The Secrets of Ordinary Farm

Chapter 41

Steve Carrillo’s parents came to pick him up about noon, and as they pulled up to the front gate in their pick-up and got out they looked as though they hadn’t got any more sleep the previous night than Tyler and Lucinda and the rest of the folk at Ordinary Farm.

“By the time you get done being grounded,” Mr. Carrillo told his son, “you’re going to be ready for the retirement home.”

“It was all my fault, sir,” Tyler said. “It was my idea. Steve was just helping me… ”

“Helping himself to a big punishment,” said Mrs. Carrillo sharply. Behind her, Alma and Carmen, who didn’t know yet what had happened, made mocking faces from the back seat. Tyler gave them an embarrassed wave.

Hector Carrillo turned to Ragnar, whose visible skin was covered with stripes of purple bruises. “And how are you all?” Mr. Carrillo asked. “You said on the telephone that Gideon had a relapse.”

Ragnar nodded. “But he will be well, I think. The crisis has finally passed-for good, this time. He is being tended.”

“You didn’t take him back to the hospital?” said Silvia.

Ragnar shrugged. “He did not wish to go.”

“He still needs to talk to us,” said Hector, and Tyler realized that the man’s anger had not all been directed at his son and Tyler Jenkins.

“This time he will, I promise,” Ragnar said. “Things will change. You have my word on it.” He extended his hand and Hector Carrillo took it. They shook, then Hector asked, “Where’s Simos? He usually comes out to say hello.”

“He… ” Ragnar’s face grew somber, but all he said was, “You must forgive him. He had a difficult night.”

“Hey, Jenkins,” Steve shouted to Tyler from the rear window of his father’s truck. “If you get a chance, come see me before you leave. You don’t have to call first. I mean, it’s not like I’ll be going anywhere… thanks to you…!”

Tyler couldn’t help smiling as they drove off. Steve was a good guy-a real friend. “Is Gideon really going to talk to them about their property? How’s anyone going to make him?”

The Norseman was still looking grim as he opened the gate. The power to the fence was off and had been since the electrical storm. The remaining pair of manticores were safely padlocked in their adobe brick barn. “Things will change around here. They must.”

Only one more day remained until Tyler and Lucinda took the train back home, and Ordinary Farm was as sharply divided as ever, with most of its residents on one side and the Needles on the other. Nothing had been resolved, of course: Gideon no longer seemed to be brainwashed but he had only been conscious for short stretches and had been too tired even to sit up, let alone deal with the weighty matters that needed his attention. Mr. Walkwell was not much better, and was being nursed on the couch in the same room with Gideon, so that Sarah and her helpers could watch over both patients at the same time. Tyler didn’t know what the greenhouse monster had done to him, but Simos Walkwell had only woken up for the first time the previous evening, and still hadn’t said much more than a few words, although Sarah said he seemed better this morning. Interestingly enough, Tyler had also discovered that there were now several gunshot holes in the Snake Parlor walls. Obviously things that night hadn’t only been happening beyond the mirror and out by the greenhouse.

Although nothing permanent could be accomplished until Gideon was back in charge, Ragnar and Sarah had at least managed by sheer stubbornness and threats of force to chase Mrs. Needle away from Gideon’s bedside and the Snake Parlor in general, so the witch had retreated behind the locked door of her part of the house. Colin spent most of his time with her, or at least in his room, which was about what Tyler would have expected.

The previous summer the Jenkins kids might have stayed silent about things and wouldn’t have expected to receive any useful answers even if they had asked questions, but now something had changed, not least of which was how Tyler and Lucinda felt about things. Even if they hadn’t become the heirs to the farm (despite all the chaos of that night, it didn’t seem as though anybody had actually managed to change Gideon’s will) Tyler knew that their great-uncle had at least been planning to do it. The way he figured it, they had a right to know what was going on. And he was pleasantly surprised to find out that Ragnar Lodbrok, at least, seemed to agree.

Tyler found the Norseman examining the blackened wreckage at the back of the garden. It was still hard to believe what had happened out here only a couple of days before, but as they stood looking at the melted ruins of the metal greenhouse and the yards-wide crater of blackened vegetation and scorched animal carcasses, but the evidence was right in front of him. It looked like someone had firebombed the place.

“We will haul away the metal bars,” Ragnar said. “They have a furnace in Liberty where they melt old metal. That will make sure the seeds are dead.” He poked with his foot at a part of a bird lying on the ground. Tyler had no idea what kind of bird it had been. “The rest we will bury. If I knew a priest I would bring him to bespell the demon’s grave.”

“It wasn’t really a demon, was it?” Tyler asked. “More of a big mushroom, really.”

Ragnar looked at him with disbelief. “If that thing was only a mushroom then the Fenris wolf himself is just a pup and the Midgard Serpent no more than an eel.”

Tyler couldn’t think of anything to say to that. “What’s going to happen with the farm?” he asked after a while. “After Lucinda and I go home? You can’t just let Mrs. Needle get away with everything she did, can you?”

“It is not so easy, Tyler Jenkins,” said Ragnar. “They are like Gideon’s kin. And would you have us kill her and leave her son an orphan?”

“You could kill him too.” Tyler saw the look on Ragnar’s face. “I’m just kidding!”

“I do not much like the boy, but his crimes are nothing like his mother’s,” the Viking said. “It would be hard to imprison her, but possible.”

“Why don’t you just throw her out?”

“So that she is out of our sight and reach, like that terrible man Kingaree?” Ragnar and others had searched up and down Kumish Creek but had found no body or any other sign of Jackson Kingaree. “Should we send her out to roam the world with all of Ordinary Farm’s secrets in her head, plotting mischief against us? Against Gideon?”

