Beyond the Reflection's Edge

“Wait.” As the music reached a crescendo near the end of the page, the reflection undulated, like ripples on a pond. The bedroom faded to black. New dark images formed deep within — ghostly shadows in a haze.

  In the mirror, a ray of light from somewhere to the side cast a glow over the scene, bringing clarity to the dim room. This time a spacious chamber materialized. The outer walls seemed curved, as if cordoning off a circular floor. Two people skulked across polished tiles toward the source of light, a lamp on a desk in the far background. They passed a shadowed object at the center of the circle, something that looked like a bulky cylinder on a pedestal aimed toward the ceiling at an angle.

  Returning to the beginning of the page and playing with all the passion he could muster, Nathan gawked at the image. It was exactly the same as one of the photos from Dad’s camera!

  Wearing long trench coats with pulled-up collars and walking away from the front of the mirror, the two forms gave away few details, though the more curvaceous shape of the smaller person revealed her gender as she carried a violin case in her feminine hand. Near the top edge of the scene, copies of their hunched forms echoed their moves, but the copies walked upside-down, as if projected on the ceiling like an inverted movie.

  When they reached the desk, they each took a seat in rolling swivel chairs. As they turned toward one another, their profiles came into view.

  Clara raised a hand to her mouth. “Your parents!”

  Nathan pulled the bow across the D string to play the final note and nodded at her, his voice rattling. “Take a shot of the mirror. Let’s see if we can go there.”

  “Or bring them here,” she added as she sidestepped to the center of the room and focused the camera. When the ready light came on, she pressed the shutter button. The camera flashed. The mirror reflected the light and shot back a radiant bolt that sizzled into the flash attachment, ripping the entire unit from Clara’s hands. It fell to her chest and bounced back and forth at the end of the strap.

  Nathan grabbed the camera, leaving it on Clara’s neck as he examined the casing. Everything looked okay. When he turned to the mirror, the image seemed to zoom in on his parents, sharply clarifying as it filled the glass with the upper half of their bodies. At the desk, his father pecked at a laptop keyboard while his mother looked on.

  Tucking the violin under his arm, Nathan laid his hand on the mirror. It remained hard, impenetrable. As he caressed the surface near his mother’s cheek, she turned toward him and sighed, her voice tired and plaintive. “I’ll try again, but it seems hopeless. I just don’t have enough power.”

  Solomon made a final tap on the keyboard and swiveled her way. “We have to keep trying. We have to stop interfinity.”

  “But if Nathan figures out how to use the Quattro camera and my violin, together we might —”

  “It’s too late for that. We have to push forward.” He stood and reached for her hand. “The scope is in position. Give it all you’ve got. This might be our last chance.”

  As a frenzied mix of sounds began to play from somewhere in the background, she took his hand and rose from her chair, still clutching the violin case. Hand in hand they walked to the middle of the chamber, and the mirror’s eye followed them, panning back as if held by a cameraman. When they stopped near the center of the circle, she withdrew the violin from its case and set it under her chin. As she hovered the bow over the strings, she looked up, but the mirror focused on her entranced eyes, not revealing what had engaged her attention above. Her pupils danced with chaotic colors that intermeshed with her brown irises, and a gentle smile graced her lips as if a long-loved memory had found its way home.

  Then, with a sudden burst of strokes, she played a series of high eighth notes that seemed void of melody, but, with her gaze still trained on something high above, she soon transformed the musical chaos into consonance, creating a glorious rendition of her birdsong piece, much fuller and more vibrant than her younger self had so recently played.

  After several seconds, the colors in her eyes dispersed, and the black pigment in her pupils transformed into brilliant white. The whiteness expanded and emerged from her eyes, like twin lasers shooting into the twilight. As she played on, the lasers strengthened, becoming so bright, they washed her skin into a ghostly pallor.

  Solomon circled behind her. “Do you see, Francesca? Have you found it?”

