The Dragons of Ordinary Farm

Chapter 5

“G o away, Tyler,” Lucinda said, but the person at the door only knocked again, louder. “I already told you, leave me alone.”

“Lucinda Jenkins? Open up please.”

It wasn’t Tyler but a deep-voiced man. She jumped out of bed and pulled on her jeans. She worried for a moment about opening the door to a stranger, but he didn’t ask again and somehow that reassured her.

The stranger was a big, bearded, fair-haired man in overalls. He looked fit and very muscular, but his whiskers and long hair were both streaked with gray, and the deep wrinkles around his eyes and on his forehead suggested he was at least her father’s age, if not older.

“You’d better come down,” he said. “Your brother is in trouble.”

Because of his accent, it took her a moment to understand, then panic exploded through her. “Oh! Is he hurt?”

The bearded man shook his head slowly. She couldn’t figure out his expression-was he hiding a smile or something less pleasant? He had a couple of old, pale scars on his cheeks, which made her nervous. “Not hurt. But I think you must come down.”

She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know this man at all. Their first night in the middle of nowhere, and what had her dumb brother gotten into? “I’m… I’m not supposed to go anywhere with strangers.”

He looked at her hard for a moment, then he really did smile-the scars disappeared into the crinkly lines around his eyes and it changed his whole face into something much, much nicer. “Fairly spoken, Lucinda Jenkins. Ragnar Lodbrok is my name. Now we are not strangers.”

“But… I still don’t know you.”

He laughed. “And I do not know you, but I will trust you not to harm me. Still, we go downstairs only to the kitchen, and perhaps then one of the women there will speak for me, yes?”

She felt a little better, although she kept some distance between them as she followed him out the door. “What happened? What did Tyler do?”

“What boys do.” Ragnar didn’t seem too put out about it. “But it was not yet time.”

“Time for what?”

He shrugged his broad shoulders. The bearded man reminded her a little of the scarecrow in the old Wizard of Oz movie-he had an almost boneless way of moving-but the scarecrow hadn’t been anywhere near so broad across the back.

Scarecrow probably didn’t have tattoos like that, either, she thought. She’d just noticed spikes of blue-black ink sticking up past Ragnar’s shirt collar.

Mrs. Needle was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, pulling a sweater on over her thin shoulders. “You found her, I see,” she said to Ragnar. “I’ll say it again-I don’t think you should bring her. This will be difficult enough.”

Ragnar nodded, but under his polite reply his voice was hard. There was some sort of power struggle between these two, Lucinda guessed-an old one. “Yes. But this secret is broken. She may as well learn now.”

His words frightened Lucinda so much that her knees went weak. Had that grumpy joke she shared with Tyler been right after all? Was this some kind of weird cult like she’d seen on so many TV shows? Were she and Tyler about to be given the chance to join or be killed?

They left by the front door and walked down the driveway, then cut back, skirting what looked like kitchen gardens, until in the distance they saw the big white tube-shaped building she had seen earlier, lit up now like an airport at night. Fearful, she slowed down, but Ragnar’s strong hand closed on her arm, gently but unbreakably firm, and kept her moving.

Long before they reached the building she could see two figures standing and waiting for them, one big, one small. Her flutter of relief lasted only a moment. The way Mr. Walkwell’s hand sat on her brother’s shoulder made it look like he was a prison guard and Tyler was a criminal. At least, she thought the small shape was Tyler: it looked just like him except for one thing-the expression on his face. Her brother was pale as a piece of printer paper and looked absolutely terrified. She’d never seen him that way.

Lucinda was getting more frightened by the second.

Mr. Walkwell let go of Tyler and walked forward to meet Ragnar and Mrs. Needle. Lucinda hurried over to Tyler. “What did you do?” she whispered.

“There’s a monster in there,” he told her, eyes wide, lower lip trembling. “I’m not lying, Luce-a real, honest-to-God monster!”

“Well, here you two are,” said a man’s voice from behind them, dry and sour. “Tyler and Lucinda Jenkins. Welcome to the farm… I suppose. I hadn’t planned our first meeting to be quite so dramatic.”

