The Dragons of Ordinary Farm of-1

by Tad Williams

  Standard Valley.

  There were at least a half dozen books in a row with those words on the cover. She pulled them from the shelf, tried to swipe the dust from the floor so she could sit, then realized it was hopeless and took them back to the chairs near the front of the building. Three of them were stapled piles of paper-Yokut County phone books (“containing Canning, Standard Valley, Tentpole, and Harper’s Creek”). There were no listings for Tinker or Ordinary Farm in any of them, so she put them aside. Another was a hardbound book from some organization called the California Grange titled Yokut County Grange, followed by a list of nearby towns, each one with a number, one of which was “Standard Valley #723.” She leafed through it, but it was just some kind of farming thing with information about water rights and who to contact in Sacramento or Washington, D.C., about various farming problems. She flipped it onto the pile with the phone books.

  The last one didn’t look any more interesting than the others-something titled Building Allotments and Land Surveys of Standard Valley, 1963 -but it fell open right to a page titled “Property: O. Tinker,” a sort of blueprint drawing of buildings and other things. Even as she stared at it, something like a cool breeze whispered down the stacks, ruffling her hair and making her gasp. She looked around in surprise but the library was empty and all the windows she could see were closed.

  Lucinda hurriedly shelved the other books, but held on to the land surveys. Then she took a deep breath as she walked back across the library to the door between the shelves-Tyler’s haunted mirror room. The key was still in the lock.

  After the chilly visitation she had just experienced her brother’s talk of ghosts seemed even more meaningful than before. She really, really didn’t want to go in. Still, as she turned and saw old Octavio’s painted, half-amused eyes on her, she knew she didn’t want to just walk out, either. This was a mystery. This was an adventure. She reminded herself of all the brave heroines in the books she’d read, took one more breath, and walked in, the book clutched to her chest like armor.

  It doesn’t feel any more haunted than the rest of the library, she told herself. It was just old, and dusty, and probably-ick-spidery.

  She forced herself forward. Like it or not, she’d have to pull out all the dresser drawers and see if anything had fallen down behind them. She should probably look under the bed as well, the horrible, cobwebby bed…

  She stopped, staring into the mirror. No one looked back but herself, so for a moment she didn’t even understand why she felt so alarmed. Then she saw that on the wall in the mirror room somebody had written a word in the dust: OLIS. She turned, hoping that the strange word would be there too, in the real room, that it was just some stupid thing her brother had traced on the wall… but it wasn’t. The strange word only existed in the mirror.

  Lucinda didn’t stop running until she was back in the overgrown garden. The sun was going down and a little wind had sprung up, but this time the cooling breezes of the outside world were welcome.

  She was walking along toward the kitchen door in the growing dark when a tall figure stepped out of the shadows, startling her so that she almost dropped the book clutched to her chest.

  “What you doing, missy?” It was Caesar, the man who brought Gideon his trays and who helped out around the house. He looked at her with concern. “You look like you seen a haunt.”

  She actually laughed-he didn’t know how right he was! Or maybe he did. She didn’t know and she didn’t care. She was sick of mysteries and just wanted to get into her room and pull the blankets over her. “I’m okay.”

  “Didn’t mean to scare you. Just taking the old vegetables and such out to the compost heap.” He showed her the bag in his hand. “What you doing running around in the nearly dark?”

  “Just… exploring.”

  He shook his head. “This not the best place to go exploring after dark. ’Spose they already told you that.”

  “Everybody told us that. But they won’t tell us why.”

  He gave her a strange look. “And you and your brother all bound and determined to find out, huh?” He shook his head again, slowly, as though he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it. He bent down until his dark, broad face was at the same level as her own. His breath smelled like cinammon. “Look here,” he whispered. “I’ll tell you this for free. You seen the best part. You seen the animals, them unicorns and all. Now go on home. There’s other things happened here ain’t so nice. Not so pretty. You and your brother too young to get tangled up in this kind of nonsense-that old man and his crazy notions-and we’ve had some bad people here too. You go on home.”

