The Secrets of Ordinary Farm

Chapter 23

Ragnar groaned and straightened up in the seat. Tyler was frightened by the blood on the Norseman’s face and chest, but Ragnar felt himself carefully, then declared, “Nothing but swipes.” He touched the back of his head. His hand came away bloody. “But that thing rattled my brains against the ground. What happened?”

When Tyler told him, Ragnar grinned through the drying blood. It made him look frightening and fierce. “Then the worm saved my life because the Manticore would have had my guts. I had never thought to owe a dragon thanks, but I do.” He looked at Lucinda. “Your sister?”

“I don’t know. She’s sick.”

Ragnar leaned over to touch Lucinda’s forehead, nodded, then saw the mess he had made of the seat behind his head. “I apologize, Hector Carrillo,” he said. “My blood is in your car.”

Mr. Carrillo didn’t say anything, but Tyler could see the man’s eyes were still wide with fright and he was hunched over the wheel as he drove like the devil himself might be chasing them.

Tyler didn’t understand how sick his sister really was until they reached the Carrillos’ farm. As Mr. Carrillo pulled up in front of the house Lucinda, who had been leaning on Tyler’s shoulder for most of the trip, began to slide off the seat. He clutched her arm and shook her but she was out cold, although “cold” was the wrong word to use-Tyler could feel the heat coming off her like a light bulb that had been burning for hours.

“She’s really hot,” he said, struggling to keep her sitting upright, but his sister was as limp as a rag doll. A very heavy rag doll. “She’s got a bad fever!”

“The Carrillos will see that she has what she needs,” said Ragnar, but he didn’t sound very convinced. It was strange to see the huge Norseman at a loss for what to do, but it was also frightening.

Tyler was so busy trying to get Lucinda to wake up that he hadn’t noticed Mr. Carrillo had got out of the car until he returned with his wife Silvia. Mrs. Carrillo looked almost as worried and frightened as Tyler felt, but she took control quickly. “Lift her out and carry her inside,” she told Ragnar. “Hector, get me some water and some towels.”

As they brought her into the house the Carrillo children came running to see what was going on.

“Is she all right?” Carmen asked. “What happened?”

“Your father said she’s got a fever. Go get a pair of your pajamas and a bathrobe,” her mother said. “She’s going to need a change of clothing-everything she’s got on is soaking wet.” When Carmen was gone and Ragnar had put Lucinda down on the couch Mrs. Carrillo wrapped Lucinda’s head in damp towels, then stuck a thermometer in her mouth.

“You couldn’t warn me?” she asked her husband.

“Phone never works over there.” He frowned. “Should we take her into Liberty?”

Mrs. Carrillo scrutinized the thermometer. “A hundred and one. Not too bad. I’ll sit with her. If it goes up any we’ll take her in.”

Lucinda’s eyes fluttered open. She looked around but it didn’t seem like she could focus. “Tyler…?” Her voice was a cracked whisper.

“I’m here, Luce. You’re going to be okay. We’re at the Carrillos’ house… ”

“Something… in… g-g-g… ” She closed her eyes, defeated for a moment, then tried again. “G-Green… house… ”

“We know. You were out in the garden near the greenhouse when something made you sick. Do you know what it was?”

“ Greenhouse…!” she said, almost crying. The effort seemed to exhaust her. She closed her eyes and seemed to fall asleep again.

Tyler held his sister’s hot, damp hand. Seeing her like this frightened him, and for the first time in a long time he wanted his mother. “Man,” he said to no one in particular. “What happened over there?”

It got worse before it got better. Lucinda had to be carried off to Carmen’s room twice during the evening to have her sweat-soaked clothes changed. She moaned and thrashed for much of the evening, sometimes talking to a Tyler who wasn’t there (instead of the Tyler who was sitting next to the couch watching worriedly); other times she seemed to be speaking to the dragons-once she even asked Desta to pass the tea. And a few times she seemed to be talking to something else entirely, something that frightened her badly. “No!” she kept saying. “Don’t want to! Don’t want to go!” During those moments it was all Tyler could do to hold onto her slippery hand.

At last Lucinda’s skin began to cool and her sleep became less disturbed. She also stopped talking.

Mrs. Carrillo examined the thermometer. “Just under a hundred. I think she’ll be okay. You kids, off to bed. Steven, get Tyler a sleeping bag and an air mattress out of the garage-and don’t forget to shake out the spiders!”

Tyler laughed. “I’m so tired I could sleep in a whole nest of spiders.”

Grandma Paz, who had been helping Silvia Carrillo nurse his sister, crossed herself hurriedly. “Don’t say such a thing-you will bring the susto on yourself.”

“A susto’ s kind of like a curse or something,” Steve whispered. “It comes from being scared.”

“As it is, I will have to sweep your sister,” said Paz. “You too, maybe.”

