“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.
Lucinda sat down on one of the sofas, the better to examine the pictures on the coffee table, but the cushions were thick with cobwebs and dust. She jumped up, brushing herself off with little squeals of disgust, and decided she could look at things just as well standing up.
In some of the photos the woman was with other people-one looked like a picnic beside a lake, where she sat smiling on a blanket with half a dozen other people in old-fashioned clothes-but in most she was alone, smiling or laughing or sometimes just looking at the camera with calm attention. Some were black-and-white, some were in color, although none of the color photos looked quite realistic. The woman was very pretty, with a long-legged figure and the kind of long, dark brown curls Lucinda had only seen before on women in old paintings.
At last, Lucinda turned to examine the rest of the room. It felt like a place no one had visited for years- faintly creepy, maybe even haunted, she thought-but strangely she wasn’t at all frightened; in fact, she almost felt like she was dreaming. In one corner a tailor’s dummy stood like a headless scarecrow. Lucinda walked over to the shadows where it stood and put her hands on the dummy’s waist. It was slender, but the hips and breasts were full. Their mother’s friend Mrs. Peirho made clothes sometimes, and she had a tailor’s dummy too. She had told Lucinda that they could be adjusted to your own exact size. Had this one belonged to the woman in the pictures? Whoever she was, Lucinda thought, she must have been very small…
“Wasn’t she lovely?” said a voice. “Her name was Grace.”
Lucinda let out a little scream and whirled around. Patience Needle was standing right behind her, as if she had suddenly risen up from the floor. Lucinda stumbled and put out a hand to steady herself on the tabletop. One of the framed pictures teetered and then fell. Lucinda did her best to catch it, but it tumbled to the floor and the glass broke, making a noise almost as loud as her scream. When Lucinda picked it up, feeling both ashamed and angry, she cut her fingers on a jagged edge.
“I’m sorry I startled you, dear,” said Mrs. Needle, and held out a hand to Lucinda, who shrank from her. “And I’m sorry things have been so strange for you children since you’ve arrived. You’re lost, aren’t you? Oh, look, you’ve hurt your hand. Really, you must let me help you.”
Lucinda’s fingers were really starting to ache now. The blood was making a little pool in her palm, and looking at it suddenly made her feel dizzy.
“Poor you!” said Mrs. Needle. “That’s a nasty gash there. Don’t worry about the broken glass, I’ll clean it up later.” Mrs. Needle took a clean white handkerchief out of the pocket of her skirt and wrapped it around Lucinda’s injured fingers. “You must let me help you-I insist.”
Standing this close to Mrs. Needle, Lucinda could smell the faint but lovely scent of lilies, rich and sweet. “Who is that woman in all the pictures?”
“Her name was Grace Tinker-well, Grace Goldring after her marriage. She was Gideon’s wife. He lost her many years ago but he loved her very, very much. I don’t think you should mention her in front of him.” Mrs. Needle put a hand on Lucinda’s shoulder. “Look at this place! I’m ashamed to see how long it’s been since we’ve dusted in here-what must you think of us? Now come and let me take care of you.”
Relief that she was no longer lost suddenly flooded through her. Lucinda let herself be steered out of the old parlor and taken down some stairs, then gently coaxed this way and that, as if she was a boat drifting down a river. “Here,” said Mrs. Needle at last, ushering Lucinda into a room unlike anything she had yet seen in this strange, strange house.
It was very large, but at Ordinary Farm that wasn’t unusual. One wall was a giant filing cabinet with what seemed like hundreds of little drawers in rows reaching up to the ceiling, like the cells of a wooden beehive, each perhaps the width of a hand. A rolling ladder stood to one side and a long desk stretched along another wall. Part
