by Tad Williams
Colin Needle pushed open the doors on either side of the corridor. The rooms were small and neat, each with an old wooden-framed bed covered with a crazy quilt, a desk, and bare white walls. The room on the left had a bigger window and a good view of the cherry tree.
“This one’s mine,” Lucinda announced.
“Fine,” said Tyler, and slung his bag into the other room.
“I have work to do,” said Colin. “Dinner is at five. Don’t go out of the house unless someone goes with you.”
Tyler snorted. “Why not?”
“Because Mr. Goldring doesn’t want you to. In fact, you should just stay in your rooms until someone is free to show you around.”
“Why? Carnivorous cows or something?”
Colin Needle was clearly angry again. “It’s a farm.” He said it like a teacher talking to the dumbest student in class. “There are open wells and ditches, sharp tools, and very few lights. And animals, yes, who shouldn’t be startled. So just stay in your rooms.” He turned and walked down the hall, stiff and straight as a wooden soldier.
“What a creep,” said Tyler when Colin was gone.
“He’s not that bad. Kind of a nerd.” Lucinda struggled to get her suitcases onto her bed. She was feeling more than a little overwhelmed by all the strange new sights.
“Yuck. Could I feel more sweaty and gross? Me first in the bathroom.”
Tyler laughed. “This is a farm, Miss Barbie Doll. You’ll probably be using the outhouse in the back forty.”
“Shut up, Tyler,” said Lucinda. “You may belong on a farm, but I don’t.”
“Well, surprise-you’re on one anyway.”
Suddenly a bellowing, booming roar rattled everything in the room, including the window in its frame. Lucinda shrieked and jumped. The rumbling sound came from somewhere outside the house, but it was so deep and powerful Tyler could feel it through his feet even as it died away. It was an animal noise like a lion with a turbo upgrade, but there was something else in it, too, a kind of hissing crackle that made it more frightening than any lion because it was somehow alien.
“Whoa! What was that?” he said. “Man, what made that noise?”
His sister didn’t say a word. She just stared at her hands as if she couldn’t believe how strange they looked, shaking like that.
Chapter 4
The Sick Barn
T yler stared out his sister’s window. His bones felt like they were still rattling from the force of that crazy sound. “Lucinda, are you unconscious or something? What made that noise?”
“Just one of the animals, I guess,” she said in a pale voice, and then actually began to unpack her suitcase.
Tyler gave her a look of utter disbelief, then crossed the hall so he could look out his own window. “Luce,” he called, “ Luce, come look at this. There are farm guys running here from all over.” Six or seven men were hurrying toward the place that looked like a vast white tube sunk into the ground. He thought one of them, bigger than the rest, might be the one Mr. Walkwell had called Ragnar.
Lucinda had stopped in his doorway as though she didn’t want to see. “Maybe-maybe a cow got hurt… or… ”
Tyler laughed harshly and dropped down to sit on his bed. “You’re kidding, right? A cow. Well, it sure was one loud cow. It sounded like a T. rex!”
Something about the way she flinched tugged at him in some deep place where there were only feelings, not words, but he couldn’t help it. He was angry. “I’m definitely going to find out what’s going on,” he said. “You have to come with me, Luce.”
“No. I’m tired. I’m going to take a nap.” She turned away from him, letting her hair fall forward in front of her face like a curtain, like a mask. Oh, but Tyler hated the way she did that-hiding from things she didn’t want to see. Okay, maybe it was because she was scared, but you wouldn’t catch him doing that, just praying for someone else to make the bad things go away.
“Luce, listen to me. There’s something out there, something really weird. You heard it too. I know you did, Luce, so just admit it. I know.”
She still wouldn’t say anything, but she didn’t go back to her room, either. “Lucinda. Luce, come on!” He reached out his foot to push at her but he pushed too hard, with too much anger.
She finally looked up, her expression ice cold. “You kicked me.”