  “What?” she asked as he straightened up. “What do you mean?”

  “You heard me,” he said quietly as he walked past her, headed for the vegetable garden. When he spoke again, it was in a normal tone-a little loud, even, as though someone else might be listening. “You have a nice evening, now, missy.”

  As he vanished into the gloom, he was singing a slow song Lucinda didn’t recognize.

  “The big bell’s tolling in Galilee

  Ain’t going to tarry here

  Ohhhh Lordy

  Ain’t going to tarry here…”

  Chapter 18

  A Hole in the World

  R agnar appeared at breakfast and announced to everyone in the kitchen, “I have news, but it is not very good, I’m afraid. Alamu found his way into the Sick Barn and took the unhatched egg. Now we will not be able to study it to learn what went wrong.”

  “Oh, no.” Lucinda looked really upset. Tyler usually teased her about her obsession with cute little baby animals-she loved any nature program with tiger or bear or lion cubs-but he felt the sadness too. These were the only dragons in the world, after all: if they couldn’t reproduce, they would also be the last. “When did it happen?” he asked Ragnar.

  “In the dawn. He fooled us, for he usually sleeps until the sun is high. Haneb saw him flying away with it in his mouth.”

  Colin Needle had just walked into the room. “That’s terrible news!” he said, then began filling his plate.

  The rest of July was hurrying past in a round of daily chores and other even less satisfying activities. Tyler felt more frustrated than ever. Mysteries bloomed around every corner but answers were a lot less common.

  Uncle Gideon was barely to be seen. The people in the kitchen (who seemed to know pretty much most of what went on at Ordinary Farm) said he stayed locked up in his study day and night, performing experiments of some kind with Mrs. Needle. It meant a lot of extra work for Ragnar and Mr. Walkwell.

  One evening Tyler ran into his great-uncle wandering alone in Mrs. Needle’s vegetable garden, distracted and apparently confused. When Tyler said hello the old man looked at him as if he didn’t know who Tyler was.

  Was he ill? Crazy? Whatever the case, it made Tyler nervous.

  Worst of all, though, every time Tyler went outside the house on his own the black squirrel followed him, ignoring both his shouts of protest and his attempts to shake it out of the trees. Even when he threw rocks at it, the squirrel scarcely reacted: if a stone came too close it moved just far enough to avoid being hit, but other than that it seemed completely unafraid. Tyler knew he was being watched-but by whom exactly, and why? Who could make a squirrel do something like that, anyway?

  Prevented from exploring, Tyler devoted his afternoons and evenings to studying the few fragments about Ordinary Farm he had collected-Octavio Tinker’s mouse-gnawed journal, the children’s book, and the book of surveys Lucinda had brought back from the library and passed to him with shaking hands. Lucinda’s ghost message, OLIS, wasn’t in the dictionary, and Tyler had combed the shredded pages of Octavio’s diary for any mention of OLIS there, but with no luck. Another mystery.

  The children’s book told him a little about Octavio Tinker’s early life. Born at the end of the nineteenth century in upstate New York, Octavio was a brilliant man who had been a pioneer in the science of crystals and had become
famous-famous enough for a children’s book to be published, anyway!-for growing, at very high speeds, huge crystals that looked like diamonds and other jewels. He had demonstrated this technique all over the world-there was even a picture of him growing some crystals for President Franklin Roosevelt. But the picture that really got Tyler’s attention was one labeled “Professor Tinker and His Continuum-Scope.” The device he was holding in the photo looked very much like the one in the painting, except bigger-Octavio, sporting a very impressive mustache, looked like he was about to play a solo on the French horn.

  So it was a real thing, after all, something he’d actually invented. After skimming the rest of the kids’ book, Tyler put it down and went back to the journal.

