He took a few steps away from the house and the monkey leaped up from his shoulder, then drifted back down toward him in a long, shallow glide and went once around his head before she flapped again and circled away. She sure seemed like she wanted him to follow her someplace.
Well, it beat lying in bed.
Zaza led Tyler around the outskirts of the house, through an orderly vegetable patch the size of a small baseball field where she plucked and ate a succession of different greens growing close to the ground, then through a tangled, deserted-seeming garden and past a greenhouse at its center that looked like it had been abandoned for a long time. Tyler could see strange shapes through the dirty glass, and in some places huge leaves pressed up against the panes from the inside, as though whatever had once been cultivated in there had been allowed to run riot. It was a little creepy, all that oversized green life just on the other side of cracked glass. He was glad that the little monkey didn’t linger.
She led him around the corner of another building, which was connected back to the house by a long covered pathway. Tyler found himself looking across a big open space with a view of the immense cement half-cylinder of the Sick Barn. He could see the high windows where he had peered in the night before-had it really been less than a day since then? Amazing. But as much as he wanted to see the dragon again, he didn’t want anyone to notice he was out of his room just when Gideon seemed to have forgiven him, so he forced himself to turn away and focus on where the monkey was leading him. Still, he couldn’t help saying to himself, “There’s a dragon in there, and I saw it. A real… live dragon!”
How many other kids could say that?
This house and its buildings and grounds really did go on forever! Tyler’s own room was a quarter of an hour behind him now and the main farmhouse-the part of the house that everyone used most-was completely out of sight. The monkey had led him past more neglected gardens and past several more outbuildings until finally they reached a long, low structure two stories high except for a domed turret looming above the middle of it. Another overgrown garden stretched beside it, full of old, tangled rosebushes and sprawling hedges that had not been trimmed for years.
Tyler trotted down a covered passage lined with wooden pillars that ran the length of the long building, like a covered walkway in a Greek temple-something Tyler had seen in a schoolbook, or more likely, some game design. But instead of being marble, everything was made of wood and painted in shades of brown and gray and green and white. Well, except the parts that were glass, and there were plenty of those. Tall windows lined the ground level as well as the floor above.
Zaza, gliding along in front of him, suddenly halted and crawled through a broken window, disappearing into the building. Dismayed, Tyler wondered, Does she want me to climb in through a twelve-inch hole eight feet off the ground? He had passed at least two doors, though, so he walked back and tried the nearest.
Bingo! The door swung open. Nobody locked anything around here.
Tyler stepped into a small room, a sort of antechamber with dark wood paneling, lots of coat hooks, and a stand with several dusty umbrellas. This wing of the house had the smell of a place nobody had disturbed for a long time, like an underground tomb.
Or a palace, he thought a moment later as he stepped through into a library. More like a palace.
It really was like some fabulous scene in a movie: Tyler grew dizzy just looking up and around. The walls were covered with bookshelves, from the dusty carpets almost to the roof. There was no second floor, just a high ceiling and all those big windows letting the afternoon sunlight stream in. Plenty of daylight still remained, but the old-fashioned electrical lights he’d seen everywhere around the farm hung all around the big room as well, high in the rafters and also on long wires over clusters of overstuffed chairs and sofas. Tyler had the thrilling sense that the farmhouse really was a palace, or even an entire lost ancient city-everywhere you went you found something crazy and wonderful. He had never imagined that there could be so many books in one place-this was a palace of books, an empire of books.
It’s too bad they wasted all this space on ’em, Tyler thought. It could have been a totally sweet game room.
Books, after all, were pretty boring, and he usually did his best to avoid them. It was because his mother was always going on about how kids who read were better than the ones who didn’t-better than game-playing idiots like her own son, she meant. But Tyler knew better. GameBoss and TV were so much more interesting than almost any book-especially this kind, the old kind that surrounded him now, most of which didn’t even have pictures.
But still, he had to admit the place itself was pretty cool.
He walked a little way down the broad central aisle until he was beneath the spot where the roof bulged up into a dome. The dome had little windows of its own, and it was painted on the inside with all kinds of weird things-animals and trees and strange letters he couldn’t read. He walked back and forth beneath, calling out and listening to his voice echo back from the high ceiling and the dome.
Outside, the sun went behind a cloud. The room darkened and Tyler suddenly didn’t like the place quite as much. He began turning on lights, climbing onto chairs to reach some of the big switches on the walls, sneezing as dust puffed up from the chair cushions. Not all of the switches worked, but golden light blossomed from enough of the lamps that the library began to look cozy and welcoming again. Tyler began brushing dust off the sofas. He felt a bit like Goldilocks as he tried them out. When he found one he liked, he lay down completely and put his dirty sneakers up onto the upholstery, then put his hands behind his head and looked around, master of an entire building.
A guy could get used to this, he thought. Then he found himself face-to-face with a pair of staring eyes.
Tyler yelled and leaped to his feet. A moment later he laughed at himself, although his heart was still beating fast. “You dork!” he said out loud. What had spooked him was only a stupid old painting looking down at him from the wall, lit now by one of the electric bulbs so that the man’s glaring eyes seemed almost alive.
It wasn’t Gideon-the man in the picture was about the same age but his clothes were really, really old-fashioned, a long coat with a high white collar, and his face was a different shape from Gideon’s too. What about the guy who’d built the farmhouse? What had they said his name was-Octavio something? Yes, that was it, Octavio Tinker. This must be him, Tyler decided. The person responsible for this whole crazy place.
The man in the picture did look a bit like a mad scientist. His dark gray hair stuck out over his ears like little wings, and his mustache curled up at the ends like something out of a cartoon. Tyler could imagine him twirling them between his fingertips and saying, “And now-tremble before my death ray!”
But he didn’t look completely like a villain. A dog sat comfortably at his feet, some small black and white breed that Tyler didn’t recognize, and Octavio held an object in his hand that looked mysterious but not particularly ominous-a striking concoction of golden metal, brown wood, and glass lenses.
Tyler stood up and walked toward the picture, squinting at the thing in the man’s hand, but he couldn’t make much of it-it looked like something out of a kid’s story, some kind of magic seeing-device.