by Tad Williams
Chapter 25
A Mother’s Heart
L ucinda stared at her brother. He was speaking English but she couldn’t understand him. “What do you mean you’re ‘going in after him’? Going in where?”
“Just… ” He glanced at Carmen and Alma, who both looked frightened. “Never mind. We can’t waste any more time-it might be bigger in there than it is in here. In fact, it could lead anywhere.”
“Tyler, what are you talking about?” Now Lucinda was beginning to be really scared too. “We have to get Ragnar or somebody.”
“No time.” To her surprise, Tyler scrambled up onto the washbasin and braced himself on the frame, as if he wanted to take a really, really close look at his own face. She was just about to ask him what he was looking at so carefully when he closed his eyes and then let himself fall forward into the mirror, disappearing through its surface like a man making a perfect dive into still water.
“Tyler!” she shouted, but he was gone. She scrambled forward in time to see him walking away from her-her brother no longer existed on her side of the mirror, only inside the reflected world. The ghost-Tyler disappeared around a corner. Behind her, Lucinda heard little Alma begin to cry.
“What’s going on?” demanded Carmen, who was close to tears herself. “This is totally crazy!”
Lucinda was fighting her own very strong urge to just run upstairs to her room and put her head under her pillow until the whole problem went away. Her brother had just jumped into a mirror. What next? She squeezed her eyes shut, fighting the urge to scream for help.
I just want to go home now. I really, really want to go home. She wanted to sleep in her own room and see her friends. She wanted to clamp on her headphones and listen to normal music and think about boys and television and what was happening at school. No monsters. No magical mirrors.
But when Lucinda opened her eyes again, Alma and Carmen were staring at her, terrified, waiting for her to do something, and she realized that this was not the time to run away and hide.
“It’s okay,” she told them. “Tyler knows what he’s doing.” One thing at a time, Lucinda, she told herself. “So you guys came over here in the middle of the night because we never answered our messages?”
Carmen looked at her terrified little sister and made a decision. She took a deep breath, and when she spoke she no longer sounded like she was about to break down. “We… we kept calling you. And that English lady kept saying you couldn’t come to the phone, or that you were busy, always something. But you never called back, and our grandma was just nodding her head like she knew it all along, and we were wondering if you guys were sick or something. After a while, we were really worried!”
Alma nodded. “And then tonight, that helicopter-Steve said maybe it was one of those ambulance helicopters, and that they might be sneaking you out to a hospital or something.”
“I told him that was dumb,” Carmen said, “but he was like, ‘I’m going! You can’t stop me!’ So we came with him.”
Lucinda grabbed the girl’s hand. “Hold on-what helicopter?”
“It was this big one- really big, but really quiet. It went right past our house about an hour after dark, and Steve and I saw it,” Carmen explained. “For a long time it just hovered by the edge of your property with most of its lights off, but then it went farther in and I think it landed. I don’t know-it was hard to see.”
Lucinda had a bad feeling. A big helicopter? That had to be the people that Mr. Walkwell and Ragnar were watching out for-like that guy they’d captured out by Junction Road, the one they said was working for that Stillman guy. But a helicopter, landing on the farm at night?
She had to do something about this.
“Listen,” she told Carmen and Alma. “I have to go tell people what you saw. It’s important that you guys don’t go anywhere or let anyone see you-really, really important. Trust me. Just stay here and wait for Tyler to find Steven. He’ll be back-they’ll both be back.” But even as she said it she felt a cold squeeze in her chest, a dread as deep as the day their dad had told them he was moving out. She stared at the dark mirror, reflecting nothing at this moment but a shadowed wall. Where had her brother gone? What was happening to him right this moment?
“S-stay here?” Carmen said. “By ourselves? Are you psycho?”
“Trust me,” Lucinda told her. “It’ll be a lot less scary here than anywhere else.”
Little Alma looked at her solemnly. The girl’s tears had dried now and she seemed to have found her strength. “It’s okay, Carmen,” she told her sister. “We’ll wait here, Lucinda. You go.”
