The Secrets of Ordinary Farm

Chapter 37

Lucinda felt like a rag doll that had lost its stuffing. Kingaree had terrified her, the thing that had grabbed Kingaree had terrified her, too, and it had all left her as weak as when she had been suffering from the greenhouse fever.

In fact, she was beginning think the fever had come back: her head seemed swollen, too big and too heavy, and there were moments when the rumbling thunder and wailing winds of the storm sounded like voices calling to her.

She did her best to concentrate on just putting one foot in front of the other as she walked back to the house. She didn’t even know what she was going to do when she got there. She couldn’t hear them at this moment, but Stillman and his men might still be running around shooting at things. Lucinda knew she should have a plan, or at least a goal, but at the moment it was all she could do just to keep moving.

As she reached the broad, curving driveway she saw a man’s shape appear in the front doorway; after a moment’s swaying hesitation, the figure went clumsily across the porch and down the stairs, then past the Snake Parlor window and along the side of the house, heading toward her. It was Gideon, barefoot in his pajamas and robe, stumbling through the hot, rainy night.

“Uncle Gideon!!” she shouted.

He didn’t even look up. He reached the end of the building and turned away from her, trudging slowly toward the garden and outbuildings like the last man in a chain gang.

Lucinda ran across the gravel but he had already disappeared into the darkness. She hurried after him as best she could, but the ankle she had twisted jumping down from the fence was beginning to feel like it might be seriously injured and she couldn’t go much faster than a limping trot.

After a moment she saw him again, staggering toward the dark rows of plants that bent and waved in the wind.

The garden. He’s headed for the kitchen garden. A sudden, chilling thought. No-he’s headed for the greenhouse…!

Lucinda reached the old man’s side just as he reached the outskirts of the garden. She tried to catch hold of his arm but he shook her off, moaning something over and over that sounded like “Lennie, no! Lennie, no!” It was only when she had grabbed him again that she realized he was trying to say “Let me go, ” but his mouth couldn’t form the proper sounds.

Gideon was stronger than she had imagined he could be-it was difficult even to hold onto his arm with the way he was fighting her. “Help!” she shouted. “Somebody help me! Help Uncle Gideon!” But just as when she had been pursued by Kingaree, no one answered. The house was still dark, although Lucinda could hear shouting voices and an occasional bang that might have been gunshots or just shutters being slammed by the powerful winds.

Gideon shook her off again and put his bony old hands on her shoulder, then pushed her so hard that Lucinda slipped on the muddy ground and tumbled backward into a row of cornstalks. She struggled to her feet, soaking wet and half-drowned in mud, but as she grabbed him again and begged him to stop he turned and she realized it didn’t matter what she said: her great-uncle’s eyes had rolled up until only the whites showed and his lips were skinned back from his teeth like the snarl of a frightened dog. As she stared in horror Gideon swung his arms and one of his hands cracked against the side of her head and knocked her down again.

Lucinda lay sprawled among the broken stalks. Old as he was, he was still too big and strong for her. Not only that, but the voice that had been just at the edge of her thoughts earlier was growing stronger. She could understand it now, not words, not even concise ideas like Desta’s thoughts: it was a feeling, something beyond language or even ordinary thought.

Come. Come here. Come here now.

But the most frightening thing was how strong it was-how much Lucinda wanted to yield to that simple, powerful demand.

Come here.

It was the greenhouse, she realized-or whatever was in the greenhouse. But even as she understood that, she also became aware that she was crawling through the rows of corn toward it and had been doing so for long moments already. She struggled against the pull and slowed herself, but Gideon, completely captured by it, was already several rows forward.

I can’t worry about me, she thought, dizzied by thunder and the pressure in her head, I have to stop Gideon. Instead of fighting the summons she struggled to her feet and staggered forward, letting the urge have its way, at least for a moment; when she caught up with her great-uncle she grabbed him around the legs and tumbled them both down into the wet garden.

Stop fighting. Wordless but clear, the voice still pulled at her. Come here.

Everything in her wanted to give in to that summons-everything except a tiny, thinking part that was still Lucinda and only Lucinda. It was like fighting against a riptide: the muddy ground all around her seemed alive as creatures of a dozen different sizes, bugs, rodents, wounded birds, crawled and hopped toward the greenhouse and whatever it was that called them all. Meanwhile, Gideon was fighting to get up, struggling and thrashing like a wounded animal, and only his witlessness allowed her to keep him from succeeding.

The greenhouse was only a few dozen yards away now-she could see it looming above the wind-lashed plants like a ship on an stormy sea. Gideon squeezed out from under her, ripping at her skin with his bare nails, and in the fight she was rolled over and her head shoved down toward the mud. Lucinda found herself face to face with what had once been a rabbit, but was now only a shriveled sack of skin covered with little white bumps, pierced through and through with smooth, white, wormlike stems that had grown up out of the kitchen garden soil. As she pulled back, gagging, she realized that she was surrounded by tiny corpses, dozens of insects and small animals snagged in white tangles.

The fungus. It really was a fungus, just as the letter from Madagascar had said, a fungus that could somehow infest a living creature and then draw it in toward the parent growth… the thing in the greenhouse…

“Help!” she shrieked, terror giving her strength. She held desperately to Gideon as though they were both caught in a whirlpool. “Help us! Help me! It’s got Gideon!” The rain washed her tears away before they reached her cheeks. “Can’t anybody hear me?”

