The Secrets of Ordinary Farm of-2

by Tad Williams

  He was holding the spool by its plastic handle, but he knew that wouldn’t help him much if a bolt struck the lightning rod now and tried to ground itself down the wire. I’ll be roasted like a Christmas goose, Colin realized, suddenly breathless with terror.

  He ran even faster until he had reached the garden and the rows of wind-whipped plants. Lucinda shrieked at him but he did not slow down to help her-if necessary, they could use some of the plastic-coated wire to tie Gideon up once the thing in the greenhouse was dead, but he couldn’t worry about that yet. He dropped the fence post, unspooled another couple of dozen yards of wire, then stripped the insulation from the unused end of the wire and twisted it around one end of the metal post before tying it through a hole in the metal and then taping the whole thing securely. He stood up and hefted the wired post like a javelin. It was fairly well-balanced. The only problem was, Colin knew he couldn’t throw it even half the distance to the greenhouse.

  “Don’t worry! This will work!” he shouted, doing his best to ignore Lucinda’s distracting screams-apparently Gideon was on the verge of escape again. The whole scene was so daunting that Colin considered waiting until Ragnar appeared: the huge Viking could easily throw the piece of metal three times the distance Colin could, probably more. But then the glory would then be Ragnar’s and Colin’s own role might even be forgotten. No, something had to done now. There could be no question of waiting for the Norseman.

  Colin walked down the ends of the rows toward the greenhouse, carefully letting the wire fall behind him without getting tangled so that when he threw it the fence-post would fly true. Mr. Walkwell had stopped struggling and his still form was only a dozen yards ahead of Colin now. He was almost close enough, almost, but another section of the storm was rolling in and he was holding bare metal in his hand-metal connected to the lightning rod on the house’s tallest point. In a sudden panic he hurried the last few steps toward the spot he had picked out, pulling his arm back, but just as he had almost reached it something snagged his feet and ankles, tumbling him to the ground.

  Colin looked down. Strange white strands like kite string had extended-grown?-from the sodden ground and had already begun to twine up his legs with amazing speed. Even as he watched they wrapped around him, tiny strands branching off and growing right through the fabric of his clothes, making his legs prickle and sting…

  Thunder boomed again. His heart speeding so fast now he felt faint, Colin realized he was lying on top of what might in moments be a live electrical wire connected to the rage of the heavens themselves. He rolled over and pulled his arm back to toss away the makeshift javelin but something was tightening all along the length of his arm. He was snared by hundreds of pale strings as strong as ivy creepers. He fought, but it was already too late: the fungal strands wrapped his arm tightly just as they had already wrapped the rest of him, and before he could do anything his hand was bound to the naked length of iron.

  He couldn’t move. He was tied from foot to shoulder and holding a live electrical conductor in his hand. “No!” he shouted, “I’m stuck! Help me! Someone help me! I don’t want to die…! ”

  But Colin Needle’s cries were drowned out as another wave of the storm swept down from the far hills and across the farm, crackling with sparks of new lightning.

  Chapter 39

  Nihlock’s Rethum

  Tyler had been certain that finding the kitchen-or the Nehctik as it was labeled here in the mirror-house-would solve their problems, and he seemed to have been proved right.

  One of the huge room’s many doors opened a crack, but for long moments nothing came through. Tyler nudged Steve Carrillo. At last, a dark shape crept through into the kitchen, staying close to the floor and moving with the fitful, stop-and-go of a spy advancing through dangerous territory. Wrapped in a billowing, dusty length of fabric that might once have been an ancient blanket or tablecloth, the interloper looked a bit like a four-legged ghost as it scuttled to one of the shelves. Then a pair of quite human-looking hands emerged from the blanket’s folds and began scrabbling in the jars and canisters.

  “ Now!” said Tyler, pushing through the door and into the kitchen.

  The strange thing heard him coming and reared up in shock-for a moment he had a glimpse of wide, frightened eyes in the shadows of the blanket-then retreated toward the door, but the cloth tangled its legs so that it stumbled and nearly fell. It hurried away across the room making a strange frightened “hoo”-ing noise.

