The Secrets of Ordinary Farm

Chapter 36

Steve looked up the dark stairway in horror. “What are you talking about? Why should we go up there? You said the witch’s rooms are up there!”

In another part of the house, nearer to the front door, unfamiliar voices were raised in loud argument. Tyler’s heart was beating hard: at any moment someone might walk in and find them. “That’s where the mirror is now,” he said with quiet urgency and pushed again, but Steve Carrillo was big enough not to be moved if he didn’t want to. “I’m serious! Mrs. Needle took it. Gideon’s wife Grace is stuck in there just like you were and we have to save her.”

“That’s totally different than what you said before,” Steve accused him. “You told me we had to stop Colin-that he had this Continnyscope thing and he was going to take over the earth or something if we didn’t get back here and stop him. That he could destroy time like some kind of supervillain.”

“Exactly!” said Tyler, shoving him again. “So we have to get Grace out of the mirror and then Gideon will… I don’t know… it’ll snap him out of whatever’s wrong with him! We need Gideon to get well so he can stop Colin.”

“What? That totally doesn’t make any sense at all! Forget it-I’m not going near that mirror. It’s crazy in there, and I felt like I was in there for years last time!”

“Nobody’s going to make you go in the mirror. You can wait for me.”

“Yeah, great. Wait around in the witch’s room in your big old scary farmhouse. Good plan. No way, Jenkins.”

“Look, if we stay here, the witch will definitely find us.” Thunder boomed outside, and as it died away Tyler heard the loud voices again. One of them sounded like Patience Needle’s. “There she is now. Get the hell up there!”

Steve Carrillo moaned in protest, but allowed Tyler to hustle him up the stairs. Tyler slipped in through the open door of the witch’s office, then turned to beckon Steve after him. The room was tidy, as it usually was, everything on the desk and in the tall stand of apothecary shelves neatly stacked, potted plants arranged along both edges of the desk in rows with each pot carefully labeled. The only thing that didn’t seem to fit was a pile of papers scattered carelessly across the desk as if a powerful wind had swept through the room and touched nothing else. On the far side of the little room stood the hand-carved wooden washstand and the tall, shiny rectangle of the mirror.

“It really is here,” Tyler breathed. He felt a kind of fierce joy, as if he had been rewarded for a stubborn defense of the truth.

“I told you,” Steve began, “I’m not… ”

All the lights went out.

“Wh-what…?”

“It’s okay,” said Tyler, but he was shaken himself. “I’m still here!”

“What’s going on?” Steve Carrillo sounded like he was working up to a major panic attack. “What’s happening?”

“The power went out, that’s all,” Tyler said. “We’ve got flashlights. It’s okay.” He flipped his on, swept the light around the room. The noise of the storm seemed louder now in the deep shadows, the witch’s room larger and even more unsettling. Tyler leaned over the desk, sweeping his light back and forth across the scattered papers, but they seemed mostly ordinary, bills and other business documents.

Bang! The muffled explosion from downstairs made them both jump.

“That’s a gun!” Steve said.

“Somebody knocked something over, that’s all,” said Tyler.

“You are totally lying, Jenkins! Let’s get out of here.”

Tyler also felt the very strong urge to bolt, but he had come too far to give up. “I can’t-I’m going in the mirror to get Grace,” he said. “I told you.”

“You’re not leaving me out here in the dark!”

“Then you can come with me.”

Another loud bang was quickly followed by a third.

Steve had just found his own flashlight. His eyes bulged. “Don’t try to tell me those weren’t gunshots…!” His eyes widened farther, until Tyler was afraid they would roll right out of his sockets. “I hear someone coming!”

Tyler started to deny it, but there was no doubt-they could both hear rapid footsteps coming up the stairs. “Oh, crap. Hide, quick!” He swung the flashlight around the room, but other than the dark space under the desk there was nowhere to go but into the mirror. Tyler knew he would never get Steve to follow him into it without a fight, so he grabbed the large boy’s arm and dragged him toward the desk instead. “Here!”

They had barely turned off their flashlights and crawled as far back under it as they could, wedged in by the backpacks they were still wearing, when the door of the room was flung open and crashed against the wall with a hollow thump.

“Traitor!” Mrs. Needle’s voice hissed, cold and sharp as a piece of broken glass. “I know you’re here somewhere. You can’t hide from me.”

