by J M Fraser
But halfway around…
The tiny log cottage poured smoke from its chimney with a vengeance.
“Woohoo!” He ran to the door—unlocked—and broke inside. “Rebecca?”
Although his cry went unanswered, he found plenty to cheer about. Rebecca had left a pair of woolen mittens on an end table, a bowl of water on the floor for her cat, and an assortment of romance novels tumbling from one end of her bookshelf to the other. The crackle of fire from the next room clinched the deal.
He headed into the kitchen and found Simon curled up by a roaring fire in the hearth. Better yet, Rebecca had set the table, leaving slices of cheese and homemade bread on a plate and a handwritten note beside a pitcher of cider. My cabin will always welcome you, Brian.
He collapsed onto a chair, stretched his legs out, threw his head back.
He’d found her.
Right?
He went into the living room, to the antique mirror resting on its stand in the middle of the floor. This was a portal. Had to be.
He tapped the glass, walked around it, moved the mirror up and down on its swivel, and fogged it with his breath.
Nothing happened.
“Rebecca?”
Dead silence.
He backed to the couch, sat, and stared into the mirror for all he was worth.
* * *
“Brian.”
He shot up and blinked the sleep from his eyes. How long had he been out?
Wow. Night had fallen.
He groped around until he found matches on an end table. He lit one. And an oil lamp.
“Brian.”
A blurry image formed inside the mirror.
“Rebecca?” He reached for her outstretched hand.
The glass dissolved into tiny beads tinkling like crystal wind chimes as they spilled across his shoes. The wooden frame transformed from polished antique to a splintered oval with cobwebs hanging where the mirror had been.
His shirt puffed out. And his slacks. Just a tug at first.
He jumped back.
But if she waited on the other side, if this portal would lead him to her, not in a dream but for real…
He leaned into it.
A sudden, powerful force sucked him through the empty frame.
Chapter 25
Brian tumbled forward into the mirror but spilled out backwards, skidding on his butt until he came to a head-banging stop against a windowsill. The room swam, then brightened impossibly, considering he’d lit only a single oil lamp earlier. A warm breeze carrying the dewy scent of spring through the window didn’t fit, either.
He reached into his pocket and found a warm Saint Brigit coin in there.
Warm equaled dreaming.
Damn. If he learned anything in a dream, he’d probably forget the answers when he woke up. The mirror had to be a portal leading to some big answers, such as why Rebecca kept flitting away. Or whether his mom was right about her being exiled to another dimension. And if so, how was he supposed to rescue her?
Maybe his hand was too cold, and it made the coin seem warm. Grasping at straws for sure, but he pulled the thing out of his pocket to see whether he’d gotten a false reading.
Silver. Yes! She’d told him about the colors, too. Silver meant he was awake.
But the coin hadn’t cooled one bit.
Am I dreaming that I’m awake?
He got up and turned to the window, shading his eyes against the glare of a scene that was so not Nebraska. Or November, for that matter. The previously barren, frosty hills had thickened with lush forest.
A pair of monarch butterflies darted into the cabin through the open window. They danced up to him, turned, and fluttered back out. Brian’s heart raced after them. Coin or no coin, everything was too real for him to be dreaming. It worked! He’d fallen through a portal into an entirely different place.
Still a cabin, but not the same. Packed dirt instead of a finished floor. Smoke-stained hardwood planks where cedar walls used to be. A rustic bench and several high-backed wooden chairs filling the space where Rebecca’s bookshelf and country furniture had been.
Not just the furniture.
The mirror had disappeared. He caught his breath. Getting answers was the plan for sure, but finding a way back home afterward was supposed to be a big part of it. This was like walking into a vault full of riches only to have the door close and lock behind him.
He bunched his fists. The coin heated in his closed hand even more.
Dreaming?
No! He needed answers he’d remember. He could worry about the missing mirror later. He dropped the coin.