  An hour later he had puzzled out a few more smeared or torn words and phrases, including scientific-looking terms like “crystallometry,” “Fulcanelli’s Cross,” “flux growth,” “covalent bonding,” and “node of pure Grailite,” but none of them meant anything to him at all. (After checking the dictionary, he suspected some of them might not even mean anything to his science teachers.) But he also pried apart two stuck pages and found a comparatively unchewed section of Octavio’s writings that he read with growing excitement:

  The Chinese philosopher says, “The adept must… learn the method directly from those skilled in the art… What is written in books is only enough for beginners. The rest is kept secret and is given only in oral teaching… Above all, belief is necessary. Disbelief brings failure.”

  Under this, Octavio had added,

  But as a general rule, believers are not scientists and scientists are not believers. Where can I find someone to help me create the perfect Continuascope?

  There it was, although spelled a little differently-a Continuascope! And when he was thinking about moving to California, Octavio was still thinking about improving the device. Tyler wasn’t certain about the rest of the passage-the dictionary said an “adept” was just someone who had secret knowledge. Octavio had wanted secret knowledge and he had also wanted help building a scientific instrument. So it was interesting, but it still told Tyler precisely nothing. OLIS hadn’t led to anything, either. A whole afternoon’s work, and he really didn’t know any more than when he’d begun.

  Studying, he thought sourly. Grown-ups act like it’s so great, like you can do anything in life if you just study enough. Okay, I’m studying! And in my own free time! And what do I get for it?

  Nothing but nothing, was the obvious answer.

  “And Colin said he really wished he could go to school like we do-you know, a real school with other kids and teachers and everything. He’s homeschooled. His mom has always taught him here. Isn’t that sad? No wonder he doesn’t always know how to behave… .”

  Lucinda was babbling away, but Tyler was still doggedly going through the Octavio Tinker material and hardly paying attention-especially since she was babbling about Colin Needle, who Tyler thought was about as interesting as a pimple on someone’s butt. He had the survey book in front of him open to the Ordinary Farm pages as he made notes on a piece of binder paper.

  “… So maybe you should try being nicer to him,” Lucinda finished. “Maybe he could help us find out some of this stuff you’re so interested in.”

  “Colin?” Tyler couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “You want me to make friends with Junior Doctor Evil?”

  “He really seems like he needs friends, Tyler.”

  “So does a skunk. That doesn’t mean I’m stupid enough to pet one.”

  “You are so mean!”

  “Hold on.” He waved his hand at her. Something had finally clicked. “Come here, Luce. Look at this.”

  She scowled, but wandered over. “What?”

  “Okay, this is what the farm looked like in 1963. Most of the buildings are pretty much the same, but there’s also a bunch of stuff that isn’t here anymore. See these buildings?” He pointed to a cluster of shapes on the survey map that looked as though they should be between the house and the library. “There’s nothing there now. Just a garden.”

  “Maybe that’s the stuff that burned down in the fire.”

  “What fire?”

  “Ragnar said there was a fire-it was a long time ago. Uncle Gideon had a laboratory with all kinds of stuff in it. And he lost it all because the lab burned down.”

  “Wow, really?” Tyler stared at the plans. “Okay, that probably explains some of the missing buildings. But that’s not what I wanted to show you. Look at this map. Really look at it.”

  Lucinda squinted, wrinkling her forehead. “What am I looking at?”

  “That’s just it. What are you looking at? Don’t you notice anything?” He put his finger on the survey and traced the shape.

  “Oh. Oh yeah! It… it all kind of makes a big spiral. Like a shell, or something. When you look at the farm buildings and the house buildings.”

  It was true. Although they weren’t all connected, the buildings marked on the plan seemed to spin off from a single empty point at the center of the property. The shapes of the actual buildings were already strange and off-kilter, and the hole left by the burned-down buildings obscured it even more, so that Tyler had never noticed the shape while walking around the real farm, but here on paper you could see it clearly.

  “But why?” Lucinda asked. “Why build it like that?”