  Nodding and breathing heavily, she increased to fortissimo, sending the loudest, most lovely notes yet into the upper reaches of the chamber. A bow hair broke away and flew wildly. Her fingers blurred. Her eyes blazed so bright, Solomon backed away and gasped, “Shekhinah!”

  As a loud cracking sound blended into the musical flow, Nathan’s fingers began to sink into the image. The glass felt like cool jelly, becoming thinner every second.

  Solomon’s voice again rose above the din. “Hang in there, Francesca! My darling, you can do it!”

  Nathan pushed through up to his shoulder. “I’m going in,” he said, extending the violin toward Kelly. But just as she took it, his mother heaved a groan and crumpled to the floor. With a loud pop, her eyes flashed a ring of sizzling fire in all directions. The ring crashed against the mirror, sending Nathan flying backwards into a pair of strong arms.

  Tony lifted him upright. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.” Nathan shook the mental cobwebs away and leaped back toward the mirror. He laid his hand on the surface, now rigid once again. Leaning his forehead against the glass, he bit his lip, trying not to lose control, but a tear forced its way out of each eye.

  In the reflection, his father sat on the floor cradling his mother. “What did you see?”

  With her eyes still emanating a faint glow, she replied in a dreamlike whisper. “I stood at the edge of the chasm and gazed down into an endless void. A shimmering golden rope was fastened around a rocky projection at my feet. As taut as the strings on my violin, it seemed to span the celestial wound, but I couldn’t be sure since it disappeared in the darkness. I plucked it. It produced a perfect tone, an E, loud and lovely and shook the ground upon which I stood, so much so, that I could no longer bear to stand. As I lowered my body to sit, I noticed three other golden ropes, so when the shaking ceased, I plucked the others and found that they played the A, D, and G notes. I tried to play the song, running as quickly as I could between the strings, but after only two measures, I became too weary to keep the timing.” She blew out a long breath and shook her head. “I don’t think I can try again, not without Nathan to help me.”

  He joined her sigh. “Then I guess there’s no hope.”

  Shifting upward in his arms, she gazed at him hopefully. “He’ll find the email —”

  “It won’t be enough. I thought he’d come with us, so I didn’t put much information in it. He won’t figure out the best way to find us.”

  “There’s still the girl, the interpreter.” She turned her gaze back to the ceiling. “And there’s always his supplicant.”

  He tilted his head upward. “And Patar, but will he help or hinder? We’d be better off shoving that vision stalker and his brother back through the hole they came from and plugging it with a cosmic cork. Patar would tell Nathan the right thing to do, but he’s likely to scare him away.”

  She took his chin in her hand and turned his head, setting his eyes directly in front of hers. “Our son will not be frightened. He will choose wisely. He has the same warrior spirit I saw in you when you were his age.”

  His countenance turned grim. “If Mictar gets wind that Nathan is punching through dimensional walls, he’ll follow the trail and find us. Even a portal view might expose our whereabouts.”

  Nathan pulled back from the mirror. “A portal view!” As soon as his skin left the surface, his mother swiveled her head to the side.

  “I hear footsteps!” she said.

  His father lifted her to her feet. “Let’s go!” The scene darkened, then slowly illuminated again, growing brighter and brighter as the objects in the bedroom reapp
eared.

  Nathan slapped the mirror. “We almost did it! We were so close!”

  Jumping to his side, Kelly displayed the violin in her hands. “Can you try again?”

  Clara pointed at the mirror. “You heard your father. It sounds like all this dimensional travel and poking around and whatnot is putting them in danger.”

  Tony crossed his arms over his chest. “It looked like he was already in trouble, like someone was coming.”

  “I know!” Nathan backpedaled and flopped into his desk chair. What else could he do? Without another clue to go on, every option seemed like it ended at a brick wall with no fire escape ladder in sight. But at least now there was hope. At least his parents were alive.

  He glanced at the digital clock on his desk. Still before noon. They spent maybe twelve hours in that other world and came back only a few minutes later than when they left. After shaking his head wearily he looked up at Kelly. “You got any ideas?”