Lucinda turned and ran across the library.
Only Sarah, Azinza, and Pema were still in the kitchen, leisurely scrubbing out the last of the dishes and preparing for tomorrow’s breakfast.
“What are you doing up so late, child?” asked Sarah.
“And why do you want Ragnar? He has gone to the Sick Barn, I think. The dragon is very difficult again today.”
“She lost her baby,” said Azinza in her lordly manner. “Of course she is sad.”
Lucinda didn’t stay to answer their questions-she was terrified that Mrs. Needle might appear. She thanked the women and headed out toward the Sick Barn. Things were getting more confused every moment. What was she supposed to do if she couldn’t find Ragnar? Wake up Gideon so he could learn there were strangers on the property? Including the Carrillo kids, one of whom had apparently fallen through a mirror and into the Fault Line?
She could feel the unhappiness of Meseret in her head while she was still fifty yards away from the Sick Barn. The dragon was making a strange, low groaning that Lucinda had never heard before. The first waves of Meseret’s powerful thoughts, just beginning to wash over Lucinda’s mind, were almost incoherent-in no recognizable form except anguish and fury.
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO…!
Lucinda hesitated at the door of the immense concrete cylinder, suddenly afraid to step inside. It was like walking into a blazing oven of unhappy emotions.
“Ragnar?” she called, but no one answered. “Ragnar? Mr. Walkwell?”
She stepped through the door. She could see the dragon’s back as the monster writhed in her pen, the restraints creaking as they stretched. A shape in a white hooded safety suit was standing at the edge of the pen, aiming a rifle at Meseret’s vast, shuddering bulk.
“Stop!” Lucinda shrieked. “What are you doing? Don’t shoot her!” She ran toward the pen. The figure turned its faceless plastic-shielded head toward her for a moment, waved violently at her to stay back, then turned to the dragon again and pulled the trigger. Lucinda couldn’t even hear the sound of the gun firing over the dragon’s groaning, and nothing seemed to happen: Meseret still struggled on, her thoughts flooding Lucinda’s head in a meaningless roar of upset.
NO NO NO…!
Haneb pulled off the hood. His black hair was lank with sweat, his scarred face full of amazement and fear. “Get back! She is dangerous! I give her medicine to sleep!”
“Medicine?” She turned to look at the dragon and saw a clump of feathers wagging on Meseret’s near haunch, so red it was almost orange under the bright fluorescent lights. “Is that… a dart?” She could feel the chaos of the dragon’s thoughts begin to calm a little.
“To make her sleep, yes! But stay back. Half hour until she sleeps, maybe an hour.”
The dragon groaned again, this one a sound that was almost human in its misery. Her thoughts, perhaps because of the sedative, were clear enough now for Lucinda to understand.
EGG THIEF RUNS! EGG GOES AWAY… GOING NOW… FLY, FLY!
Lucinda turned on Haneb. “She’s upset about her egg again. What did you do to her? Why does she think you stole it?”
Haneb’s look of dismay turned to something deeper-an expression of utter panic. “She speaks to you?”
“What did you do? Why does she hate you so much?”
He took a few steps back. If this had been a vampire movie, Lucin
da felt sure, he would have been flashing his crucifix at her. Then, to her astonishment, the little man began to weep.
“I did not want!” he cried. “I did not want take the egg! Please do not tell Mr. Gideon! Mr. Colin make me take!”
Meseret groaned and thrashed. Her head snaked around on her long neck as she began to bite at her restraints. If she was about to fall unconscious, Lucinda thought, she was doing a pretty good job of not showing it. She turned back to Haneb, who had fallen to his knees. “What do you mean, Colin made you?”
“He want egg. He made me take it or he tell Gideon I sneak out to the town one day. Just to look! But Colin say Gideon send me back to where I come from if I don’t help him. Now the great she-dragon wants to kill me!” He was so upset she could hardly understand him, and the pounding of Meseret’s thoughts in her skull wasn’t making it any easier, but she was beginning to get the point.
