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.
“Where are we?” Steve spun in a circle, his eyes wide with terror. “I don’t recognize any of this!”
Tyler was about to shout at him, but he realized a second later he didn’t either.
“Oh, man,” he said. “You’re right. How did we wind up here?” The hall was broad and high, with flickering lights perched in cobwebbed chandeliers and the floors covered with dusty carpets thrown haphazardly across each other. At the far end a stairwell spiraled up at strange angles, and a single door led out of either side of the hall.
“I don’t know, Tyler, but I can hear something back there… ” Steve was bouncing in place like a kid who needed to use the bathroom. “Where do we go?”
Something was telling him that he should choose the left hand door, but that didn’t jibe with his memories and sense of direction-surely they had descended for some time to find the kitchen? And just as certainly he remembered that the Gideon-thing, the Bandersnatch, made its home in the lowest parts of the mirror-house. He glanced at pale Steve and the exhausted, frightened old woman. Lucinda was always telling him not to be so impulsive, and there was nothing about the left hand door to recommend it except a vague feeling.
“We go up,” he decided. “The stairs-hurry!”
Without waiting for discussion he caught at Grace’s arm and pulled her forward across the dusty hall. Steve groaned but followed. As they ran, shadows passed across the high windows, winged shapes that seemed far too large to be birds.
The stairs were much harder to climb than he would have guessed, leaning at treacherous angles. At the top they pushed through a doorway onto another landing, this one smaller and better kept-the dust only lightly frosted the surfaces instead of lying in drifts like snow-but from this smaller entry hall there was only one way out, up another set of narrow stairs like a dimly-lit tunnel.
Up, he thought to himself, although some dim feeling was still urging him to turn around and take his chances with whatever might be below. Up is the only thing that makes sense. We’ll either find the way out or we’ll find some light.
“I want to get out of here, Tyler,” Steve said, huffing up the stairs behind him. “I really want to go home, man. My parents must be going crazy…!”
Tyler shook his head, not to deny what Steve said, but because he barely had the strength to climb and pull Grace-he couldn’t talk at the same time.
They spilled out into a room that was the cleanest and best-lit they had yet seen, but still dim and dusty by
