by Tad Williams
Sometimes they fed the baby animals, which was Lucinda’s favorite chore. Once, Mr. Walkwell let her put on a bird-headed glove to feed a baby griffin, which was about the size of a housecat. It had a four-legged body but a head like a bird, and was covered all over with golden down like a baby chick. Despite having fierce little claws the baby griffin was more nervous about her than she was about it. Lucinda had to be very patient until it would accept the bits of worms and ground tuna fish she held in the puppet’s beak.
“If this is a baby, how big do they get?” she asked.
Mr. Walkwell gestured to one of the older siblings in the main pen a few yards away-the aiglet, as Uncle Gideon called the baby, had a small cage of its own. Tawny, feathered hind legs were tucked under its body as their owner napped, its tail occasionally lifting to slap away flies. It was big-about the size of a lion-and she was suddenly grateful that they didn’t have to get the baby out of the adults’ enclosure to feed it. The tail went slap again and the adult griffin sighed in its sleep, a strange noise that might have come from a trumpet made of bone.
As the first week passed, then the second and third, and June gave way to the first of July, Lucinda began to get a sense of how the farm truly worked, but it only made her more confused. First of all, she came to realize, it didn’t seem to be a farm at all. Gideon and his workers didn’t seem to be raising the animals for any purpose, and except for the acres of grass that would be hay for winter feed, and the orchard of fruit trees behind the house, the only normal thing the farm seemed to grow were the vegetables and spices and herbs in Mrs. Needle’s kitchen garden. It was a good-sized garden, full of plants Lucinda had never seen before, and even had a mysterious greenhouse with lots of elaborate, Victorian-looking ironwork, but Mrs. Needle wasn’t growing anything to sell. In fact, nothing on the farm seemed set up to make money or satisfy more than a few basic needs for the people who lived there.
No, Ordinary Farm was more a zoo than anything else-everything seemed to revolve around taking care of all the fantastic animals. But zoos made money by selling tickets to people, Lucinda knew, and that certainly wasn’t going on here (although Gideon could make millions, she realized-maybe billions-if they ever did). So what was going on? If they weren’t making anything, and they weren’t showing anyone the dragons and unicorns, then how were they paying for all the food the animals and people ate, and the medicine, and the people’s salaries, and…?
She hated to admit Tyler was right, but the whole thing just didn’t make sense.
And there were a lot of mouths to feed. The herders, Kiwa, Jeg, and Hoka-“the Three Amigos,” as Tyler called them-spent most of their time in a hut out by the pastureland, but came into the house to eat. Besides them and Haneb and Ragnar and Mr. Walkwell, more than a half dozen other men of many colors and sizes worked on the property and lived in a bunkhouse near the reptile barn. Lucinda hadn’t had a chance to learn their names yet. So what was that altogether-eighteen or nineteen people to be fed and housed, not including herself and Tyler? And if the animals had been made, somehow, as Tyler thought, then there had to be things she and her brother hadn’t seen-a laboratory and people to staff it.
So how did it all work? Was Uncle Gideon rich? You’d sure never know it from his old striped bathrobe and his threadbare pajamas, which he seemed to be wearing most of the times she saw him, even in the middle of a hot afternoon. In fact, rich or not, Lucinda was pretty sure he was at least a little crazy, especially when she thought about the scary way he had forced that promise out of them.
Still, even if their great-uncle turned out to be the world’s richest loony, it didn’t explain the dragons.
It was a Friday, the third Friday since she and Tyler had come to Ordinary Farm, and Lucinda was in the huge front parlor. The room had a marvelous stained-glass window featuring a gorgeous snake-Lucinda found herself quite hypnotized by it-plus a large collection of mirrors and clocks, which she was giving an offhand dusting when she heard the bell summoning everyone to dinner. She was thinking with pleasurable anticipation about the apple brown betty Sarah was baking when Gideon walked in the front door.
Lucinda assumed that he was on his way to dinner as well, but he only walked by her on his way to the staircase, his face sagging and empty.
