by Tad Williams
Gideon sounded amused but not cheerful. “I have been thinking, Patience. That’s why I don’t want to wait any longer. The children would have all the help they needed-Simos to look after the animals and the land, and you to keep an eye on the business end of things. And of course you and Colin will always have a place here, no matter what. So I can rely on your help if such a day ever comes, can’t I, Patience?” Lucinda thought she heard a little edge in his voice, as though he was giving her a test of some kind. What were they talking about? She couldn’t make sense of it. Were she and Tyler the children they were talking about? And why a lawyer…?
“Of course.” Mrs. Needle said it very quickly. “Of course you
… they… would have my help, Gideon. I would hope by now that goes without saying.”
“Goes without saying, of course.” Gideon sounded pleased. He cleared his throat. “But before we discuss the details, I need a glass of water. I’m dry as a bone… ”
“I’ll get it for you,” said Mrs. Needle, her chair scraping on the floor. Lucinda heard the housekeeper’s footsteps and realized she had only seconds. She looked around, but there was nowhere to hide nearby. With no other alternative, she simply turned and bolted back down the hall in the direction she had come.
Lucinda didn’t stop until she reached the entry hall, where she threw herself down on one of the old velvet stools that stood against the walls and tried to get her breath back and listen for pursuit, but for half a minute she heard nothing but her own pounding heart. Finally she could think clearly again.
He must have been talking about this house, Lucinda realized. This farm. About what happens if he dies. The children-that must be us! She paused as the thought finally showed itself-a huge thought, a huge surprise.
Giving us this farm someday. That had to be what Uncle Gideon was talking about. That much seemed unmistakable. But like everything else important that happened here, they had only learned about it by accident or spying, by listening to whispers in back rooms.
But what did that mean? Had he really forgiven them for all the times they’d screwed up…? Then someday the dragons-Desta, Meseret-and all the other animals will belong to us, Lucinda thought in sudden excitement. To us!
She couldn’t wait to tell Tyler.
Lucinda had two complicated gates to open, pass through, and then lock behind her, and plenty of time to think on her during the long walk, so some of her first excitement began to wear off before she reached the Reptile Barn.
What if something happened and she and Tyler did inherit Ordinary Farm one day? Suddenly that seemed such a huge thing that she felt overwhelmed. It wouldn’t just be having a giant farm to run, although that would be challenge enough for anyone, let alone kids their age. And as strange, wonderful, and dangerous as they were, it wasn’t even the dozens of different kinds of mythical animals that was suddenly worrying her: Lucinda had helped with them enough to know it could be done (although it took a lot of work and money.) The thing that suddenly frightened her was that whoever inherited the farm from Gideon would also inherit all the farm folk as well, because Gideon Goldring’s farm was a refuge for misplaced people as well as creatures. Every single one of the farm’s inhabitants except for Gideon himself had come from another place, another century-some, like Haneb and Ooola and Mr. Walkwell, from nearly forgotten ages of the distant past. Gideon had plucked them all from their original eras at the moment of what had seemed like their certain deaths, hoping that way he would cause minimum upset in the flow of time. The farm’s inhabitants might sometimes resent Gideon and his high-handed ways, but he had saved the life of every one of them, and now they were all stuck in the modern world with no way to go back home and no way to prove they belonged here.
The responsibility was terrifying and Lucinda decided she didn’t want to think that much right now. Time enough later when she found Tyler and told him about it. She hurried the last yards to the Reptile Barn, anxious for the distraction.
She didn’t linger, but trotted to the back of the cavernous barn where the dragons were housed. They were by no means the place’s only exotic residents, but Lucinda wasn’t much interested in flying snakes and poison-breathing basilisks.
Meseret was lying on her side in her huge pen like an airliner docked for service, her fiery eye half-open and following Lucinda as she approached. The baby dragon was harnessed in her own pen a short distance away. As Lucinda approached, Little Haneb waved in his usual bashful way, scarcely looking up from the cheerful chore of shoveling dragon poop. Full-grown dragons like Meseret didn’t eat very often, but when they did, they pooped out piles the size of a sports car. Haneb wore a bandana over his face as he shoveled the ill-smelling black and green mess into a wheelbarrow. Gideon had told her that after it had been properly treated dragon poop made safe and excellent fertilizer-they even used it on the farm’s vegetable patch. That had been more about the subject than Lucinda had wanted to know, and it had also kept her off greens for days.