  “Not a clue.” She smoothed out her safari shirt and drew closer. “With the whole clothes–swapping thing and clones of us getting murdered, there’s some serious sh —“She winced but continued with barely a pause. “Some serious stuff going on. Maybe we really did travel through time.”

  Nathan shook his head. It couldn’t have been time travel, but he was too tired to argue the point. After all, how could they have made drastic changes in the past without affecting the present? He shifted his gaze toward Francesca. Not only that, now they had his ten-year-old mother in his bedroom. If she stayed with him, then he couldn’t have been born. Time travel just didn’t make sense, but, then again, neither did anything else. What other options were there? She couldn’t have come back to life and then aged backwards.

  Taking the violin from Kelly, Nathan got up and put it away. “It looks like our only plan is to find the email Dad mentioned.”

  “But was that your father?” Kelly asked. “There was more than one Nathan. Maybe that was the other Nathan’s father. Maybe he’s the Nathan they were talking about.”

  Nathan sagged his shoulders. She was right. How could he know who they were for certain? If there was another Nathan, there had to be another set of parents, and they probably experienced the same events in their lives, even the stuff about Quattro.

  He thinned out his lips. “Thanks for the uplifting theory.”

  “Sorry. I’m just looking at all the angles.”

  Francesca pulled on Nathan’s sleeve. “Can we find my mother now?”

  Bending over, he lifted her fingers to his lips and kissed her knuckles. “We’ll do our best. I promise.”

  “Is there anything else we might have missed?” Clara asked. “A puzzle piece you might have overlooked?”

  He pulled the newspaper from his back pocket. “There is one clue …” Unfolding it, he showed the article to Clara. “Do you know anything about this murder back in nineteen-seventy-eight?”

  Clara’s eyes darted back and forth across the page. “No. Nothing like this ever happened.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I attended this concert. Your mother’s teacher, Dr. Malenkov, and his wife were the violinists in one of the quartets, so I remember it well. Since my dear husband was a percussionist, I was quite involved in the orchestra social circle. Eventually that’s how I first met your mother, when she joined the CSO as its concertmaster at the age of twenty-one.”

  Nathan creased the newspaper and laid it on the bed. He stared at the article as it lay open, searching for more than the scant information in the wrinkled type. Since Dr. Malenkov never returned from the concert, maybe he really was one of the victims. Could he and his wife have replaced the pieces of Rosetta from his dream? He tapped Kelly’s shoulder. “Let’s see if Dad has any emails from Dr. Malenkov.”

  Kelly scooted the mouse pointer and pressed the button. A list of messages appeared. There were several from Nikolai Malenkov.

  He joined Kelly’s hand with Francesca’s. “Kelly can you and your father get some lunch for Francesca while Clara and I look at these emails?”

  “Sure.” She looked at Tony who was still glaring at the mirror. “Daddy what can we whip up for lunch?”

  Half closing one eye, he gazed at the ceiling. “We have a lot of tuna-banana salad left over and buffalo wings marinated in ketchup and mayonnaise.”

  Taking Francesca along, she reached for her father’s hand. “C’mon. We’re going on a safari hunt in the freezer.”

  As they walked down the hall, Tony’s voice echoed, “I think we have some eels still frozen from the fishing trip. What do you think? Serve the eels with some of my special rattlesnake sauce?”

  “No! Don’t you dare!”

  After bringing in a chair from another bedroom, Nathan and Clara sat together at his desk, studying his father’s inbox. The messages from Dr. Malenkov focused on his visit to Chicago, expressing his concern about attending the shareholders’ meeting even though he had no interest in the company. Since he hadn’t seen Francesca in so long, he just wanted to hear her play. Another email asked if her favorite flowers were still white roses, but there seemed to be no hidden messages, at least nothing Nathan could spot.

  Clara pointed at an icon on the screen. “Looks like there’s something in the draft folder.”

  He clicked on it. “One message. It’s addressed to Dr. Malenkov. It was never sent.”

  They both leaned close and read it silently.

