The Dragons of Ordinary Farm

Chapter 8

“B ut I still don’t get it-where did the unicorns come from?” Lucinda asked as the wagon bumped along. “And the dragon?”

Ragnar smiled and shook his head. “I have said many times: that is not for me to answer. But look there and you will see something.”

Lucinda didn’t want to look at anything else. She wanted to keep the amazing sight of the unicorns in her memory and not let anything else push it out-that cloud of manes and tails and flashing eyes and horns.

And horns, yes. Poor Haneb. The farmhand had only been trying to protect her. She still felt bad about how she had reacted.

“What is it?” Tyler asked. “It’s… huge!”

Lucinda looked up, suddenly fearful that they were being taken to something even more terrifying than the dragon-a chained ogre out of a story, or some monstrous, girl-grabbing gorilla. Instead she saw only a pale, whitewashed building stretched along the valley floor below them. But what a building it was, sunk half into the hillside, a single low wooden structure like a dozen oversized shoeboxes placed end to end, its roof covered in solar panels. It seemed as long as the immense playing field at her school. “It’s… a giant barn,” she said.

Ragnar nodded. “It is, child. That is the dragon barn. No dragons in it now, since Meseret is in the Sick Barn, but you will see what else is there.”

“Was it built just for the dragon?” Tyler asked as the wagon crunched to a stop.

“No, this was made for an earlier owner of the land who kept cattle. We tore out many of the stalls to make space for Meseret. You will see.”

“There are train tracks going right into it,” Lucinda said as they walked through the low, dry grass toward the high doors.

“Of a sort,” Ragnar said. “They are for a rolling flatcar, to bring feed. And to move Meseret when it must be done.”

“Why would you even do that?” Tyler asked. “That dragon must weigh as much as a whale!”

“A small one, yes. But these creatures are delicate, and what makes one animal sick can sweep through them all. So we move the sick ones to the special barn. But you are right-it is not easy to move Meseret, even with the lifting-thing.”

Lucinda was too startled by the smell and the heat that hit her as they went through the big doors to wonder what a “lifting-thing” might be. The ceiling of this barn was dauntingly high, twice as high as the Sick Barn’s, spider-webbed with metal girders and dozens of bright hanging lights. The odor of the place made her nose prickle and her eyes water. It smelled like the dragon, but more so-more musky, more sour, more… strange.

Stranger than a dragon? she couldn’t help thinking. A day ago she couldn’t even have imagined meeting a dragon at all. She heard a sound behind her and turned to see Colin Needle coming in after them.

“Hello, Lucinda,” he said. “Looks like I caught up with you.”

“Are you not supposed to be working on the feed budget, Master Needle?” asked Ragnar sternly.

For a moment, as the pale boy stared angrily at the big yellow-haired man, Colin didn’t look very nice at all. “As it happens, my mother sent me here to ask Gideon something.”

Ragnar was still frowning. “Mr. Goldring is here? I thought he was ill this morning and was going to stay in bed.”

Colin shrugged. “He changed his mind. My mother wasn’t very happy about it, but you know how Gideon is-”

Just then something screeched, a noise like failing car brakes. Lucinda jumped. “What was that?” she demanded. “You said the dragon was gone!”

“Don’t be such a baby,” Tyler growled.

She wanted to slug him. Like he wasn’t ever scared of anything! How about when Mom tried to get him to eat sushi?

Ragnar patted her shoulder. “I said no dragon. But the other serpents-this is their home too.”

“And not just reptiles,” Colin said helpfully. “Almost all of our cold-blooded animals live here. There are amphibians and some… well, not fish, exactly.”

“Their water must boil,” she said. “It’s so hot in here!”

“We turn up the heating lights while Meseret is gone,” Ragnar explained.

“Why?” asked Tyler.

Colin was happy to show what he knew. “Most of the time, she contributes a lot of the warming of this place all by herself.”

