They did and it did. Colin didn’t get any ice cream. Gideon and Ragnar looked like they’d just come from a funeral. The drive home was a very quiet one.
Chapter 17
A fter dinner Tyler knocked on his sister’s door and actually waited until she said, “Come in,” before bursting in. He ran to the window and drew the curtains while Lucinda watched, puzzled.
“What’s that about?”
Tyler waved away the question. “So where’s the book?”
Lucinda pulled it out from under her mattress. She was curious, but not quite as worked up as her brother. While they had been taking care of the baby griffins with Ragnar, Tyler had just kept hopping from foot to foot as if he had to use the bathroom. Badly.
“Let me look,” he said now. “Come on, I found it!”
“Booger. We both found it. Besides, it’s hard to find anything left to read.” She leafed through a few pages. Chewed-page confetti rolled out in little showers. “The mice have chewed almost all of it.”
“Here, let me see.” But instead of snatching it, he waited until she put it in his hands, then carefully pushed the shredded pages apart. “Look, here’s some bits in the middle they didn’t get. Really weird old handwriting.” He spread a page as flat as he could and began to read out loud.
“But here is my question: Why must we think of it as simply a fourth dimension? Perhaps it would be more instructive to consider it as akin to earth’s terramagnetic field-as something that surrounds and permeates the dimensions we perceive rather than being simply one more dimension. At the places of intersection, the lines of force would cohere, much as the lines of an electromagnetic pole cohere, albeit invisibly, and influence physics in our three known dimensions, and perhaps beyond them. If so, then the structure of the Breach itself might be something familiar to most scientists, a Fibonacci spiral.
“This Breach, as I named it in the first of these journals, or Fault Line, as I have begun to call it since setting my sights on California as the most propitious spot for prospecting, has now become my central obsession. (‘Fault’ is by way of a small jest, since the earth of America’s western coast is rotten with faults of the seismic variety, coupled with the fact that several people have suggested my fascination with this line of study is a bit of a ‘fault.’)
“Man, it just goes on like this,” Tyler grumbled. “Old Octavio has a totally bad case of can’t-talk-normal-English.”
“Do you want me to read it instead?”
“No.”
“If it does take the form of a Fibonacci spiral, there would not only be a point of intersection with physical space, but at that intersection would be found areas of greater concentration of what is currently thought to be a single medium of unchanging density-the fourth dimension expressed as a cohered monopole at the center of a fifth-dimensional rolling vortex. That is to say, at the heart of the infolding there would be a place where a near infinite expression of that medium would be located in a very small part of our four-dimensional matrix. Would that not be a very merry thing to find?
“In any case, Father and Mother are both quite put out with these kinds of ‘maunderings,’ as Father puts it, and forbid me from such research until at least the time when I have received a doctorate and may pursue knowledge without the shame of being perceived a ‘crackpot’ … ”
“Man, this guy is the mayor of Mad Scientist Town!” said Tyler, laughing.
“But what does it all mean?” she asked. “What’s a fourth dimension?”
“How should I know? In my science class we learned how to make a rocket out of a plastic soda bottle.” Tyler riffled through the pages of the ruined notebook. “That’s about all there is left to read-just a few words and sentences here and there and some math stuff. The only thing for certain is that he’s saying there’s an earlier diary, and if old Octavio’s the kind of guy who keeps diaries there might be a whole bunch of them stashed away somewhere and not eaten by mice.” Tyler handed her back the notebook. “Hide it again. If there’re more I’m going to find them. If anybody’s going to tell us what’s going on with this place, it’s the guy who built it.”
Something fell against the window.
Both Tyler and Lucinda jumped. Suddenly frightened, Lucinda shoved the diary under her pillow.
Tyler went to the window and pulled back the curtain. “I knew I was right,” he said. “I knew it! Look outside, Luce.”
Lucinda stood up and stared out the window. The cherry tree filled much of her view, its blossoms gone and the leaves turning purple-brown.
“What do you see?” he asked.
“Just the usual stuff.”
“Okay. Stand there and watch for a minute.” Tyler clattered out of the room and down the stairs.
Lucinda shook her head. What was it now-more ghosts? Tree ghosts? Midafternoon tree ghosts?
Tyler appeared a few moments later in the overgrown patch of dry grass under the window. He stood there for a moment, then started walking, in the direction of the library and the rest of the unused wing without even looking back. Lucinda reached up to tap on the glass to get his attention, but before she could do it something dark hopped onto a branch high above Tyler’s head. It squatted for a moment, fat as a toad and just as still, then jumped effortlessly to the next tree.
It was following him.
Tyler turned around suddenly, heading back again toward the kitchen and dining room. The black squirrel followed, changing direction itself a few moments after he did. Lucinda felt a sudden surge of panic, although it seemed ridiculous-what could a squirrel, even a big one, do to a boy Tyler’s size? Still, she couldn’t help pulling up the window to warn him.
“Tyler!”
He didn’t turn, but the squirrel did, fixing her with the queasy yellow of its stare. For a moment she felt sure the animal was truly looking at her-as if marking her for future attention. She swallowed hard and rattled the window back down. Her brother and his hopping pursuer vanished from sight.
Tyler came back into the room a short while later. “Did you see?”
“That creepy squirrel again-and it was following you!”
“Yeah-duh. It’s been doing it for days. Everywhere I go, unless I’m out with the farm people. Even then I keep thinking I see it, hiding up in the trees, watching. And it keeps Zaza away-I hardly ever see her now.”
“What’s going on? Why would it do that?” She felt suddenly chilly, as if she had a fever. Those eyes!
“I don’t know. It started when I found the library. I think Mrs
… I think somebody’s using it to keep an eye on me.”
“You were going to say Mrs. Needle.”
“Yeah, well, she creeps me out. I think she’s a witch or something.”
“Tyler Jenkins! Do you hear yourself? A witch? This isn’t one of your video games.”
“And it isn’t one of your ‘We’re all friends, everybody learns a lesson, then we all hug’ TV shows, either. There’s some creepy stuff going on around here, and I’m not just talking about dragons and… and hoop snakes.”
Lucinda sat down on the bed, too tired to argue. She didn’t want Mrs. Needle to be bad. She didn’t care if every body hugged, but she did need friends. She was lonely with only her brother for a friend. She wasn’t used to it.
“Look, just do me a favor,” he said. “I want you to go to that library and see if you can find any more of Octavio’s notebook. If I go that thing is going to follow me and somebody is going to know about it.”
The library? Where Tyler said he’d seen a ghost? She absolutely did not want to do that. “How do you know it won’t just follow me?”
“Because I’m going to take Secret Squirrel for a little walk around the property.”