by Tad Williams
“Steve!” he called. “You down there?”
A dry scratching whispered up from the depths, as if someone was dragging dead leaves and discarded snake-skins up the stairs. It didn’t sound like Steve Carrillo at all, but it did sound like it was slowly coming closer.
Tyler hurried along the corridor toward the “ YRARBIL.”
He found it at last, at the end of what seemed like a mile of turning, poorly lit passages. It was at least as big as the real one, maybe bigger, and at least as full of shelves as the other. It wasn’t laid out in straight lines, but in haphazard clusters of tables and shelves and other strange furniture. In fact, if there were such things as haunted libraries, this sure looked like one of them. Many of the flickering lights on the walls here weren’t even oil lamps but actual candles: their flames jiggled when he passed, which made his shadow seem to dance and jump on the walls.
“Steven? Steve Carrillo? Where are you?”
He thought he heard a noise, not the scratchy hiss and scrape he’d heard on the cellar steps, but a muffled sound like someone calling from another room. He made his way quietly across the big central space, looking without much interest at the backward-lettered spines of the books on the shelves. There were pictures on the wall of this library, too, although he didn’t see anything quite like the big portrait of Octavio Tinker. Most of these pictures showed weird-looking old people in even weirder clothing. A few of them were of places-dark, stormy oceans and lonely mountaintops. Glass cases stood in some of the library’s open spaces, full of weird objects that looked as though they’d come from the oldest, dustiest attic imaginable. One purple-black ball caught his eye because it looked like a huge gem. He peered into the case to read the label, which said
GGE S’REHTNAP.
Panther’s Egg? What kind of silly crap was that? Not that there might not be some interesting things to explore here some other time. If only the place wasn’t so creepy.
Something rustled nearby and Tyler whirled around in time to see a flick of shadow disappearing behind one of the library stacks. “St
… Steve?” he called. Nobody answered.
Now he went more quickly, trying to keep to the open spaces at the center of the room. Who knew how big it was on this side of the mirror? Maybe it was a whole world! Tyler began to feel quite hopeless about ever finding the boy from the neighboring farm. He raised his voice a little. “Steve?”
“Ssssssssteeeeeeeeeev… ” It wasn’t an echo that whispered through the room but something stranger and far more disturbing, as though a creature that had never spoken before was trying to imitate his voice. Tyler turned again and saw a cluster of shadows down one of the aisles, something that looked as though it was covered with swinging rags and moved in a hunched-over, sideways motion like a crab. It was visible only for a moment, then scuttled away into the darkness beyond the candle flames again.
“ Sssteeeee,” the cracked voice whispered from of the shadows, then the shape appeared again, one row nearer this time. The rags waved like seaweed straining for the surface and the light.
Tyler ran.
He crossed the nearest part of the library in moments, trying to put as many shelves as he could between himself and whatever was following him. He found himself in a gallery of ancient photographs along the back wall, black-and-white pictures of half-built machinery and monuments. A door stood ajar and he ducked through it into a hallway beyond, closing it behind him as quietly as he could. The corridor was lined with more old photos-children wearing ceremonial outfits so strange they looked like Halloween costumes, fantastical combinations of scarves and turbans and long coats. He pushed himself back against the wall between two pictures and tried to be absolutely silent.
When a few minutes had passed without any new noise, and the door between himself and the library still remained shut, he began to breathe a little easier. He was just mopping the sweat off his forehead when a voice spoke quietly beside his ear.
“I think it’s gone now.”
Tyler squeaked and jumped. He looked up and down the hallway but there was nothing and nobody to be seen.
“I’m here,” the voice said-a woman’s voice, shaky with age but calm and refined, like something you might hear on television. “Turn around.”
Tyler turned, his heart beating so fast he felt weak in the knees. Then he saw something moving and took a step closer to the wall. One of the two rectangles he had stood between was not a photo like the others but some kind of ironwork grille in the wall. On the other side of it, barely visible in the uneven lamplight, was what looked like a woman’s face and a suggestion of white hair.