Tyler scowled. “What, she breathes fire on everything?”

“No, Tyler.” Colin said “Tyler” like he was an elementary school teacher. “Just with body heat. She’s extremely large and she’s warm-blooded.”

They crossed the open area inside the doors and trooped up the stairs behind Ragnar, who didn’t look quite so big in this building. The second floor ran like a giant balcony all the way around the interior of the massive barn, leaving the middle open. From up there Lucinda could see the huge, empty expanse of straw-covered concrete where the dragon usually lay.

“Gideon is probably in the cockatrice pen,” said Colin.

“Well, perhaps, then, we show those to you, if Gideon is there,” Ragnar told Lucinda and Tyler. “But everyone must wear the eye shields.”

“Goggles,” Colin translated.

A large wire enclosure took up much of this side of the second floor, and someone was moving around inside it. The figure straightened up when it saw them and gave a jerky wave with a garden-gloved hand. Lucinda could tell it was Gideon only by his skinny shape and his bathrobe, since his head was covered by something like a beekeeper’s hood, which made him look like a very badly dressed space alien. It came to her suddenly that she didn’t know what frightened her more-the animals or this stranger, this supposed relative, who, out of the blue, seemed to have claimed their lives.

Scattered on a table near the beginning of the wire mesh lay thick plastic goggles, each with its own elastic strap, and the kind of paper masks people wore in hospitals. Ragnar passed Lucinda and Tyler one of each, but Lucinda only stared at hers with dismay. “Do these cocky-whatsits have diseases? I don’t want to catch some snake disease.” She heard Tyler snort but ignored it. Someone had to be practical.

“Not for disease.” Ragnar pulled on the goggles and tugged the mask into place-the elastic barely stretched around his big head and bushy beard. “For spit.”

“What?”

“You’ll see,” said Colin. “Don’t worry, Lucinda, we’re not going inside the pen. They’re too nasty-and they bite, also. But it’s the spitting you really want to avoid.”

“Gross!” she said.

“Excellent!” said Tyler.

Uncle Gideon came out of the pen, being careful to latch the door behind him. Lucinda could see movement inside, but the enclosure was full of boxes and boards piled haphazardly and it was hard to make out what was actually in there. Gideon pulled off his hood and gave them an uncertain look. Lucinda, though she quaked inside, determinedly met his gaze. Gideon said, “What did you think of the unicorns?”

“It was amazing,” Lucinda said. “They’re beautiful!”

A broad grin spread across Gideon’s face. “Aren’t they?” he said. “Aren’t they?”

“Where do they come from?” asked Tyler.

“Yes, when I see them running, I believe that what we’re doing here is worth every dollar and every drop of sweat.” Gideon mopped his brow with his sleeve. He was wear ing ordinary pants under his bathrobe, but had bedroom slippers on his feet instead of regular shoes. “And in here we have the cockatrices and the basilisks. Don’t take those goggles off until we tell you it’s all right.”

“What are they?” she asked. “Ragnar said they spit.”

“Yes, yes. But it’s perfectly all right.” He frowned.

“Haven’t you even heard of these creatures before? Devil me, what happened to teaching children the classics? Basilisks go clear back to Pliny the Elder in ancient Rome-although old Pliny could have learned a thing or two from taking a tour of our little zoo.” He wiped his forehead again. “For one thing, he’d find out that the cockatrice and the basilisk are actually the same creature.”

“I don’t know what either of those are,” said Lucinda, trying to peer more closely through the wire without actually touching it. She was very nervous something might jump out at her. Considering the brightness of the lights overhead, the pen was quite dark and it was hard to make out anything. “Cockastripe?”

“Cock-a-trice,” said Gideon. “A medieval monster, or at least it was in the eleventh and twelfth centuries when it started to show up in bestiaries. Head of a rooster, tail of a serpent. And basilisks were supposed to be dragons that could kill with their eyes-just by looking at someone!”

