Uncle Gideon actually started to turn purple. “You, boy,” he said, “have clearly been watching too much so-called ‘reality’ TV. Or reading trash magazines, I don’t know what. We will hear no more of that rubbish, if you please!” He took a breath; his color eased. “Now,” he said, as if trying to be jolly again, “enough arguing. We have many more things to see and a limited amount of time. Come along. Sadly the hippocampus is in the Sick Barn-I think it may be dying. It was one of our finest specimens.”
“Some animals are not meant to be kept captive,” Ragnar said-a touch darkly, Lucinda thought.
“Yes, well.” Gideon clapped his hands together as though he’d finished a difficult, messy job. “I don’t think we’ll take the time to show you all the birds upstairs. The roc is only small, and to be honest I doubt our phoenix is actually a phoenix. Now come along. We may still have time to see Eliot-he likes to come out in the morning, but morning is almost over!”
His eyes, in his wrinkled face, were bright-too bright. Lucinda could not meet them. She dropped her own, look ing at her feet and wondering what might be coming next, and what kind of creature Eliot could possibly be.
Uncle Gideon took them to the pond in his small truck, an electric vehicle not much bigger than a golf cart. The others followed in Mr. Walkwell’s wagon. Unlike Mr. Walkwell, Uncle Gideon clearly had no dislike of motorized transport, and did, in fact, seem to go to the opposite extreme-he drove like he was auditioning for NASCAR. Nor had he even bothered with a seat belt. “We’ll get there much faster this way,” he shouted at Lucinda and Tyler as they crashed down into a dip in the road, then actually lifted off the ground as they bounded up again. “And Eliot doesn’t show himself much after noon.”
“Who’s Eliot?” asked Lucinda as she clung to the frame of Gideon’s little truck. Death by dragon, death by golf cart-one way or the other, they were clearly doomed.
“You’ll see, if we’re lucky. If anyone knew he was here, Eliot alone would bring in tourists by the hundreds of thousands!”
“You’re going to bring in tourists?” said Tyler.
“What? No, never!” Uncle Gideon took his eyes off the bumpy road long enough to give Tyler a very stern glance. The truck promptly jounced so hard that Lucinda’s head and ears began to ache. “That’s the most important rule of Ordinary Farm-everything here is a secret. Secret, secret, secret!”
“We know,” said Tyler pointedly.
“Just remember, even a breath of what’s here getting out to the world at large will ruin everything. Everything!” He shouted the words, then fell silent, looking as sour as if he had caught Tyler and Lucinda making a video of the place to post on the internet. He said nothing for the next several minutes as they careened along the bumpy road, then emerged at last out of a little forest of oak and red-barked manzanita.
“Wow! That’s not a pond.” Lucinda stared out at the vast, flat expanse of water that filled the bottom of a medium-sized valley. “That’s a lake!”
“ ‘The Pond’ is what old Octavio used to call it. He had a rather
… dry sense of humor,” said Gideon. “Why do you think he called this place Ordinary Farm?”
“What’s in there?” Tyler asked. “A whale?”
“Nothing so ordinary.” Gideon giggled to himself. He seemed to be in a better mood again. Lucinda had thought he was going to shove them out of the truck when he had been yelling about secrecy. “No, let’s park and walk over to the rocks and sit quietly. Then maybe we’ll see him.”
“The sun feels good,” said Uncle Gideon. “I should get out more often, no matter what Mrs. Needle says.”
They had been sitting on a high place above the water for some minutes. Suddenly Lucinda spotted something long and silvery moving just beneath the surface of the water. “There!” she said. “I see something!”
“Ssshhh,” cautioned Uncle Gideon. “Not too loud. Eliot is one of the shyest of the animals we have.”
“Eliot? That’s a weird name for… ” Tyler abruptly fell silent, watching with his mouth open as the creature broke the water about a hundred feet away from where they sat, its silvery expanse of neck kicking up a curl of wake below. “For… for a sea serpent,” he finished. The shiny, snakelike head swayed from side to side, then darted back down into the water. The curling neck remained visible above the surface for a moment, a shining loop, then it, too, disappeared like a knot being undone.
Lucinda’s heart beat fast as she watched the graceful monster slide down and then back up to the surface again, but this time more from excitement than fear.
“I’m afraid the name Eliot is a bit of a joke,” said Gideon. “Ness, like Loch Ness, do you see? Eliot Ness?”
“I’ve heard of Loch Ness,” said Lucinda quietly, staring. “But I still don’t understand the Eliot part.”
“Never mind. He was a famous man, but long before your time. In any case, our Eliot goes after fish like the old Eliot used to catch bootleggers. Watch.”
They sat watching the lake monster feed, all silvery swiftness, until the sun was high in the sky and Gideon, weirdly calm now after a morning of watching his creatures, decided it was time they headed back for lunch.
Chapter 9
L ucinda woke up late in the afternoon, feeling the way she had once in fifth grade when she’d come down with a really bad fever and had to stay home from school for almost two weeks. Time had seemed to pass in strange pieces when the fever was strong, and sometimes it had been hard to remember whether something she was recalling had been real or just a dream.
Like now.
She had only meant to take a little nap, but she had dropped unconscious like someone had hit her with a club. Now she lay on her mattress, breathing the too-warm air and remembering every little bit of the events of the morning. It was hard to believe it had all happened, the unicorns and dragons and sea serpents, but there couldn’t be any such thing as a dream this complicated and realistic.
Not unless you went crazy.
That was a disturbing thought. Lucinda sat up. It was breathlessly hot in her room. She struggled out of bed to get a drink of water from the bathroom.
She knocked on Tyler’s door for at least a minute. He didn’t answer, so she wandered down the stairs with the idea of finding something better to drink than warm tap water. Within moments she realized she had taken yet another wrong turn and was in a dusty hallway covered with dark red wallpaper, the walls full of empty picture frames.
What’s with this crazy place? she wondered. Why do I keep getting lost? It was almost like the house itself kept turning away from her, like when the other girls at school had secrets and were freezing her out. Lucinda hated being on the outside-it took all her strength away, left her feeling too weak to do anything except say sour, nasty things.
But right now there was no one to say anything to -only the house and its long, dark, many-angled corridors full of stiflingly warm air.
None of it made any sense-not the house, not the farm. Where did someone get actual, honest-to-goodness dragons? Was Tyler right about Uncle Gideon being the mastermind of some weird genetic project like in a science-fiction movie? What else could it be? The animals weren’t robots or any kind of special effects, that was for sure. Meseret had looked her right in the eyes. Lucinda had no question that dragon was real.
She looked down at the threadbare carpet and its design of green roses. She’d never been in this hall before, she was sure. She sighed and started off again. She spent at least ten minutes wandering up and down hallways and staircases without coming across an outside window or anything else she recognized.
Finally she opened a heavy paneled door and found herself in another unfamiliar place, a sitting room of some kind-a parlor, with dusty sofas and shelves full of photographs. The carpet, with its black and gray patches and green roses, was mirrored more or less in reverse by the wallpaper, where the background was a pale green and the twining roses were black. Lucinda hesitated before backing out. The pictures had caught her attention. She let the door fall shut behind her and walked deeper into the room. There were dozens of photographs, and they all seemed to be of the same dark-haired woman.