“You mean Colin has the egg? It didn’t get stolen by the other dragon-by Alamu?”
But Haneb wasn’t talking anymore. He had buried his face in his hands and was sobbing.
Now the dragon began to fight even harder. EGG! her thoughts bellowed. TAKING AWAY NOW! STEALING! And with the ideas a sort of vision came into Lucinda’s head-of a hunched, slightly glowing shape moving through the dark, not so much seen as sensed, like the night vision option on that combat game of Tyler’s. But the object that the glowing figure carried glowed more brightly still-an egg-shaped smear of warmth.
It’s happening right now, Lucinda realized. She can sense someone taking her egg away right now!
YES! EGG! Meseret was biting ever more frantically against the restraints, not caring if her teeth dug into her own scaled skin. Blood dribbled down her side, purple-black under the fluorescents. EGG! NOW! The thoughts were still understandable, but wavery, as though they came from beneath water. The sedative might, at last, be starting to take effect, Lucinda decided with relief.
Then one of the heavy restraints, frayed by Meseret’s teeth, snapped with a gunshot noise- Pow! Another went, and then another- Pow! Pow! Pow! -like fireworks. A moment later the dragon had freed enough of herself to get her midsection up over the edge of the pen, bending back the metal fence at the top like it was no more than a cheap spoon stuck in frozen ice cream. Her head stretched over the edge, one of the restraints still flapping like a scarf around her neck. Her red-gold eyes were wide, rolling, and Lucinda gave up any thought of trying to communicate with this many-ton monstrosity. The idea that her stolen egg was somewhere close by had all but driven the dragon mad, and the sedative wasn’t helping much. Lucinda screamed to Haneb, but the little man was crouching, holding his head. He had faced the male dragon bravely, but something about this situation was too much for him. He looked like he was waiting to die.
Still wrapped in torn restraints, Meseret dragged the bulk of her body out of the pen, her long, wing-fringed front legs hunching and stretching as she struggled across the room, knocking over the tables, smashing the equipment. One of the trailing harnesses caught in a set of shelves and the whole thing was yanked off the wall and onto the concrete floor, scattering liquids and broken glass everywhere. The dragon crashed past both Lucinda and Haneb and butted the door of the Sick Barn with her huge head, smashing it off its hinges, but the rest of the door frame and the semi-circular wall was concrete and she could not get past it. She roared in desperate frustration-Lucinda could hear it echoing across the farm.
EGG! EGG! The creature’s thoughts were so furious and powerful that they burned in Lucinda’s head like fire. She bashed at the wall around the broken door like the biggest woodpecker in the universe, but the concrete would not yield even to her great strength. With another bellow of frustration, she turned and headed toward the other end of the Sick Barn.
Lucinda was right in the dragon’s way.
Everything around her seemed to ooze into a stately crawl, like a slow-motion video replay. Only her thoughts were moving quickly. The tranquilizer rifle was gone, buried under debris, and Haneb was still down on the floor-he might even be dead already, felled by flying metal.
Lucinda bent and picked up the box by her foot that said TRANQ. DARTS in large, felt-tipped letters. Underneath it had been written BIG ANIMALS-THIAM, PHENC, SCOP MIX, which she hoped meant the drugs were already in the darts.
Meseret was coming toward her, stripping metal shelves from the wall with her lashing tail, oblivious to anything except the big back door with its metal shutters at the far end of the Sick Barn.
Lucinda reached carefully into the box. There was only one dart left, a cylindrical tube the size of a roll of toilet paper, marked like a hypodermic, with a tail of feathers at one end and a thick needle about four inches long covered with a plastic cap.
Meseret was on top of her, big as a bus and seemingly blind with rage. Lucinda tried hard to keep her eyes open as the monster bore down on her. She held up her trembling hand, ready to try to punch through the ridiculously thick skin with the needle, but at the last moment the dragon swerved around her. Lucinda had only a half second of relief before the remains of Meseret’s restraints whipped over her as the dragon thundered past, knocking the needle from Lucinda’s hand and tangling her in canvas straps.