Lucinda took a step back. “But that’s not true, is it?”

Gideon laughed. He seemed stronger than he had the night before. Maybe Mrs. Needle’s medicine was helping him. “There’s a grain of truth in most mythology, children. Ah, look there.” He pointed to the corner of the cage where a quite remarkably ugly creature the size of a turkey had scrambled up onto a pile of wood to stand looking at them. From neck to long, draggled tail, it was covered with scales, between which poked straggly feathers, but its head was bare. At first Lucinda thought it was some kind of vulture, but the beaked face wasn’t quite right. Then she saw that the beak was actually a snout full of little needle-sharp teeth. It lifted up a huge, bony claw and nipped at it for a moment, then put it down and tipped its head to stare at them again, yellow eyes unblinking.

“It’s horrible!” said Lucinda.

“I daresay it thinks the same about you,” Gideon pointed out in a grumpy voice. “But no animal is horrible, girl. Not one. They are all as they are made by Nature.”

“Why does it have feathers?” Tyler asked. “It doesn’t look like a bird.”

“No, it’s not. As best I can tell, it’s something closer to a late dinosaur-feathered, like an archaeopteryx. But one thing about it is rather horrible. Ragnar?”

Ragnar shook his head as though he didn’t approve, but he walked to a part of the pen nearer the cockatrice and banged on the wire with the flat of his hand before pulling back quickly. As the creature turned its hairless head toward him he stepped away. It kinked its neck and then jabbed its head as though trying to cough out something stuck in its throat. A stream of clear liquid splashed on the wire where Ragnar’s hand had struck.

“Poison,” Gideon said cheerfully. “And not a nice one. Isn’t that fascinating? Won’t do much more than irritate your skin, but if it got in your eyes you’d be blind-hence the goggles. And if you swallowed it you would be very sick, if not dead, which is why we have the surgical masks. Now come on and I’ll show you the earlier stage of the life cycle-the fearful basilisk!” The skinny old man strutted along past the end of the wire enclosure, bathrobe flapping like the robe of some tatterered king. He seemed different today-happier, calmer, almost like a normal old man. Lucinda stepped wide around the spot where the poison had splashed on the fence.

The group stopped in a little bay between pens. Metal trays, each with its own lights-as if it needed to be any hotter in here!-had been set up side by side, perhaps a dozen in all. The bottoms of the trays were covered with straw, and each tray held from one to a half-dozen eggs. Lucinda could see they weren’t chicken eggs. They were too round, and slightly saggy, like Ping-Pong balls someone had baked in an oven.

“The cockatrices tend to eat their own eggs in captivity, we’ve found,” Gideon said. “And the young are vulnerable while they’re small, so we keep them out of the main pen for the first few months.” He indicated a row of glass tanks against the back wall of the barn, beyond the egg trays. “Come and see.”

The tanks were like miniature versions of the wire pen, with sand on the bottom and piles of rocks. The creatures inside didn’t seem as interested in hiding as those in the bigger pen. A half-dozen of them, each the size of a pet rat, crowded up against the glass; and when their long, hairless tails writhed they had the look of nestling snakes, although their lumpy little bodies were covered with fine, pale down. The creatures also had claws on their bony front feet, but no back legs that Lucinda could see. She shuddered as the blunt little snouts banged against the glass.

“They don’t use their poison to kill prey when they’re this small, but mostly for self-defense,” Gideon said. “And they’re so small it’s not a stream of it they shoot but a mist-you might not even know you’d inhaled it until paralysis started to set in. Hence, I’m guessing, the idea that a basilisk can turn a man to stone with a mere look.” He nodded vigorously. “Hungry. Do you want to see me feed them?”

Suddenly it was too much for Lucinda. She stumbled back, retreating as far from the scuttling creatures as possible until she had the second-floor railing at her back. She felt like she might faint or throw up.

“Hey, you okay?” Tyler asked. He actually sounded like he meant it.