Saint Brigit hit the dirt and bounced back up like a yoyo without a string.
He grabbed it again. Cold.
The coin went crazy, flashing colors and changing temperature, before settling on totally useless information—warm silver.
I’m awake. Period.
He could only hope so.
Voices rose from the kitchen.
He hurried over to the doorway. Stopped at the sight of an Amish scene. No, not Amish. Colonial.
A girl slicing beets at a table might have been Rebecca, but not quite. She was a little shorter and less filled out, like a younger sister, maybe. She and the woman standing beside her looked like they’d raided the early American racks of a costume store. They wore long black dresses puffed below the waist as if filled with air by a bicycle pump—hoop designs like the one Kara once bought for a Halloween party—and tight, renaissance-faire bodices. White aprons and matching bonnets covering their pinned-back red hair completed the outfits.
Where the hell had he fallen? He tried to speak. “Wha?”
The girl moved a finger to her lips. “Shh.”
The woman had bent to a sack of potatoes on the floor. She glanced up. “What, Rebecca?”
“Nothing, Mum.”
Brian took another stab at coherent speech. “Rebecca?”
She pressed her lips together, furrowed her forehead, motioned to the woman now rising, shook her head.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “Why—”
The power of a thousand vacuum cleaners sucked him backward through the cabin. The front door opened just in time to prevent him from bashing against it. He landed outside on his back, hard enough to see stars.
A V-shaped formation of geese honked their way across the sky above. He watched them till they disappeared behind a line of trees, and then caught the drift of a cloud moving in the opposite direction. This place seemed like earth, more or less, at least in some respects. Brian scrambled up and did a slow three-sixty.
The woods he’d noticed through the window surrounded a crescent-shaped cluster of log cabins. Farm animals came into view—random chickens clucking and flapping their wings, a pig tethered to a stake.
In the center of the little settlement, women dressed in more balloon-skirt-white-bonnet outfits took turns filling wooden buckets with water from a well. The combined aroma of chimney smoke, pine trees, and animals came at him like no dream ever could.
A man pulled a cart along a dirt pathway leading into the woods. He wore white stockings rising to meet dark pants that ended just below the knees, a white shirt, and a tall black hat. Other men in similar getup stacked wood, wielded axes, burned brush, or loitered on the steps of various cabins. One whittled. Another smoked a pipe. They all looked like they’d stepped out of a first Thanksgiving museum diorama.
Although Brian had made plenty of noise bursting out of the cabin—his scream still rang in his ears—no one noticed him. Must be a dream after all, then. Yet his palms stung from striking the ground, and who ever experienced pain in a dream?
He eased away from the land of Ichabod Crane until his back was up against the cabin door.
He grabbed the handle.
It wouldn’t budge.
He turned and knocked.
Nobody answered.
Now what? He’d come to the mirror seeking answers, but he must have hit the wron
g channel on the remote. Definitely a right-church-wrong-pew kind of moment. Time to try control-alt-delete for a quick reboot.
Enough clichés already. The mirror—the portal!—had to be inside that cabin somewhere.
He pounded on the door.
Still no response.
Brian rushed around to the window off to the side, almost tripping over something along the way. A panicky rabbit scrambled back and forth inside a small wooden cage. Yeah, buddy, I know the feeling.
He peered through the open window.
The youngish version of Rebecca sat on the bench in the living area of the little cabin. Her hooped dress puffed upward, but she managed to balance a sheaf of papers in her lap. A black cat slept at her feet. Colonial Simon? Get real.
“Pssst.”
Rebecca ignored him. She reached without looking and groped her hand across a low table beside her. In doing so, she nearly spilled a small bottle of black liquid. Then she turned to the table and frowned. “Mother, what use is ink without a quill? Did you take it?”
The woman came into the room, wiping her hands on her apron. “Work aplenty I have for thee, Rebecca. Chores are more important than the nonsense in thy journal.”
