The Dragons of Ordinary Farm

Chapter 17

A fter dinner Tyler knocked on his sister’s door and actually waited until she said, “Come in,” before bursting in. He ran to the window and drew the curtains while Lucinda watched, puzzled.

“What’s that about?”

Tyler waved away the question. “So where’s the book?”

Lucinda pulled it out from under her mattress. She was curious, but not quite as worked up as her brother. While they had been taking care of the baby griffins with Ragnar, Tyler had just kept hopping from foot to foot as if he had to use the bathroom. Badly.

“Let me look,” he said now. “Come on, I found it!”

“Booger. We both found it. Besides, it’s hard to find anything left to read.” She leafed through a few pages. Chewed-page confetti rolled out in little showers. “The mice have chewed almost all of it.”

“Here, let me see.” But instead of snatching it, he waited until she put it in his hands, then carefully pushed the shredded pages apart. “Look, here’s some bits in the middle they didn’t get. Really weird old handwriting.” He spread a page as flat as he could and began to read out loud.

“But here is my question: Why must we think of it as simply a fourth dimension? Perhaps it would be more instructive to consider it as akin to earth’s terramagnetic field-as something that surrounds and permeates the dimensions we perceive rather than being simply one more dimension. At the places of intersection, the lines of force would cohere, much as the lines of an electromagnetic pole cohere, albeit invisibly, and influence physics in our three known dimensions, and perhaps beyond them. If so, then the structure of the Breach itself might be something familiar to most scientists, a Fibonacci spiral.

“This Breach, as I named it in the first of these journals, or Fault Line, as I have begun to call it since setting my sights on California as the most propitious spot for prospecting, has now become my central obsession. (‘Fault’ is by way of a small jest, since the earth of America’s western coast is rotten with faults of the seismic variety, coupled with the fact that several people have suggested my fascination with this line of study is a bit of a ‘fault.’)

“Man, it just goes on like this,” Tyler grumbled. “Old Octavio has a totally bad case of can’t-talk-normal-English.”

“Do you want me to read it instead?”

“No.”

“If it does take the form of a Fibonacci spiral, there would not only be a point of intersection with physical space, but at that intersection would be found areas of greater concentration of what is currently thought to be a single medium of unchanging density-the fourth dimension expressed as a cohered monopole at the center of a fifth-dimensional rolling vortex. That is to say, at the heart of the infolding there would be a place where a near infinite expression of that medium would be located in a very small part of our four-dimensional matrix. Would that not be a very merry thing to find?

“In any case, Father and Mother are both quite put out with these kinds of ‘maunderings,’ as Father puts it, and forbid me from such research until at least the time when I have received a doctorate and may pursue knowledge without the shame of being perceived a ‘crackpot’ … ”

“Man, this guy is the mayor of Mad Scientist Town!” said Tyler, laughing.

“But what does it all mean?” she asked. “What’s a fourth dimension?”

“How should I know? In my science class we learned how to make a rocket out of a plastic soda bottle.” Tyler riffled through the pages of the ruined notebook. “That’s about all there is left to read-just a few words and sentences here and there and some math stuff. The only thing for certain is that he’s saying there’s an earlier diary, and if old Octavio’s the kind of guy who keeps diaries there might be a whole bunch of them stashed away somewhere and not eaten by mice.” Tyler handed her back the notebook. “Hide it again. If there’re more I’m going to find them. If anybody’s going to tell us what’s going on with this place, it’s the guy who built it.”

Something fell against the window.

Both Tyler and Lucinda jumped. Suddenly frightened, Lucinda shoved the diary under her pillow.

Tyler went to the window and pulled back the curtain. “I knew I was right,” he said. “I knew it! Look outside, Luce.”

Lucinda stood up and stared out the window. The cherry tree filled much of her view, its blossoms gone and the leaves turning purple-brown.

“What do you see?” he asked.

“Just the usual stuff.”

“Okay. Stand there and watch for a minute.” Tyler clattered out of the room and down the stairs.

Lucinda shook her head. What was it now-more ghosts? Tree ghosts? Midafternoon tree ghosts?

Tyler appeared a few moments later in the overgrown patch of dry grass under the window. He stood there for a moment, then started walking, in the direction of the library and the rest of the unused wing without even looking back. Lucinda reached up to tap on the glass to get his attention, but before she could do it something dark hopped onto a branch high above Tyler’s head. It squatted for a moment, fat as a toad and just as still, then jumped effortlessly to the next tree.

It was following him.