“Yes, I’m just… ” She took a deep breath.

“Come and see something else,” said Colin kindly. “The flying snakes are in the next pen. They’re rather pretty.”

He was right. A tree stood in a generous, wide tub, and the red and black and gold snakes hung from its branches. Every now and then one of them would snap open pale wings like a Japanese lady’s fans and glide to the ground. The largest wasn’t much longer than Lucinda’s forearm, and their enclosure didn’t stink like the cockatrice cages.

“That’s a spice tree,” said Uncle Gideon. He had finished feeding the basilisks and come to join them. “Frankincense, to be specific, the resin that we are told the three wise men brought as a gift for the baby Jesus.” He smiled a hard little smile. “It’s harder to keep the tree alive than the winged snakes.”

“Whoa,” said Tyler suddenly. “Flying snakes. Are there flying monkeys here too?”

“Only one on the whole farm,” Uncle Gideon said. “She’s a real rarity.”

“I saw her! The night I saw the dragon!”

“You did, did you?” Gideon shook his head. “I’m surprised. Zaza is usually shy of everyone, even us. That’s why we let her have her freedom. Actually sometimes we don’t see her for weeks.”

“Her name is Zaza?” Tyler said it like he was memorizing something important-like a cheat code for a game he was playing, Lucinda thought. She just wanted to get out in the open air again, to somewhere that didn’t smell like reptiles.

Farther along the second floor there was another pen, this one just a flimsy chicken-wire fence. The floor was covered with shallow pans of water. A number of slow, docile-looking creatures sat in the water or crawled stiff-legged across the floor. It was only when Lucinda looked at one that stood unmoving that she realized what made them so unusual.

“They have heads at both ends!”

“Awesome!” Tyler leaned over the rail, which made the light material buckle a little and earned him a poke from Uncle Gideon.

“Don’t break my cage, boy, we’ll have amphisbaenae all over the place. Yes, they do seem to have two heads, don’t they? An amphisbaena’s back is a decoy, it turns out-a tail with scales that look just like the creature’s eyes, mouth, and nostrils on the other end. A myth put to rest, this one. Still, they don’t exist anymore on earth-except right here.”

“Why is that, Uncle Gideon?” Tyler asked.

“Well, well, well,” said Uncle Gideon with a hard smile. “That inconvenient curiosity of yours just won’t let up for a minute, now will it?”

Lucinda could see the look in Tyler’s eye. “What do you expect?” he said. “We’re surrounded by magical animals, but you won’t even-”

“Stop right there!” cried Uncle Gideon, causing strange sounds to rise from cages all around. “Magical-what utter garbage! All of these animals, boy- all of them -have at some time been alive in Earth’s history. Apart from our work here they are all now completely extinct, as far as we know. These are real animals, as created by Nature, and if I hear any more fairy-tale nonsense from you,” Gideon spluttered, “why, I’ll… ”

Tyler said, “Well, it’s DNA, then, isn’t it? Making monsters by, like, gene splicing… ”

Uncle Gideon actually started to turn purple. “You, boy,” he said, “have clearly been watching too much so-called ‘reality’ TV. Or reading trash magazines, I don’t know what. We will hear no more of that rubbish, if you please!” He took a breath; his color eased. “Now,” he said, as if trying to be jolly again, “enough arguing. We have many more things to see and a limited amount of time. Come along. Sadly the hippocampus is in the Sick Barn-I think it may be dying. It was one of our finest specimens.”

“Some animals are not meant to be kept captive,” Ragnar said-a touch darkly, Lucinda thought.

“Yes, well.” Gideon clapped his hands together as though he’d finished a difficult, messy job. “I don’t think we’ll take the time to show you all the birds upstairs. The roc is only small, and to be honest I doubt our phoenix is actually a phoenix. Now come along. We may still have time to see Eliot-he likes to come out in the morning, but morning is almost over!”