The tiniest little whimper escaped Steve Carrillo’s mouth. Tyler grabbed his friend’s hand and squeezed it as hard as he could. Mrs. Needle had not moved, which meant she was still standing in the doorway, listening. A moment later she strode toward the desk and Tyler felt his body turn cold, as though all the blood had leaked out of him at once. He squeezed Steve’s hand again, as much to remind himself he wasn’t alone as to keep his friend quiet.

Mrs. Needle was right beside the desk now: he could hear the swish of her skirts as she moved. “If you can hear me, you had better come out,” she said. Only the fact that she didn’t seem able to see in the dark, like a cat or a fox, kept him from crying out in fear. He bit his lip until he tasted blood. “Come out, I said.” She raised her voice. “I know you’re here. You can’t hide from me.”

Steve was shaking, his body moving as though he were crying without sound. Tyler didn’t know what his friend was doing, but prayed he’d at least do it silently. At last Mrs. Needle moved away from their hiding place.

“If you are here and not answering me,” she said at last, “I will give you cause to regret it, Mr. Kingaree. I swear I will teach you a very, very painful lesson.”

She paused as if waiting for an answer, then turned and stalked out of the room, pulling the door closed behind her. Tyler heard her move down the hall and open another door.

Tyler flicked his flashlight on and dimmed the beam with his shirt. To his astonishment, Steve Carrillo was kneeling beside him holding a long metal spike in his hand.

“I couldn’t find my knife,” he whispered. “I was going to stab her with the tent peg.”

“If it’s not made out of silver it’d probably just make her mad,” Tyler told him. “Come on, we have to get out of here before she comes back.”

Steve put the peg in his pocket. “Where do we go? Downstairs?”

“Are you kidding? Didn’t you hear? She’s looking for Kingaree. That’s the slavery guy I told you about! He’s probably running around here with a gun, shooting at people.”

“Then where…?” He suddenly understood. “Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no.”

“Come on, dude. Do you want to be here when she comes back with a flashlight of her own?” Tyler pulled himself out from under the desk and climbed up onto the marble sink.

“No!” said Steve, tugging himself loose with a bit more difficulty than Tyler had. “Not going-no way!”

“Suit yourself.” Without even wondering whether it would work, Tyler threw himself forward into the mirror, which parted for him like vertical mercury.

He landed in a clumsy heap, his backpack twisted halfway around his shoulders and head so that he fell over trying to get up. When he finally got it straight and could sit up and turn on his flashlight, he was stunned to discover he was in a different room than the last time he had crossed through the mirror. For a moment it frightened him badly-had they fallen through into some even weirder and more dangerous place this time?-but then he realized why: the mirror wasn’t in the library anymore, so the Yrarbil was no longer on the other side of it. Instead he was in the mirror world’s version of Mrs. Needle’s office.

He crawled back to the washstand mirror and waved his flashlight before it so that Steve could see it on the other side. “I’m okay, Steve,” he said, though he doubted his friend could hear him. “Come on!” A few seconds later Steve Carrillo tumbled through the mirror’s surface and crashed to the floor like a punctured parade float, backpack crooked and cup and canteen clattering.

“Let’s go find Grace,” Tyler said. “Maybe we can get back and get out before the lights come back on.”

Steve shuddered. “Not me, dude. I don’t need another visit to Spooktown. I’ll wait right here.”

Tyler shook his head. “Not a good idea. We don’t know enough about how this place works-we might never find each other again. You better come with me.”

“Crud.” Steve said it with real feeling.

The corridor was empty outside Mrs. Needle’s mirror-rooms, but that didn’t make Tyler feel much better. The real pictures on the real wall in this part of the house were creepy enough; the pictures in this mirror-version were even more bizarre, photos of deserted, crumbling houses and ruined stone towers, fading images of people in clothing from times and places Tyler couldn’t even guess at, places and things he’d never seen and never wanted to.

“Yecch!” said Steve, peering into one dusty frame as they passed. “Does that woman have some kind of giant grasshopper? She’s holding it like a baby…!”

“Don’t look at that stuff. Just keep moving.” Tyler was straining every nerve to listen. He was hoping that the ragged thing that haunted the library didn’t come down to this end of the house-the Bandersnatch, Grace had called it, a name from the Alice in Wonderland books-but who knew what other nasty things might be crawling around in this ugly reflection of Ordinary Farm? He certainly didn’t want to meet a mirror-dragon or a mirror-manticore.