  “Stop!” Tyler called, “stop-we want to help you!” But the shrouded figure was already halfway out the far door. He had to leap forward and grab at it, then suffer a few panicky but ineffective blows before the struggling subsided. As it fought him the blanket fell away from its head. Tyler found himself face to face with the old woman he had met before, her eyes wide with fear.

  “Grace!” he said. “Grace, it’s me! You met me before, remember? You warned me about the Bandersnatch. Don’t be frightened, Grace.”

  She was still trying to pull away even as she watched him and listened, as though her body was not entirely under the control of her mind. In the midst of this faded fairytale castle her clothes seemed strangely modern, although tattered and threadbare and dusty, the kind of thing a nice lady on a bus might wear. Grace had disappeared twenty years earlier. Had twenty years passed in for her in this place, or had it seemed much more?

  At last she stopped wriggling. “You’re… Grace?” she asked.

  “No, no, you are.” He turned to Steve, who was staring nervously from the doorway. “It’s okay. This is how you were, too. Help me with her.” He turned back to Grace. “Don’t be afraid. That’s just my friend Steve. He was trapped here, too. He got out. Now we’re going to get you out.”

  “Out…?” she said slowly. “What do you mean?” She wasn’t fighting now, but it felt like she might begin again any moment. What if she cried out? If those bug-things had been the sweet, friendly kitchen workers in this weird reflection of Ordinary Farm, he definitely did not want to meet anything more unpleasant like a mirror-manticore.

  “Out,” he told her, making his voice as soothing as he could. “We’re taking you back to where you came from, Grace. Don’t you remember Ordinary Farm? The real Ordinary Farm, not this backward place? Gideon? Octavio?” None of the names began to ring a bell, which frightened him. Steve had taken a while to get his memory back. Maybe she had been here so long she never would. “Do you remember anyone?” Who might be particularly memorable from Grace’s days on the farm? “Mr. Walkwell? From Greece?”

  She paused in surprise, then nodded slowly. “He’s kind. Yes, I remember him, he’s kind.”

  Relief flowed through Tyler. “Well, he’s there-he’s waiting to see you again, Grace. And so is your husband, Gideon.”

  The woman’s expression suddenly turned worried. “Gideon. He’s angry with me. Shouted. I remember.”

  “He’s not angry anymore. He wants you to come back. Really.”

  She allowed herself to be maneuvered toward the door, but when she saw the stairs, she balked. “No! Not up there. The White Lady… the one with the eyes…!”

  That didn’t sound very nice. “Don’t worry-whoever she is, she’s not there now because that’s where we came from. Come on, it’s okay!”

  But as they finally coaxed her up the last set of steps toward the passage leading to the room where the mirror waited, they heard a rustling and the air was suddenly full of the scent of ashes, the cold, acrid stink of something that had burned long, long ago. Tyler, who was following Grace and Steve Carrillo, looked down as a shapeless head surrounded by tattered gray filaments peered up at them from the depths of the stairwell.

  “It’s that thing from the library-the Bandersnatch!” Tyler called, trying to keep his voice low even as his mouth and throat went dry with terror. “ Run!”

  He put his hand in the middle of Grace’s bony back and pushed, almost lifting her up out of the stairwell and onto the hallway floor. Steve was
tugging her arm so hard Tyler hoped he didn’t damage her, then thought, No, God no, better a broken arm than to get caught by that thing…!

  Tyler knew he shouldn’t look back but he had never been very good at doing the sensible thing. Curiosity may have killed the cat, Tyler Jenkins, a teacher had once told him, but if it had also been as stubborn as you it would have quickly lost the other eight lives as well. He snuck a glance back over his shoulder.

  He had seen the otherworldly thing chasing them the last time he came through the mirror, had even seen a little of its terrible, vague face, but this time he recognized something in the dead gray features. Whatever it had become, the Bandersnatch had once been some version of his great-uncle, Gideon Goldring.

