The Dragons of Ordinary Farm

Chapter 10

W hen he first got back from meeting Eliot the sea monster, Tyler had been exhausted, but after a few minutes of lying on his bed and feeling the afternoon get hotter, he knew it would be harder to fall asleep than it used to be on Christmas Eve when he was a kid. How could he just lie there? He was in the middle of the biggest adventure a kid had ever had-like something out of the most spectacular special-effects movie of the year. It made a top-of-the-line video game like Deep End seem like Pong or some other ancient history. Dragons! Unicorns! Sea serpents!

What if there were real dinosaurs here too? Or outer-space creatures? And where had they all come from?

A scratching at the window distracted him. Something was sitting on the sill, a bundle of gray and white with a pink face and two huge eyes.

The monkey! The flying monkey!

Tyler went slowly toward the window, careful not to frighten the little animal. He stared. The monkey stared back, seemingly undisturbed by his nearness. It wasn’t very big-less than a foot tall, greenish gray on the back and pale on the belly, with a spiky green-gray cap of fur atop its round little head like a hairstyle out of some hilariously ancient 1980s music video. What was most amazing, of course, were the wings, although they were folded and hard to see. It didn’t have a separate pair of wings on its back like an angel (or like the only other flying monkeys he knew about, the ones in The Wizard of Oz), but instead they were more like a bat’s, stretching between its arms and its knees.

What had Uncle Gideon called it?

“Zaza?” he said quietly. The monkey tipped its head and stared at him as though Tyler, of the two of them, was the more unlikely creature. Tyler lifted his hand to touch the glass. “Zaza?”

The monkey tilted over backward and dropped off the windowsill so unexpectedly that Tyler felt his heart stumble for a moment, as though he had broken an expensive ornament, but the monkey only spread her wings and sailed in a lazy circle down to the cherry tree below Lucinda’s window. She stopped there, clinging upside down to a branch, still watching him with her shiny, dark little eyes as if she was waiting for something.

She seemed to want Tyler to follow her.

He wasn’t quite sure how he found his way down through the confusing maze of stairs and hallways, and down to the ground floor and then outside-he seemed to do better with this house when he didn’t think about it too much-but a few minutes later he was standing beneath the bough of the cherry tree looking up at the winged monkey. The dry grass crackled under his feet and the hot air was full of little buzzing things.

“So is that really your name, huh? Zaza? That’s a funny name.”

The monkey yawned as though Tyler was a fine one to talk but she wasn’t going to be rude enough to say anything about it. Then, without warning, she dropped down from the tree onto his shoulder. Tyler jumped and said, “Hey!” but she only settled in and began to scratch herself. He was surprised by how light she was. For her size he’d expected her to be something like a small cat, but instead she didn’t seem to weigh much more than his long-gone hamster, Fang, although she was a great deal bigger.

He took a few steps away from the house and the monkey leaped up from his shoulder, then drifted back down toward him in a long, shallow glide and went once around his head before she flapped again and circled away. She sure seemed like she wanted him to follow her someplace.

Well, it beat lying in bed.

Zaza led Tyler around the outskirts of the house, through an orderly vegetable patch the size of a small baseball field where she plucked and ate a succession of different greens growing close to the ground, then through a tangled, deserted-seeming garden and past a greenhouse at its center that looked like it had been abandoned for a long time. Tyler could see strange shapes through the dirty glass, and in some places huge leaves pressed up against the panes from the inside, as though whatever had once been cultivated in there had been allowed to run riot. It was a little creepy, all that oversized green life just on the other side of cracked glass. He was glad that the little monkey didn’t linger.

She led him around the corner of another building, which was connected back to the house by a long covered pathway. Tyler found himself looking across a big open space with a view of the immense cement half-cylinder of the Sick Barn. He could see the high windows where he had peered in the night before-had it really been less than a day since then? Amazing. But as much as he wanted to see the dragon again, he didn’t want anyone to notice he was out of his room just when Gideon seemed to have forgiven him, so he forced himself to turn away and focus on where the monkey was leading him. Still, he couldn’t help saying to himself, “There’s a dragon in there, and I saw it. A real… live dragon!”

How many other kids could say that?

This house and its buildings and grounds really did go on forever! Tyler’s own room was a quarter of an hour behind him now and the main farmhouse-the part of the house that everyone used most-was completely out of sight. The monkey had led him past more neglected gardens and past several more outbuildings until finally they reached a long, low structure two stories high except for a domed turret looming above the middle of it. Another overgrown garden stretched beside it, full of old, tangled rosebushes and sprawling hedges that had not been trimmed for years.

Tyler trotted down a covered passage lined with wooden pillars that ran the length of the long building, like a covered walkway in a Greek temple-something Tyler had seen in a schoolbook, or more likely, some game design. But instead of being marble, everything was made of wood and painted in shades of brown and gray and green and white. Well, except the parts that were glass, and there were plenty of those. Tall windows lined the ground level as well as the floor above.