Tyler could see the garden from the windows in the passage. That didn’t look like a place he ever wanted to visit, either. It was a stormy evening in the real world, but here there was only the bleak, depressing calm of a late winter afternoon, a tiny trace of silvery light still to be seen in the dark gray sky. The nearest part of the garden was a courtyard and lawn surrounded by a stone wall, empty but for a large black bird with a long thin beak and long thin legs that hopped slowly from place to place, hunting for something in the matted grass beside a ruined sundial. Beyond the walls stretched the rest of the garden, so overgrown and untended that it seemed more like a ghostly forest.

Way too easy for something to sneak up on you around here, Tyler thought.

“So where are we going?” Steve Carrillo was trying to sound calm but he wasn’t entirely succeeding. “Do you even know?”

“I’ve been thinking. The other time I was here Grace was hanging around the library, like you-but so was that Bandersnatch, that creepy thing that tried to get us.”

Steve looked a little sick. “Oh, God. I remember that.”

“But Grace is a real person. She has to eat, and I didn’t see anything like food in the library place, so I figure we should check the kitchen instead.”

“Great, Jenkins. If we had a map.”

“Well, there are signs, and since everything’s kind of backward here, just keep your eyes open for one that says, ‘Nehctik.’ ”

Steve made a face. “Neck Tick? What’s that, a room full of giant bloodsucking ticks?”

“It’s ‘kitchen’ backward, you doorknob. Remember ‘Yrarbil’ and ‘Rallec’?”

“Oh. Yeah.”

They found the stairs. The carpet was so old that it had been worn down to the wood in the middle of each step. Tyler held up his hand for silence and led Steve Carrillo downward until they had gone two stories and were somewhere near what Tyler felt should be the kitchen. He led Steve down the hall until he saw a large double door, then cautiously pushed it open and peered inside.

It was the kitchen, but it took Tyler a few moments to be certain: the ceiling was several times higher than in the real kitchen, so that the room seemed almost like some kind of silo or tower, the looming walls covered with shelves that mounted up far above their heads, so high they could only be reached by teetery ladders.

Tyler saw movement and let the door fall shut a little farther, narrowing the crack through which he and Steve were peering. Several small shapes were scuttling about the room, strange creatures with big eyes, not much face, and arms like long twigs, as if instead of Pema and Azinza and Sarah the mirror-kitchen was staffed by huge pale beetles in old-fashioned dresses and bonnets.

“Oh, man, what are those?” whispered Steve. He sounded like he was getting ready to bolt.

“Sshhh!” Tyler whispered back. “Doesn’t matter. We’re just waiting.” It seemed to be near supper time-the little workers darted busily from place to place, skittering up and down the ladders to fetch ingredients, tending a huge boiling pot that seemed larger than the ancient wood-burning stove on which it sat, stopping only to argue with each other in voices like the swish and rattle of crumpled paper. Despite their clothes the kitchen creatures seemed as alien as crabs scuttling across the bottom of the sea. After a moment Tyler decided he didn’t want to watch them any longer than he had to, and let the door fall silently closed.

“We’re just waiting,” he told Steve again. “Find a comfortable spot.”

It took almost an hour to finish the preparations, but at last all the kitchen creatures, nearly a dozen in all, trooped off to serve the meal, a chittering parade weighed down with bowls and trays as it made its way out of the kitchen by the far door. Some of the meals they carried were still moving, rattling the crockery as they tried to escape. One of the main courses, a mouselike creature with a tail ten times its own length, caused a huge fuss when it leaped off its tray and ran up the sleeve of one of the beetle-workers. When the shrieking was over, the meal recaptured, and trays and crockery picked up again, the remaining cooks filed out of the room, leaving the Nehctik silent and empty.

“Finally!” said Steven Carrillo. “My legs are killing me from sitting like this! Can we go back in now?”

Tyler shook his head. “Not yet. Just stay there.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see.” Tyler held his fingers to his lips. “Remember, everybody’s got to eat.”

Something stepped into the corridor behind them, filling the low hallway with cold, sighing like a windstorm. To Tyler’s immense relief it turned away after a few moments and moved off in the opposite direction, rasping and scraping like a metal fireplace screen dragged across the wooden floor. Steve Carrillo flinched and trembled but stayed silent. Tyler was proud of him-he had been very close to running away himself.

“Yeah, everybody’s got to eat, Jenkins,” Steve said in a shaky voice when the noise had finally died away. “But I bet some of these things would be happy to eat us. ”