  Steve slowed to a trot in front of him as they burst out into an open hall.

  “What are you doing? Keep running!” Tyler said. He almost ran into Grace, who was suddenly stumbling.

  “Where are we?” Steve spun in a circle, his eyes wide with terror. “I don’t recognize any of this!”

  Tyler was about to shout at him, but he realized a second later he didn’t either.

  “Oh, man,” he said. “You’re right. How did we wind up here?” The hall was broad and high, with flickering lights perched in cobwebbed chandeliers and the floors covered with dusty carpets thrown haphazardly across each other. At the far end a stairwell spiraled up at strange angles, and a single door led out of either side of the hall.

  “I don’t know, Tyler, but I can hear something back there… ” Steve was bouncing in place like a kid who needed to use the bathroom. “Where do we go?”

  Something was telling him that he should choose the left hand door, but that didn’t jibe with his memories and sense of direction-surely they had descended for some time to find the kitchen? And just as certainly he remembered that the Gideon-thing, the Bandersnatch, made its home in the lowest parts of the mirror-house. He glanced at pale Steve and the exhausted, frightened old woman. Lucinda was always telling him not to be so impulsive, and there was nothing about the left hand door to recommend it except a vague feeling.

  “We go up,” he decided. “The stairs-hurry!”

  Without waiting for discussion he caught at Grace’s arm and pulled her forward across the dusty hall. Steve groaned but followed. As they ran, shadows passed across the high windows, winged shapes that seemed far too large to be birds.

  The stairs were much harder to climb than he would have guessed, leaning at treacherous angles. At the top they pushed through a doorway onto another landing, this one smaller and better kept-the dust only lightly frosted the surfaces instead of lying in drifts like snow-but from this smaller entry hall there was only one way out, up another set of narrow stairs like a dimly-lit tunnel.

  Up, he thought to himself, although some dim feeling was still urging him to turn around and take his chances with whatever might be below. Up is the only thing that makes sense. We’ll either find the way out or we’ll find some light.

  “I want to get out of here, Tyler,” Steve said, huffing up the stairs behind him. “I really want to go home, man. My parents must be going crazy…!”

  Tyler shook his head, not to deny what Steve said, but because he barely had the strength to climb and pull Grace-he couldn’t talk at the same time.

  They spilled out into a room that was the cleanest and best-lit they had yet seen, but still dim and dusty by most standards. Something about it seemed familiar, although Tyler knew he’d never been there. It was some kind of sitting room, with chairs and small tables and sideboards. Photographs in frames stood on every surface-Tyler thought there must be a hundred or more-and as he moved into the center of the room he realized they were all of the same woman, her face always blurred by shadow but her slender, upright figure and graceful bearing recognizable in each likeness, no matter how strange the other things in the pictures.

  It’s like that place Lucinda told me about, he realized. The parlor in the real house with all the pictures of Grace-“the Shrine,” Luce called it.

  He watched the real Grace moving between the pieces of furniture, oblivious to the faded photographs, and wondered why they meant so little to her.

  Then something screeched.

  The cry was so loud and harsh that for a crazy instant Tyler thought it must be one of the shadow-birds he had seen outside the hall windows, loose in the house and swooping toward them. “Rethuuum oot muk!” it cried. “ Reed, rethum oot muk!”

  Tyler and Steve looked at each other in shocked surprise, but it was Grace who seemed the worst affected. She let out a whimper of fear and fell against one of the tables, sending the pictures crashing to the floor.

  “It’s her,” she moaned. “The White Lady! She’ll catch us now for sure!”

  Something heavy was coming nearer, something strange and clumsy dragging and bumping toward them. Then lights brighter than any of the house’s flickering bulbs flashed in the corridor outside the picture parlor.

  “Nihlock!” the thing cried and the edge in its voice grew sharper, more jagged. “Nihlock, oo-ee ra rrrehw?”