It got worse.
Before she even had a chance to scream Lucinda was jerked off her feet and dragged backward across the laboratory floor, through upturned tables and bits of broken glassware, as the dragon crawled swiftly across the barn toward the loading door. She couldn’t untangle her foot-her own weight was pulling the knot of straps tight around her ankle. It was all she could do to pull herself double to get her head off the floor.
The dragon smashed hard against the metal loading door where the large animals were brought into the barn on the flatcar. It rattled but did not give, and Lucinda swung in the straps and thumped painfully against the wall and the dragon’s immense, scaly hip. Meseret groaned again.
OUT! EGG!
Lucinda banged hard into something else as the dragon twisted and threw herself once more against the unyielding door. Meseret didn’t even know she was there and probably wouldn’t care. Lucinda struggled to get a chest full of breath.
“Haneb!” she screamed. “Open the door! She’s going to kill me if you don’t!”
Again and again Lucinda was smacked bruisingly against hard surfaces as the dragon tried to batter down the heavy door. She had hit her head at least twice and she was finding it hard to think. “Please, Haneb!” she shouted, but she had no idea if he was was even conscious.
Then Lucinda heard a deep bass rumble. She thought at first it was the dragon again, groaning in frustration, but then she saw black sky and spotlights where a moment before there had only been the loading gate. The door was rising. Either Haneb had heard her or Meseret had somehow triggered the mechanism.
Lucinda struggled but she was still hopelessly tangled. A moment later they were out into the darkness and cold air. The dragon was running, dragging Lucinda along the ground. Bump, bump, then something struck her on the head.
Dizzy. Suddenly there was no ground anywhere, only rushing wind, and Lucinda was swinging free in nothingness, whipped back and forth at the end of a tangle of canvas straps as the ground fell away beneath them and the dragon took to the sky.
Chapter 26
The Yrarbil
G oing through the mirror was like crossing half a second’s worth of freezing black space. Tyler rolled across the washstand on the far side and hopped down to the floor. As he had guessed, everything in the room was a mirror reverse of the room he had just left except for one thing: the other room had been full of people, the Carrillo girls and his sister, but he was alone in this one.
“Steve!” he shouted, and pushed through the door into what should have been the mirror version of the library. “Steve Carrillo!” It was only then that he realized he might be in more trouble than he had even guessed.
Outside the door, he found himself in an unfamiliar corridor-som
ething that had nothing to do with what he had left behind on the other side of the mirror. It was dark and covered with dirty, ancient wallpaper like some parts of the house he had seen, but like nothing in the real library. One solitary, flickering oil lamp gave the only light, a weak glow extending a few yards down the corridor on each side. He would have to choose a direction. He listened, but heard nothing.
“Steve?”
When nothing came back to him but a faint, distant scratching, he turned in the direction of the noise and began carefully to make his way forward. It was only as the door he had come through fell away behind him that he wondered, Why an oil lamp? Old as they were, the real house and library at least had electricity.
He turned the corridor and found a new oil lamp and a forking of the way. To his right a wide, dark stairway led downward-he could see a few levels into its depths before the light of the lamp would carry no farther. The corridor itself led beside the open space of the stairwell. Two signs hung on the wall below the lamp. One had an arrow pointing down and read RALLEC. The other pointed straight ahead and said YRARBIL.
CELLAR and LIBRARY -it was easy enough to figure out, and sort of made sense for the far side of the mirror. What he didn’t understand was why there was a cellar here when there wasn’t one under the real house-at least not that he knew of-and why the library seemed so much farther away than the real library-the one in his world.
Maybe it wasn’t just a mirror version, everything exactly the same but in reverse. Uncle Gideon had said something about the Fault Line being about time, but Octavio Tinker had written in his journal that alternate realities, alternate worlds, were possible too. So what was behind the washstand mirror at Ordinary Farm might be only another version of Ordinary Farm.
Which meant, he suddenly realized, that he had no real idea what might be here at all.
He leaned over the railing, looking down the stairwell into the lightless cellar depths.