Tyler frowned. Put like that, it really wasn’t very simple. “But she can’t get away with what she did! What she tried to do! She could have killed us all!”

“I know,” Ragnar said. “And when Simos is well again, we will do our best to make a plan to keep her from doing evil.”

“What are you going to do?”

The Norseman shook his head. “I have not talked to Simos, so I will not share my thoughts yet. Gideon is still master of this place and still my thane-not you, young Tyler. Not yet.” He looked at Tyler’s outraged expression and a trace of amusement crept over his broad, bearded face. “What, do you hate secrets so much? Don’t you have a few of your own, boy? What about the woman hidden in your sister’s room?”

Tyler flushed. “Grace? But that’s different-that’s a good secret. And I’ll share it with Gideon as soon as he’s well enough to know what’s going on. Besides, she’s barely been awake herself.” Much to Lucinda’s irritation, of course, since it meant she had to share her brother’s room. Grace seemed to be sleeping off the effects of her years of fugitive existence in the mirror-house, waking only to take a little nourishment and peer around in confusion before going back to sleep again. The kitchen women had been nursing her (when they were not ministering to Gideon and Mr. Walkwell) with Ooola the Ice-Age girl taking the lead, perhaps fascinated by someone even newer to the modern world than herself.

“Remember, you are not a grown man yet… ” Ragnar began, as if Tyler didn’t already know that, but the Norseman was interrupted by a flutter of wings as a small shape swooped down out of the hot, bright sky. (The lightning storm an the rain had passed with that terrible night and already seemed as distant as an old nightmare.) A second later Tyler was laughing and trying to keep tiny hands from pulling off his eyebrows and poking up his nose.

“Zaza! You’re back! I missed you, girl-I’ve hardly seen you all summer!”

Ragnar watched the winged monkey climbing on Tyler’s head, then looked to the misshapen blob of metal and charcoal that had once been the greenhouse. As he stroked his beard another faint smile curved his lips. “Animals know much we do not, Tyler Jenkins. If the little ape will come to this place again, perhaps we do not need a priest after all.”

With Zaza riding shotgun on his shoulder, Tyler followed Ragnar out to the Reptile Barn where the Three Amigos and Haneb were clearing up the wreckage left by the manticores’ break-in. Lucinda was there too, standing a few yards away from the Desta’s pen. The young dragon was pointedly ignoring her, and Tyler thought his sister looked miserable, like she had a crush on some high school big shot who didn’t even know her name.

The manticores had had caused a great deal of destruction in the huge barn, tearing open metal cabinets and scattering feed bags and canisters everywhere, terrorizing and killing some of the smaller or slower animals (Tyler was glad those remains had already been cleaned up) and generally creating as much havoc as an entire herd of elephants. Tyler could still see one of the stepladders hanging from a beam thirty feet overhead, but couldn’t begin to guess how it had gotten there.

Only two of the manticores had survived that terrible night-the fungus had lured and destroyed two, and a third had apparently come too close to Mesta’s pen, only a bloody stump of tail left behind afterward to show what had happened. After they way the first one had attacked Ragnar and the rest of them at the gate, Tyler didn’t feel sorry for the manticores, but he was happy to know the last pair were back safe in their cage. They were rare, amazing things, there was no question about that-Tyler just didn’t ever want to see one again.

As Tyler surveyed the damage, Lucinda walked over to him, a baby amphisbaena looking around confusedly from the palm of her hand. At least, Tyler thought it was looking around, but it might also be waving its tail in the air: even near the end of their second summer it was hard to tell which end of an amphisbaena was which.

“How are Gideon and Mr. Walkwell this morning?” his sister asked.

“Sarah said Gideon’s better this morning. Eating a little. Talking. Making sense, even.” He reached out and stroked the little creature on its nearest end. It was the front, he could now see, although its implacable stare didn’t give much away. “I think I’m going to bring Grace down to him this afternoon. Mr. Walkwell’s a little better too, she said.”

Lucinda carefully put the lizard back into its cage. “Are you sure? He’s not very well.”

“This will make him feel better. Besides, we’re leaving soon.”

“It is too bad you cannot get advice from Simos first,” said Ragnar from a short distance away. “He is very wise, and he was here before I was-before any of us who came from the Fault Line. In fact, he is the only one of us who knew Gideon’s wife. Perhaps he knows something about the two of them that you do not, young Tyler Jenkins.”

“You know how much Gideon misses her,” Tyler said. “What could be better for him than having her back…?”

He was distracted by a sudden whoop of noise from Kiwa and Jeg. The two of them were chasing a hoop snake, which had got loose from its pen and was bowling across the floor just out of their reach, tail in its mouth as it rolled like a wheel. Alarmed, Zaza leaped from Tyler’s shoulder and flapped up into the upper reaches of the massive barn where she hovered, shrieking indignantly at them all.

“There he goes, over there, under the sprayer! Don’t hurt him!” shouted Ragnar, laughing as he went to help them. “But remember, he can give you a good nip!”

As the third herdsman and Haneb joined in the comic scene became even more frantic, Tyler turned to look for Lucinda. His sister was observing the chaos with all the joy of someone watching homework assignments being written on a blackboard. A moment later she turned and walked out of the barn.

“Luce!” he shouted, but she didn’t acknowledge him.

He didn’t hurry after her-it was too much fun watching everybody trying to catch the swiftly-rolling snake. The chase had excited and upset many of the other residents of the Reptile Barn, the basilisks hissing and the tiny cockatrices spattering the insides of their enclosures with venom, until even Meseret lifted her massive head above the edge of her pen to have a look. Zaza got so excited she peed on one of the Amigos from mid-air, which only added to the shouting.

Wow, thought Tyler, enjoying the chaos-j ust look at this crazy place! Is there anywhere cooler on the entire planet? And me and Lucinda saved it again!