard nothing through this mirror, but now we could discern muffled splashes.
The mirror was still a few inches below the surface, so Wald didn’t want me to try going through, but he agreed to hold me while I stuck my hand up and waved it in 1967 for the first time in months.
“Hey!” I heard a muffled scream from beyond the mirror. “Kenny! Is that you?”
“It’s Rick!” I said to Wald. “It’s him.”
The shouting continued for a few more minutes. Through the glass I couldn’t make out everything, but I understood that he was asking me to hold on, and saying he’d be there soon.
At long last, a hand grasped mine and began to pull. “He’s got me,” I said to Wald.
Sure enough, we could see the bottom of the canoe through the watery light, and Rick Beech’s face, leaning over, a strained expression on it as he tried to pull me up. Rick was good in a canoe, and I guess it helped that 1967 gravity only asserted itself on the parts of me that were through the mirror while the rest of me stood in the Silverlands leaning over.
Wald was right about the danger being more than just the ordinary risk of drowning. When Rick pulled me up through the mirror and the shallow covering of water, my body began to convulse. A wave washed over me and I took a sharp, involuntary gulp. My thrashing almost overturned Rick’s canoe, but Wald pushed from the Silverlands and Rick leaned back to drag me in. As soon as he had me, he threw me on my back and pressed on my stomach while I heaved and coughed out water.
“Wald,” I finally said weakly.
“What?”
“In the—mirror. We have to get him out.”
“Stay there,” he said. “Let’s get it to shore first. If this Walt guy’s any bigger than you, I don’t think I can do it. I’ll get a rope around this chest and we’ll tow it in.”
With strong, clean strokes Rick took us to shore. We weren’t more than twenty feet out, but I would never have made it. When Rick pulled us onto a tiny scrap of sand and rocks under the bluffs, he and I got our hands around the mirror and propped it up against the cliff wall. Pushing our contraption ahead of himself, Wald walked through.
Rick stepped back on seeing him.
“It’s okay,” I said. “He’s our friend. He’s John Wald. He’s from the seventeenth century.”
Rick’s mouth hung open for a moment, then he grinned and shook his head. “Jeeze, you sure know how to make an entrance, H. G. Wells. Come on, I got a fire going. You must be freezing.”
He was right. Both Wald and I were shivering. Rick got us blankets and towels, and served us coffee from a thermos. He wanted to hear everything, but first he was dying to tell us about his own part in all this. “Can you imagine me, getting that letter last week? All summer long, Jimmy and me, we’ve been all over the place looking for that guy, looking for the mirror. Then, bang, a letter from you.”
“You did good,” I said.
He ruffled my hair. “Thanks, kid. Come closer to the fire. You too, Mr. Wald; it ain’t getting any warmer. I wanna know everything. What happened? You went back to the seventeenth century?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “Felt like it sometimes. But I can’t tell you that now. We have to get back.”
“What? You just got here. What do you mean, get back? Buddy, you have to go home.”
I shook my head. “No. I still have to do something.” As quickly as I could, I outlined for him the events of the past two months. He had a million questions, but I waved them aside. All I wanted was for him to understand a few things: how keys worked, how they were made, and why I needed one. Even with my hurrying, the story must have taken an hour to tell. All the while, I kept looking at the mirror, waiting for my plan to work. Where was Luka? As evening began to spread out over the lake, I kept telling myself it would be okay. Curtis wasn’t born until tomorrow. There was still time.
Rick was able to clear up one mystery for me, though, when I told him of Prince Harming’s reappearance in 1957. As he had prepared to row out onto the lake to look for me, he had come across an abandoned wetsuit, washed up on the shore. “It was water-logged, like someone had just taken it off in the middle of a swim. There’s been a bunch of break-ins at the marina this summer. He must have used it to go through, then tossed it back out.”
After that, I didn’t let him have many more interruptions, just rocketed through until the present moment.
“But what can I do?” Rick said when I had finished my story. “I can get Jimmy to start cooking one of these key things up, but that won’t do you any good right now.”
“Not Jimmy,” I said. “Luka.”
“What?”
“There’s a little stand of trees across from that place where the tabletop is buried. You remember it? There’s a crooked maple on the outside.”
“With the big knot way up high like a face? Yeah, I know it.”
“I need you to go dig up a box that’s buried there. It’s right under that knot, about three feet from the tree. It’s got a plaque on it that says July. Inside there’s a note I wrote to Luka. Put another note in there. Tell her how