  “Oh, man-it’s talking backward!” said Steve. “ Nihlock, nihlock -it’s yelling for Colin! ”

  “Oo-ee ra rrrehw, Nihlock?” the thing howled, and something crashed against a wall and broke.

  Now Tyler knew who it was, if not what it was. He also knew that with the horrid sounds getting louder each moment they had only one hope. “Run!” he shouted. “Back down the stairs!” He reached over and gave Steve a shove in the back. “Hurry!”

  As they pelted down the stairs Tyler did his best to keep Grace upright. Her legs kept moving but she seemed barely conscious, murmuring as though caught in a terrible dream and trying to wake herself up.

  They reached the bottom of the crazy-curving stairs. Steve tumbled onto the floor but got up quickly. “Which way?” he shouted.

  Which one had been the left-hand door? They were facing the other way now, so it had to be the one on the right. “There-go!” Tyler was furious with himself: instead of trusting his instincts he had tried to do what someone else would have done-he, Tyler Jenkins, explorer of the Fault Line and navigator of the Mirror-World-and it had almost gotten them killed. In fact, he thought as he half-carried Grace after Steve, it still might.

  As they sprinted across the hall toward the door something big came down the stairs behind them, something tall and stretched with long, waving arms, a twisted figure wrapped in billowing white like a misshapen bride. Twin beams of brilliant light stabbed out from the place where its eyes should have been, their glare obscuring the thing’s face as they raked the walls of the great hall and then fell on Tyler and Steve.

  “Meth ees I!” it cried. “Nihlock, mooorlob huth nih!”

  Tyler could only pray as he slammed through the doorway that they wouldn’t have to meet the mirror-Colin, too.

  They ran and ran. For a while they could hear the mirror-Needle clumping along behind them, and then could only hear the steam-whistle shriek of her voice, then finally they got beyond even that. Tyler now all but shut his eyes, relying on his sense not of where they should be, but of where the mirror was, a sensation like a warm glow at the edge of his thoughts.

  It seemed like they had been running for half an hour when they found themselves getting near the Nehctik again. Of course-he had stupidly forgotten that the washstand mirror was in a different place, in the mirror-version of Mrs. Needle’s office. Did that mean they were entering the mirror-Needle’s territory again? He shuddered, but realized that maybe they had done themselves a favor, leading her away from her office.

  At last he reached a door that felt right. Tyler swallowed deep as he turned the knob, but when he saw that it was indeed the mirror-office he gasped in relief. He dragged Steve and the white-haired woman through, then slammed the door and grabbed the handle tightly. The mirror was waiting, all alone in a pool of faint, dreary light.

  “Go!” Tyler said. “Help her through, Steve. I’m going to ho
ld the door just in case.”

  Steve Carrillo guided the exhausted Grace through the frame of the mirror and pushed her through the reflection, then clambered wearily up onto the mirror-washstand himself. “Jenkins,” he said. “I gotta tell you something… ”

  “I know,” said Tyler as he pulled himself up beside him. He could hear something moving in the hallway just outside, and the angry murmur of backward speech. “I know- never again. And I totally agree.”

  As the knob began to turn on the office door they plunged through the unsolid glass, Steve first, then Tyler right behind him.

  Chapter 40

  Carrot Girl Not Nice

  Lucinda didn’t even know why she was still trying to hang onto Gideon. She was out of strength, while he, deranged by the call of the greenhouse-thing, was still fighting as hard as ever. Colin Needle had tried to help but had failed completely and instead put himself in deadly danger. Even Mr. Walkwell had fallen to the thing. Ragnar, the only person left who might conceivably help, was on the other side of the farm. It was hopeless.

  Yes, surrender, a voice urged her, although not in words: the words were all Lucinda’s, as if she was talking to herself, a soothing, reasonable version of her own inner voice… Come here. Join. Become. An impression of completeness beckoned to her, a promise of joy in belonging so powerful it wasn’t even an emotion but a state of being-so wonderful that words couldn’t even describe it. Come. Become us…!