“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” she said. “Who are you? Why are you out when the Bandersnatch is hunting?”
“Bandersnatch?” The name seemed familiar.
“That’s just what I call it. Like in the old story… or is it a rhyme?” She laughed a little, and for the first time she didn’t sound quite right. “I… I can’t remember everything I should. In fact, I can’t remember much of anything.”
It suddenly hit him who he might be talking to. “Grace? Are you Grace?”
She didn’t seem to hear him. “You really should find somewhere to hide. There’s nothing I can do for you. I’m too frightened of that thing. It’s been after me for… for years.”
“Where are you?” Tyler leaned forward, trying to get a good look at her face, but his sudden movement startled her and she moved back. He was terrified he might lose her. “Don’t go away! Where are you? How can I get to where you are?”
“You can’t. At least, I don’t know how. I’m lost right now myself.” She sounded sad about it, but not devastated, as though it happened fairly often.
“You mean you can’t get to me, either?”
“No.” He thought he saw her shake her head. “But you need to find someplace safer. The Bandersnatch can… well, it can find you. And it can be very quiet. It likes the shadows. Look for the light. There’s a place at the top of the library where it hardly ever goes. Too bright.” She started to move back from the grating. “Be careful. What did the poem say? ‘Beware the Jubjub bird… and shun the frumious Bandersnatch!’ Something like that.”
“Wait! Are you Grace?”
The face hesitated, half gone into the shadows. “Grace?”
“Is that your name? Are you Grace? Gideon’s wife? I’m his nephew, Tyler.”
“Grace.” She sounded as though she was drifting away. “The name
… is familiar. Gideon? Gideon. I remember… I think I remember.” For a moment she disappeared from the grille entirely, then her face reappeared and her fingers came through the bars dangling something shiny. “Take this. Give it to… No, Gideon, he gave it to… ” It slid from her and chinked to the floor, coiling there like a tiny, gleaming snake.
When he stood up again with the gold locket and chain in his hand, she was gone.
The last thing Tyler had wanted to do was go back into the library, but he had to find Steve. The only alternative was to look for him down in the cellar, and Tyler knew it would be a long time before he decided to do that.
Grace, if that was the woman behind the grating, had told him to head for the high part of the library-that he would be safe where it was lightest. He moved as quickly across the library floor as he could, staying out in the open, until he found the main staircase. This led up to a level that ran all the way around the top of the great room, but then a set of stairs rose from there toward the building’s pitched ceiling, a floor that seemed to have been used as an attic, with boxes of old books and clothing and other things stacked haphazardly all around. Tyler climbed the steps as quietly as he could. It was indeed brighter than the rest of the library up on the platform below the ceiling: it was flooded with flickering oil light from the central chandelier, but there were also dormer windows in the top of the roof that let in the light from an oily gray sky.
“If you stand on a pile of boxes you can see the rest of the
house,” someone said.
This time the voice wasn’t quite as much of a shock. Tyler managed to stifle his shriek of alarm before he turned and found Steve Carrillo sitting cross-legged on the floor, carving a piece of wood with an antique pocketknife.
“Steve!” said Tyler, relief washing through him.
The black-haired boy looked at him, puzzled. “Do I know you?”
“Do you know me? I’m Tyler! You came to find us, remember? You and your sisters?”
Steve squinted for a moment. “Tyler. Yeah. It’s just that I’ve been here so long…”
“What do you mean? You just came through a little while ago!”
The look of confusion came back to Steve Carrillo’s face. “Days. I’ve been here for days and days.”
“Look, never mind. We have to get you back. Come on.” Tyler turned and headed for the stairwell, but quickly realized no one was following him. “Steve?”
The other boy looked pale with alarm. “I’m not going down there! It’ll get me.”
“That Sanderbatch thing?” Tyler shook his head. “We’ll just stay in the open. Maybe we can find a flashlight or something-I don’t think it likes light.”
