The Secrets of Ordinary Farm of-2

by Tad Williams

  I have a funny feeling they are not all Madagascan. Sorting through and understanding what we have here will take time and study. However I do wish to draw your attention to the prize of the group (as far as I am able to tell!) It is a fungus completely unlike anything I have ever known. I have included a small piece for you, but in the safety of a glass tube! Again, it is not native to Madagascar, but enough have landed on the shores over the years that the Mikea tribes have incorporated it into their myths, naming it what is best translated as “Call-You Spirit Plant”. Their tales claim that the thing is something like the Sirens or Loreleis of the esteemed ancient poet Homer! Many tribal stories tell of people summoned to die by the “Call-You”, and that they are helpless to fight against it-as if their will was no longer their own. My tests suggest it is simply a fungus, although a highly complex one! Anyway, I send it to you, learned Dr. Goldring, with the hope you may find it as interesting as I did…

  The letter was signed, “Your friend and colleague, Fabien Koto.”

  Lucinda put the letter down, her heart beating wildly. An entire box of rare and unknown specimens had been sent to Ordinary Farm-to Gideon’s wife Grace, a scholar and a scientist trusted with the handling of rare and possibly quite dangerous specimens. But instead they had been hidden away for twenty years and now had fallen into the hands of Patience Needle. Had the specimens been labeled? Lucinda knew that Mrs. Needle and her son, unlike the rest of the farm’s workers, actually knew how to use a computer. Had Mrs. Needle been able to find out something about the dangerous secrets that had been lurking in that box all these years? Had she decided… to grow some of them?

  Several things clicked into place in Lucinda’s mind all at the same time. On the night they found the box Tyler had said the tubes were full of seeds, plant cuttings, and fungus. Mrs. Needle loved things like that. She was an expert in these things-botany, herbology. And the logical place to try to grow unknown tropical species would be

  …

  The old greenhouse.

  And if the witch was going to plant one of those weird specimens, which one would she want to grow? Lucinda knew the answer to that one, too.

  “Many tribal stories tell of people summoned to die by the ‘Call-You’ fungus, ” Fabien Koto had written, “ and that they are helpless to fight against it-as if their will was no longer their own.”

  Those spores-it must have been the “Call-You” that I breathed at the greenhouse! she realized. I’m so lucky I only got a tiny bit… !

  And what better way to control someone’s mind than with the mysterious Call-You, which even most doctors would never have heard of? What better way to make sure that Gideon Goldring behaved the way Mrs. Needle wanted him to behave? And what better time to do it than right when he was about to change his will to give Lucinda and Tyler the farm?

  And once the witch is certain she’s figured out how to use it, she could use it on anyone… or on everyone. Then it wouldn’t be just mice and birds and bugs dying outside the greenhouse, pulled helplessly by the Call-You, it would be any victim Mrs. Needle chose.

  The thought of what had almost got her, and what was probably still lurking inside her, made Lucinda feel ill all over again.

  Chapter 25

  Valley of the Whirlwind

  “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.

  Chapter 26

  Beasts and Baloney

  In the evenings after dinner Lucinda liked to lie on her air mattress in Carmen’s room and listen to the warblers and bluebirds flitting through the trees that shaded the Carrillos’ back yard. Their chiming songs soothed her and reminded her that although she might not be where she wanted to be, on Ordinary Farm, she was still in a very nice place, surrounded by friends like Carmen and Alma and the rest of their family. But today the birds were silent, as if the distant thunder that had begun half an hour or so ago had frightened them away.

  “What, another storm?” Carmen looked up from the laptop she had to share with her brother and sister, the subject of much power-struggling among three Carrillo kids. “This has been the wettest summer in, like, forever.”

  “It never rains very hard,” said Alma. Carmen’s little sister was stretched on the floor, drawing with pastels. “And it smells so good afterward. Like growing.”

  “As long as I don’t have to go out in it.” Carmen frowned. “Speaking of annoying things, where did Steve and your brother go, Lucinda? They ran off after dinner while they were still chewing.”

  Lucinda made a face. “I think they’re doing something in the garage. Last time I went past I heard a lot of banging and clattering.”

  “Building a spaceship out of old soft drink cans, probably,” Carmen said.

  “No,” Alma corrected her, “I think Steve said they were getting stuff together to… ” She paused and looked up as the door of her room opened.