“I heard you,” said a voice close to her ear. “You can let him go.” Strong brown hands closed on Gideon and lifted him from her grasp as easily as plucking a dandelion. Mr. Walkwell carried Gideon back many yards, to the edge of the garden, then dumped on the ground. The caretaker leaned down and flicked his finger at the back of Gideon Goldring’s skull and the old man in the muddy bathrobe immediately collapsed in a heap.

“I did not want to do that to him.” Mr. Walkwell’s hooves were plunged deep in the muddy ground. “But the thing has enslaved him.”

“Oh, thank you, thank you…!” Lucinda began, but Simos Walkwell was already walking past her toward the greenhouse.

“Get the others. I will need help,” he told her.

She felt too exhausted even to stand. “Where are they? Where’s Ragnar?”

“He cannot come.” He waded through the greenery like a fairytale giant crashing through a forest. “The manticores are out,” he called, “and some of them are in the Reptile Barn.”

“The Reptile Barn…?” No wonder poor Desta had seemed so frightened. Lucinda got to her feet, about to run back to the house, but saw that Gideon was already stirring and beginning to crawl back toward the garden. “Mr. Walkwell! Wait…!”

The man with goat’s hooves had almost reached the greenhouse.

“You must deal with it!” he shouted. Another flare of lightning blazed across the sky and lit up the entire garden. A huge cloud of what looked like white dust puffed out of the greenhouse, enveloping Mr. Walkwell like a fog. Thunder boomed, then lightning scratched across the sky again. Even as Mr. Walkwell waved his arms, trying to clear the powdery mass, countless white tubes or stems suddenly wriggled up out of the greenery to tangle and tie him like Gulliver on Lilliput’s beach. Mr. Walkwell fought back, snapping many of the faintly luminous stems, but for every one he broke several more wrapped around him, lively and clever as fingers. Within instants he had become a wriggling, man-shaped mass of fungus strings, but his thrashing was already beginning to slow.

“Oh, God, somebody help us!” Lucinda shrieked.

Gideon was crawling back into the garden. She wrapped her legs around his waist and then threw herself down, grabbing at the thickest, most well-rooted plants she could reach, but she knew that her failing strength couldn’t hold out long against the pull of the thing in the greenhouse. Rain splashed dirt into her eyes. “Help us, please!”

Then, to her immense relief, she saw that somebody was coming toward her with a flashlight. She prayed it was Ragnar or one of the Mongolian herders, anyone who could help her keep Gideon from the greenhouse. The flashlight played over Gideon’s maddened face.

“Good God, what is that fool doing?” asked Ed Stillman.

“Help me!” Lucinda begged. “Grab him!”

Stillman stood and stared for a long moment. “You know,” he said at last, “I don’t believe I will. I’ve made sure no one’s altering the will tonight. That’s all I really cared about.” He looked out over the storm-whipped garden and the almost unrecognizable form of Simos Walkwell in his cocoon of white strands. “Now if, as it appears, some botany experiment of Gideon’s has gone badly wrong, I don’t think I want to be around for the end… especially if my old friend is as determined to get himself killed as he appears to be.” He laughed and pointed his light at Gideon’s face again; Gideon growled and snapped his teeth at the beam like a trapped animal. “And I’m not interested in staying to answer police questions. No, I rather think that’s up to you and the rest of Gideon’s weird little cult… ”

“You… you rat! We’ll tell them you were here…!”

“Oh, I rather think you’ll have trouble getting that to stick.”

Somebody else came stumbling toward them out of the darkness, a big, shadowy shape, but Lucinda’s hope that Ragnar had finally arrived was quickly dashed.

“Mr. Stillman,” said the man named Cater, out of breath and frightened, “something… something attacked the car!”

“Really?” The billionaire smiled sourly. “And you two with all those guns and the car with all that armor? What could possibly be the problem?”

“I don’t know! But it ripped through the metal in a couple of places and it almost got Deuce! The power went out in the house and we turned the light on in the car, then it just… jumped on us. From nowhere!”

Stillman rolled his eyes. “Fine. I was just thinking we should be leaving anyway-after all, we’ll own this all soon enough. Come along, we still have to go collect that idiot Dankle and get him fixed up.” Stillman looked to Lucinda with a shrug. “I shot him by accident. My God, the fuss he made! You would have thought I’d blown a hole in his chest instead of giving him a harmless wound in the fat of his arm

… ”

Lucinda was losing her hold on Gideon, who was as slippery-wet as a giant otter. “Please, Mr. Stillman, please don’t leave…!”

He shook his head sternly. “You don’t understand, little lady. Other people don’t use me to get what they want- I’m the one who gets what I want. That’s how it works.” He turned to Cater. “Let’s leave these folks to their… horticultural activities.”

Ed Stillman and his bodyguard turned and walked back toward the darkened house, visible only in the intermittent flashes of lightning.

“No!” screamed Lucinda. Gideon had his hand over her face now, pushing so hard it felt like her nose might break. “Don’t leave us like this! Don’t do it!”

But only the storm answered her.