going to be the stupidest death of any student in the history of Chavez Middle School.
Tyler was out into open land now, with dry knee-high grass and only an occasional stunted tree. Just before him was the long, low trough where the unicorns came to feed, rushing in like a hurricane when Mr. Walkwell or one of the herdsmen summoned them.
And there, at last, was a gleam of an idea. As he ran through the grass he bent and picked up the first stick he passed, but it was so thin he threw it away. The second one was too heavy to be much use in defending himself from something as small and quick as the squirrel, but Tyler had a different idea.
When he reached the trough he ran around it in a tight circle, banging on it with the stick as hard as he could, over and over. A dozen yards away the dark, compact shape of the squirrel appeared from a clump of high grass and hopped toward him, little more than a shadow in the light of a partial summer moon.
Tyler put the trough between him and the squirrel and waited. It hopped closer. Now he could hear its hiss, loud as a teakettle. He held the stick up in front of him and the squirrel stopped, waiting to see what he would do. They stared at each other, and Tyler felt as if he was looking at something that was more than a mere animal- there was a nasty, cruel little intelligence behind those slotted eyes.
Then he heard the sound, that rumble like an approaching storm, and his heart seemed to swell in his chest. He hadn’t known what they would do at night-if they were even close enough to hear. The rumble grew louder. The squirrel froze, looking around, and the yellow eyes bulged.
“Yeah!” Tyler screamed. “Yeah! How ya like me now?” He turned and sprinted for the nearest tree.
The squirrel hesitated a moment, and that was a moment too long. As it jumped after him the unicorns suddenly burst out of the trees at the top of the nearest rise and came crashing into the meadow like a flood from a ruptured dam, right over the spot where the squirrel was leaping through the low grass. Within moments the entire pasture around Tyler’s tree was a seething ocean of pale sides and swinging manes, of kicking hooves and needle-sharp horns.
The unicorns finally galloped off ten minutes later, clearly irritated that they had been summoned for no purpose-that they had found no food in the trough. Tyler climbed down and began limping his way back toward the library, promising them silently that he would make it up to them someday. He owed them. Nothing else seemed to be moving, although there might have been a slow, broken squirming in the trampled grass.
“Hey, Squirrelly-kinda sucks to be you, huh?” he called over his shoulder.
As he pulled the library door open, Lucinda ran to meet him with a flashlight. “Oh, Tyler,” she moaned, “it’s terrible!”
“We’ll figure out something to do. They can probably sneak back close to dawn-I don’t think Mr. Walkwell’s going to be out there all night long, do you?”
“No, it’s not that! Steven’s… gone.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Come on.” She grabbed his arm and hustled him across the darkened library, their footsteps echoing.
Tyler suddenly knew where they were going and his heart sank.
The door to the retiring room across from Octavio’s portrait was open. Alma and Carmen were looking in every corner of the small room with their flashlights when Tyler arrived. Carmen, the older girl, shone her light at him.
“Oh, Tyler, what happened to you?”
Lucinda saw his wounds for the first time. “Oh! Are you okay?”
“Never mind me-what happened to Steve?”
“We don’t know,” Lucinda said. “We were talking, then we looked up and he wasn’t there anymore. The door to this room was open, and he
… he was just gone. He’s not anywhere else in the library. We’ve looked for him everywhere. He’s disappeared!”
Tyler stared at the mirror above the washbasin. At the moment it was as dark as a piece of volcanic glass. He reached up a finger and tentatively touched the surface.
His finger went straight through.
“Oh, this is bad-real bad.” He swallowed and turned to the three girls. They looked terrified. Tyler wasn’t too happy about things himself. “Uh… I think I know where he’s gone.”
Chapter 25
A Mother’s Heart
L ucinda stared at her brother. He was speaking English but she couldn’t understand him. “What do you mean you’re ‘going in after him’? Going in where?”
“Just… ” He glanced at Carmen and Alma, who both looked frightened. “Never mind. We can’t waste any more time-it might be bigger in there than it is in here. In fact, it could lead anywhere.”
“Tyler, what are you talking about?” Now Lucinda was beginning to be really scared too. “We have to get Ragnar or somebody.”
“No time.” To her surprise, Tyler scrambled up onto the washbasin and braced himself on the frame, as if he wanted to take a really, really close look at his own face. She was just about to ask him what he was looking at so carefully when he closed his eyes and then let himself fall forward into the mirror, disappearing through its surface like a man making a perfect dive into still water.
“Tyler!” she shouted, but he was gone. She scrambled forward in time to see him walking away from her- her brother no longer existed on her side of the mirror, only inside the reflected world. The ghost-Tyler disappeared around a corner. Behind her, Lucinda heard little Alma begin to cry.
“What’s going on?” demanded Carmen, who was close to tears herself. “This is totally crazy!”
Lucinda was fighting her own very strong urge to just run upstairs to her room and put her head under her pillow until the whole problem went away. Her brother had just jumped into a mirror. What next? She squeezed her eyes shut, fighting the urge to scream for help.
I just want to go home now. I really, really want to go home. She wanted to sleep in her own room and see her friends. She wanted to clamp on her headphones and listen to normal music and think about boys and television and what was happening at school. No monsters. No magical mirrors.
But when Lucinda opened her eyes again, Alma and Carmen were staring at her, terrified, waiting for her to do something, and she realized that this was not the time to run away and hide.
“It’s okay,” she told them. “Tyler knows what he’s doing.” One thing at a time, Lucinda, she told herself. “So you guys came over here in the middle of the night because we never answered our messages?”
Carmen looked at her terrified little sister and made a decision. She took a deep breath, and when she spoke she no longer sounded like she was about to break down. “We… we kept calling you. And that English lady kept saying you couldn’t come to the phone, or that you were busy, always something. But you never called back, and our grandma was just nodding her head like she knew it all along, and we were wondering if you guys were sick or something. After a while, we were really worried!”
Alma nodded. “And then tonight, that helicopter-Steve said maybe it was one of those ambulance helicopters, and that they might be sneaking you out to a hospital or something.”
“I told him that was dumb,” Carmen said, “but he was like, ‘I’m going! You can’t stop me!’ So we came with him.”
Lucinda grabbed the girl’s hand. “Hold on-what helicopter?”
“It was this big one- really big, but really quiet. It went right past our house about an hour after dark, and Steve and I saw it,” Carmen explained. “For a long time it just hovered by the edge of your property with most of its lights off, but then it went farther in and I think it landed. I don’t know-it was hard to see.”
Lucinda had a bad feeling. A big helicopter? That had to be the people that Mr. Walkwell and Ragnar were watching out for-like that guy they’d captured out by Junction Road, the one they said was working for that Stillman guy. But a helicopter, landing on the farm at night?
She had to do something about this.