Tyler turned around suddenly, heading back again toward the kitchen and dining room. The black squirrel followed, changing direction itself a few moments after he did. Lucinda felt a sudden surge of panic, although it seemed ridiculous-what could a squirrel, even a big one, do to a boy Tyler’s size? Still, she couldn’t help pulling up the window to warn him.

“Tyler!”

He didn’t turn, but the squirrel did, fixing her with the queasy yellow of its stare. For a moment she felt sure the animal was truly looking at her-as if marking her for future attention. She swallowed hard and rattled the window back down. Her brother and his hopping pursuer vanished from sight.

Tyler came back into the room a short while later. “Did you see?”

“That creepy squirrel again-and it was following you!”

“Yeah-duh. It’s been doing it for days. Everywhere I go, unless I’m out with the farm people. Even then I keep thinking I see it, hiding up in the trees, watching. And it keeps Zaza away-I hardly ever see her now.”

“What’s going on? Why would it do that?” She felt suddenly chilly, as if she had a fever. Those eyes!

“I don’t know. It started when I found the library. I think Mrs

… I think somebody’s using it to keep an eye on me.”

“You were going to say Mrs. Needle.”

“Yeah, well, she creeps me out. I think she’s a witch or something.”

“Tyler Jenkins! Do you hear yourself? A witch? This isn’t one of your video games.”

“And it isn’t one of your ‘We’re all friends, everybody learns a lesson, then we all hug’ TV shows, either. There’s some creepy stuff going on around here, and I’m not just talking about dragons and… and hoop snakes.”

Lucinda sat down on the bed, too tired to argue. She didn’t want Mrs. Needle to be bad. She didn’t care if every body hugged, but she did need friends. She was lonely with only her brother for a friend. She wasn’t used to it.

“Look, just do me a favor,” he said. “I want you to go to that library and see if you can find any more of Octavio’s notebook. If I go that thing is going to follow me and somebody is going to know about it.”

The library? Where Tyler said he’d seen a ghost? She absolutely did not want to do that. “How do you know it won’t just follow me?”

“Because I’m going to take Secret Squirrel for a little walk around the property.”

Lucinda never really said yes, but she didn’t say no forcefully enough to stop him, either. She watched from her window as Tyler wandered past, looking around like a little kid playing army spy-trying to convince the squirrel he was doing something secret and important, she guessed. She was too nervous to be disgusted-and maybe, just maybe, Tyler was right, because within a few seconds the black squirrel reappeared, then waited until Tyler had rounded the corner and headed out toward the front of the house before it hopped after him, its weight making even some of the bigger branches bounce and sway.

Lucinda forced herself to follow her brother out of the house, but headed in the opposite direction. She didn’t look up for fear of what she might see, but once she heard a rattling noise above her head that froze her in her tracks. She stayed that way for long seconds, heart beating, breathless, until a blue jay squawked loudly and flew away past her and the trees were silent again.

Silence and dust greeted her inside the library. In the fading evening light slanting in through the big windows she could see the footprints she and Tyler had left during their last visit-or at least she hoped that’s who had left them. The place was half in shadows and extremely creepy, but Lucinda was afraid to turn the lights on in case someone at the house should notice.

Why didn’t I bring a flashlight? She had to admit it-Tyler was better at this ninja spy-stuff than she was.

Her footsteps made little smacking noises as she crossed the library to the picture of Octavio Tinker. What was that thing in his hand, that weird brass tangle of curves and wheels? Why was it the brightest thing in the picture? The old man’s eyes seemed to sparkle with self-regard- I know and you don’t! He must have been as hard to put up with as Uncle Gideon.

Lucinda knew she should investigate the little room with the mirror-after all, that was where the other piece of journal had been found-but she honestly didn’t know whether or not she could walk into a place that Tyler said was haunted. Instead she stalled by exploring the rows and rows of books. A lot of the library was shelved in alphabetical order by subject. She found nothing under “Ordinary Farm,” although that seemed a little too obvious anyway, but she looked under “Tinker” and actually found a book about Octavio, titled Octavio Tinker, the Crystal Prophet. Her excitement faded a little when she saw that it was some sort of biography written for kids, a book at least sixty years old with corny-looking black-and-white photos and lots of weird diagrams. Still, she took it off the shelf. It might not be old Octavio’s journal but it was something.

She wandered up and down the aisles, scanning the shelves of books and trailing her fingers across their dusty spines. None of the volumes seemed to be newer than decades old, and none of them looked obviously like a journal, although it would take years to open them all and make sure. She was about to give up when something caught her eye.

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…”