Steve shook his head emphatically. “It’s… it’s made out of dust and paper, I think. I hear it all the time. It’s just waiting. Waiting for me to come down.”
“Look, don’t you want to see your family again? Your sisters? Your mom and dad?”
Steve looked at him doubtfully.
“Trust me. I’ll get us back.” A thought occurred to Tyler. “You find any matches up here?”
Once they were through the library and into the corridors beyond they lit the bundles of mirror-written book pages Tyler had tied to two halves of a broken broom handle. The paper was so old and damp it burned slowly. Torches in hand, they scurried along the passageways, talking only in whispers, stopping every few minutes when Steven’s courage started to fade. He really did act like someone who had been here for months, not minutes, Tyler thought-like a prisoner of war in some movie, his spirit almost crushed. Every echo of their own passage made Steve jump like a rabbit, and Tyler couldn’t imagine what would happen if they actually ran into anything serious. He would probably just fall down and die.
Finally, in an effort to take the other boy’s mind off what was happening, Tyler began talking about their escape as if it was a video game. “Okay, we’re finally at the end of the first level-we just have to go a little farther. We’ve earned a lot of rubies.”
“Life points… pretty low,” Steve groaned, but at least he was playing along.
“Look, we’re almost through. We beat the boss, so we’re pretty much home free.”
“We haven’t beaten the boss,” Steven said. They were nearing the stairway to the cellar now, which to Tyler meant they were almost out, but Steven was walking slower and slower. “The boss lives down there. In the RALLEC.” He stopped. “Hear that?”
Much to his sorrow, Tyler did. It was the scraping, dragging, rustling noise he had heard before, getting slowly louder as it came up from the depths. “Follow me,” he said. “Run!”
The torch flames streamed behind them until Steven had to drop his before it burned his hand. Tyler briefly wondered about setting the corridor on fire behind them-it surely wouldn’t burn through to the real-world side of the mirror-but then he remembered the sad, confused eyes of the woman behind the grating. He turned back and stamped out Steven’s sparking, sputtering torch, then began to run again.
He didn’t know what made him look back just before they got to the room with the mirror-it wasn’t a sound. Whatever was following them was as noiseless now as ash blown on the wind. Perhaps it was a feeling, the idea that something was fluttering along behind them like an untethered shadow. But once he looked, he wished he hadn’t. All he could see of the indistinct shape was a face made of shadow, and all he could see of that face was hunger and loneliness and madness.
They crashed through the door into the mirror-bedroom. Tyler pushed Steve headfirst into the washstand mirror and then dived after him into the silver-mercury reflection.
Carmen and Alma wouldn’t let go of Steve. The girls were crying, but Steve was like someone who’d just woken up from a strange dream.
“Where’s Lucinda?” Tyler asked, then felt his stomach grow heavy with dread when they told him.
“I have to go,” he said. “I have to go after her. It’s that guy your dad was talking to Mr. Walkwell about-Stillman, the rich guy. The helicopter must be his.” He sighed. He was exhausted and scared and all he wanted to do now was go to bed. Wasn’t this night ever going to end? He didn’t want any more answers about Ordinary Farm because all they did was lead to more questions. “You’d better come with me,” he said a moment later. “It may be the only chance to sneak you off the property. We might have the police here by morning-especially if your parents find out you’re gone.”
“It seemed like a good idea when I thought of it,” said Steve Carrillo sadly.
“Yeah, I get a lot of those too.”
“No more magical mirrors, right?” Steve asked.
“No more mirrors. We’re just going to get you off the farm as quietly as possible.”
“That sounds good,” Steve said, sounding a little more like his old self. “I don’t want any more excitement tonight, that’s for sure.”
Chapter 27
No Tricks
C olin Needle had to admit he was a little nervous.