“Uncle Gideon?”
He didn’t even speak or look back as he trudged through a door at the back of the stairs and off somewhere into the depths of the house, his bathrobe flapping like the cape of a defeated superhero who had just decided to retire from the crime-fighting business. Then Colin Needle came through the front door also, his bony face twisted with anger.
“What’s wrong?” Lucinda asked him. “What’s going on?”
Colin was so upset that flecks of spit flew from his mouth as he spoke. “I tried to tell him I was sorry. I tried to tell him how upset I am too. But he never listens to me! He just pushed me aside like I was nothing.”
Lucinda had never seen the older boy show much emotion. She felt sorry for him, though-she’d been on the other end of Gideon’s anger and knew what it felt like. “Sorry about what? What’s happened?”
Colin looked at her almost blankly. Then he said, “Meseret’s egg isn’t going to hatch. There’s a baby inside but no heartbeat. Again. It’s happened every time.” His anger surged again. “But he blames my mother for it! In spite of everything she tried to do!” He was getting loud now and it made Lucinda a little nervous-Gideon couldn’t have gone very far in such a short time. “Like she’s supposed to fix the dragon, fix the money, fix everything that’s wrong with this stupid farm! Fix all his stupid mistakes!”
“Colin, I’m really sorry… ” she began, but the boy was so consumed with his feelings that he wasn’t even looking at her. Instead Colin turned and half walked, half ran toward the kitchen.
Suddenly Lucinda was in no hurry to follow him. She wasn’t very hungry anymore. In fact, the thought of apple brown betty made her stomach turn.
Chapter 13
Cheeky Monkey, Sneaky Squirrel
T yler woke up late on Saturday, the day after the bad news about Meseret’s egg. Nobody was talking much at the breakfast table-even the farmhands seemed depressed.
“It has happened three times before,” Ragnar said, shaking his head. “The eggs will not hatch. It begins to look like she will never give birth to a living wormlet.”
For a moment Tyler thought the big man was making some weird joke about eggs. “Omelette?”
“Wormlet-a dragon child. Worm -that is the word for dragon where I come from.” Ragnar smiled sadly. “Where I grew up, we were terrified of them. We would have thought the news that a lindenwurm egg had died was cause for celebration. Now we all fear that Meseret and her mate will be the last of their kind.”
Ragnar grew up believing in dragons? Tyler wondered where that might have been-in Storybook Land? “What’s her mate’s name, again?”
“Alamu.” Ragnar went back to the heavy work of shoveling in his breakfast, an immense pile of bread and fruit and sausage. It was a process that even Tyler, who could put food away faster than his mom could earn money to pay for it (as she always told him), could only watch with stunned respect.
After finishing breakfast, Tyler pocketed a nectarine for Zaza and headed back to his room. The little winged monkey came to his window at least once a day and happily took any scraps he gave her. He had begun to think of her almost as a pet.
He put the nectarine on a napkin on top of the dresser, then stretched out on the bed, wondering what he was going to do today while everyone else seemed to be mourning a bad egg. He hoped Mr. Walkwell didn’t have more slave labor in mind for him. The old man could be a very hard taskmaster, and he didn’t particularly like Tyler’s habit of asking lots of questions. He was a good teacher about farm things, but about anything else-forget it.
Something was poking uncomfortably into the back of Tyler’s neck. He reached under his pillow and his fingers found something crinkly and rough-p
aper. He sat up, unfolding it. Had someone left him a note?
No, he realized with astonishment, he’d seen this piece of paper before, yellowed with age and chewed into a fringe along the edges like a cowboy’s chaps. It was the scrap of paper from the library, the one he had lost when the figure in the mirror startled him. But how had it wound up here?