Zaza, gliding along in front of him, suddenly halted and crawled through a broken window, disappearing into the building. Dismayed, Tyler wondered, Does she want me to climb in through a twelve-inch hole eight feet off the ground? He had passed at least two doors, though, so he walked back and tried the nearest.

Bingo! The door swung open. Nobody locked anything around here.

Tyler stepped into a small room, a sort of antechamber with dark wood paneling, lots of coat hooks, and a stand with several dusty umbrellas. This wing of the house had the smell of a place nobody had disturbed for a long time, like an underground tomb.

Or a palace, he thought a moment later as he stepped through into a library. More like a palace.

It really was like some fabulous scene in a movie: Tyler grew dizzy just looking up and around. The walls were covered with bookshelves, from the dusty carpets almost to the roof. There was no second floor, just a high ceiling and all those big windows letting the afternoon sunlight stream in. Plenty of daylight still remained, but the old-fashioned electrical lights he’d seen everywhere around the farm hung all around the big room as well, high in the rafters and also on long wires over clusters of overstuffed chairs and sofas. Tyler had the thrilling sense that the farmhouse really was a palace, or even an entire lost ancient city-everywhere you went you found something crazy and wonderful. He had never imagined that there could be so many books in one place-this was a palace of books, an empire of books.

It’s too bad they wasted all this space on ’em, Tyler thought. It could have been a totally sweet game room.

Books, after all, were pretty boring, and he usually did his best to avoid them. It was because his mother was always going on about how kids who read were better than the ones who didn’t-better than game-playing idiots like her own son, she meant. But Tyler knew better. GameBoss and TV were so much more interesting than almost any book-especially this kind, the old kind that surrounded him now, most of which didn’t even have pictures.

But still, he had to admit the place itself was pretty cool.

He walked a little way down the broad central aisle until he was beneath the spot where the roof bulged up into a dome. The dome had little windows of its own, and it was painted on the inside with all kinds of weird things-animals and trees and strange letters he couldn’t read. He walked back and forth beneath, calling out and listening to his voice echo back from the high ceiling and the dome.

Outside, the sun went behind a cloud. The room darkened and Tyler suddenly didn’t like the place quite as much. He began turning on lights, climbing onto chairs to reach some of the big switches on the walls, sneezing as dust puffed up from the chair cushions. Not all of the switches worked, but golden light blossomed from enough of the lamps that the library began to look cozy and welcoming again. Tyler began brushing dust off the sofas. He felt a bit like Goldilocks as he tried them out. When he found one he liked, he lay down completely and put his dirty sneakers up onto the upholstery, then put his hands behind his head and looked around, master of an entire building.

A guy could get used to this, he thought. Then he found himself face-to-face with a pair of staring eyes.

Tyler yelled and leaped to his feet. A moment later he laughed at himself, although his heart was still beating fast. “You dork!” he said out loud. What had spooked him was only a stupid old painting looking down at him from the wall, lit now by one of the electric bulbs so that the man’s glaring eyes seemed almost alive.

It wasn’t Gideon-the man in the picture was about the same age but his clothes were really, really old-fashioned, a long coat with a high white collar, and his face was a different shape from Gideon’s too. What about the guy who’d built the farmhouse? What had they said his name was-Octavio something? Yes, that was it, Octavio Tinker. This must be him, Tyler decided. The person responsible for this whole crazy place.

The man in the picture did look a bit like a mad scientist. His dark gray hair stuck out over his ears like little wings, and his mustache curled up at the ends like something out of a cartoon. Tyler could imagine him twirling them between his fingertips and saying, “And now-tremble before my death ray!”

But he didn’t look completely like a villain. A dog sat comfortably at his feet, some small black and white breed that Tyler didn’t recognize, and Octavio held an object in his hand that looked mysterious but not particularly ominous-a striking concoction of golden metal, brown wood, and glass lenses.

Tyler stood up and walked toward the picture, squinting at the thing in the man’s hand, but he couldn’t make much of it-it looked like something out of a kid’s story, some kind of magic seeing-device.

Probably just an old-fashioned microscope, Tyler decided at last. Back in the past they probably thought that was the coolest invention ever. Man, they would have freaked out if they saw a GameBoss!

What was interesting, though, was the way that the man in the picture stared out so intently, not at the viewer, as Tyler had first thought, but at something beyond. Tyler turned, wondering if some other portrait might be staring back from that wall behind him, but instead he saw only a very simple dark door set in the wall between two sets of tall bookshelves.

As Tyler walked toward the door he felt a little tingle on his neck, as though old Octavio might be climbing down out of the frame behind him. He knew that was totally silly, but he looked anyway. The mustached scientist was still in his painting, staring out with solemn amusement.

An old brass key with a loop of yarn dangling from it was already in the keyhole, as though someone had unlocked the door only moments earlier. Tyler opened the door slowly, half expecting to find a dead body (or a half-dead murderous zombie or something else that would be in a scary movie). Instead he found himself in a fairly ordinary old bedroom-a retiring room off of the library-with a four-poster bed and a large washstand. He took a few steps inside and stopped. There was very little dust in here, and the air seemed different from in the library just a few feet away-close and tight in his throat.