At Ordinary Farm, even the salad has secrets…!
She pushed away her worries about the conversation she had overheard between Mrs. Needle and her great-uncle. Hello, Meseret, she thought. Can you hear me? Do you remember me?
The golden eye stared, blinked slowly, stared.
Lucinda tried to remember how it felt the first time she had made the dragon understand her-the first time she and the huge creature had shared thoughts. I rode on you, do you remember that? “Rode” was a bit of an exaggeration, of course-“held on for dear life” would have been closer to the truth. I helped you get your egg back-do you remember? Lucinda let her gaze slip over to Desta, curled on sand and hay. I helped bring back your daughter.
Meseret’s immense yellow eye blinked again, then closed and stayed that way: The dragon wasn’t going to talk to her, that was clear, but whether she just didn’t want to do it or Lucinda had lost the knack, there was no way to tell. Lucinda shrugged and moved over to Desta’s much smaller pen.
“Not too close to them, Miss,” called Haneb as he trundled his wheelbarrow past. “Remember what happened to Master Colin.”
Of course I remember, she thought. It was my fault. “I’ll be careful. Neither of them would hurt me, Haneb.”
That was called “wishful thinking” and she and Haneb both knew it; still, the small man nodded shyly at her and went on his way. “Just
… careful, please, Miss.”
She turned to the baby dragon, who was watching her with the same seeming disinterest as her mother had shown. “Hello, Desta,” she said, both out loud and in her thoughts. She remembered the day the baby dragon had been born, how excited they had all been when she pecked her way out of her leathery egg, and tried to make those memories into pictures so Desta could “see” them too; but the dragon showed no signs of noticing.
Lucinda continued her efforts for most of an hour, talking with both her thoughts and her voice, trying everything she could think of and making notes about each failed approach, but it was like calling over and over in the center of an empty room: nothing came back to her but echoes. The dragons seemed happy to ignore her. At last she gave up and stood by the rail of Desta’s pen, fighting back tears. She had looked forward to this so much all year, had got through so many boring classes with the knowledge that this was ahead of her-that once again she would have the chance to be special, to be Lucinda, the Girl Who Talks to Dragons! Had it all just been an accident, a fluke?
“Don’t feel bad, Miss,” Haneb said. “They are not friendly. They are dragons. But the little one…” He hesitated. “With the little one-there is a secret… ”
Lucinda sniffed and quickly wiped her eyes. She was ashamed to have Haneb see her feeling so sorry for herself. “A secret…?”
“So she like you better. To… touch her. To be her friend.”
Lucinda’s heart jumped. Ragnar had once told her Haneb had come to Ordinary Farm with Meseret and Alamu when the dragons were younger than Desta was now, that they a
ll came together from the ancient Middle East. Was he finally going to share the secret of communicating with them? Magic words? Some special hand-movements? “Yes, Haneb, tell me! Please!”
The animal handler looked at Desta, then turned toward Lucinda in that odd way he had, looking at her only from the corner of his eye. “She… she likes carrots.”
Chapter 8
Old Furniture
Really weird things were going on with the farm this year-Tyler could feel it. Probably the strangest was that Lucinda had overheard Gideon talking to Mrs. Needle about what might happen if he died-she was certain their great-uncle had been saying that that he wanted to arrange things so that Tyler and his sister would inherit the farm! And Mrs. Needle had actually gone along with that, or at least appeared to, but Tyler didn’t think that if something really happened to Gideon things would go so easily: the witch was not just going to give up on grabbing the farm for her son Colin.
But if she couldn’t change Gideon Goldring’s mind, what else could Patience Needle do? She didn’t even legally exist in this century-it wasn’t like she could take him to court and sue him.
