The Secrets of Ordinary Farm

Chapter 25

“We have to do something, Luce!” said Tyler before he had even finished reading Fabien Koto’s letter. “This is terrible! Colin’s got the Continuascope and his mom’s brainwashing Gideon with some kind of zombie mushroom-we have to get back to the farm!”

“What good would that do?” Lucinda shook her head. “As long as she’s got Gideon under her control she can just throw us out-she can have us arrested for trespassing if she wants to. She could claim we stole something…!”

“They can’t arrest us without calling the police. They’re not going to do that,” Tyler said. “The Needles don’t want strangers on the property any more than Gideon did.”

“I don’t know. We have to talk to Ragnar about this.”

“He’s not here, Luce. He snuck back over to the farm to help Mr. Walkwell with the unicorns. A lot of them are sick.”

His sister frowned. “Wow. Maybe it’s because of that fungus. I mean, if it poisoned all those birds and bugs in the garden… ”

Tyler waved his hand. “It doesn’t matter now. We can’t wait any longer. We have to do something!”

“No! We can’t do anything until we figure out what it is we should do,” Lucinda said.

Tyler sighed and shook his head. His sister just didn’t get it. “If you don’t want to get involved,” he told her, “then just leave it to me.”

Grandma Paz was in the yard behind the house when he found her, throwing out food for the chickens from a plastic bin.

“Layer food, it’s called,” she told him, as if he had asked. “Nothing to do with layer cake. It means like laying eggs.”

The little old lady, Tyler was beginning to discover, liked to tell stories about everything, not just Ordinary Farm. At dinner she would often share long and occasionally funny tales about one of her relatives getting into trouble or making an embarrassing mistake. Sometimes she even talked about her Indian grandmother and the more distant past, but she never said anything about the stuff Tyler really wanted to hear, and he had been waiting for this chance to talk to her on his own.

He followed her around the yard as she scattered the chicken feed, which pretty much looked like ordinary birdseed to Tyler. “In Australia they call them ‘chooks’,” Paz said, exactly as if he’d asked that too. The birds scuttled after her, heads bobbing, making happy little purple-purple-purple noises in their throats.

Tyler took a breath. “The other night, you said something about

… about a haunted mine.”

“Ah, you heard that, did you? I was wondering when one of you would ask. You are the one who always wants to know, aren’t you? You must get in lots of trouble.” She laughed.

Tyler did his best to share her amusement. “Yeah, I guess that’s me. Is there really a place like that around here?” Ever since he had heard the phrase he had been thinking about it-it sure sounded a lot like the Fault Line. And if anyone around here had made it clear they knew some strange things about Ordinary Farm, it was Grandma Paz.

“ La Mina Frecuentada. That’s what my father and mi abuelo used to call it. Steven is right, it means ‘the haunted mine.’ But they didn’t go there. Too many stories. The whole place had too many stories.”

“Like what?” Tyler hoped he didn’t sound too interested-that was a sure way to scare off a grown-up. They started thinking, What if this kid gets into trouble? It’ll be my fault! Then they clammed right up. “Ghost stories?”

“Sometimes.” She was halfway around the pen now, the hens and chickens crowding along the fence near her feet like tourists looking up at a plump Statue of Liberty. “All kinds of things, child. Monsters. These hills have had stories since long before my abuela’s day. I told you about the Indian man who found the Land of the Dead, right…?”

Tyler remembered well, but it was rare to get her alone and talking. “Tell me again.”

“Don’t play with me, boy. I told you once, that’s enough. He went to bring back his dead wife and went all the way to the Place of the Spirits. That was in these same hills- Las Lomas Embrujadas, the old folks called them when I was a girl, the Witching Hills.”

“Witching Hills?”

She stood. Tyler hadn’t really started to get tall yet, but he could easily look her in the eye. It was hard just now, though, because she was staring at him like he had called her a name. “I said, don’t play with me, boy. You know about these things. I can tell by how you look, how you listen-the questions you ask. You have the same look as old Octavio when he first came.”

“You knew Octavio Tinker?”

“Knew him? Men in my family built most of that crazy house of his. I was a young woman when Octavio first came, so I remember him very well, yes. He was always asking my grandmother for stories like you ask me. Her people were from the Yaudanchi tribe… but I told you that already, too.” She smiled again. “Yes, you are a lot like him-you even look a little like him. He loved that name, Las Lomas Embrujadas . And just like this rich ladron Stillman, Octavio wanted to buy the old mine and the land around it to add to what he had already bought. But my grandfather wouldn’t sell, no. Ha!”

Tyler had already started to ask another question when he suddenly realized what Grandma Paz had said. “Hang on. Octavio wanted to buy the mine from your grandfather? You mean the haunted mine you were talking about?”

“That’s what they called it, yes. I didn’t say it really was haunted.” She frowned, as if wishing she hadn’t started the conversation. “But… way back then, my grandfather let some men dig there for the silver. He didn’t sell the mine to them, he just

… how do you say it…? Leased it. But those men didn’t stay long!” She laughed. “No, not long at all! That’s where it got the name! They were scared like rabbits! Never came back!”

Tyler shook his head in confusion. “Hold on. You mean there’s a piece of land here, on this property, that has a haunted mine? A place where people see ghosts?”

“They used to. Nobody goes there anymore. Too dangerous.” She nodded. “And not just ghosts. All kinds of things. Magic animals.” She shuddered and crossed herself.

“But you’re saying it’s on your property. Not ours.” It sounded like she was talking about the Fault Line. He couldn’t make sense of it.

Grandma Paz stared at him again. “You’ve been here two summers and you still don’t know which are the Magic Hills?” She pointed away from Ordinary Farm to a line of hills some miles away to the west, blanketed in purple and brown shadows as the sun sank behind them. “ Those are Las Lomas Embrujadas,” she said. “And down at the bottom of the biggest one is the place they tried to make their mine.”

“But I thought all the magic places like that were on our farm-you always say what a dangerous place it is!”

“It is! Where you live- Valle del Torbellino, it’s called, Valley of the Whirlwind. My grandmother’s people said that in the old, old days, Whirlwind broke open the ground there to find his lost son, and that was how the opening was made into the Land of the Spirits!”

“So you have an opening like that on your land, too? Then why did you say all those bad things about Ordinary Farm?”

She shook her head in disgust. “Octavio’s land, Gideon’s land, is very bad all over. Our land here is fine as far as you can see. Only out there, in the north… ” she pointed to the distant hills, “are there bad things. We don’t go there, so no problem. The cows are happy, the milk is sweet, and the ghosts don’t bother us. That is why we live here. That is why I would never live where you live.” She nodded her head as if she had proved a difficult and unlikely mathematical theory.

Tyler turned to head back to the house, his head full of complicated and confusing thoughts.

“Don’t step in the chicken poop!” Paz cackled.

So the Carrillos have had haunted tunnels in their hills all along

… he said to himself. A sudden thought made him stop and hold his breath. He was so stunned by the idea that the world around him seemed to have suddenly gone silent.

Does that mean that their haunted mine is… is connected to the Fault Line somehow? Underground? Which would mean it’s connected to Ordinary Farm, too.

That put everything in a different light. Everything.

The Haunted Mine. The Witching Hills. The- what had Paz called it? -the Valley of the Whirlwind. The whole place is weird-the whole valley! If Octavio didn’t want outside attention, it’s no wonder he started calling these places things like “Standard Valley” and “Ordinary Farm”…

Because this place had never been ordinary.