The washstand had an old marble sink and a jug for water. Behind the basin, mahogany columns framed a huge mirror. Tyler moved to the front of the sink, drawn by something he could not at first put his finger on-then he saw it: the room reflected in the mirror was not exactly the same as the one he was standing in. Here, where Tyler stood, the light had disappeared from the window high on one wall, across from the bed. But in the mirror of the washstand the light of the reflected room was stronger, and he could see that the sky outside the window was still early-afternoon blue.

A chill went up and down his back, and his scalp tingled.

He moved closer to the mirror, but was distracted suddenly by something on the floor, peeking out from under neath the washstand. Tyler reached down and picked it up. It was a tattered old piece of paper, its edges shredded and stained. What remained was covered with somebody’s skinny, old-fashioned handwriting. It was too dark in the bedroom to read it. He clutched it tightly, then looked up again. The light in the mirror still seemed different. He reached out his hand to touch the mirror and his reflection reached out too.

The Tyler reflected in the mirror was wearing a watch-the diver’s watch his father had given him for his twelfth birthday, with all the dials and things he’d never figured out how to use.

But he had left the watch on the table in his room-there was nothing on his own wrist but freckles.

His blood roaring in his ears, Tyler lifted his other arm. The mirror Tyler did the same, perfectly synchronized. Tyler here and now held the scrap of paper in that hand; the hand of the reflection was empty.

He stared openmouthed at the mirror, and as he did so he saw something else. Someone in a dark, hooded cloak was standing in the reflected doorway behind him, watching him.

This time Tyler shouted aloud with surprise and terror, a ragged noise that echoed flatly in the small room. When he whirled around no one was there. He dashed out of the haunted room into the library aisle and stopped, listening for footsteps, listening for any evidence that whatever he had seen through that washstand mirror was, in fact, here with him now, pursuing him. Something with clawed fingers grabbed at the back of his neck.

When his shrieks finally died down and no werewolf or vampire had seized him, Tyler climbed back onto his feet-he had been lying on the floor with his hands over his head-and discovered a very frightened Zaza clinging to the nearest bookcase, staring at him with eyes so wide it seemed certain she’d never seen a boy having a total wuss-out fit before.

“So that was you, huh?” Tyler tried to laugh, for the monkey’s benefit if no one else’s. “Old Banana Breath. Should have known. Land on a guy’s neck… ”

But, of course, unless the winged monkey also had a hooded cloak she liked to wear, it still didn’t explain the person he’d seen in the reflection.

Tyler was shivering now. He’d had quite enough of the library. He turned off the lights as quickly as he could and hurried outside.

Zaza followed him, although none of her fluttering circles brought her too close, and she kept looking at him worriedly, as if he might start screaming and thrashing again at any moment.

The flying monkey left him outside the doorway leading to the kitchen. Tyler could hear people talking in the dining room, but he didn’t go in. He hurried through the kitchen, pocketing a few bits of fruit for the monkey in case she came back to his window again, then made his way upstairs. He found their hallway so quickly and easily this time he didn’t even realize he was there until he saw the familiar carpet. He left the fruit in his room and knocked on Lucinda’s door, but she didn’t answer. He certainly wasn’t going to wait. His sister was probably downstairs already and Tyler was getting hungrier by the second.

He almost ran directly into Colin Needle downstairs, who stepped without warning into the dining room doorway like he was trying to block Tyler’s entrance.

“What are you doing?” Tyler demanded. “I nearly knocked you over.”

“Oh, sorry.” Colin didn’t sound like he meant it. “I see you’re finding your way around.”

“Yeah,” said Tyler, trying to push past him, but Colin moved back into his path.

“By the way, I noticed that you were in the library.”

Suspicion made Tyler’s skin prickle. “How do you know that?”

“Because you turned on most of the lights, stupid. Even in daytime I could see that from my window. Nobody’s been in there for years so I knew it must be you. We’ve all seen how the famously daring Master Jenkins likes to go out and stick his nose into things.”

“Just get out of my way,” Tyler told him, pushing him, but Colin wasn’t ready to move yet.

“And I saw you making friends with the monkey,” the older boy observed. “How sweet.”

“What if I did? She’s not your monkey, is she?”

“Lord, no!” Colin sounded like a little old man instead of a teenager. “My mother hates that animal. I was just going to warn you not to bring it around her.” He gave Tyler an odd, sudden smirk-he looked like he had a secret he was itching to tell. “Well, toodle-oo!”

Tyler watched him go, nettled. That had been a deliberate attempt to get under his skin. But why? Why should Colin care what Tyler did?

As he pushed through into the dining room, he suddenly recalled something he’d forgotten in the last hour’s excitement and confusion. That weird trick mirror above the washstand had startled him so badly that he’d left behind the ancient piece of paper he’d found there-the one with the scratchy writing.

Well, it would just have to stay there, Tyler decided. He was hungry now-no, starving. And besides, he couldn’t see himself going back into the haunted library any time soon.