“What does that mean?” Tyler whispered. “I don’t want to be swept.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Steve told him quietly. “You just lie down and she waves a broom over you. But don’t let her near anything bleeding. I fell off the monkey bars at school once and my leg was all bloody and she wanted to put powdered rattlesnake in the cuts.”

In fact, now that it seemed like Lucinda was going to be all right, Tyler was beginning to feel all his own cuts and bruises from his time in Alamu’s nest: every inch of his body seemed to have been scraped or poked; but Tyler’s idea of medicine did not include any kind of poisonous snakes. “So, yeah,” he told Steve. “That’s really interesting, about your grandmother and everything. Maybe I’ll just sleep in the front yard tonight.”

He didn’t, of course. In fact, Tyler woke up several times during the night, frightened for his sister, but each time he went out to check on her she was sleeping more or less peacefully on the couch with either Grandma Paz or Mrs. Carrillo asleep in Mr. Carrillo’s big armchair beside her. At last, sometime before dawn, he was able to fall asleep for good, but his dreams were full of tangles and snags and the sounds of something large trying to find him.

Tyler stood out in front of the Carrillos’ house and stared across the valley, but of course he couldn’t see anything of Ordinary Farm from here except the hills that surrounded it. Lucinda, who for the first time in two days had felt well enough to get off the couch, stood beside him wrapped in a blanket even though the day was a hot one.

“I’m telling you, there’s something in that greenhouse, Tyler. It was like smoke, or like… I don’t know. But it got into me and made me sick!”

“You just know that witch is growing poison apples or something in there,” Tyler said. “You’re lucky you’re alive.”

“It wasn’t just poison, though,” his sister said, shivering and pulling the blanket closer. “It was… like something got inside me. Into my head. I can’t explain. I can still feel it a little… ”

“Better be careful or Grandma Paz is going to get out her broom again.” Tyler squinted. “Anyway, you’re better now, so forget it about it.” He picked up a dirt clod and flung it as far as he could. “The real problem is Colin Needle.”

“Oh, Tyler, he’s not that bad… ”

He turned on her. “He is, Lucinda. He is. And he’s got the Continuascope, I just know it.”

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” She was pale and distracted, still nowhere near her old self. “It’s been missing a long time and Uncle Gideon really needs it to look for Grace. Who cares who gets the credit…?”

“That’s not the point!” At least Tyler was pretty certain it wasn’t. “I don’t care about the credit, but don’t you understand-Colin has the Continuascope! He can use the Fault Line! And if his mother gets hold of it, she can use the Fault Line. They could go back into the past and make it so we were never born!” Something at the corner of his eye was distracting him, an odd shape flitting toward them across the pale blue sky.

“Colin wouldn’t do that,” Lucinda said.

“He’ll do anything his mother tells him to do,” Tyler said stubbornly. “It was probably her who sent him after it in the first place… ” He narrowed his eyes against the sun. “What is that?”

For half a moment he almost convinced himself it was Alamu streaking toward them down the sky like an avenging demon, but although it drew rapidly nearer the shape did not grow much larger and his heart began to slow to normal. Then he recognized it.

“Zaza!” He laughed and clapped his hands together as the little creature glided down toward them. “Look, Luce, it’s Zaza!”

“That’s nice. But I have to go lie down again.” She turned and made her way unsteadily back into the house. Tyler hardly noticed her go because the little winged monkey had landed on him and was climbing around on the top of his head, tugging at his hair and chattering softly, seeming as pleased to see him as he was to see her.

“Good girl! Heya! Good girl!” He laughed at the little tickling fingers. “Hi, Zaza! Whatcha doing? You came all the way over here, did you?” In other times he would have been terrified that the Carrillos would see-Silvia and Paz were only a dozen yards away in the kitchen, making dinner-but if they hadn’t said anything about the manticore and Alamu he didn’t think they were going to make much of a deal about Zaza. “What brings you here, Z?”

It was strange that the little monkey should come so far to see him when she had hardly spent any time with him at all this summer. The year before they had been almost inseparable, but this time she had stayed away except when Tyler was out on the edges of the farm. Why would she come to him out by the Reptile Barn or all the way over here at Cresta Sol but never come to the window of his room as she used to almost every night?

He sat down and let her climb all over him, petting her and playing with her, enjoying the softness of her velvety wings and her funny, inquisitive noises. She looked him in the face and pulled on his nose with her little fingered hands until he began to believe she wanted him to follow her, maybe even back to the farm.

“I can’t,” he said. “I got kicked out. But I sure wish you could talk like Lucinda’s dragons. I bet you’d tell me what’s going on back there.”

At last, puzzled and a bit distressed, Zaza flung herself into the air, circled Tyler’s head once, twice, chattering loudly, and then sped away back toward Ordinary Farm.

“Okay,” Tyler said to the Carrillo kids. “What’s going on with your folks? It’s been three days. Why haven’t they said anything about what happened?”