  Nathan, in case you happen to find this and read it: The mirrors lead to alternate dimensions. Dr. Simon maintains a steady state. Must find the hole and seal it, or interfinity will result. We will need your help to produce the musical key. Tell no one that we have discovered how to heal the wounds.

  Nathan clenched his fist. This had to be the email they were supposed to find, locked away in the draft folder where it couldn’t be intercepted during transmission.

  Clara’s eyes darted back and forth as she read the message again. “Very interesting. Alternate realities that are out of phase with each other on the timeline.”

  Nathan propped a pencil eraser on his chin. “Just like I thought. We didn’t travel through time. We went to another dimension.”

  “That’s what pure logic demands, but it doesn’t explain your dead bodies.”

  “Maybe it does. Maybe there are exact copies of everyone in the other world. Our copies died over there and somehow got transported over here.” He pointed his pencil at the mirror and shrugged. “When we came back, they got zapped into their world again. Two corpses, special delivery.”

  Clara jerked off her glasses. “Nathan!”

  He squinted at her. “What?”

  “You’re acting like it’s no big deal. A couple of dead kids, who happen to look just like you and Kelly are getting thrown back and forth like an old pair of shoes, and you’re as cool as a cod.” She set her fingers against her neck. “I put my hand on their lifeless pulses. I mopped their hair back from their ashen faces and stared at the scorched pits where their eyes used to be.” Pointing her glasses at him, she gave him a stern glare. “You need a dose of reality Nathan Shepherd, and a heaping bowl of compassion.”

  Nathan lowered his head, shaking it slowly. What could he say? Clara had nailed him to the wall. Letting out a long breath, he looked up at her. “You’re right … as usual. I guess I never felt like the other Nathan and Kelly were real. I only saw them in the mirror, like it was a movie or something.”

  “And let’s not forget this.” She tugged on the sleeve of his safari shirt. “These aren’t your clothes. Or, then again, maybe they are yours. Maybe you’re really the Nathan from the other dimension.”

  “That’s impossible.” He nodded toward his reflection. “I remember being here before I went over there. That place didn’t even have the mirror, and I never saw this shirt before this morning.”

  “Fair enough. You’re the Nathan I know. But there are still mysteries aplenty. I don’t understand what your mother was doing. How did th
e light appear in her eyes? And what was that dark chamber she was in? With all the reflections and colors, it looked almost like the house of mirrors.”

  “You’re right. That was too weird.” He tapped the pencil on his knee. Should he tell her about sometimes seeing light in his own eyes when he looked in the mirror? But how could that help? She couldn’t possibly know why it happened. And the bigger mystery was all that stuff Mom said about playing a huge violin. She was great at storytelling, but she sounded dead serious.

  “So,” Nathan continued, “Dad says Dr. Simon maintains a steady state. Any idea what that means?”

  “Maybe. Here’s how I would piece the puzzle together.” She set a finger on the screen. “The part about sealing the hole makes me think someone figured out a way to open passages between the dimensions. Somehow this hole threatens to bring about some kind of catastrophic state called interfinity, and Dr. Simon was keeping that from happening.”

  “But he killed them! Why would he be on Dad’s side, keeping a steady state?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “And now Simon’s dead, so interfinity is probably on its way.” He kept his eyes on the message, reading it absentmindedly. “Didn’t you say Dad did an assignment for a company called Interfinity?”

  “Yes. And that reminds me. With all the excitement, I forgot to tell you that the police called this morning. They found your parents’ bodies, so I have to go to Chicago early tomorrow morning to finalize the funeral arrangements. I’ll pay Interfinity a visit after everything’s settled.”

  Nathan sank in his seat. “Now I’m more confused than ever. I don’t know if I’m an orphan, if I’m trying to rescue my parents or someone else’s, or if I’m just chasing after ghosts.” He glanced at the suitcase on the floor of his closet, still not quite unpacked. “What time do we leave?”

  “We?” She patted his leg. “You have to stay here.”

  “What? Why?”

  She rose to her feet and stretched, speaking through an extended yawn. “You have to register for school Monday.”