Lucinda whirled around, startled. Hobbling up the path toward them from the other end of the house was a strange-looking old man in a red-and-white-striped bathrobe. He was tall and thin, with a crest of white hair that stuck up as though he’d just got out of bed, and even under the spotlights he looked as tan and wrinkled as the leather of Tyler’s old baseball glove.

“Are you… are you our uncle Gideon?” she asked.

“Your great-uncle, to be technical. But I think ‘Uncle Gideon’ will do.” He narrowed his eyes. “And despite the more relaxed attitude these days about choosing names for children, I’m going to assume that you, girl, are Lucinda, and that this young ne’er-do-well is Tyler.”

“There’s a monster in there,” Tyler said. “In that Sick Barn place. A dinosaur!”

Gideon Goldring stared at them in silence for a long moment. “I’m not happy about this,” he said at last, and made a noise in the back of his throat. “I don’t like Nosy Parkers prying into my business.” He gave Tyler a fierce look-actually glared at him. Despite being frightened, Lucinda felt a moment of anger. If you don’t want people nosing around, she thought, you shouldn’t invite them somewhere and then get all mysterious! She didn’t dare say it out loud, of course.

“But here we are,” the fierce old man said, “so I suppose I don’t have much choice. No, it’s not a dinosaur, boy-it’s something much more interesting. And her name is Meseret.” Uncle Gideon pulled a pair of glasses that were little more than two lenses out of the pocket of his bathrobe and inspected Tyler’s face like a doctor examining a particularly interesting wart. “Yes, you look a bit shocked-no surprise there, but no less than you deserve. I shouldn’t reward you for being a troublemaker, but if I send you two back to the house now we’ll just have to do this some other time.” He snorted. “Children- pfah! ” Gideon turned his attention to Lucinda, then back to Tyler again, as if he was making some huge decision. “Well? Do you want to see her properly? Do you want to meet Meseret?”

Tyler stared at back him and then slowly nodded his head. “That thing in there? Yeah. Yeah, sure.”

“What is going on here?” Lucinda almost screamed. “Will someone please explain it to me?”

“We’re right here, child,” said Mrs. Needle with more than a touch of impatience. “There’s no need to shout.”

“Oh, there probably is,” said Uncle Gideon, and he laughed, a sort of cracked hiss that didn’t make Lucinda feel much better at all. “Come along, then, all of you-follow Simos, if you would be so kind.”

“Simos” was apparently Mr. Walkwell. Tyler and Lucinda followed him as he scrunch-scrunch-scrunched his way around the front of the Sick Barn to a heavy metal door. As before, he sounded like he was walking on packing material, but he was on the same soft dirt as the rest of them and he was the only one making a noise. When they reached the door, Mr. Walkwell opened a little cabinet beside it and punched numbers into a keypad inside, as though this was some kind of top-secret missile base out of a spy show.

The door swung open silently and Mr. Walkwell stepped into bright fluorescent light. Tyler stared in, his pale face suddenly reluctant. Lucinda felt a sudden urge to take his hand as she used to when he was still her little brother instead of the irritating kid with the headphones who lived across the hall. She stepped forward, but as soon as she touched his hand he pulled away and walked into the Sick Barn. Lucinda followed a little more slowly.

She would never forget how the place looked in those first moments-a long room that seemed to stretch for a city block, with a dozen banks of lights hanging from a grid of pipes beneath the curved ceiling. Stainless steel tables stretched along one side of it, and the walls and shelves and open spaces were cluttered with bags of supplies and gasoline cans and cabinets full of tools, so that the place almost looked more like a garage than anything to do with animals. Lucinda would never forget how it smelled, either-that weird mixture of a doctor’s office and a zoo on the hottest day of summer. It made her eyes water.

But as impressive as it all was, she would never be able to remember exactly how it felt to see Meseret for the first time. Some things were so powerful that as soon as they came into your life they changed you completely-changed everything, so that the you who was trying to remember was just too different from the you who hadn’t known.