“About what happened where?” asked Steve without looking up from his GameBoss screen.

Tyler rolled his eyes. “Come on, man! Your father was driving the car-we had a manticore chasing us and a dragon on the hood. We almost died! Why haven’t they said anything about that?”

“I know,” said Carmen. “It’s scary. It’s like it never happened.”

“No.” Little Alma shook her head, her expression solemn. “It happened. You can see it on their faces. They’re just not talking to us about it.”

“But why?” Carmen flopped down on her bed, bouncing Lucinda who was resting there in a sleeping bag.

“Stop,” Lucinda groaned. “My head hurts.”

“Sorry. But your brother’s right-why haven’t they said anything? It’s creeping me out!”

Steve Carrillo stood up. “Dude, there’s a simple solution. Let’s go ask ‘em.”

They could hear Hector and Sylvia Carrillo arguing in quiet but strained voices as they approached the kitchen. “… To deal with it,” Hector was saying. “It’s pretty clear we have to do something

… ”

“Do something?” This was Mrs. Carrillo. “What are we supposed to do? You might as well try to do something about… about a volcano!”

Carmen knocked on the closed door. “Mom? Dad? What’s going on?”

A moment later it swung open. “We’ll talk to you kids later,” Mrs. Carrillo said, peering out. “Your father and I are having a discussion.”

“About the stuff we want to talk about. So why don’t you have the discussion with us?”

Mrs. Carrillo stared at the children for a moment. “All right,” she said at last. “Meet us in the living room.”

“Well,” Mr. Carrillo said when they were all settled, “as you may have guessed, this business with the Tinker farm, with those… dragons, or whatever those things were… didn’t come as a complete surprise to your mother and I.”

“Huh?” Steve looked stricken. “You mean you knew? About the farm and… and the kind of animals they have there?”

“But how?” Carmen asked.

“Because… well, because your great-grandfather knew Octavio and helped to build that farm,” said Hector. “And… there are some other things you haven’t… ”

Suddenly the front door rattled and banged open. Grandma Paz pushed through with two hefty bags of groceries, which she deposited on the floor, then turned around and closed the door firmly. “He’s coming again,” she told them. “That man. He was right behind me the whole way in from town.”

Hector Carrillo turned to Tyler and Lucinda. “You two stay out of sight or he might ask questions,” he warned, then turned to his own offspring. “Go with them.”

“Who are they talking about?” Tyler whispered as he and the others pushed down the hallway into Steve’s room.

“Who do you think?” Steve told him. “That crazy Stillman guy-the billionaire. He comes by every few days.”

Tyler heard the doorbell ring and the door open. He was curious-he had never seen Stillman in real life-and opened Steve’s door just a crack, but he couldn’t see anything of the living room. He could hear voices, though, and heard an unfamiliar one say, “I find it hard to believe you won’t take twice the market price for this place, Mr. Carrillo.”

“And I find it hard to believe you won’t take no for an answer,” said Hector.

They spoke for a minute or so more, but their voices became quieter and Tyler could make out only a few words, then the front door was firmly closed.

“Why does he keep trying to buy our house, Papa?” Alma asked when they were all back in the living room. “We told him we won’t sell it.”

“Because he’s the kind of man who thinks he can always get what he wants just by throwing money at it,” Hector said, but the lines between his brows deepened. “I’m beginning to think he might be right.”

Sylvia Carrillo sat on the sofa, pinching the bridge of her nose. Tyler, horrified, looked from one to the other and said, “You’re not really going to sell to him, Mr. Carrillo, are you? Not to Stillman. He’s Uncle Gideon’s worst enemy!”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do if Gideon Goldring won’t even talk to me.” Hector Carrillo banged his beer down on the little round table. “How many times can I beg the man to talk to me? How many times do I have to let him treat me like a dog?”

“But it’s not really Gideon’s fault!” said Lucinda. Everyone turned to look at her.

“What do you mean?” Tyler asked.

Lucinda shook her head. “I’m not sure-but it’s not! I mean, there’s something really wrong with him… ”

Grandma Paz chose this moment to emerge from the kitchen with a glass of tomato juice and plop herself down on the couch next to her daughter. “So,” she asked, “have you and Hector told them about the mina frecuentada yet?”

“Mother!” Silvia Carrillo almost screamed it.

“Whoa! Doesn’t that mean ‘ghost mine’ or something? asked Steve. ‘Sounds like an amusement park ride. What are you talking about?”

“Nothing,” said his father sternly. “Your grandmother just likes to tell crazy old stories.” He gave Paz a very hard look. “It’s her age.”

Sylvia stood up, an expression of pain and weariness on her face. “Enough for tonight,” she said. “Have you all forgotten about the evening milking? The cows must be full to bursting. It’s time for work! We’ll finish this later.” But she looked as if she hoped they would never, ever return to that particular subject.