“I’m trying to get you to pay attention!”
“I hate you, Tyler Jenkins.”
“Luce, I’m sorry, but-”
“I hate you!” she shouted, then turned and ran into her room, slamming the door behind her. “I hope that cow really is a monster,” she yelled from inside. “I hope it eats you!”
Tyler stared at her closed door. He almost knocked-he really wanted her to come with him-but he didn’t, because he knew that asking her again wouldn’t change a thing. Some things never changed.
As he stomped along the corridors and staircases of Ordinary Farm looking for a way outside, Tyler found his anger toward Lucinda easing up a little. She just wasn’t good at stuff like this. She yelled about the smallest, most unimportant things until he wanted to slug her, but when she gave up, she really gave up.
When Dad first left, things had been bad-really really bad. It was Lucinda who had kept Tyler fed-Lucinda, trying to be the big responsible one. That was a time when she had definitely come through for her kid brother…
And after a while, things got better. Mom had started work and was home most nights to make them dinner, though it was usually a bit late because she worked so hard. She would need an hour to kick off her shoes and pour herself a glass or two of wine-“decompression time,” as she called it. After that she’d usually throw something together-nothing fancy, of course, just hot dogs and a can of baked beans or her two-minute quesadillas. Sometimes after the wine kicked in she could be quite amusing, doing imitations of the impossible people she had to deal with every day or making jokes about Lucinda’s bad moods. Even Tyler had to admit his mother could be funny-in a grown-up, mom-ish kind of way-and okay-looking too. Inside Tyler, the alternating states of nothingness and anxiety had eased because things were no longer terrifyingly out of control…
But about that time, Tyler began catching Lucinda staring at their mom, and what was on her face was a look of the most intense longing. All his sister wanted was a little normal stuff in her life, just a bit of what those perfect families on television had so much of, and Tyler knew it. And not long after that, the really dark stuff came for Lucinda. Recalling it now made it hard for Tyler to stay angry at her, even when Lucinda was acting like a total-
Tyler suddenly stopped, realizing that he had been walking for a while now without thinking much about it. “Wow,” he breathed, looking around at the unfamiliar surroundings. He was completely, absolutely lost.
He was on a landing at the bottom of a staircase. In front of him lay a weird little parlor room with a glass door, and on the far side of the room he could just see a second door. He walked across the echoing wooden floor, wondering if he was somewhere he shouldn’t be. Considering that Colin had told him they were supposed to stay in their rooms, that seemed pretty certain.
The glass door was unlocked. There was no furniture in the small parlor except a single overstuffed chair and a table with a vase and a dirty plastic flower so old that it might have been the very first plastic flower ever made. He crossed to the far door and found another staircase outside, this one leading somewhere else entirely. Tyler climbed the stairs and stepped into a corridor with windows along one side. He took a few steps, then something rattled against the window, startling him so badly that he gasped and jumped in the air. He had only the quickest glimpse of the thing that had bumped against the window from the outside, a round little head and a blur of greenish-gray body, but that glimpse had made no sense. Why were there monkeys here? Did colonies of wild monkeys live out here in the hills of California? Or was Great-uncle Gideon running some kind of crazy monkey farm?
He was
lost, stalked by monkeys, and meanwhile, whatever had made that noise was out there and he was stuck in here. It made him want to hit something. He hurried back down the stairs and began searching even more strenuously, but every hall seemed to lead nowhere, every window to look out on puzzling, confusing sights, and nothing seemed to get him closer to finding his way outside.
Another hallway, another window, another rattle that caught him by surprise, but this time the perpetrator didn’t hurry away. Yes, it really was a monkey crouched on the outside window frame, its little fingers splayed on the glass as it peered in at him. It was a small one, with big eyes and short fur, but it was definitely, unquestionably, a monkey. He had only a moment to stare back at the little animal, wondering nervously if it was rabid or something, wondering if it could get through the window and bite him, before it sort of flipped away and was gone.
