Tad Williams - The Dragons of Ordinary Farm

Colin Needle pushed open the doors on either side of the corridor. The rooms were small and neat, each with an old wooden-framed bed covered with a crazy quilt, a desk, and bare white walls. The room on the left had a bigger window and a good view of the cherry tree.

“This one’s mine,” Lucinda announced.

“Fine,” said Tyler, and slung his bag into the other room.

“I have work to do,” said Colin. “Dinner is at five. Don’t go out of the house unless someone goes with you.”

Tyler snorted. “Why not?”

“Because Mr. Goldring doesn’t want you to. In fact, you should just stay in your rooms until someone is free to show you around.”

“Why? Carnivorous cows or something?”

Colin Needle was clearly angry again. “It’s a farm.” He said it like a teacher talking to the dumbest student in class. “There are open wells and ditches, sharp tools, and very few lights. And animals, yes, who shouldn’t be startled. So just stay in your rooms.” He turned and walked down the hall, stiff and straight as a wooden soldier.

“What a creep,” said Tyler when Colin was gone.

“He’s not that bad. Kind of a nerd.” Lucinda struggled to get her suitcases onto her bed. She was feeling more than a little overwhelmed by all the strange new sights.

“Yuck. Could I feel more sweaty and gross? Me first in the bathroom.”

Tyler laughed. “This is a farm, Miss Barbie Doll. You’ll probably be using the outhouse in the back forty.”

“Shut up, Tyler,” said Lucinda. “You may belong on a farm, but I don’t.”

“Well, surprise-you’re on one anyway.”

Suddenly a bellowing, booming roar rattled everything in the room, including the window in its frame. Lucinda shrieked and jumped. The rumbling sound came from somewhere outside the house, but it was so deep and powerful Tyler could feel it through his feet even as it died away. It was an animal noise like a lion with a turbo upgrade, but there was something else in it, too, a kind of hissing crackle that made it more frightening than any lion because it was somehow alien.

“Whoa! What was that?” he said. “Man, what made that noise?”

His sister didn’t say a word. She just stared at her hands as if she couldn’t believe how strange they looked, shaking like that.

T yler stared out his sister’s window. His bones felt like they were still rattling from the force of that crazy sound. “Lucinda, are you unconscious or something? What made that noise?”

“Just one of the animals, I guess,” she said in a pale voice, and then actually began to unpack her suitcase.

Tyler gave her a look of utter disbelief, then crossed the hall so he could look out his own window. “Luce,” he called, “ Luce, come look at this. There are farm guys running here from all over.” Six or seven men were hurrying toward the place that looked like a vast white tube sunk into the ground. He thought one of them, bigger than the rest, might be the one Mr. Walkwell had called Ragnar.

Lucinda had stopped in his doorway as though she didn’t want to see. “Maybe-maybe a cow got hurt… or… ”

Tyler laughed harshly and dropped down to sit on his bed. “You’re kidding, right? A cow. Well, it sure was one loud cow. It sounded like a T. rex!”

Something about the way she flinched tugged at him in some deep place where there were only feelings, not words, but he couldn’t help it. He was angry. “I’m definitely going to find out what’s going on,” he said. “You have to come with me, Luce.”

“No. I’m tired. I’m going to take a nap.” She turned away from him, letting her hair fall forward in front of her face like a curtain, like a mask. Oh, but Tyler hated the way she did that-hiding from things she didn’t want to see. Okay, maybe it was because she was scared, but you wouldn’t catch him doing that, just praying for someone else to make the bad things go away.

“Luce, listen to me. There’s something out there, something really weird. You heard it too. I know you did, Luce, so just admit it. I know.”

She still wouldn’t say anything, but she didn’t go back to her room, either. “Lucinda. Luce, come on!” He reached out his foot to push at her but he pushed too hard, with too much anger.

She finally looked up, her expression ice cold. “You kicked me.”

“I’m trying to get you to pay attention!”

“I hate you, Tyler Jenkins.”

“Luce, I’m sorry, but-”

“I hate you!” she shouted, then turned and ran into her room, slamming the door behind her. “I hope that cow really is a monster,” she yelled from inside. “I hope it eats you!”

Tyler stared at her closed door. He almost knocked-he really wanted her to come with him-but he didn’t, because he knew that asking her again wouldn’t change a thing. Some things never changed.

As he stomped along the corridors and staircases of Ordinary Farm looking for a way outside, Tyler found his anger toward Lucinda easing up a little. She just wasn’t good at stuff like this. She yelled about the smallest, most unimportant things until he wanted to slug her, but when she gave up, she really gave up.

When Dad first left, things had been bad-really really bad. It was Lucinda who had kept Tyler fed-Lucinda, trying to be the big responsible one. That was a time when she had definitely come through for her kid brother…

And after a while, things got better. Mom had started work and was home most nights to make them dinner, though it was usually a bit late because she worked so hard. She would need an hour to kick off her shoes and pour herself a glass or two of wine-“decompression time,” as she called it. After that she’d usually throw something together-nothing fancy, of course, just hot dogs and a can of baked beans or her two-minute quesadillas. Sometimes after the wine kicked in she could be quite amusing, doing imitations of the impossible people she had to deal with every day or making jokes about Lucinda’s bad moods. Even Tyler had to admit his mother could be funny-in a grown-up, mom-ish kind of way-and okay-looking too. Inside Tyler, the alternating states of nothingness and anxiety had eased because things were no longer terrifyingly out of control…

But about that time, Tyler began catching Lucinda staring at their mom, and what was on her face was a look of the most intense longing. All his sister wanted was a little normal stuff in her life, just a bit of what those perfect families on television had so much of, and Tyler knew it. And not long after that, the really dark stuff came for Lucinda. Recalling it now made it hard for Tyler to stay angry at her, even when Lucinda was acting like a total-

Tyler suddenly stopped, realizing that he had been walking for a while now without thinking much about it. “Wow,” he breathed, looking around at the unfamiliar surroundings. He was completely, absolutely lost.

He was on a landing at the bottom of a staircase. In front of him lay a weird little parlor room with a glass door, and on the far side of the room he could just see a second door. He walked across the echoing wooden floor, wondering if he was somewhere he shouldn’t be. Considering that Colin had told him they were supposed to stay in their rooms, that seemed pretty certain.

The glass door was unlocked. There was no furniture in the small parlor except a single overstuffed chair and a table with a vase and a dirty plastic flower so old that it might have been the very first plastic flower ever made. He crossed to the far door and found another staircase outside, this one leading somewhere else entirely. Tyler climbed the stairs and stepped into a corridor with windows along one side. He took a few steps, then something rattled against the window, startling him so badly that he gasped and jumped in the air. He had only the quickest glimpse of the thing that had bumped against the window from the outside, a round little head and a blur of greenish-gray body, but that glimpse had made no sense. Why were there monkeys here? Did colonies of wild monkeys live out here in the hills of California? Or was Great-uncle Gideon running some kind of crazy monkey farm?