His eyes, in his wrinkled face, were bright-too bright. Lucinda could not meet them. She dropped her own, look ing at her feet and wondering what might be coming next, and what kind of creature Eliot could possibly be.

Uncle Gideon took them to the pond in his small truck, an electric vehicle not much bigger than a golf cart. The others followed in Mr. Walkwell’s wagon. Unlike Mr. Walkwell, Uncle Gideon clearly had no dislike of motorized transport, and did, in fact, seem to go to the opposite extreme-he drove like he was auditioning for NASCAR. Nor had he even bothered with a seat belt. “We’ll get there much faster this way,” he shouted at Lucinda and Tyler as they crashed down into a dip in the road, then actually lifted off the ground as they bounded up again. “And Eliot doesn’t show himself much after noon.”

“Who’s Eliot?” asked Lucinda as she clung to the frame of Gideon’s little truck. Death by dragon, death by golf cart-one way or the other, they were clearly doomed.

“You’ll see, if we’re lucky. If anyone knew he was here, Eliot alone would bring in tourists by the hundreds of thousands!”

“You’re going to bring in tourists?” said Tyler.

“What? No, never!” Uncle Gideon took his eyes off the bumpy road long enough to give Tyler a very stern glance. The truck promptly jounced so hard that Lucinda’s head and ears began to ache. “That’s the most important rule of Ordinary Farm-everything here is a secret. Secret, secret, secret!”

“We know,” said Tyler pointedly.

“Just remember, even a breath of what’s here getting out to the world at large will ruin everything. Everything!” He shouted the words, then fell silent, looking as sour as if he had caught Tyler and Lucinda making a video of the place to post on the internet. He said nothing for the next several minutes as they careened along the bumpy road, then emerged at last out of a little forest of oak and red-barked manzanita.

“Wow! That’s not a pond.” Lucinda stared out at the vast, flat expanse of water that filled the bottom of a medium-sized valley. “That’s a lake!”

“ ‘The Pond’ is what old Octavio used to call it. He had a rather

… dry sense of humor,” said Gideon. “Why do you think he called this place Ordinary Farm?”

“What’s in there?” Tyler asked. “A whale?”

“Nothing so ordinary.” Gideon giggled to himself. He seemed to be in a better mood again. Lucinda had thought he was going to shove them out of the truck when he had been yelling about secrecy. “No, let’s park and walk over to the rocks and sit quietly. Then maybe we’ll see him.”

“The sun feels good,” said Uncle Gideon. “I should get out more often, no matter what Mrs. Needle says.”

They had been sitting on a high place above the water for some minutes. Suddenly Lucinda spotted something long and silvery moving just beneath the surface of the water. “There!” she said. “I see something!”

“Ssshhh,” cautioned Uncle Gideon. “Not too loud. Eliot is one of the shyest of the animals we have.”

“Eliot? That’s a weird name for… ” Tyler abruptly fell silent, watching with his mouth open as the creature broke the water about a hundred feet away from where they sat, its silvery expanse of neck kicking up a curl of wake below. “For… for a sea serpent,” he finished. The shiny, snakelike head swayed from side to side, then darted back down into the water. The curling neck remained visible above the surface for a moment, a shining loop, then it, too, disappeared like a knot being undone.

Lucinda’s heart beat fast as she watched the graceful monster slide down and then back up to the surface again, but this time more from excitement than fear.

“I’m afraid the name Eliot is a bit of a joke,” said Gideon. “Ness, like Loch Ness, do you see? Eliot Ness?”

“I’ve heard of Loch Ness,” said Lucinda quietly, staring. “But I still don’t understand the Eliot part.”

“Never mind. He was a famous man, but long before your time. In any case, our Eliot goes after fish like the old Eliot used to catch bootleggers. Watch.”

They sat watching the lake monster feed, all silvery swiftness, until the sun was high in the sky and Gideon, weirdly calm now after a morning of watching his creatures, decided it was time they headed back for lunch.