The paper had been tattered to begin with and Tyler lying on it hadn’t helped things, so he had to smooth it out very carefully. He squinted, trying to make out words. It was handwritten in ink that had turned mostly brown and the letters were funny, old-fashioned cursive with odd, stringy shapes. Some ancient grocery list or something, perhaps from one of the old newspaper boxes they used in the barns to make nesting material for the basilisks and some of the smaller birds. The only interesting thing about it was how it might have wound up in his bed.
Then, just before he dropped the paper into the wastebasket, the word dragons jumped out at him.
Tyler held the faded letters up to catch the morning light. There wasn’t much left on the page that was readable-most of it had been water smeared or shredded into confetti-but he could make out the sentence: if dragons are not strictly fabulous, then we shall find them before, not during, the spread of their tales into Europe…
Fabulous? Wasn’t that what people said on fashion shows or something- “You look fabulous, dahling!” How could a dragon be fabulous? He ought to ask somebody, but he suddenly felt jealous about sharing this little bit of paper with anyone-it was, after all, the first bit of the mystery that seemed to be his and his alone. But who had put it here, since he had definitely not had it when he came back from the library? Lucinda, and then forgot to tell him? One of the housekeepers?
Zaza. Of course, it had to be the monkey. Perhaps she had seen him drop it and thought she was returning something of his. Did monkeys think like that? Tyler went to the window to look for her, but nothing living was in sight except for a single, fat black squirrel watching him from the branch where Zaza often sat. The squirrel’s staring eyes seemed an odd color, as if it were sick. Tyler didn’t like the look of it. He ducked his head back inside and pulled the window closed.
When he turned again to the scrap of paper another clear fragment of writing caught his eye, a darker black swath of ink that had been protected by being folded in on itself: and if, as I believe, this Breach or Fault shall prove to be a phenomenon of supernature, that is, NATURE THAT HAS NOT PREVIOUSLY BEEN DISCERNED OR DESCRIBED, then it could be I owe it to all humanity to make public what I have found. This likely will be the dilemma from whose solution my entire career will take direction.
Whatever the heck that meant. None of it made sense so far, although the words Breach and Fault stuck in his mind. What was the person writing talking about? And who had written it? Octavio, the guy in the painting?
The library, he decided. That was where it had come from, and even though he didn’t like the place and its creepy washstand mirror, that was where he’d have to look for more pieces. Tyler sighed. If you had asked him a month ago what he’d do with his first free day of the summer, going to the library would not have been the activity he’d have bet any money on.
“Really?” Lucinda looked up from her diary, staring at Tyler like he was some stranger pretending to be her brother. “You want me to come with you? You’re actually asking me?”
Tyler groaned, weighing the flashlight in his hand. Was this going to be just what he feared, another stupid argument with his sister? Why couldn’t she just go along with things?
“I mean… ” She shook her head. “I’ll do it, yeah. I’m just surprised. You don’t usually ask me to go with you.”
“I do too.” A nervous little something in Tyler was tap ping its foot, but he was doing his best to ignore it. “Whatever. The reason we have to go there is because I think I found part of Octavio Tinker’s diary.”
“Really?” Her eyes got big. “Uncle Gideon’s grandfather, or whatever he was?”
“Yeah.” He took the folded page out of his pocket and held it out. “Here, look. Mice kind of got it…”
She handed it back when she’d finished. “ ‘Supernature’? I don’t understand it.”
“Neither do I, but I bet if we find more, we will.”
“I don’t want to get into any more trouble, Tyler.”
He made a noise of frustration. “Come on! Uncle Gideon’s practically daring us to find out what’s going on here. Don’t you want to know?”
She stared at him, then sighed. “Okay. When do you want to go?”
“Now, when no one’s watching. Well-I’m not sure where Colin is.”
“It’s okay-he’s off working on his computer.”
“Good. Do you have to run any errands for the Wicked Witch of the West?”
“Oh, don’t be so mean,” she said, then shook her head. “Anyway, she’s in the kitchen, helping Sarah and Azinza with something. She told me she wouldn’t need me for an hour.”
“Perfect.” He resisted the urge to yank her onto her feet, but only barely. “Come on, then!”
