“Fine,” I said. “But this better not take long.”
“You should bundle up,” said the new kid. “We’re going outside.”
When I got my strings-and-spoon key out of my coat pocket, Connor gave a low whistle. “Wow. The classic.”
“Pardon?”
“Nah, it’s just—I’ve heard about it, that’s all. That was the first key.”
I shrugged the comment aside. “Let’s get going.”
The cold was as bone-chilling as it ever had been, worse because of how wide the Silverlands had become. When I was going in every day, I had hardly noticed the change, but now it must have been fifteen feet from one mirror to the next. We didn’t see a single person on our journey back.
In 1917, the dresser was back on the second floor of the carriage house. Even in the dark, I noticed the finished wall right away. I guessed Mrs. Hollerith had put that up as quickly as she could.
Enough of our journey had been either painful or necessarily silent that the new kid and I had barely talked. Now I wanted answers. “So where’s Luka?” I said as we stamped our feet and beat our arms for warmth.
Connor turned on a flashlight and aimed it downstairs. “Like I said, we have to go outside. I don’t know how much I should tell you. She’ll be pretty mad that I brought you, especially if she ends up getting shut out of your mirror for the last week of the year. I hate it when she’s mad at me.”
I held up the diary but didn’t give it to him. “You said she’s in trouble. Which way?”
Connor grinned. “The hiding hole.”
He led me out of the carriage house and into the snow-covered winter-bare wood at the back of the property, and on the walk he gave me a scattered account of what had led him to this point. His other adventures in the glass had been all over the place, mostly in the future, but this one had drawn him far into the past. “It started a few years ago, I guess, but I didn’t realize what it all meant until last week. When I was nine years old, Dana took me to a retirement home.”
“Dana?”
He looked at me as though I were slow. “My older sister. I didn’t know why she wanted me to go there at first. All my grandparents still lived in their own houses, but she said it wasn’t them. It was someone way older, my great-grandmother. I hadn’t seen her much at all in my life. She had been in that place since before I was born. At first, she didn’t even seem to remember me, but then when my sister introduced me to her, last name and everything, she grins really wide and asks me how old I’ll be in 2017. I tell her I’ll turn seventeen. Grin gets wider. ‘Well, you’ll be the one, then,’ she says. She looks at Dana and says, ‘Don’t feel bad it isn’t you, dear. It’s a lot of trouble in there.’
“I was just going to put it down to, old people are weird. Then she stares right at me. You know, one of those laser-beam stares? And she says, ‘Connor, I have a message for you to carry, but I’m old and I can’t remember which one of them it’s for. I can’t remember which one does it. Maybe it’s you. Here’s the message. Remember it as well as you can. He can still save her. He’ll just have to get there before her and wait. Curtis can still save Peggy.’”
I felt like I was wearing my Speedy Gonzales T-shirt. “She said Curtis and Peggy?”
“Yeah. Didn’t mean a thing to me. I asked Dana about it, and all she would say is that I’d understand it someday. Then last week, Eric—that’s my older brother—he gives me this pile of old journals. I mean, really old, like forty years. They had been caught in a fire we had a while ago, and there was a lot of stuff I couldn’t make out, but I could definitely see those two names. That got me remembering that visit to the retirement home. I asked Dana about it, and she says it was just something that—something my dad asked her to do.”
“So you asked Luka about it.”
“So I asked Luka about it. She got crazy excited.”
“And?”
“And … ” He found the spot he was looking for, slid down the creek bank, and gestured for me to come along. “That led us to this mess.”
I slid down and followed his pointing finger with my gaze. We were back at Clive Beckett’s tiny hand-dug cave, and outside of it, sitting on an upturned crate, was the most ruined and lost Prince Harming I had seen yet.
Four months had not been kind. His cheeks were sunken and his arms, under layers of rags, were twig-thin. “Don’t look,” he said to me, and his eyes still burned with a manic fire. “Don’t look at me. No one looks at me. If no one looks at you, you don’t exist. Brother killer. Shouldn’t exist. Wiped away. Shouldn’t exist. Nobody look.”
He didn’t seem like much of a danger anymore. “Curtis, you didn’t mean to—”
He stood up and screamed, causing us both to step back. “Don’t use the name! Doesn’t deserve it. Killed a brother. A baby.” After a moment of standing there twitching, he sat back down again. “A little baby. Stood outside the door and heard them talking about it. A little baby. Clive. The better one. Named after the father. So just the bad one lived. Killed a baby.”
Behind him, someone unfolded from the tiny entrance to the cave. “No, you didn’t,” said Luka. “I’ve been trying to tell you that. Hi, Kenny. Sorry I got you into all this again, but maybe you can help me talk some sense into him. I’ve been trying, but he won’t listen. We need the diary. The shatterdate book. Did you bring it?”
I took it out of my pocket. When he saw it, Curtis cocked his head to one side. “I did that,” he said. “Long ago.”
“I know,” said Luka. “You were trying to make sense of it, weren’t you? When you were ten. Did you steal your mother’s diary to do it?”
He nodded, his eyes still fixed on the beaten-up old book. “Wanted to know what—couldn’t remember. After hurting the little girl. Whose boy? Kept—waking up from the nightmare where—killed the little boy that was—was me—and then no more me. Used the mirror to visit Rose, she told that it was all a bad dream. She showed me the little boy that was me. She said everything was all right now. But—didn’t believe her. Thought she was lying. Bad man was going to come and get me.”
Luka stepped out from behind Curtis and took the book from Connor’s outstretched hand. “You started trying to find out about the bad man, didn’t you? You wrote down the little skipping rhymes.”
His eyes stayed on the book as he mumbled out the version of the rhyme I had always found hardest to understand. “Treacle sweet, bloody feet, loudly yelling down the street. Holler loud, holler proud, you shall wear a coffin shroud.” He bit his lip for a moment, remembering, then said the next one. “Trick your feet down the street, then the years will vanish fleet. Head will hurt, death’s a cert, a dead man’s sentence should be curt. Let me pass, leave the lass, don’t go down the backward glass.”
When he said the bit about leaving the lass, his voice trembled and his eyes filled up with tears.
“That one’s about you, isn’t it?” said Luka. “‘A dead man’s sentence should be curt.’ You’re Curt. And the other one. Holler loud. As in Hollerith.”
“But how?” I said. “How is that old skipping rhyme about him? It goes back further than this.”
Luka shrugged. “Rose, probably. She only saw the kid from 1907 a few times, but all it would take was once, right? She teaches the kid the rhyme, that kid teaches other people … ”
“Oh, wow,” I said. “Then someone else teaches it to Rose when she’s little.”