It wasn’t sneaking across Ordinary Farm by night with a stolen dragon’s egg that was worrying him-he’d been preparing to do this part for days, and had been back and forth over the route with an appropriately sized rock in his backpack a half-dozen times, practicing until he knew every potential hazard, with or without a flashlight. No, it was the way the stakes of the game had been raised that worried him.
First off, Colin had never wanted to make a deal with this Stillman fellow. If he had known the true story of Jude Modesto’s important client, he felt sure he would have abandoned the whole project. But he had already given Modesto the chip from Meseret’s previous egg before he found out, and apparently Stillman had tested it and decided it was very, very interesting, so it was too late to turn back.
Still, Colin had to admit that the half-million dollars would make it easier to deal with his own conscience. He would have asked for more, but he needed to be able to carry it back himself, and this way Stillman would be even more eager to come back for such one-of-a-kind bargains-and Colin would supply them to him.
Second, things would have been much easier if Modesto could have waited just a few days more to set up the meeting. The Jenkins kids would have gone back home and Colin’s distraction for Ragnar and Walkwell would have been ready. He had planned to arrange an escape from its pen by the bonnacon, a slow-moving but immensely strong and stubborn bull-like animal that sprayed caustic dung; recapturing it would have taken them most of the night. Modesto’s sudden email demanding the sale take place tonight had meant that he had been forced to improvise instead.
Colin had left a glove (part of a pair he had bought but never used) near the barbed-wire fence out on the edge of the property, then made an “innocent” remark at dinner about having seen a surprising number of cars and other activity out on Springs Road near where he had left the telltale glove. He figured that should keep them busy for at least the first couple of hours of darkness, searching for intruders out at the farthest point of the property from his rendezvous with Jude Modesto. Colin certainly hoped so-he didn’t want to look up and find himself staring into Walkwell’s weird, angry eyes. That man-that goat-horned thing -scared Colin Needle almost as much as his mother did, and that was saying something.
Still, it shouldn’t have been this way. Everything would have been so much simpler without the Jenkins kids. Sure, it had been occasionally interesting to have people his own age around the farm, and Lucinda was okay, but Colin Needle had big plans and having Gideon’s rel
atives around just made things more difficult.
He stopped to rest on top of a hill beyond an abandoned barn where he could look back toward the house. All good so far, no more than the ordinary number of lights on, Gideon’s study and bedroom, the kitchen, a few along the porch and the other outside doors. So much of the house was unlighted at night that most of the time you couldn’t even begin to guess at its immense size. Only on bright, moonlit nights like this one could you see the array of roofs, the covered arcades and outbuildings, and the unusual silo and tower rooms that made Ordinary Farm look like some strange Oriental palace.
And it’s going to be my palace someday, he thought with no little satisfaction. Because I’m the only one who really cares about it-or at least I’m the only one with any sense. Any guts.
He heaved up the backpack. The egg was no easy burden, big and lopsided as a partially deflated beach ball, heavy as a sandbag. He got the straps over his shoulders again and made his way down into the shadowy, oak-shrouded valley beside Junction Road, out of the moon’s glare.
Colin hadn’t really expected a helicopter, let alone the biggest helicopter he’d ever seen. Its dark hide gleamed like the shell of a beetle as it crouched on the hilltop half a mile from the road, its rotors lazily turning. It had no markings, but Colin had a feeling that the darker patch on its side was something covering a corporate logo-Stillman’s Mission Software, most likely. His stomach tightened. Several men stood waiting outside the copter’s open bay door.
Colin wasn’t simply going to walk up to them with the treasure in his hands, of course. He wasn’t a fool. He’d read plenty of spy novels and seen plenty of movies and he knew all about double crosses. He’d even thought about one of his own, substituting something for the real dragon egg before selling it, so he certainly didn’t trust Jude Modesto not to cheat him. While he was still in the shadows he took off the heavy backpack and hung it over the branch of a tree, high enough to be almost impossible to see in the dim light, and counted the trees as he fol lowed the deer path to the edge of the clearing and out into the open.