  “Because Octavio Tinker was a major nutcase, probably.” Something else was still puzzling him, but he couldn’t figure it out-something missing, like a noise he hadn’t even noticed until it had stopped. “That stuff in his diary sounds like it comes right out of the Ultimate Scroll II strategy guide…”

  “Where’s the haunted house thing?” Lucinda chewed her lip. “If that’s the reptile barn over there, and that’s the front of the house, then the haunted house thing ought to be right… there.” She put her finger in the center of the open space, the empty hub around which the buildings seemed to spin.

  Tyler stared. “Whoa! You’re right. Lucinda, you’re right!” The “haunted house thing,” as his sister called it, was the big, empty, windowless building they had passed when they first arrived at the farm, a weird structure that looked kind of like a scary mansion out of a movie, with ancient gray boards and a big tub that stretched down from it, like a mosquito’s stinging snout. “But that barn or whatever it is looks like it’s been around since a lot farther back than 1963

  … so why isn’t it on this map?”

  “It’s not a barn,” Lucinda said, leaning on him to examine the picture. “Don’t you remember? They told us.” She chewed her lip. “It’s a… what is it? Oh yeah, a grain silo. But since most of the animals here don’t eat grain, Uncle Gideon doesn’t use it.”

  “So has it been here all along?” He looked at the empty spot on the survey. “Then it should be here on this map. But it isn’t, so maybe they built it since then-well, that’s just weird. No one would build a silo just to keep it empty…” He trailed off. “Oh, man. Lucinda-silo! S-I-L-O!”

  “So? What’s so… ” It sank in. “Oh my God. But the message in the mirror said ‘OLIS.’ ”

  “Yeah! That’s SILO backward!”

  Tyler laughed, still amazed how it had all come out. “I’d bet all my allowance for the rest of my life that something in that mirror is trying to send us a message-and the message is ‘Check the silo.’ ”

  It was all Lucinda could do to keep him from going at once to explore the place. He felt like a child being sent to bed early when she reminded him about the black squirrel, but he had to admit she had put her finger on a problem. For a moment he considered sending Lucinda to explore the mystery in his place, but she refused before he could even suggest it.

  “Forget it-I’m not going in some crazy haunted silo,” she said very firmly. “If you want to get killed by ghosts or collapsing farm machinery or… or something, then you do it.”

  That night Tyler lay awake for hours, unable to fall asleep, trying to imagine a wa
y to thwart the spy squirrel. It came to him in the long, quiet hour just after midnight-something he had seen in a shed at the back of the house. He fell asleep at last and dreamed of buildings and people made of paper, all threatened by a spreading fire.

  All the next day Tyler could hardly concentrate on anything, his mind so full of what he was going to do that Ragnar and even shy Haneb wound up shouting at him to be careful. He thought he would go crazy waiting for it to get dark enough for him to get started, but after finishing the day’s chores he came back to his room and collapsed on the bed. The room was stuffy with afternoon heat and he promptly fell asleep. He woke up to Lucinda’s knock on the door.

  “Did you change your mind?” she asked when he stumbled over to let her in.

  “No,” he said, suddenly panicked that he might have missed his chance. “What time is it?” The light coming through his window was tinged with the shadows of approaching evening. “Shoot!”

  He grabbed his sweatshirt, then went through the pockets to make sure he had not only his flashlight but extra batteries.

  “Did you put that thing out for me?” he asked.

  Lucinda was watching him with arms crossed. “Yes, I did.”

  “Right where I said?”

  “The oak tree at the edge of the garden right where you said, yes.” She shook her head. “Tyler, I don’t think this is a good idea

  …”

  “You never think anything is a good idea unless it includes watching television or talking on the phone,” he said.

  “That’s really mean, Tyler. And it’s not true, either. Who went into the library for you and saw the message and found you that map?”

  “Okay, I’m sorry. You’re right. But we have, like, two or three weeks left before we go home. What if Uncle Gideon never tells us anything? What if he never asks us back? In, like, another year we’ll be wondering whether this even happened.”