The Last Mirror on the Left, page 7
“Take a left at that brown station wagon,” Leen instructed, and Sheed obeyed. “Now right at that red truck.”
Otto, hoping to distract Leen from Sheed, said, “Isn’t it scary how things change so suddenly here? It’s all so weird.”
Leen came to a sudden stop, miffed. “Things aren’t weird in the Logan County you come from?”
Otto said, “Yeah, but—”
“But nothing! You have your weird, we have ours. You shouldn’t turn your nose up because the place you go isn’t like the place you been,” Leen said, swinging them around the fender of a sports car—the tires were soccer balls.
Otto felt a little embarrassed and put out. Very much like when Grandma corrected him for something he probably should’ve known better than to say or do.
They reached the end of the lot. Beyond it, an open field pocked with dips, hills, and shrubbery extended to the north toward the Fry border.
Leen said, “If you guys want to get back to town, circle west. Should keep you clear of Missus Nedraw and that Judge guy.”
“Thanks, Leen,” said Sheed.
Otto begrudgingly said, “Should we need an assist?”
“Me and Wiki are done with CORNucopia duties in, like, two hours. If you survive until then, we’ll look for you.”
“If we don’t survive?”
Leen smiled wide and scary. “I’ll still look for you. Can’t let good parts go to waste. Good luck.” Her eyes bounced between them. “Or not.”
She weaved her way back to the market, leaving the boys alone. Otto was relieved she didn’t say anything to tip Sheed off to his illness. Sheed was relieved the Leen back home never talked about using people for spare parts.
“We gotta get outta here,” they said together.
They continued north a ways before swinging west, to be sure they weren’t spotted. It gave them time to think, plan.
Sheed said, “This isn’t right, Otto. First Missus Nedraw is all ‘Help or you’re going in a mirror!’ then she’s like, ‘Go home, you’re free.’ Which would be awesome if it didn’t seem super obvious she was in trouble with the Judge.”
“We don’t know she’s in trouble.”
Sheed’s expression scalded him. “For real?”
“We don’t know.”
Sheed exploded then, in typical Sheed fashion, words rushing from him like the steaming whistle from a teapot. “If you’re scared, just say you’re scared! Are you?”
“No.” Yes. Yes, he was. But not of the Judge. Well, maybe he was a little scared of him, but that wasn’t what made him quiver most.
Sheed said, “Whatever is up with you, it’s been going on for weeks, and I’m sick of it.”
“You’re sick,” Otto said, testing the words but unable to stop there, still reluctant to tell the whole truth in the moment, “of . . . what?” His own anger was rising.
“Of you acting like a . . . a . . .”
“Acting like a what?”
Sheed got fully in his face then. “Like you’re not a legend.”
That stung.
Otto shoved Sheed. “Take it back.”
Sheed laughed. Loud. At the sky. “That’s all you got? Stop acting all scared and . . . and soft . . . and I will.”
Scared and soft? I’m acting like this for you, dummy! Otto thought, just about vibrating with rage. He veered away from Sheed, still moving in the same general direction as him, but also apart. “Don’t talk to me right now.”
“Gladly!”
Otto resorted to his Legend Log, drafting several nonsensical entries that were really just his way of releasing his fury quietly.
Entry #Whatever
I’m SCARED?! SOFT?!
SOFT!!!!!
BIG DEDUCTION: Sheed. IS. STUPID!
He burned through a few more pages, most expressing the same sentiment over and over, while Sheed walked slightly ahead, swinging his sword at nothing in particular. Not paying Otto any mind. Or pretending not to. Jerk.
Otto kept writing mean things about him, even going for words that Grandma would’ve washed his mouth with soap over if she knew he knew such language. As far as he was concerned, Sheed deserved every one of them. Otto was so mad, he was ready to vocalize some of the nastiness he’d scribbled down. Only when he glanced up again, Sheed was nowhere in sight.
“Sheed?” he called, still mad, though the anger gave way quickly to his finely tuned sense of something ain’t right here. The tiny little hairs on the back of Otto’s neck stood up. He pocketed his notepad and drew his slingshot, quickly loading a ball bearing into the shooting pad. He tugged the rubber bands taut and turned in a circle, ready for whatever danger was near. “Sheed, where’d you go?”