  Silvia Carrillo leaned in.

  “Carmen, m’hija, your father and I promised we’d go have some dessert with the Sotos. We’ll be back about nine-thirty, but if we’re not I want you getting ready for bed then and you can read ‘til we get here, okay? Grandma Paz is in her room watching television if you need her.” She shut the door and a moment later they heard her go out the front door.

  Lucinda had been trying to read but she was feeling distracted. Maybe it was the smell and feel of the coming storm, but she hadn’t been having much luck with “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” anyway. Those kids were in a magical place, too, but everything seemed to come pretty easy to them, and when things got bad the wonderful “Jesus lion” (as Carmen called him) always showed up and fixed things.

  I wish we had a magic Jesus lion, she thought. I’m tired of trying to figure out all the answers by ourselves.

  Mr. Walkwell wasn’t Aslan, of course, but he was the closest thing they were going to get-after all, he was practically a Greek god! Lucinda thought that was true, anyway. From what she’d learned on the internet and in books he seemed to be a faun, a kind of Greek forest spirit, but every time she had worked up the courage to ask him more about his background, one look at his weathered face and his dark, watchful eyes made the words clog in her throat like lumpy oatmeal. There was so much she would have liked to ask him-were the gods real? Had there really been a Hercules? And a Jason and the Argonauts, like that funny old movie Tyler loved so much? But this afternoon, as she had stood with Ragnar at the fence between Cresta Sol and Ordinary Farm, she didn’t even consider asking him. There were far too many other things to think about-serious things. Life and death things.

  “You should not risk coming back, Ragnar,” Mr. Walkwell said. Here at the edge of the property and in broad daylight, he was wearing boots to hide his hoofed feet, and it was plainly uncomfortable: he shifted from one leg to the other as they spoke, the stuffing that made the shoes fit crinkling and crackling. “At the moment things are no worse with either Gideon or the witch. We should try to keep them that way… ”

  Ragnar shook his head. “No, Simos. Look at you-you are exhausted. You did the work of ten men even when I was there…!”

  Mr. Walkwell snorted. “So now I do the work of ten and a half. I will manage.”

  Ragnar smiled at the joke, but Lucinda knew he didn’t approve of Mr. Walkwell taking on so much. “I have never seen him this way,” the Norseman had told her that morning. “He almost seems old.” Which was a strange thing to say, considering Mr. Walkwell must have been around for at least a couple of thousand years, but
now looking at the old Greek’s bony face and dark-ringed eyes she understood Ragnar’s concern.

  “It is not me who needs your pity,” Mr. Walkwell told them. “Every time the witch brings out Gideon to have him give orders he seems slower, weaker, and more stupid, like a tree that does not get enough water. I fear for him.”

  The idea of her great-uncle growing sicker and sicker at Mrs. Needle’s hands made Lucinda’s heart race with fear. “It’s the greenhouse! I know there’s something in there! I can give you the letter I found if you want to see it-there’s something really bad in there and I’m sure it’s what Mrs. Needle is using to control Uncle Gideon!”

  Mr. Walkwell only looked at her, not as though he didn’t believe her, but as if it didn’t matter. Ragnar shook his head sadly.

  “If I could simply break the witch’s neck, I would,” the Norseman said. “But the gods only know whether we would ever get Gideon back afterward. The same if we simply took him away from her. As long as he is in her power she knows we dare not do anything.”

  “Ragnar speaks the truth, child,” Mr. Walkwell told her.

  “But what about the thing that got Gideon-and me?”

  “I will not let anyone go near the greenhouse, that you need not fear.” Mr. Walkwell turned to look over his shoulder, back toward Ordinary Farm. The wind was changing-even Lucinda could feel that. “Another storm coming,” he sighed. “By Olympus, what next?”

  “That settles it,” Ragnar said. “I am coming with you. The sick animals will have to be penned. You cannot get it done in time on your own.” The big man vaulted the fence with the ease of someone a quarter his age. “I know it is hard for you to wait, Lucinda, but I will come back this evening and tell you everything I have seen. Go back to the house, now. This storm may bring lightning.”

  “ Will bring lightning,” said Mr. Walkwell darkly. “And only the Moirae -only the Fates themselves-can say what else will come with it.”