Read Online Backward Glass by David Lomax - Free Book Online

slight, like there was a mouse inside making halfhearted escape attempts.
    Rick picked the box up and blew the dust away, though when he did, I had to step back because the tingling in my hand grew to a genuine pain.
    Luka directed her flashlight beam at the box. “Holy crap.”
    “You got that right,” Rick said. He read from the box: “Lucky-for-you rabbit’s foot. Genuine talisman of good fortune from ancient times. Only left hind feet. Just thirty-five cents.”
    Luka took the box from Rick, broke the seal, and opened it up. You could pick it out easily. One foot, packed in with the rest and dancing with blue sparks. Luka steeled herself and put her hand around it, then held it up to me.
    I yelped and dropped mine, the shock so intense. Luka did the same.
    They landed close together. An electric blue tentacle darted out of the keychain I had been holding and struck the one from the box. It wasn’t a spark. It wasn’t quick or thin or jagged enough. It was more like an arm made up of silvery blue ripples, and it lingered for a good two or three seconds. Along its length, flickering back and forth like eels, were ghost images of the rabbit’s foot, for all the world like one thing remembering its life, another imagining what was yet to come.
    Then, with a final crack, the glowing connection moved the two keychains apart and collapsed.
    “Holy crap,” said Luka into the ringing silence of the room.
    “What the hell was that?” said Rick, looking at the two good-luck charms. “Is this one … are they … ?”
    “The same rabbit’s foot,” said Luka. “Your grandmother gave it to me. They’re the same thing.” She kicked the one she had given me a safe distance away, then asked me to put the other one back in its box.
    “So … it does this because it can’t be in two places at once?” I said.
    Luka shrugged. “What am I, a scientist? Come on, it’s getting late.”
    We found a place for the mirror in the larger bedroom, then Rick wanted to sit in the hallway between piles of horrible oil paintings and boxes of mason jars and talk for a while, mostly about setting up some rules. “For the house, I mean. If you’re seen coming and going in daytime, it’s gonna be trouble. I’ll make copies of the key and leave them in front of the mirror.”
    We agreed to all of this. Rick would have talked more, but Jimmy started getting increasingly nervous, and even Luka began to yawn.
    The goodbye was awkward. “You guys—you guys’ll come back, right?” said Rick.
    We promised we would.
    I had intended this time just to power through the three steps it now took to cross the slow, buzzing space between the mirrors, but the moment we were inside, I heard a gasp from my right, and I turned my head and opened my eyes before I knew what I was doing. Luka must have done the same, because we both winced and cried out in pain at the same time.
    Or maybe it was surprise.
    Just more than an arm’s length away stood a girl, brown-skinned and wrapped in a colorful cloth. Around her swirled another cloud of images, like ours but dimmer.
    After a moment of silence on both sides, the girl broke out into a wide grin. “Greetings,” she said in a musical accent. “I have not yet met any of the blessed from your mirror.”
    “Our mirror,” said Luka. “You mean … are there other mirrors?”
    The girl’s eyes widened. “Have you not looked down the hallway?”
    As soon as she said it, I couldn’t help but steel myself against the buzzing pain and look beyond her. They got dimmer as they stretched away, but there they were, more clouds of images, two at a time, stretching far beyond the limits of vision.
    “It is the same in both directions,” said the girl. “Do not ever use them, though. You are blessed only for your own mirror. If you go through another, you may never return. Even a key will not open them.”
    “A key?” I said. “The mirrors have keys?”
    The girl raised an eyebrow. “How little you