Tad Williams - The Secrets of Ordinary Farm

The mirror was gone.

In fact, the entire piece of furniture was gone: all that remained in the retiring room was the dusty bed and an angular shadow on the wallpaper that showed where the washstand and its magic mirror had stood.

Tyler felt like he had been punched in the stomach by a heavyweight fighter. It took him a full minute or more to calm down enough to walk back out into the library. “So what happened to that sink in there?” He asked as casually as he could, but he could hear a quiver in his voice.

Colin barely looked up. “What sink?”

“In that room. Across from the picture of Octavio. There used to be a sink there.”

Colin made a face-the great man interrupted by small minds. “My mother took it over to her room. She said it was an antique and it should be taken care of better.”

It was all Tyler could do to bite his lip and stay silent. Mrs. Needle has the mirror. The mirror that led the way to Grace. She must know the truth! Or at least she must know there was something special about it-he didn’t believe that “antique” story for a second.

Tyler was so angry and frightened by this news that all he could think of now was to get back outside into the open air. The washstand mirror had been taken by the witch and Colin Needle was squatting in the library like a bandit. It was all bad, impossibly bad.

“Tired of books already?” Colin said as Tyler went by. “Off to play?”

“Shut up.” He shouldered the door open.

“That’s just like you, Jenkins,” the older boy said. “You don’t try to understand this place at all, you just mess about with things. You don’t understand the true genius of someone like Octavio Tinker. You wouldn’t know a Continuascope if you saw one. But I would-I’ve been learning all about them. In fact, I might just make one… ”

With that horrifying threat echoing in his ears, Tyler let the door fall shut.

Zaza came down to accompany him, sporting and fluttering, clearly pleased to be with him again no matter how downhearted Tyler himself might feel, how listlessly he might trudge back toward the farmhouse. But when they got to a certain point she leaped up, spread her wings, and disappeared without a backward glance. When he turned from watching her fly the first thing he saw was the distant glitter of the old greenhouse, flashing its underwater colors in the afternoon sun.

Lucinda was beginning to appreciate traveling by horse cart-the only wheeled vehicle Mr. Walkwell would ever use. Rattling along through the open air made her feel so vital, so connected-as if nature itself was flowing through her. Mr. Walkwell, horns and goat-legs hidden once more for the trip into town, held the reins loose but taut, almost talking to the horse Culpepper through the leather straps.

When he saw her watching the old man gifted her with a quick, careful smile, something she hadn’t seen much. The sunlight was golden, the day, not too hot, and the air filled with the smells of eucalyptus and warm yellow dust. Things even seemed to be going well at the farm this year-why wasn’t Mr. Walkwell happier?

“Is everything all right, Lucinda?” asked Colin Needle. “You seem very quiet.”

That sounded like sincere interest, which surprised her a little. “I’m fine. Just enjoying the ride. Do you think it’s going to rain?”

Colin looked up at the bruise-gray sky. “Maybe. Gideon says there hasn’t been weather like this since 1983-they had floods then! But it won’t rain anywhere near that hard this summer, I don’t think.”

1983 was well before Lucinda had been born. She was impressed. “Have there really been a lot of storms here this year?”

Colin smiled. “Oh, yes-thunder, lightning. The week before you came it was almost like being in a war-boom, crack, boom! Sarah said the world might be ending!” He laughed and Lucinda found herself laughing with him. They both fell silent again, but this time it was a comfortable silence.

When they reached downtown Standard Valley (such as it was) Mr. Walkwell tied Culpepper and the cart to a hitching post outside the store. Colin stood up. “I have to go over to Rosie’s for something. Shall I meet you somewhere?”

The old man looked up, squinted, and said, “You can do what you wish, Master Needle. Just be back here in an hour.”

“Where are you going?” Lucinda asked, then immediately regretted it. Surely secretive Colin Needle wouldn’t take kindly to being quizzed about his plans. But to her surprise Colin only grinned.

“I’m going to Rosie’s to use their wireless connection.”

Lucinda couldn’t help laughing at the idea of the ancient diner with its glowering owner as a fancy internet cafe. “Wi-fi? You’re kidding, right?”

“No. Rosie lets me use it when I’m in town and I help him with his accounting software.” Now Colin laughed, too. It sounded quite ordinary and pleasant. “Yes, even Standard Valley is finally stumbling into the twenty-first century.” He climbed down, threw Lucinda a little goodbye salute, then walked off toward Rosie’s cradling his laptop as carefully as a bundle of dreams.

Lucinda picked up a large bag of carrots at the grocery store, then decided it wasn’t big enough-they were for a dragon, after all!-and dug down to find a larger one. When she had paid for it she headed back to the feed store where Mr. Walkwell was talking sourly to the clerk about the horrors of machinery. Bored, Lucinda stared out of the window at the main street and wondered when they were going to see the Carrillos again, the kids from the farm next door. She and Tyler had met them first here in Standard Valley last year, on another of Mr. Walkwell’s shopping trips, and they had all become friends. She thought it was a little strange they’d been back on the farm so long and still hadn’t heard anything from Carmen and the rest. She and Tyler would have to find a way to contact them.

Mr. Walkwell was still denouncing the dangers of steam power to the confused counter clerk when Lucinda finally gave up and wandered outside into the hot, gray afternoon. The air smelled like rain but none was falling yet. She briefly considered going over to join Colin at the diner but felt reluctant to do that-what if he thought she had a crush on him? Which, though he occasionally acted almost human, she most definitely did not…

She wandered away from the center of town instead. It didn’t make for a very long walk-past the few stores and the train station until the only buildings around her were board houses with small, fenced front yards.

As Lucinda turned in front of the farthest houses and started back, someone stepped out of the shadows at the front of the train station, a tall man who angled toward her with long strides. By the time she had reached the center of the block the stranger was walking beside her.

“You-child,” he said. “Stop and talk to me for a moment.”

Every instinct told Lucinda to run; only the fact that they were standing in the middle of the town’s main street in the middle of the afternoon with people watching them from in front of the diner gave her courage to stand her ground. The towering stranger had to be nearly six and a half feet tall, she thought, with the easy physical grace of a young man, but his face was tan and creased as old leather. His hair was black, as were most of his clothes and his wide-brimmed hat. He looked more like a gunslinger out of a western movie than a farmer… a man out of time…

A sudden understanding felt like icy fingers on her neck: this man did look like someone from another time-like someone who had stepped out of the Fault Line. Suddenly she was terrified.

“I saw you and Simos Walkwell roll into town,” the stranger said in a slow, confident drawl. “Are you staying out at the Tinker farm? Gideon Goldring’s an old friend of mine.”