The Secrets of Ordinary Farm

Chapter 18

With Gideon downstairs in the Snake Parlor all of the house staff had been tiptoeing in and out to have a look at him, thrilled to have the master of the farm home again, but when Lucinda saw him it shook her badly. Her great-uncle was sitting up and eating broth from a spoon, but he didn’t quite look right, although she wasn’t certain exactly why. It was obviously Gideon, and he was still able to talk-she heard him grumbling a warning at Pema when the nervous young woman almost spilled some water on him-but his eyes were sunken and bloodshot, and he looked at almost everyone who came close as if he suspected them of trying to harm him. Yes, she realized, that was it-Gideon Goldring looked like one of his own less pleasant animals, peering out of its cage at its captors.

Mrs. Needle seemed to think everything was as it should be, though, and it was true that he didn’t make those faces at her: instead, Gideon looked up at her like a trusting child. She even made encouraging little noises as he slurped his broth or drank water, which made Lucinda feel sick to her stomach. She wondered whether Gideon had suffered some kind of stroke or something really bad, but no one was telling them.

Well, she thought, if they’re trying to hide it from us, maybe they shouldn’t move his bedroom downstairs where we all have to see him…

“Where are you going?” Mrs. Needle asked as Lucinda sidled toward the door. “I might need you to run an errand for me.”

The last thing Lucinda wanted to do was spend all day here in this room, under the cold, watchful eyes of Patience Needle. “Oh, I’ll be back really quick,” she said. “I just wanted to… to pick some flowers in the garden. To brighten the room up.”

“The garden,” said Gideon, nodding, his eyes not quite focused on anything. “We lived in the garden once.”

“Huh?” Lucinda took a step back. “What did you say, Uncle Gideon?”

“The garden.” Her great-uncle spoke as though it were an ordinary conversation, but what he said next showed that it wasn’t. “We had to leave. Angel… an angel chased us out. With a flaming sword. You saw him, didn’t you? Or was that the serpent…?”

“Hush, Gideon, you’re confused,” Mrs. Needle said, which seemed a bit of an understatement. “Just finish your broth.”

Suddenly the old man seemed to see Lucinda for the first time. He leaned forward, fingers outstretched as though he might grab at her, but she was well out of his reach. “But listen… ” He looked around as though worried about eavesdroppers, then turned his red, staring eyes to Lucinda once more. “ We can go back. Yes! We can sneak past the angel and get back into that lovely garden again… ”

Lucinda could not bear to listen to any more of Gideon’s crazy ramblings. She turned and all but ran for the door.

I know he wasn’t talking about this place, not this garden, Lucinda thought as she made her way down the rows, but this part of the property still creeps me out sometimes.

The huge garden spread down from the slightly higher spot where the house stood, or at least where the main and largest part of the house stood, and stretched across what would have been at least a city block back home, most of it overgrown and neglected. Only Mrs. Needle’s herb garden and Sarah’s vegetable garden, which covered quite a bit of space at the end nearest the kitchen, looked as though they were regularly tended. The rest of the sprawling garden, with its rioting plants, overgrown paths, vine-choked arbors, and corroded greenhouse almost buried in vegetation, looked more like the remnants of some ancient civilization that the jungle had reclaimed.

It took a while for Lucinda to find the rose bushes she had been thinking of-the garden, like the farmhouse itself, could be a slippery place to find your way around-but she located them at last along a wooden fence some ten or eleven rows forward from the old greenhouse. Lucinda thought it was a little strange that although the roses looked completely untended, the stems tangled in each other and many of the blooms brown and withered, the rose arbor had a smell like someone had been putting fresh fertilizer on it, a pungent stink that made her want to hold her nose. Then, as she went down the length of the rose bed clipping the stems of the flowers that had just started to bloom, she stepped on something squishily unpleasant.

It felt so wrong that she was reluctant to lift her shoe, afraid to find she had trodden on a slug or some kind of animal dropping. When she finally worked up the courage to look, though, it was even worse-she had stepped on a dead mouse.

Except it was still moving.

Lucinda leaped back with a cry of disgust and horror. The dying mouse’s legs paddled weakly, as though it were trying to swim, then slowed and stopped.

She stared at it from a safe distance. Whoever heard of a mouse being slow enough for a human to step on? What if it had rabies? The very thought made Lucinda’s toes curl. She yanked off her shoe and scraped it on a wooden fencepost until she thought she would be sick, then pounded the sole in the dirt, trying to make sure every last bit of the mouse was gone, but suddenly in her mind she stood in a cloud of invisible rabies germs. Didn’t people say there was no cure? Or was that something else? What would her mother say? What if she had to have rabies shots… her friend at school had told her they injected them in your stomach…!

The unexpected sound of voices made her jump, but it was only Pema and Azinza laughing as they picked vegetables from the kitchen garden. She looked back down at the mouse carcass and for a disturbing second thought she saw it moving again-some kind of unkillable zombie mouse-but then realized that the movement was fleas and other small creatures deserting the corpse.