It felt like she was in a movie, one of those special-effects epics that she had to go see when it was Tyler’s turn to pick. Lucinda was looking at a stretched-out shape that almost entirely filled the massive steel pen running down the far side of the room, a scaly shape the size of a small jet plane. Even though she had been expecting something to fit Tyler’s word, monster, her brain couldn’t make sense of the immense thing in front of her. It was a giant robot, maybe, some kind of theme-park attraction, but it couldn’t be real.

It lifted its huge head on its huge neck and looked back at her with snaky yellow eyes almost as big as hubcaps. Nothing else, Lucinda found out, was as convincing as actual eye contact.

Her shrieks didn’t seem to bother the creature much. Its yellow eyes followed her, but without much obvious interest, as she stumbled backward toward the door and slammed into Colin Needle, who had just walked into the Sick Barn.

She fell down at Colin’s feet, still staring helplessly at the monster and trying to remember how to breathe. He didn’t bother to help her up, but the big farmhand Ragnar did.

“Don’t fear,” Ragnar said. “She will not harm you.”

“It’s a monster!” Lucinda shouted.

“See? I told you!” Tyler had stopped a good dozen feet from the pen to stare, which was clear evidence of how frightened he still was. But he was shaking with excitement too. “See! It is a real dinosaur. I wasn’t lying!”

“Don’t be stupid,” Colin said. “That’s not a dinosaur.”

“Have you children forgotten all the stories?” Ragnar sounded almost sad.

The monster in the pen stirred and the immense leathery flaps folded against her long front legs scraped along her scales. Wings.

“Oh my God,” said Lucinda, almost in a whisper, not talking to anyone but herself. “It’s a dragon. It’s a real, true dragon.”

Colin pushed past her. “Why are you showing them the Sick Barn?” he demanded of Ragnar. “Why didn’t anyone tell me you were all coming here? I’m going to tell Gideon.”

“He’s here,” said Mrs. Needle, pointing to the corner of the room where the old man in the striped bathrobe was talking quietly with Mr. Walkwell. “And we didn’t tell you because I thought you needed your rest.”

Colin scowled like a three-year-old about to throw a tantrum, but turned away instead. Uncle Gideon was coming back toward them, but Lucinda didn’t think that was the only reason Colin wasn’t arguing with his mother.

Gideon’s voice rose sharply and suddenly. “Here now, boy! What’s-your-name-Tyler! Don’t get too close to her. She hasn’t been feeling well.”

Tyler had been moving steadily forward, drawn toward the huge creature as though hypnotized. He looked like he was over his fear and into his I-wonder-how-it-works phase, something that usually spelled trouble for anything that interested him. Lucinda felt a clutch of fear. If he got eaten, how would she explain it to Mom?

It really was a dragon. There was no avoiding the fact, no arguing with it. Lucinda couldn’t see every detail because much of the creature’s body was hidden by the metal rails of the pen, but unless there was some normal kind of animal longer than a school bus that had scales and fangs and wings, then she, Lucinda Anne Jenkins, was standing in the same room as…

“A dragon,” she said again, loud this time, finally starting to feel the wonder of it all.

“She certainly is,” Uncle Gideon said. “I will introduce you to her-and I do mean introduce. This is a dragon, not just some kind of giant lizard or crocodile. You must treat her with respect. Her name is Meseret.”

“Un-be-lievable!” Tyler was bouncing up and down again. “This is so awesome! Where did she come from?”

Uncle Gideon scowled. “ That, at least, you’re going to have to wait for until I’m ready, boy.” He was still frowning as he said, “Now step forward carefully. That’s right. Just stand and let her smell you.”

Tyler and Lucinda had moved up to within a couple of feet of the bars. The dragon’s nostrils twitched like little volcanoes getting ready to erupt. It was all Lucinda could do not to run away. The smell, the size-she was terrified.

“Move slowly and quietly, will you?” said Gideon. “She has very little experience of human children. In fact, as far as we know, before today she hasn’t met any except Colin.”

“Poor dragon,” said Tyler, too quietly for anyone but Lucinda to hear.