Brian couldn’t imagine what weird, alternate universe he’d beamed into. The colonial costumes and Shakespearian language suggested a three-century trip backward, not the mere two or three years accounting for Rebecca’s younger age.
Rebecca waved her mother off. “Leave me read what I set down when a quill was at hand. My nonsense is a discourse about the ancient foretellings.”
“Mind thy tongue, child.” The woman stalked back into the kitchen.
Alone again, Rebecca pushed her papers aside and rushed to the window like a little kid on an Easter-egg hunt.
Brian instinctively responded to her wide smile with one of his own despite the queasy feeling in his stomach.
“Be you demon or angel come to visit me in secret this day?” she asked.
“Huh?”
“Twice you appeared, and Mum made no note of you.”
The people outside didn’t, either. Popping through a portal had been like stepping into a 3-D holograph. No interaction, except for now. And she’d noticed him earlier, too. “I don’t get it. You’re Rebecca, right?”
She nodded. “And you are…?”
“You don’t know?”
“Why would I?”
“I’m Brian.”
Rebecca gasped, stared at him wide-eyed, then finally cracked a smile. “Oh! ’Tis a joke!”
“Rebecca!” the woman’s shout rang out from the kitchen.
Rebecca grimaced at the sound. “Please don’t leave, Brian. We must speak.”
“Where would I go?”
The woman stormed out of the kitchen and looked through him as if he wasn’t there. “I heard thy laughter, Rebecca. Pray close the window, lest thy pleasure fall upon unwelcome ears. Frivolity is not at home amongst these people.”
Rather than shift her gaze to her mom, Rebecca kept her focus on him. “We should find a new district, then. Or perchance a suitor from another land will sweep me away instead of the dreadful man you invited for supper, Mum.”
Brian kept a vise-like grip on the windowsill to avoid floating away. He’d become the actor who’d forgotten his lines, the butt of a joke gone over his head, a castaway on puzzle island.
“Henry shall sweep thee to a new district, Rebecca—out of Salem and into Albany.”
Salem?
Duh. The poem she recited on stage. The research he’d done about the witch trials.
That crazy mirror hadn’t transported him to some random place. It sent him to colonial times. Something important had happened here, something affecting Rebecca, and he was supposed to find out what it was.
He could have a panic attack over the lack of any return portal later.
Right?
His heart pounded anyway.
Rebecca’s mom draped an arm over her shoulder and led her away. They settled onto the bench together. “Thy sharp tongue begs taming by an elder, Rebecca.”
“You are an elder. I need no one else,” she replied.
“A young witch could do far worse than marry a rich merchant from the fine town of Albany.”
“Henry is older than you, Mum.”
“Am I a hag now?”
Brian could only half listen. His thoughts raced in a circle from where he was to when he was to how old the modern-day Rebecca might actually be. Did she have some supernatural ability to age only a year or two every couple centuries?
Rebecca turned her back to her mother. “I will not marry money! A filched station brings no joy.”
“Perchance not,” her mother said, “but it does bring security. The man offers what he shall, and the maiden gives what she must—a bedmate and a child. Such bargains have brought men and lasses together since long before the days of Old Ireland.”
“Speak not of bargains, Mum. You care only for the advance of our line.”
The woman clucked her tongue. “Thou art fourteen and unwed, Rebecca. Shall I feed and shelter thee beyond the age when sensible maidens have taken a husband?”
Brian cringed. His mom had been sixteen when she married his dad, lying about her age or producing phony ID or whatever. The only consistent part of his parents’ story was the punch line. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
Fine. But expecting someone to marry at fourteen brought to mind the old joke, this is a nice place to visit, but…
The woman stormed into the kitchen. “An extra pair of hands would be a kindness.”
“In a moment, Mum.”
Rebecca hurried in the opposite direction, back to the window. Excitement gleamed in her eyes. “Where do you live?”
“When I’m not stuck on the wrong side of missing mirrors?”