He sensed the subtle vibration at his feet a second too late.
There was a slight, earthy breeze. A flap of grass flew back like the top on Mr. Green’s old-timey convertible cars. Four arms snatched Otto backwards and down before the flap resealed, blocking all the sunlight.
Otto OOFED! when he crashed to the cavern floor. The sudden dark was alarming, and cold, and Otto nearly screamed when he sensed the inhuman, yet familiar, scurrying all around him. Before he freaked out, a hand touched his shoulder, and Sheed said, “We’re cool. I think. See?”
And Otto could see, the cavern was not totally dark, thanks to a few lit torches revealing the spider brothers—and some other new acquaintances—surrounding the boys.
Spencer stepped forward, six of his arms spread wide for a hug. “Hey there, buddy.” He scooped Otto up in an embrace, his coarse spider hair as comforting as pine needles. “It’s been a minute.”
Otto squeezed Spencer’s thorax lightly, just so he’d let go, then dropped to the cavern floor at the huge spider’s feet. “What is this place? How’d we get down here?”
“Oh, that’d be m’cousin, Spenelope. Say hi, Spenelope.”
“Hey,” said a slender, slightly shorter giant spider, also in jailhouse garb.
Spencer said, “Her thing is trapdoors. And beats.”
“Sick beats, mate.” Three of her spider hands cupped her twitching mandibles, and she began to beatbox.
A-BOOM-BOOM-BAH-DAP-DAP-BAH!
All around, Spencer’s brothers, cousins, or whatever began gyrating, spinning, doing flips into handstands. And, clearly forgetting the uncertainty of the situation, Sheed joined in with his own popping-and-locking . . . until Otto popped him in the back of the head.
“What?” Sheed said, perplexed. “The beat is sick.”
“Enough!”
It’s what Otto felt like saying, though he wasn’t the one who said it. He doubted he could’ve pulled it off with that much authority. Spenelope stopped beatboxing. The other spiders stopped dancing. Then they parted, allowing a much tinier creature to hop through.
He came to Otto’s belly button. Was furry, with perky ears, a pointed snout, and a beard like Santa Claus. The toes of elongated patent-leather shoes extended past the hem of his small billowing black robe, and a thick tail swished from the back. He looked very much like a small kangaroo. He said, “State your names.”
Cautiously, Otto introduced them. “I’m Otto. He’s Sheed.”
Sheed’s chin tilted. “Who are you supposed to be?”
The creature’s eyes narrowed. “My name is Nevan.”
“The Nightmare?” Sheed smacked his forehead, realizing he probably shouldn’t have said that part.
Nevan seemed unphased. “No. I’m Nevan the Judge. I mean to take my title back.”
12
Kangaroo Court
“How can you be a judge when you’re a—” Otto almost said monster, Missus Nedraw’s word, but it felt rude saying it to Nevan’s face like that. “A prisoner at the emporium?”
Nevan spread his arms. “Do I look imprisoned?”
He did not. Especially given the various adornments that Otto had overlooked upon their initial introduction. His stubby fingers poked through several thick gold rings dotted with colorful jewels. More gold peeked over the collar of his robe, the links in a chain leading to a diamond-encrusted medallion resting on his chest. His front buckteeth were gold. He reminded Otto of Grandma’s cousin Rufus, who wasn’t a judge. Rufus was a truck driver.
Sheed said, “Missus Nedraw told us—”
“Evian Nedraw is sorely mistaken on many things. What else has she told you?”
Otto spoke plainly. “She said you’re the leader of a gang.”
“A gang!” The tiny creature threw his hands up, his jewels winking reflected torchlight, then hopped around the cavern. “Oh Evie, Evie, Evie. Go on!”
Otto motioned to Spencer and Spenelope. “She said they’re part of a gang, too. I think she called them—” He flipped through his notes. “ArachnoBRObia.”