Tyler had also been wondering what Colin was really up to in the library. Tyler had told Gideon he’d found Grace’s locket there, of course, but on a farm with so few people to do all the work, would Gideon really send a healthy young man to sit in the library for months just in case another locket appeared out of thin air? And why had they been talking about books? What did books have to do with Gideon’s missing wife?
The locket hadn’t just appeared out of nowhere in the first place, of course, but Tyler couldn’t admit that without giving up the secret of the washstand mirror, the gateway he had discovered that led to another, strange version of Ordinary Farm, a place where Tyler was certain Gideon’s wife Grace was still trapped.
Tyler scowled. Just a couple of small lies had made things really complicated. It didn’t seem fair.
Tyler took a bite from his peanut butter sandwich and spread what he called the Octavio Files across the bed-all the fragments of the great inventor’s notes and journals he’d been able to collect last summer and had just collected from its hiding place, a pile of ripped, water stained and mouse-chewed fragments small enough to fit into a single old cigar box. It was the first time this visit he’d had a chance to look them over and he wondered if they would make more sense now. He’d tried to pay closer attention at school the last year, especially in science and math, but the kind of things Octavio Tinker wrote about in his journals- crystallometry and dipolar coupling -just hadn’t seem to come up much in Mr. Ortolani’s sixth grade Earth Sciences class.
Octavio kept going on and on in his early notes about the need to create a device that would enable someone to steer their way through the Fault Line. Later on, Tyler knew, Octavio had actually invented such a thing (with some help from Gideon Goldring, apparently) and named it the Continuascope. Tyler himself, however, had gone through the Fault Line safely and come out again without any such gadget. Had that been a one-time accident, or was Tyler himself some kind of mutant freak, like out of a comic book? He had wondered about that since last summer, and now something in one of Octavio’s long, boring, and hard-to-make-out scribbles jumped out at him like a jack-in-the-box:
“I am beginning to believe that some people like myself might have a natural sensitivity for the Fault Line-an inbred ability to discern between its close-packed strata and perhaps even MOVE from one to another… ”
Strata. Tyler went and found Lucinda’s school dictionary to look it up; it meant “layers.” It was only one sentence, but it felt like dynamite in his brain. Octavio was saying that some people could steer their way through the Fault Line even without a machine like the Continuascope! That made Tyler’s hair stand on end. Octavio Tinker was saying some people might have a built-in sensitivity to the Fault Line-people like Octavio himself.
And maybe like Tyler Jenkins, too…!
Octavio had bought this land a long time ago, and had built his endless, crazy house in part to distract people from the Fault Line that he had found here. Maybe Octavio had even found this place in the first place because he had that “natural sensitivity.” And Tyler was Octavio’s descendant-a blood relative through his mom’s side of the family.
Octavio Tinker had discovered the crazy time-hole, the Fault Line, and built his farm around it. Tyler had proved he could travel through the Fault Line by himself. And now Uncle Gideon was thinking of making Tyler and his sister the ones who would inherit the farm. It was all fitting together as if it was meant to be!
Tyler couldn’t stand to sit in his room by himself any longer. He pulled on his shoes and hurried down the stairs, totally psyched to find Lucinda so he could tell her the latest news.
He looked around all the obvious places in the house but he couldn’t find his sister. He guessed that she was off annoying the dragons on the other side of the farm, but he went out to have a quick look in the gardens behind the house just in case-she sometimes liked to wander around there.
Ooola, the girl he had brought back from the Ice Age, was out in the middle of the vegetable patch, down on her knees as though she was pulling weeds.
“Hey, Ooola,” he called, “have you seen my sister? I’m trying to find her.”
She thought about it very carefully, then shook her head. “I do not see her.” She smiled. “Will you come to help me, Tyler? I am picking up slocks!”
“Slocks?” He wandered nearer to peer over the fence. Ooola was kneeling by a patch of sunflowers, each bloom bright as a tiny sun. As if to make an argument against such colorful good cheer, the old abandoned greenhouse stood by its lonely self at the distant end of the garden rows, like a tomb with picture windows.
“See?” The cave girl held out an aluminum pie pan filled with gross, shiny little blobs. “Many slocks I find!”
“Oh. You mean ‘slugs’.”