Her bright expression dimmed to forehead-wrinkling confusion. Had mirrors been invented yet? Hopefully, a seventeenth-century girl would have heard of them. If not, he’d be diving into reflecting ponds in search of an escape hatch. He tried to keep his mind off that little wrinkle by sticking with the conversation at hand. “I grew up in Chicago, but I live in Wisconsin at the moment.”
“Wis Con Sin?”
“You say it faster. It’s west of here.”
“And when do you live?”
Ah ha! So this younger Rebecca was already onto the time-travel angle. That would make the conversation a whole lot easier. “I live in the future, actually.”
Rebecca grabbed one of his hands. “The twenty-first-century future?”
He reached into his pocket, found a nickel, and handed it over, showing her the date. “How did you guess?”
Rebecca stared at the nickel, glanced at him, then back at the coin. She beamed as though he’d handed her a million dollars. “’Tis prophecy,” she murmured. “You are the Brian from the land of tomorrow.”
“No. I mean, yeah, but we’re sleeping. I’ve stepped into your dream, like with Agatha Christie that time in the tree or—”
“I am not dreaming, Brian.”
Of course she was. A person in the present interacted with a person in the past by stepping into their lingering dreams. Rebecca had demonstrated this concept more than once. If she wasn’t asleep now, she wouldn’t have created a dream for him to step into.
Except…witches knew when they were asleep. She’d told him that. Meaning he’d fallen through the mirror into the actual, waking past? He took her hand and found a possible yes in the warm flesh and bones gripping back.
Brian backed from the window and looked up. Unassuming blue sky. Puffy white clouds. From three hundred years ago?
“Brian.” Rebecca gazed at him with the rapt expression of someone watching the Red Sea part. “The foretelling is carved into stones all over Ireland. Brian and Rebecca shall face the darkness together!”
“Let me get this straight. You believe in a prophecy because I showed up from the future today?”
She moved her head slowly—up and down—snatching simple logic’s false bottom away to reveal a spiraling hole beneath.
Brian needed to sit down before he fainted. “No, Rebecca. I wouldn’t have fallen into this place if you hadn’t met me in my world first.”
“I’ve never journeyed to Wisc… Wisc—”
“Wisconsin.” Not yet, anyway. But she would eventually. Or did. What came first, the chicken or the egg?
“How do we get from here to there, Brian?” Rebecca bored soft, gray-green eyes into his soul. “You must know a way. Else how could you come from there to here?”
The question lurched his stomach like one too many hot dogs. This version of Rebecca wasn’t the girl with all the answers. She didn’t have any more clues than he did for racing forward to the era of supersized French fries.
Slow seconds ticked by while he and Rebecca stared at each other. Colonial Salem, his new home, rang in his ears from behind—the voices of women in the square, the cluck of chickens, the bleat of a pig. He forgot how to swallow.
But logic hadn’t totally spiraled into a black hole, had it? Rebecca would find a way to leap into the future. After all, they’d met in the twenty-first century. Her tomorrow was his today. Or something like that. And if she could figure out how to do it, so would he. He relaxed his tightened fists.
She tried to give the nickel back to him.
“No,” he said. “Keep that as a reminder I’ll always be there for you, even when you’re…waiting maybe, for a really long time.”
Because, seriously, that might have happened, right? Somehow, Rebecca came from this place and time to his, and not necessarily on the fast track.
“But I’m nothing. Who would wait for someone small?” Nevertheless, she kept the coin, slipping it into the pocket of her dress.
“Don’t be silly, Rebecca. You’re everything to me.”
She smiled a mile wide but then looked down with a shyness he’d never seen in her modern-day rendition.
“Rebecca!” Her mother’s sharp voice rose from the kitchen.
“Yes, Mum!” She grabbed his hand again. “A horrid man comes for supper this day. Please stay for me.”
“Um. You mean, like, out here by the window?”
She hurried into the kitchen.
