Tad Williams - The Dragons of Ordinary Farm

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.