Spencer laughed in a horrific way that made his mandibles jiggle and drip saliva. “We’re no gang. We’re a dance crew.”
“The best dance crew,” Spenelope confirmed. “But I never liked the name. I’m not a bro.”
“I told you to give us some suggestions for a better name.”
“I did. The Spinsters. It’s inclusive, with layers. But we went and got locked in mirrors before the crew could vote.”
“Well, then it’s just a matter of patience. We’re out now, the monthly meeting is still on the third Wednesday. We’ll add it to the agenda and—”
Sheed cleared his throat loudly, interrupting. “If you’re not a gang, why’d you get locked up in those mirrors?”
Nevan’s authoritative voice became sheepish, embarrassed. “That would be my fault.”
Several spiders grumbled or sighed. Spencer placed a comforting hand on Nevan’s shoulder. “Don’t beat yourself up, mate. We all got caught up in that crazy unfair system. And you got us out. That means a lot.”
Nevan paced the cavern floor. “I know. I know. I did manage to free us all from our horrible circumstances, didn’t I? A bit of a hero I am. That does count for something. But I can never be truly free of blame.”
“Why?” Otto asked.
“Because the whole Mirror Prison System,” Nevan said. “I created it.”
The Legendary Alston Boys leaned in. This they had to hear.
* * *
Nevan swept a hand across the entire expanse of the cavern. “This place we’re in now, this strange, strange world—it is not the world any of us originate from. My eight-legged friends have a home away from here, as do I.” He motioned to Otto and Sheed. “As do you, I presume.”
The boys nodded.
“And you understand how vastly different these places can be?”
Yes. After today, Otto and Sheed totally understood.
“Where I come from, there are strict laws that help make our society comfortable for all. When people broke such laws, they came to my courtroom to have their fate decided.”
Sheed said, “So, like, if they robbed a bank or something?”
“Well, yes. That would fall under criminal law. We covered the other laws as well. Like civil law. Or the law of gravity. Murphy’s law—”
Sheed made a T with his hands. “Time-out. How can someone break the law of gravity?”
Nevan looked aghast. “Oh, you would not believe the depths some will sink to. There was this lawless family back home. Absolutely depraved. They invented a machine meant to lift people off the ground for extended periods of time, then lower them back to earth at a location well beyond where they could’ve leapt to with their own legs. Insanity, I tell you. It was one of the easiest decisions of my career. If they never get out of their mirrors it will be for the best.”
Otto lowered his notepad, startled. “The machine, it had wings?”
“Yes.”
“This depraved family, was it a pair of brothers?”
Nevan went wide-eyed. “You’ve heard of the case, then?”
Sheed, his face fixed in a disbelieving frown, recalled what they’d learned about this particular family and their machine at school. “You’re talking about the Wright brothers?”
As in the inventors of the airplane and the fathers of modern aviation. At least in Otto and Sheed’s world.
A creature with the head of deer and gold chains coiled around his antlers—presumably a member of Nevan’s “gang”—said, “More like the Wrong brothers.”
Nevan chuckled at that one, as did the rest of his associates. The spiders looked as uncomfortable as Otto and Sheed felt.
Sheed said, “YOU LOCKED UP THE WRIGHT BROTHERS?!”
Nevan’s eyes narrowed, and the cavern became a few degrees cooler. “They broke the law. Wasn’t I clear about that?”
Otto touched Sheed’s sleeve, signaling for him to back off. “We get it. You enforced laws where you come from. Where did the mirrors come in, and how you’d end up in one?”
Nevan calmed, but Otto noticed his robe seemed tighter somehow. Like it had shrunk in that moment of irritation.
Or he’d grown.
He said, “We have always used mirrors in multiple ways. Communication. Short-range travel that’s much more civilized than—blech—flying. And, obviously, interdimensional travel between parallel earths.”
Sheed mumbled from the side of his mouth, low enough for Otto to hear, “Because no way that breaks any laws.”
Otto elbowed him in the ribs to shut him up.
