vulnerable while they’re small, so we keep them out of the main pen for the first few months.” He indicated a row of glass tanks against the back wall of the barn, beyond the egg trays. “Come and see.”
The tanks were like miniature versions of the wire pen, with sand on the bottom and piles of rocks. The creatures inside didn’t seem as interested in hiding as those in the bigger pen. A half-dozen of them, each the size of a pet rat, crowded up against the glass; and when their long, hairless tails writhed they had the look of nestling snakes, although their lumpy little bodies were covered with fine, pale down. The creatures also had claws on their bony front feet, but no back legs that Lucinda could see. She shuddered as the blunt little snouts banged against the glass.
“They don’t use their poison to kill prey when they’re this small, but mostly for self-defense,” Gideon said. “And they’re so small it’s not a stream of it they shoot but a mist-you might not even know you’d inhaled it until paralysis started to set in. Hence, I’m guessing, the idea that a basilisk can turn a man to stone with a mere look.” He nodded vigorously. “Hungry. Do you want to see me feed them?”
Suddenly it was too much for Lucinda. She stumbled back, retreating as far from the scuttling creatures as possible until she had the second-floor railing at her back. She felt like she might faint or throw up.
“Hey, you okay?” Tyler asked. He actually sounded like he meant it.
“Yes, I’m just… ” She took a deep breath.
“Come and see something else,” said Colin kindly. “The flying snakes are in the next pen. They’re rather pretty.”
He was right. A tree stood in a generous, wide tub, and the red and black and gold snakes hung from its branches. Every now and then one of them would snap open pale wings like a Japanese lady’s fans and glide to the ground. The largest wasn’t much longer than Lucinda’s forearm, and their enclosure didn’t stink like the cockatrice cages.
“That’s a spice tree,” said Uncle Gideon. He had finished feeding the basilisks and come to join them. “Frankincense, to be specific, the resin that we are told the three wise men brought as a gift for the baby Jesus.” He smiled a hard little smile. “It’s harder to keep the tree alive than the winged snakes.”
“Whoa,” said Tyler suddenly. “Flying snakes. Are there flying monkeys here too?”
“Only one on the whole farm,” Uncle Gideon said. “She’s a real rarity.”
“I saw her! The night I saw the dragon!”
“You did, did you?” Gideon shook his head. “I’m surprised. Zaza is usually shy of everyone, even us. That’s why we let her have her freedom. Actually sometimes we don’t see her for weeks.”
“Her name is Zaza?” Tyler said it like he was memorizing something important-like a cheat code for a game he was playing, Lucinda thought. She just wanted to get out in the open air again, to somewhere that didn’t smell like reptiles.
Farther along the second floor there was another pen, this one just a flimsy chicken-wire fence. The floor was covered with shallow pans of water. A number of slow, docile-looking creatures sat in the water or crawled stiff-legged across the floor. It was only when Lucinda looked at one that stood unmoving that she realized what made them so unusual.
“They have heads at both ends!”
“Awesome!” Tyler leaned over the rail, which made the light material buckle a little and earned him a poke from Uncle Gideon.
“Don’t break my cage, boy, we’ll have amphisbaenae all over the place. Yes, they do seem to have two heads, don’t they? An amphisbaena’s back is a decoy, it turns out-a tail with scales that look just like the creature’s eyes, mouth, and nostrils on the other end. A myth put to rest, this one. Still, they don’t exist anymore on earth- except right here.”
“Why is that, Uncle Gideon?” Tyler asked.
“Well, well, well,” said Uncle Gideon with a hard smile. “That inconvenient curiosity of yours just won’t let up for a minute, now will it?”
Lucinda could see the look in Tyler’s eye. “What do you expect?” he said. “We’re surrounded by magical animals, but you won’t even-”
“Stop right there!” cried Uncle Gideon, causing strange sounds to rise from cages all around. “Magical-what utter garbage! All of these animals, boy- all of them -have at some time been alive in Earth’s history. Apart from our work here they are all now completely extinct, as far as we know. These are real animals, as created by Nature, and if I hear any more fairy-tale nonsense from you,” Gideon spluttered, “why, I’ll… ”
Tyler said, “Well, it’s DNA, then, isn’t it? Making monsters by, like, gene splicing… ”
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!”