Out in the hallway, when Zaza dropped down from nowhere onto Tyler’s shoulder, Lucinda jumped. “Whoa!” she said. “Oh, it’s the monkey. She scared me.”
“She kind of likes to hang out with me.” He couldn’t help being a little proud of it.
Zaza seemed nervous, turning in circles on his shoulder as they walked around the house and through the garden and outbuildings toward the library hall. It seemed a longer trip this time, Tyler thought, but the house was always funny that way.
The monkey suddenly leaped up shrieking, wings flapping hard, nearly scaring Tyler and Lucinda to death. It took a long time before she settled on Tyler’s shoulder once more and went back to tugging anxiously at his hair. He looked up but couldn’t see anything in the trees or skies overhead that might have frightened her.
Lucinda was impressed by the library, all right-not so much by the picture of Uncle Octavio, who she thought looked very full of himself, but by the sheer number of books. “This is more than we have in our whole school library,” she said. “More than in our whole city library!”
“Yeah, but most of ’em are, I don’t know, crazy science and math books and stuff you wouldn’t like-not a single copy of Mallchickz Go to Malibu.”
“You’re being a craphead again, Tyler. I haven’t read those books since I was in fourth grade-when you were reading Axel the Tow Truck Fixes a Flat.”
He laughed in spite of himself. How had she remembered that? He had really liked those stories-Axel had a best friend who was a girl motorcycle and all the characters were cars and trucks. “Come on,” he said, and switched on his flashlight-this time he wasn’t going to give away their presence by turning on the lights. “I’ll show you the haunted room.”
The room didn’t look quite as creepy as it did before, but Lucinda didn’t exactly look like she wanted to move in, either. “Why did you say ‘haunted’?” she asked in a whisper.
He took her to the mirror at the washstand and swept the flashlight over it. At first it looked like nothing more than an ordinary mirror, reflecting Tyler and his light, Lucinda, and the room. After a while, though, it still looked like that.
“I don’t get it,” his sister said.
“It was different last time.” Tyler was embarrassed. He could hear the upset in his own voice and didn’t like it-too much like a little kid. “I could see me, but I was different -different clothes and stuff. It wasn’t the same me. And the light in the room was different, too, like a different time of day. I’m not lying, Lucinda!”
“I believe you,” she said, surprising him. “We’ve seen unicorns and a dragon, so why couldn’t there be a haunted mirror?”
Tyler let out a breath. He hadn’t expected to be believed. Suddenly he felt so much lighter he almost thought he could float up into the air like Zaza. “Good. Anyway, it’s also where I found this piece of paper-on the floor here. We should look through the drawers
.”
Most of the washstand drawers were empty, but in the bottom right drawer they found an old-fashioned pen, the kind you dipped into a bottle of ink. Part of the length had been chewed off by something, and the bottom of the drawer was broken so that they could see down to the darkness under the dresser. Tyler was just pushing it closed again when Lucinda grabbed his arm and pointed. A shred of yellowed paper was caught in the jagged edge of the drawer’s broken bottom. Tyler’s heart began to beat more quickly. It was only a tatter the size of a fingernail clipping, but when he pulled it out and held it up next to the page with the writing, the paper was the exact same color.
They tried to move the washstand away from the wall, but it was either much heavier than it looked or had been bolted to the wall, perhaps to keep the heavy mirror on top from tipping the whole thing over. Tyler got down on his hands and knees and began probing the hole at the bottom of the drawer with the ruined pen. Something was still in there. He poked at it until sweat ran down into his eyes and dripped onto the dusty floor, then finally had the idea of poking it out toward the front where he could get a grip on it and gently ease the whole thing out.
Lucinda leaned in as he held it up. It was a leather-bound notebook, full of pages just like the one he’d found on his bed. The whole thing had been badly chewed by mice or some other scavengers, so that many of the pages were little more than tangled curls of paper. Still, a quick riffle through the pages showed lots of writing-the mice hadn’t ruined it all.