Nevan went on. “But we’d locked up so many disobedients that our prisons were stuffed to capacity. It occurred to me and my colleagues that there might be yet another use for some specially constructed mirrors. For the space it took to house one prisoner in a conventional cell, we could keep twenty or thirty in a single mirror cell of my own design. And we could store a thousand mirror cells in the same space it takes to keep a hundred prisoners. Don’t you see how marvelous that is?”
Nevan’s glee over this admission chilled the boys.
Otto looked to one sleepy-eyed, sort of adorable figure standing just over Nevan’s shoulder. She wore a flower print dress and looked like a sloth. If sloths were also rappers. Because she was rocking a serious platinum chain encrusted with emeralds. “What do you have to do with all this?”
She motioned with her long sloth fingernails (painted red to match her lipstick) in the direction of the other strange and bejeweled individuals. “We’re the Jury.”
Otto scribbled and mumbled, “Judge. And jury.”
“What’s up with the other Judge, then?” asked Sheed. “Why’s Missus Nedraw working for him if it was your system?”
Irritated, Nevan returned, “He’s no Judge. I’m the true Judge. My loyal friends here are my Jury. And that usurper was in my employ as well before he betrayed me.”
Otto said, “He worked for you. As what?”
“My Executioner,” Nevan said. “Of course.”
“What?!” Sheed said. “That big, diesel, zombie-looking dude kills people?”
Nevan stuck one hand out, held it flat, then made a back-and-forth waffling motion. “Eh.”
“Eh. What’s eh?”
“We didn’t, exactly, ever sentence anyone to death. We’re not barbarians. So, while the Executioner was around if needed, he was never, actually, needed.”
Otto said, “He had a job he never ever did? For how long?”
Nevan was hesitant, but did answer. “Roughly eight hundred years or so.”
Otto gawked; he looked to the Jurors. “Were you guys there the whole time?”
A tall, slim Juror that resembled a rabbit in a breezy tropical shirt with gold doubloons falling out of his stuffed pockets, said, “Jury duty is a big time commitment.”
“A civil responsibility,” Nevan corrected.
Otto became steadily unnerved. “I can understand a world where the laws are very strict. Our grandma, and our friend Leen, I guess, say different places and people can have another way of doing things, and we should respect those differences, but how did this mirror system end up in their world”—he pointed to Spencer and the spiders—“or our world, or here in Warped World?”
Nevan stroked his chin and shook his head slowly. Obviously saddened. Or wanting to appear that way. “Once word of how efficient my system is got out to the most powerful people in the various dimensions, there was little to be done to keep this innovative and cost-saving technology from rapid expansion.”
“Yes, yes. Rapid expansion. The investors insisted on it,” said a Hippo-like Juror with a big mouth and a sapphire nose ring.
The cutting look Nevan gave him suggested the boys weren’t the only ones who thought that Juror had a big mouth.
“You got paid,” Sheed said, sneering, “to lock people up in your mirrors.”
Entry #60
Nevan and his Jurors invented the mirror cells and got rich (or got a really good deal on their jewelry) selling the idea to all sorts of different worlds. I guess that makes sense, but . . .
Should people be able to get rich locking other people up? Especially over laws that feel unfair? As Sheed said, THEY LOCKED UP THE WRIGHT BROTHERS!
DEDUCTION: Missus Nedraw had her own reasons for calling Nevan a nightmare, but now that I’ve met him, I think the name fits perfectly. So what are me and Sheed going to do about it?
“What are you writing there?” Nevan asked, suddenly at Otto’s hip. This close, he looked different. Before, Otto thought he was a few inches shorter, more round than muscular. Not so. Now he was almost as tall as Otto, and the muscles in his arms and chest bulged through the fabric of his robe.
Otto flipped his notepad closed and said, “Nothing.”
Nevan huffed. “At least you’re using a pencil. That’s the right way to do it. In case you make mistakes. Use of permanent ink is strictly forbidden where I’m from. Unless you apply for a proper permit.”
“Do the permits cost money?” Sheed’s eyes were narrowed.
“There is a small fee, payable to the court,” Nevan confirmed.
A Juror with a face like a koala bear held up a golden cup embedded with gems. “Permit fees bought me goblet!”