Tyler ran in the direction the monkey had gone, opened a door, and found-glory Hallelujah!-stairs that led down and down and down. He didn’t bother to count floors, he just ran down flight after flight until there weren’t any more, then found a door and burst into the outside world, laughing hysterically.
He stepped onto a gravelly path. Some early evening cool had begun spilling into the heat of the afternoon, and the air was filled with the scents of dried grass and baked yellow earth. There was an animal tang too-Tyler suddenly remembered visiting the zoo when he was small, how the lion cages had stunk of big-animal urine.
Then something leaped, rattling along the edge of the porch roof.
Tyler jumped with surprise. The monkey moved in an awkward, bouncing way along the roof guttering, as if it was injured somehow. Tyler followed it along the edge of the house as it led him around a corner and into a place that was a sort of courtyard, with an archway opening at the far end.
And then the creature dropped from the roof and into a patch of light angling into the courtyard. It stood exposed, staring at him. If Lucinda was here, she’d be saying, “Ooohh, look!” or something like that, because it was kind of cute. The monkey spread its arms, as though waving at him to hurry. Bizarrely it was wearing a cape. No, Tyler realized an instant later, his heart suddenly speeding, that was no cape.
The monkey had wings.
Even as he watched, astonished, the little creature jumped and flew to the far end of the courtyard, disappearing into a patch of thick, high grass. Tyler started toward it, then froze as he realized he was about to run in front of a large window and that Mrs. Needle was on the other side of it, talking to someone he couldn’t quite see.
The grass rustled. The monkey was going to get away. Tyler took a breath, waited until Mrs. Needle turned her back to the window for a moment, then leaped out of the shadows and dashed past the window as fast as he could. He threw himself down into the grass and lay breathing and listening. There was no sound of pursuit-but no sound of the creature he’d been following, either. Only crickets.
He sat up. Through the archway he could see the huge cement building they’d noticed from their windows, the bomb shelter or whatever it was. The concrete seemed to glow a little in the light of the late-afternoon sun, but it also had lights of its own strung along the side of it, as if for security, and at the moment it looked as mysteriously fascinating as a UFO. Tyler dashed across the grass, out of the courtyard. Up close, the tube-shaped building was even bigger than he’d guessed, more than a hundred feet long. Narrow, high windows started halfway up its side, their bottoms a dozen feet or more above the ground. Tyler really wanted to look through one of them, but knew he wouldn’t be able to climb the sloping concrete wall to reach them, so he crept silently along the edge of the building looking for a door. He found something better at the far end-a metal platform that ran beneath the last three windows. He stared at it for a long moment, listening to the crickets.
“ Don’t go out of the house, ” Colin Needle had told them. “ Just stay in your rooms. ”
Yeah. Right.
Tyler ran toward the platform and began climbing. The ladder was really rusty-it shed flakes when he put his weight on the first rung and it creaked alarmingly. He froze at the top, holding his breath, but the crickets seemed to think all was well and were still making noise. He slid off the ladder and crawled along the platform to the first window, then peered in.
What a disappointment-something really big was blocking most of the window. It gleamed a little like plastic in the uneven light, and was patterned like a quilt or a honeycomb. Tyler’s mind tried to make sense of it. He was probably looking at sacks, he decided at last, sacks of animal feed piled high and then secured with a net.
Tyler crept to the next window. The pile of sacks sloped off a bit here, enough to give him more of a view of the building’s interior. Bright lights were burning inside-the place looked more like something industrial than part of a farm, like an auto repair garage at night-and in their glare Tyler could make out some of the farmhands slicing open more feed-sacks with knives as big as machetes, then emptying them into a huge trough. Nothing very interesting, he decided.
The pile of sacks, just beside him on the other side of the window, heaved.
Tyler’s breath caught so sharply that for a moment he thought he would choke on it. He stared, trying to make sense of the weird motion just a few feet from where he crouched.
