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
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.