Tad Williams: The Secrets of Ordinary Farm

Lucinda was so excited she couldn’t stay quiet. “Wow, it’s great to be here! How is everybody-and how are the animals? Ooh, how’s the baby dragon? Your last letter said she was big now!” Uncle Gideon’s last letter had also been months ago. Lucinda had been driving her brother crazy since then. “Is she all right?”

Gideon chuckled. “Yes, child, yes, all the animals are fine. All the people, too!”

Mr. Walkwell swung back up onto the bench and clucked his tongue. Culpepper the cart horse snorted, then pulled the wagon into a broad turn across the main road. A few townsfolk on the opposite sidewalk looked up and one or two even waved. It was clearly another slow Saturday in downtown Standard Valley.

Gideon lowered his voice. “You didn’t tell anybody at home anything, did you? About the farm?”

“No, Uncle Gideon!” both children cried at the same time, and Tyler added, “We wouldn’t do that. We promised.”

“Darn right.” Gideon settled back on the bench. “Because that is the first rule. In fact, that’s almost the only rule I have!”

Not quite true, Tyler thought, amused. You’ve got a few of them. Don’t ask too many questions about the animals. Don’t ask questions about the Fault Line, where the animals come from. Don’t ask about what happened to your wife, Grace. And definitely don’t ask why you have a witch for a housekeeper…! But of course Tyler didn’t say any of that. He had made it through an entire amazing, wonderful, incredibly dangerous summer at Ordinary Farm last year and the one thing he had learned for certain was that when Gideon Goldring was in a good mood it was better just to keep your mouth shut and enjoy it.

And their great-uncle really was in a good mood, as though he had missed the children almost as much as they had missed Ordinary Farm. Tyler hadn’t spent his school year counting the seconds until they could return in quite the way his sister had, but he had definitely been looking forward to this. He had been worrying about it, too. So many secrets-so many crazy, dangerous secrets!

And now it all starts again, he thought. Ten whole weeks. Anything could happen!

“Wow. We’re really back.” Lucinda stared down the sloping road to the valley floor. “It was so hard to wait!”

“Does it look the same?” asked Gideon. “As you remember it?”

“Better. When can I see the dragons?” Tyler knew she was dying to talk to them, as she had found out she could do at the end of last summer-she had talked about little else all the way down on the train today. “Can I stop in and see them now, Uncle Gideon? Before we go to the house? The Reptile Barn’s just over there, and we’re so close

…!”

Mr. Walkwell grunted in disapproval, but Gideon was still in a good mood. “I suppose so, just for a minute- if you promise to stay out of trouble…!”

“I will, I will! Oh, thank you, Uncle Gideon!”

The old man was smiling. “Just don’t tell Mrs. Needle. She doesn’t like me changing the schedule.”

“She doesn’t like anything with a pulse,” Tyler said under his breath, but he knew that at this moment Lucinda wouldn’t have cared even if Patience Needle were riding toward them on a broom.

After they had descended from the hill road they crossed a wooden bridge over Kumish Creek, then followed the line of the new and impressively tall wire fence that ran around the outside of the property. Tyler also couldn’t help noticing the signs reading

DANGER-ELECTRIC FENCE.

“Is it really electric?” he asked.

“Not enough to kill anyone,” said Gideon. “Just to keep unwanted visitors from climbing over. And if they try it some other way, well

… ” He pointed to a small dome-shaped object on the top of a fence post. “We’ve got cameras-they work at night, too!” Gideon chortled. “Much less work for Mr. Walkwell to guard the property now, isn’t that right, Simos?”

“I didn’t ask for this.” Mr. Walkwell sounded unhappy. “My ears and my nose are still better than any seeing-box.”

“Yes, but even you can’t keep track of what’s going on across the whole valley at the same time.” Gideon seemed amused by the overseer’s grumpiness. “This will be good for you, Simos. You’re not getting any younger.”

“Pericles said that to me, too.” Mr. Walkwell turned back to watching the road as it ran along beside the fence. They were approaching a large timber gate that was definitely another new addition.

“He never knew Pericles,” said Gideon in a stage-whisper. “Pure exaggeration.”

Since Tyler didn’t know the guy either, he could only shrug. “So that’s the new gate?”

“One of them, yes.”

“But why?” Lucinda sounded alarmed and Tyler couldn’t entirely blame her. The hills and the valley hadn’t changed at all, but here was something that definitely had, a ten-foot tall gate of steel and heavy timbers. Tyler thought it looked like the entrance to a fortress

… or a prison.

“I told you in the letter I sent over the Christmas holidays,” Gideon said. “Told you we couldn’t have you visit until now because we were making some changes. Well, this is one of them. We’ve got new fences and gates for the whole farm-in fact, we’ve got a whole new security system!”

“Kind of weird,” said Lucinda. “It looks like… like…!”

“East Berlin,” said Tyler, who had just finished the Cold War in his American history class.

Gideon shook his head emphatically, happy mood now gone. “Don’t be stupid! The Berlin Wall was meant to keep people in. I am protecting myself against people who want to creep onto my property and steal my secrets. Not the same at all!” He glared at the children. “Or have you forgotten what happened last summer?”

Tyler decided it might be a good time to stop talking about the gate. “No, Uncle Gideon.”

“Of course not, Uncle Gideon,” said Lucinda. “We get it.”

Tyler looked along the fence, which stretched as far as he could see in either direction. “It… umm… looks very secure.”

Gideon laughed harshly. “It had better! Do you know how much it cost to build fences and mount cameras around 10, 000 acres? It took most of the money that Ed Stillman tried to use to bribe Simos! And that was quite a lot of dough!”

Except that money hadn’t really been a bribe, Tyler knew. Billionaire Ed had brought it to purchase a dragon egg from Colin Needle, a crime against Ordinary Farm that Tyler and Lucinda had helped prevent, then also helped to hide from their great-uncle.

Now Gideon climbed down from the cart and punched some numbers into a keypad beside the fence. The lock clicked open and the heavy gate rolled to one side on little wheels. After they had driven through it slid closed again by itself.

“That’s to make sure no one leaves it open by mistake,” Gideon said. “Wonderful improvement-and there are others you haven’t seen yet! We’re really set now. Just let Stillman’s mob try to sneak in here without us knowing about it!”

Even Lucinda had finally fallen silent. As they turned toward the Reptile Barn, the tall shadow of the gate stretched a long way down the road in front of them.

As they pulled up in front of the Reptile Barn, Lucinda thought she heard someone calling them. Mr. Walkwell must have heard it too, because he turned to look off in the direction of the farmhouse. A strange object was approaching them, something odd and upright trailing a cloud of dust.

“Oh, crud,” said Tyler. “Him.”

Colin Needle rode unevenly toward them across the dirt, jouncing up and down on the seat of a plain, old-fashioned black bicycle.