The massive pile heaved again and Tyler felt himself go cold all over. They weren’t sacks at all but something alive, something as big as an elephant-no, a dinosaur! Whatever it was groaned, a sound so deep and loud that the window and the platform both vibrated as if a hurricane had hit them. Tyler staggered to his feet in sudden terror and slipped on the slick metal platform, then he was sliding under the railing, scrabbling for a hold…
A strong hand reached down and grabbed his collar. For one second Tyler’s legs thrashed over empty air. Then a second hand curled itself into his hair and Tyler, yelling with pain, was yanked back onto the platform so hard that he hit the wall beneath the window and made it rattle. The thing on the other side of the glass made a groaning, rumbling noise, and the whole platform shuddered again.
“You stupid boy!” somebody shouted next to his ear. “You stupid boy!”
Lights came on suddenly all around the concrete building- fwam fwam fwam! -burning lights, bright as the sun. For a moment Tyler couldn’t see anything. When the spots in front of his eyes finally faded, he was looking up into the very angry face of Mr. Walkwell.
Chapter 5
Meseret
“G o away, Tyler,” Lucinda said, but the person at the door only knocked again, louder. “I already told you, leave me alone.”
“Lucinda Jenkins? Open up please.”
It wasn’t Tyler but a deep-voiced man. She jumped out of bed and pulled on her jeans. She worried for a moment about opening the door to a stranger, but he didn’t ask again and somehow that reassured her.
The stranger was a big, bearded, fair-haired man in overalls. He looked fit and very muscular, but his whiskers and long hair were both streaked with gray, and the deep wrinkles around his eyes and on his forehead suggested he was at least her father’s age, if not older.
“You’d better come down,” he said. “Your brother is in trouble.”
Because of his accent, it took her a moment to understand, then panic exploded through her. “Oh! Is he hurt?”
The bearded man shook his head slowly. She couldn’t figure out his expression-was he hiding a smile or something less pleasant? He had a couple of old, pale scars on his cheeks, which made her nervous. “Not hurt. But I think you must come down.”
She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know this man at all. Their first night in the middle of nowhere, and what had her dumb brother gotten into? “I’m… I’m not supposed to go anywhere with strangers.”
He looked at her hard for a moment, then he really did smile-the scars disappeared into the crinkly lines around his eyes and it changed his whole face into something much, much nicer. “Fairly spoken, Lucinda
Jenkins. Ragnar Lodbrok is my name. Now we are not strangers.”
“But… I still don’t know you.”
He laughed. “And I do not know you, but I will trust you not to harm me. Still, we go downstairs only to the kitchen, and perhaps then one of the women there will speak for me, yes?”
She felt a little better, although she kept some distance between them as she followed him out the door. “What happened? What did Tyler do?”
“What boys do.” Ragnar didn’t seem too put out about it. “But it was not yet time.”
“Time for what?”
He shrugged his broad shoulders. The bearded man reminded her a little of the scarecrow in the old Wizard of Oz movie-he had an almost boneless way of moving-but the scarecrow hadn’t been anywhere near so broad across the back.
Scarecrow probably didn’t have tattoos like that, either, she thought. She’d just noticed spikes of blue-black ink sticking up past Ragnar’s shirt collar.
Mrs. Needle was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, pulling a sweater on over her thin shoulders. “You found her, I see,” she said to Ragnar. “I’ll say it again-I don’t think you should bring her. This will be difficult enough.”
Ragnar nodded, but under his polite reply his voice was hard. There was some sort of power struggle between these two, Lucinda guessed-an old one. “Yes. But this secret is broken. She may as well learn now.”
His words frightened Lucinda so much that her knees went weak. Had that grumpy joke she shared with Tyler been right after all? Was this some kind of weird cult like she’d seen on so many TV shows? Were she and Tyler about to be given the chance to join or be killed?