“Slogs, yes. They walk here from all over, these slogs!” she said. “Many and many following! Like the deers that run all together in my home.”
“Herds of slugs. I get you.” Tyler wasn’t quite certain what she was so excited about-there were lots of slugs in the garden, so what? Wasn’t that where slugs liked to hang out? Tyler liked Ooola, but she also made him a little nervous: he thought she might have sort of a crush on him because he’d rescued her from a bear. He also didn’t want to spend his day in the hot summer sun picking up gooey slugs. “Sorry, Ooola, but I can’t help right now. I have to find Lucinda.”
She looked disappointed, but smiled again. “Is okay, but tell Gid-ee-on-lots of many slogs!”
When he looked back, she was waving at him. “Wait, Tyler! Something is remembering!”
“I know, many lots of slugs!”
“No!” She shook her head vigorously. “Remembering to me! When I am lying down looking at slogs, I hear someone walking. Maybe your sister. Going that way.” She pointed to where the path curved away from the vegetable garden, past the old greenhouse toward the outer gardens and the library. Tyler had a strange moment of jealousy. Lucinda hadn’t gone to hang out with Colin Needle, had she? He thanked Ooola and trotted off in the direction she had indicated.
Tyler had a bigger surprise as he reached the ancient, mostly overgrown rose garden and the path that led through it to the library: something dropped flapping out of the upper branches of a tall tree, brushing against his hair so that he jumped in surprise and covered his head with his hands.
“Zaza!” he shouted in delight when he realized who was gliding around him in wide circles. “Zaza, come here, you crazy monkey! I missed you!”
They had a long conversation. Tyler was the only one talking but Zaza contributed enthusiastically, mostly with ear-pinches and nose-nips. The little gray winged monkey was clearly happy to see him. He wondered why she had stayed away from him so long. Maybe she didn’t know where his room was this year.
As he reached the library Zaza jumped up into the air and flapped h
er way up to the roof where she settled and folded her finger-wings around her like a cloak, telling him as clearly as if she’d spoken it that she was going to wait outside while he finished whatever errand was taking him into the spooky old building.
Tyler walked through the open front door without knocking-he had as much right to be there as his sister, didn’t he?-but slowed within a few steps because he heard voices, and neither of them was Lucinda’s.
“Because, Colin, if you wait for Gideon to understand what’s best for the farm, you’re going to wait forever.” That was Mrs. Needle, her voice angry but also as cold and controlled as what came out of a soft-serve ice cream machine. “And we will have lost our home. Because Gideon Goldring is a fool.”
“That’s not fair, Mother,” Tyler heard Colin say. He wasn’t arguing with her, exactly, but he wasn’t agreeing with her, either, which was a point in his favor, Tyler thought. A very small point, but a point. “Gideon promised there would always be a place for us here … ”
“Yes! As servants! Is that what you want, Colin? To be a servant to the Jenkins children in your own home?”
Tyler had been backing toward the open door, but now a breeze pushed it closed behind him with a sudden and surprising bang.
“Who’s there?” An instant later Patience Needle had appeared from around the corner. “What are you doing here, Master Jenkins?” She had wiped the emotion from her voice, but her eyes looked like furious black pinpoints. “Were you eavesdropping…?”
“N-no!” Tyler stammered. She was a small, slender woman-smaller than Tyler now that he had grown a bit-but she still frightened him very badly. “No! I just came to… to look for my sister… ” He swallowed. Better to act like he hadn’t heard anything. “Is Lucinda here?”
“Perhaps she is doing something useful,” Mrs. Needle said, her emotions now completely disguised again. “As Colin has been doing-which is why I brought him his lunch.” She smiled. It looked like the last thing a small, furry creature might see before it got swallowed. “I didn’t know you were coming, Tyler, otherwise I would have brought you something as well.” She turned and called over her shoulder, “Don’t work too hard, Colin, dear!” She swung back to Tyler. “I wish he’d get out more,” she said with almost convincing sweetness. “Perhaps the two of you could have a game of catch.” She showed her tight smile once more, then stepped past him and out the library door, leaving behind a hint of chill and the scent of something flowery.