Underneath it had been written BIG ANIMALS-THIAM, PHENC, SCOP MIX, which she hoped meant the drugs were already in the darts.
Meseret was coming toward her, stripping metal shelves from the wall with her lashing tail, oblivious to anything except the big back door with its metal shutters at the far end of the Sick Barn.
Lucinda reached carefully into the box. There was only one dart left, a cylindrical tube the size of a roll of toilet paper, marked like a hypodermic, with a tail of feathers at one end and a thick needle about four inches long covered with a plastic cap.
Meseret was on top of her, big as a bus and seemingly blind with rage. Lucinda tried hard to keep her eyes open as the monster bore down on her. She held up her trembling hand, ready to try to punch through the ridiculously thick skin with the needle, but at the last moment the dragon swerved around her. Lucinda had only a half second of relief before the remains of Meseret’s restraints whipped over her as the dragon thundered past, knocking the needle from Lucinda’s hand and tangling her in canvas straps.
It got worse.
Before she even had a chance to scream Lucinda was jerked off her feet and dragged backward across the laboratory floor, through upturned tables and bits of broken glassware, as the dragon crawled swiftly across the barn toward the loading door. She couldn’t untangle her foot-her own weight was pulling the knot of straps tight around her ankle. It was all she could do to pull herself double to get her head off the floor.
The dragon smashed hard against the metal loading door where the large animals were brought into the barn on the flatcar. It rattled but did not give, and Lucinda swung in the straps and thumped painfully against the wall and the dragon’s immense, scaly hip. Meseret groaned again.
OUT! EGG!
Lucinda banged hard into something else as the dragon twisted and threw herself once more against the unyielding door. Meseret didn’t even know she was there and probably wouldn’t care. Lucinda struggled to get a chest full of breath.
“Haneb!” she screamed. “Open the door! She’s going to kill me if you don’t!”
Again and again Lucinda was smacked bruisingly against hard surfaces as the dragon tried to batter down the heavy door. She had hit her head at least twice and she was finding it hard to think. “Please, Haneb!” she shouted, but she had no idea if he was was even conscious.
Then Lucinda heard a deep bass rumble. She thought at first it was the dragon again, groaning in frustration, but then she saw black sky and spotlights where a moment before there had only been the loading gate. The door was rising. Either Haneb had heard her or Meseret had somehow triggered the mechanism.
Lucinda struggled but she was still hopelessly tangled. A moment later they were out into the darkness and cold air. The dragon was running, dragging Lucinda along the ground. Bump, bump, then something struck her on the head.
Dizzy. Suddenly there was no ground anywhere, only rushing wind, and Lucinda was swinging free in nothingness, whipped back and forth at the end of a tangle of canvas straps as the ground fell away beneath them and the dragon took to the sky.
Chapter 26
G oing through the mirror was like crossing half a second’s worth of freezing black space. Tyler rolled across the washstand on the far side and hopped down to the floor. As he had guessed, everything in the room was a mirror reverse of the room he had just left except for one thing: the other room had been full of people, the Carrillo girls and his sister, but he was alone in this one.
“Steve!” he shouted, and pushed through the door into what should have been the mirror version of the library. “Steve Carrillo!” It was only then that he realized he might be in more trouble than he had even guessed.
Outside the door, he found himself in an unfamiliar corridor-something that had nothing to do with what he had left behind on the other side of the mirror. It was dark and covered with dirty, ancient wallpaper like some parts of the house he had seen, but like nothing in the real library. One solitary, flickering oil lamp gave the only light, a weak glow extending a few yards down the corridor on each side. He would have to choose a direction. He listened, but heard nothing.
“Steve?”
When nothing came back to him but a faint, distant scratching, he turned in the direction of the noise and began carefully to make his way forward. It was only as the door he had come through fell away behind him that he wondered, Why an oil lamp? Old as they were, the real house and library at least had electricity.
He turned the corridor and found a new oil lamp and a forking of the way. To his right a wide, dark stairway led downward-he could see a few levels into its depths before the light of the lamp would carry no farther. The corridor itself led beside the open space of the stairwell. Two signs hung on the wall below the lamp. One had an arrow pointing down and read RALLEC. The other pointed straight ahead and said YRARBIL.
CELLAR and LIBRARY -it was easy enough to figure out, and sort of made sense for the far side of the mirror. What he didn’t understand was why there was a cellar here when there wasn’t one under the real house- at least not that he knew of-and why the library seemed so much farther away than the real library-the one in his world.
Maybe it wasn’t just a mirror version, everything exactly the same but in reverse. Uncle Gideon had said something about the Fault Line being about time, but Octavio Tinker had written in his journal that alternate realities, alternate worlds, were possible too. So what was behind the washstand mirror at Ordinary Farm might be only another version of Ordinary Farm.
Which meant, he suddenly realized, that he had no real idea what might be here at all.
He leaned over the railing, looking down the stairwell into the lightless cellar depths.
“Steve!” he called. “You down there?”
A dry scratching whispered up from the depths, as if someone was dragging dead leaves and discarded snake-skins up the stairs. It didn’t sound like Steve Carrillo at all, but it did sound like it was slowly coming closer.
Tyler hurried along the corridor toward the “ YRARBIL.”
He found it at last, at the end of what seemed like a mile of turning, poorly lit passages. It was at least as big as the real one, maybe bigger, and at least as full of shelves as the other. It wasn’t laid out in straight lines, but in haphazard clusters of tables and shelves and other strange furniture. In fact, if there were such things as haunted libraries, this sure looked like one of them. Many of the flickering lights on the walls here weren’t even oil lamps but actual candles: their flames jiggled when he passed, which made his shadow seem to dance and jump on the walls.
“Steven? Steve Carrillo? Where are you?”
He thought he heard a noise, not the scratchy hiss and scrape he’d heard on the cellar steps, but a muffled sound like someone calling from another room. He made his way quietly across the big central space, looking without much interest at the backward-lettered spines of the books on the shelves. There were pictures on the wall of this library, too, although he didn’t see anything quite like the big portrait of Octavio Tinker. Most of these pictures showed weird-looking old people in even weirder clothing. A few of them were of places-dark, stormy oceans and lonely mountaintops. Glass cases stood in some of the library’s open spaces, full of weird objects that looked as though they’d come from the oldest, dustiest attic imaginable. One purple-black ball caught his eye because it looked like a huge gem. He peered into the case to read the label, which said
GGE S’REHTNAP.
Panther’s Egg? What kind of silly crap was that? Not that there might not be some interesting things to explore here some other time. If only the place wasn’t so creepy.
Something rustled nearby and Tyler whirled around in time to see a flick of shadow disappearing behind one of the library stacks. “St