“Gross,” she said out loud. There was a daddy longlegs walking away, too-surely that hadn’t been on the mouse. But in fact many different kinds of bugs were all walking and hopping in the same direction, like a tiny parade. Horrified but fascinated, Lucinda bent and followed it along for several feet.

“But why would they all do that?” Several roly-polies joined the little procession. It was beginning to look more like some kind of bug protest march. She poked with a twig at one of the roly-polies, which curled into a ball until she stopped, but then it got right back up and trundled after the others toward the back of the garden.

Lucinda followed the procession for several more yards as it was joined by other streams of tiny creatures, beetles and spiders and more pillbugs. She also discovered that it was not the only such line-several other streams were winding through the leaning rows and tangled plants, but they all seemed headed in the same direction. Lucinda was beginning to wish she had Tyler with her, or even Colin Needle, but both boys had left the house hours earlier.

She saw a lump lying only an inch or two away from the little procession she was following. Ick, she thought -a dead bird. But they’re all just walking past it! Don’t bugs, like, eat dead stuff? Where are they all going?

She straightened up until she could see where all the lines seemed to be converging-the old greenhouse, which loomed from the tangle of wild plants like a rock in an angry sea. Its high, peaked roof and all the glass made it look a bit like an abandoned church. The iron frame that held the glass, once painted green, had long ago become a ghostly rust-colored skeleton, except for the roof and the ornamental weathervane, both mostly scorched black. In some places the bars had even melted and changed shape, sagging like taffy. It almost looked as though there had been a fire here, like the one in Gideon’s lab that so obsessed her brother. But it didn’t just smell like a fire: Lucinda was still very aware of the sweet stink she had noticed earlier, as though something much larger than any mouse or bird lay rotting nearby. Was that what was drawing all the bugs, some big thing like a dead raccoon in the ruined greenhouse? But that didn’t make sense-if all the little creatures wanted was to scavenge on a dead animal, why had they marched past the bird as if they didn’t even notice it?

A dead cat, lying sprawled at the base of the greenhouse as though it had fallen from a great height, nearly made Lucinda turn around and head back to the house, but instead of clearing up the mystery it only made it stranger, because it was surrounded by the bodies of dozens of smaller creatures, mostly insects and birds, while the streams of insects and other tiny creatures wound through this accident scene without even slowing, vanishing at last into cracks in the greenhouse glass or holes in the ground at the base of the old structure.

“What the heck is in there?” Lucinda asked, talking out loud again because she was badly spooked. She stepped over the bodies, most of which seemed quite recent, until she had nearly reached the dusty glass of the greenhouse. If she hadn’t been able to hear Azinza singing something only a hundred feet away, with Pema shyly chiming in, she might have turned and bolted. Just the smell was beginning to get to her, but she also knew Tyler would be look at her like she was the girliest girl in the world if he found out she had retreated without even examining at the greenhouse. Still, she wasn’t going to be stupid about it. She turned and shouted to the two women at the other side of the garden.

“Hey, Pema, Azinza!”

Tall Azinza turned, shading her eyes. “Hello, Lucinda!”

“There’s something really strange about this greenhouse,” she called. “A funny smell… and there are all these dead animals

…!”

“What?” Azinza said something to Pema. “I can’t hear you!”

Lucinda was struck by a sudden worry. Was Mrs. Needle making some kind of witchy poison in there? But surely she would have done a better job hiding the fact… “Could you come over here and look?” she called to the two kitchen women.

“We come to you!” Azinza called back, then led little Pema toward the space between the rows. From a distance and despite the different colors of their skins, they looked like a mother and child.

As she waited for them Lucinda stared at the scorch-marks and the charred husks of vegetation that lay around the base of the greenhouse like a shadow. How could you have a fire just here, but not have it affect the plants growing inside the greenhouse? As Azinza and Pema came down the garden toward her she leaned closer to the greenhouse, and tried to see through the dirty glass. The inside was so full of leaves that she couldn’t make out anything, as if a crowd of green people were covering the panes with their hands to keep outsiders from looking in. Just beside where she stood one of the panes had been pushed a little way out of its paint-flaking iron frame by the exuberant plant life inside. Without thinking she reached out to push the square of glass back into place and it tilted and fell out, breaking into two pieces on the ground.

For a moment Lucinda could only stare at the pale, wispy plume that snaked out of the opening-was it smoke? Was something burning in there? Then the wind changed direction and swirled the powdery cloud into her face. She gasped in surprise and accidentally sucked some of it into her nose and mouth-dusty, gritty, itchy… Her skin felt as if it were on fire. “Oh, God,” she cried, but could scarcely force the words from her throat, “my face! Help, my face…!”

“We are coming!” Azinza shouted, but the African woman seemed to be getting farther away, not nearer. Eyes streaming with tears, cheeks burning, Lucinda blindly reached out her hands. Why wouldn’t anyone help her?

She fell to the ground. Hands pulled at her, trying to drag her back onto her feet again, but Lucinda barely noticed them. Her throat was on fire, and her thoughts were drifting away into the darkness like dying sparks.