Tad Williams - The Secrets of Ordinary Farm

Meseret’s immense yellow eye blinked again, then closed and stayed that way: The dragon wasn’t going to talk to her, that was clear, but whether she just didn’t want to do it or Lucinda had lost the knack, there was no way to tell. Lucinda shrugged and moved over to Desta’s much smaller pen.

“Not too close to them, Miss,” called Haneb as he trundled his wheelbarrow past. “Remember what happened to Master Colin.”

Of course I remember, she thought. It was my fault. “I’ll be careful. Neither of them would hurt me, Haneb.”

That was called “wishful thinking” and she and Haneb both knew it; still, the small man nodded shyly at her and went on his way. “Just

… careful, please, Miss.”

She turned to the baby dragon, who was watching her with the same seeming disinterest as her mother had shown. “Hello, Desta,” she said, both out loud and in her thoughts. She remembered the day the baby dragon had been born, how excited they had all been when she pecked her way out of her leathery egg, and tried to make those memories into pictures so Desta could “see” them too; but the dragon showed no signs of noticing.

Lucinda continued her efforts for most of an hour, talking with both her thoughts and her voice, trying everything she could think of and making notes about each failed approach, but it was like calling over and over in the center of an empty room: nothing came back to her but echoes. The dragons seemed happy to ignore her. At last she gave up and stood by the rail of Desta’s pen, fighting back tears. She had looked forward to this so much all year, had got through so many boring classes with the knowledge that this was ahead of her-that once again she would have the chance to be special, to be Lucinda, the Girl Who Talks to Dragons! Had it all just been an accident, a fluke?

“Don’t feel bad, Miss,” Haneb said. “They are not friendly. They are dragons. But the little one…” He hesitated. “With the little one-there is a secret… ”

Lucinda sniffed and quickly wiped her eyes. She was ashamed to have Haneb see her feeling so sorry for herself. “A secret…?”

“So she like you better. To… touch her. To be her friend.”

Lucinda’s heart jumped. Ragnar had once told her Haneb had come to Ordinary Farm with Meseret and Alamu when the dragons were younger than Desta was now, that they all came together from the ancient Middle East. Was he finally going to share the secret of communicating with them? Magic words? Some special hand-movements? “Yes, Haneb, tell me! Please!”

The animal handler looked at Desta, then turned toward Lucinda in that odd way he had, looking at her only from the corner of his eye. “She… she likes carrots.”

Really weird things were going on with the farm this year-Tyler could feel it. Probably the strangest was that Lucinda had overheard Gideon talking to Mrs. Needle about what might happen if he died-she was certain their great-uncle had been saying that that he wanted to arrange things so that Tyler and his sister would inherit the farm! And Mrs. Needle had actually gone along with that, or at least appeared to, but Tyler didn’t think that if something really happened to Gideon things would go so easily: the witch was not just going to give up on grabbing the farm for her son Colin.

But if she couldn’t change Gideon Goldring’s mind, what else could Patience Needle do? She didn’t even legally exist in this century-it wasn’t like she could take him to court and sue him.

Tyler had also been wondering what Colin was really up to in the library. Tyler had told Gideon he’d found Grace’s locket there, of course, but on a farm with so few people to do all the work, would Gideon really send a healthy young man to sit in the library for months just in case another locket appeared out of thin air? And why had they been talking about books? What did books have to do with Gideon’s missing wife?

The locket hadn’t just appeared out of nowhere in the first place, of course, but Tyler couldn’t admit that without giving up the secret of the washstand mirror, the gateway he had discovered that led to another, strange version of Ordinary Farm, a place where Tyler was certain Gideon’s wife Grace was still trapped.

Tyler scowled. Just a couple of small lies had made things really complicated. It didn’t seem fair.

Tyler took a bite from his peanut butter sandwich and spread what he called the Octavio Files across the bed-all the fragments of the great inventor’s notes and journals he’d been able to collect last summer and had just collected from its hiding place, a pile of ripped, water stained and mouse-chewed fragments small enough to fit into a single old cigar box. It was the first time this visit he’d had a chance to look them over and he wondered if they would make more sense now. He’d tried to pay closer attention at school the last year, especially in science and math, but the kind of things Octavio Tinker wrote about in his journals- crystallometry and dipolar coupling -just hadn’t seem to come up much in Mr. Ortolani’s sixth grade Earth Sciences class.

Octavio kept going on and on in his early notes about the need to create a device that would enable someone to steer their way through the Fault Line. Later on, Tyler knew, Octavio had actually invented such a thing (with some help from Gideon Goldring, apparently) and named it the Continuascope. Tyler himself, however, had gone through the Fault Line safely and come out again without any such gadget. Had that been a one-time accident, or was Tyler himself some kind of mutant freak, like out of a comic book? He had wondered about that since last summer, and now something in one of Octavio’s long, boring, and hard-to-make-out scribbles jumped out at him like a jack-in-the-box:

“I am beginning to believe that some people like myself might have a natural sensitivity for the Fault Line-an inbred ability to discern between its close-packed strata and perhaps even MOVE from one to another… ”

Strata. Tyler went and found Lucinda’s school dictionary to look it up; it meant “layers.” It was only one sentence, but it felt like dynamite in his brain. Octavio was saying that some people could steer their way through the Fault Line even without a machine like the Continuascope! That made Tyler’s hair stand on end. Octavio Tinker was saying some people might have a built-in sensitivity to the Fault Line-people like Octavio himself.

And maybe like Tyler Jenkins, too…!

Octavio had bought this land a long time ago, and had built his endless, crazy house in part to distract people from the Fault Line that he had found here. Maybe Octavio had even found this place in the first place because he had that “natural sensitivity.” And Tyler was Octavio’s descendant-a blood relative through his mom’s side of the family.

Octavio Tinker had discovered the crazy time-hole, the Fault Line, and built his farm around it. Tyler had proved he could travel through the Fault Line by himself. And now Uncle Gideon was thinking of making Tyler and his sister the ones who would inherit the farm. It was all fitting together as if it was meant to be!

Tyler couldn’t stand to sit in his room by himself any longer. He pulled on his shoes and hurried down the stairs, totally psyched to find Lucinda so he could tell her the latest news.

He looked around all the obvious places in the house but he couldn’t find his sister. He guessed that she was off annoying the dragons on the other side of the farm, but he went out to have a quick look in the gardens behind the house just in case-she sometimes liked to wander around there.

Ooola, the girl he had brought back from the Ice Age, was out in the middle of the vegetable patch, down on her knees as though she was pulling weeds.