The dragon fixed Lucinda with an emotionless stare. The huge eye glowed with red-gold light like the coals of a fire, and for a moment it seemed something Lucinda could fall into, fall forever, twisting helplessly downward… She backed away, knowing that if she didn’t she’d scream again. “This is too weird,” she said. “Everybody here’s acting like… like this is all normal! Like it’s… ”

“Ordinary?” asked Uncle Gideon, the light winking off his spectacles. He looked amused and angry at the same time, a strange combination. “Yes, I’m afraid the name of the farm is a trifle deceptive.”

“Oh, man-flaming cows!” Tyler said, laughing a little wildly. “Flaming cows! Now I get it!”

Uncle Gideon nodded. “Ah, you did receive the book, then. I was worrying I’d missed getting it in the mail in time. Good. Obviously it’s not really about cows. And I do want you to memorize it. They’re not at all like ordinary animals, dragons.”

Lucinda felt like her head was going to blow up. “But this can’t be real! If this was really true, it would be in the news… people would know… it would be on television!”

Without warning something grabbed her arm, and a second later she and Tyler were both being dragged across the Sick Barn by Uncle Gideon. He was holding her wrist so tightly her bones ached, and his face had gone red with anger. When they got out into the glare of the outside spotlights he abruptly let go. They both staggered. From the corner of her eye Lucinda registered the others coming out of the Sick Barn, too, but no one said anything.

Gideon stood in front of them, and he didn’t just look like an eccentric old man in a bathrobe anymore. He looked really mad and really scary. “Now you listen to me,” he said in a voice that trembled with fury. “You have no idea- no idea, I tell you -of the great privilege you have received in being invited to this place. And yet I find that the first thing you two do when you get here is abuse my hospitality. You, boy, do exactly what you are told not to do. You were told not to leave the house, weren’t you?”

“I warned him, sir,” said Colin. He sounded pleased.

“And then you, girl, start telling me this place should be on television.” Gideon made a sputtering noise, like a snake about to bite. “You have been here five minutes and you would give away our hard-won secrets to a society of idiots and thieves, would you?”

“No, I didn’t… ” she began, but there was no stopping Gideon Goldring.

“I cannot tell you how deeply disappointed I am in my first impressions of you both. Moreover, you just confirm my worst fears. Once people have been allowed into Ordinary Farm, there’s no control-no control at all! Yes, children, if you haven’t guessed, I am very, very angry.”

Tears sprang into Lucinda’s eyes and her heart hammered. She looked to Tyler, but he had his head down, avoiding Uncle Gideon’s eyes. Her little brother wouldn’t argue, but he wouldn’t give in, either. He was too stubborn for that.

“Give me your hands,” Gideon said, suddenly and loudly. “Right now! You are going to swear me an oath.”

Lucinda saw the mouths of some of the others fall open in shock. She looked at Tyler.

“ Now! ” roared Gideon.

They did so. Somehow there seemed nothing else they could do. Lucinda heard distant birds in the trees, a breeze ruffling leaves, the ragged breathing of this terrible man, their great-uncle.

“Promise me,” said Gideon, “swear on everything you hold sacred, that you will never, never betray the secrets of Ordinary Farm to the outside world!”

The old man’s grip was so tight that she could feel him trembling, and she suddenly had the feeling that he was more than just angry-Gideon Goldring was frightened. Really, seriously frightened that they might tell people about the farm. An odd calm came over her. “Yes,” she said, “I promise.”

Tyler didn’t say anything for a moment. “As long as you don’t try to hurt me or my sister,” he said. “Remember, you asked us to come here.”

Gideon let go of their hands. He sounded surprised. “Hurt you? You are my relatives-you are family!”

“Okay, then, I promise.”

Another silence fell. When Lucinda looked up at Gideon to see if he was getting over his anger, the heels of his hands were pressing his eyes. “God,” he cried suddenly, “oh, God, my head!” Suddenly he swayed and almost fell.

Mrs. Needle, black hair streaming, ran to his side. “Gideon, enough! You are still unwell. You must come away now and lie down.” And she began to lead him to the house. Gideon leaned into her, hobbling and wiping at his eyes.

“Just like Mom told us,” Tyler said quietly. “Right, Lucinda? A nice, old-fashioned summer on the farm.”