most standards. Something about it seemed familiar, although Tyler knew he’d never been there. It was some kind of sitting room, with chairs and small tables and sideboards. Photographs in frames stood on every surface-Tyler thought there must be a hundred or more-and as he moved into the center of the room he realized they were all of the same woman, her face always blurred by shadow but her slender, upright figure and graceful bearing recognizable in each likeness, no matter how strange the other things in the pictures.
It’s like that place Lucinda told me about, he realized. The parlor in the real house with all the pictures of Grace-“the Shrine,” Luce called it.
He watched the real Grace moving between the pieces of furniture, oblivious to the faded photographs, and wondered why they meant so little to her.
Then something screeched.
The cry was so loud and harsh that for a crazy instant Tyler thought it must be one of the shadow-birds he had seen outside the hall windows, loose in the house and swooping toward them. “Rethuuum oot muk!” it cried. “ Reed, rethum oot muk!”
Tyler and Steve looked at each other in shocked surprise, but it was Grace who seemed the worst affected. She let out a whimper of fear and fell against one of the tables, sending the pictures crashing to the floor.
“It’s her,” she moaned. “The White Lady! She’ll catch us now for sure!”
Something heavy was coming nearer, something strange and clumsy dragging and bumping toward them. Then lights brighter than any of the house’s flickering bulbs flashed in the corridor outside the picture parlor.
“Nihlock!” the thing cried and the edge in its voice grew sharper, more jagged. “Nihlock, oo-ee ra rrrehw?”
“Oh, man-it’s talking backward!” said Steve. “ Nihlock, nihlock -it’s yelling for Colin! ”
“Oo-ee ra rrrehw, Nihlock?” the thing howled, and something crashed against a wall and broke.
Now Tyler knew who it was, if not what it was. He also knew that with the horrid sounds getting louder each moment they had only one hope. “Run!” he shouted. “Back down the stairs!” He reached over and gave Steve a shove in the back. “Hurry!”
As they pelted down the stairs Tyler did his best to keep Grace upright. Her legs kept moving but she seemed barely conscious, murmuring as though caught in a terrible dream and trying to wake herself up.
They reached the bottom of the crazy-curving stairs. Steve tumbled onto the floor but got up quickly. “Which way?” he shouted.
Which one had been the left-hand door? They were facing the other way now, so it had to be the one on the right. “There-go!” Tyler was furious with himself: instead of trusting his instincts he had tried to do what someone else would have done-he, Tyler Jenkins, explorer of the Fault Line and navigator of the Mirror-World-and it had almost gotten them killed. In fact, he thought as he half-carried Grace after Steve, it still might.
As they sprinted across the hall toward the door something big came down the stairs behind them, something tall and stretched with long, waving arms, a twisted figure wrapped in billowing white like a misshapen bride. Twin beams of brilliant light stabbed out from the place where its eyes should have been, their glare obscuring the thing’s face as they raked the walls of the great hall and then fell on Tyler and Steve.
“Meth ees I!” it cried. “Nihlock, mooorlob huth nih!”
Tyler could only pray as he slammed through the doorway that they wouldn’t have to meet the mirror-Colin, too.
They ran and ran. For a while they could hear the mirror-Needle clumping along behind them, and then could only hear the steam-whistle shriek of her voice, then finally they got beyond even that. Tyler now all but shut his eyes, relying on his sense not of where they should be, but of where the mirror was, a sensation like a warm glow at the edge of his thoughts.
It seemed like they had been running for half an hour when they found themselves getting near the Nehctik again. Of course-he had stupidly forgotten that the washstand mirror was in a different place, in the mirror-version of Mrs. Needle’s office. Did that mean they were entering the mirror-Needle’s territory again? He shuddered, but realized that maybe they had done themselves a favor, leading her away from her office.
At last he reached a door that felt right. Tyler swallowed deep as he turned the knob, but when he saw that it was indeed the mirror-office he gasped in relief. He dragged Steve and the white-haired woman through, then slammed the door and grabbed the handle tightly. The mirror was waiting, all alone in a pool of faint, dreary light.
“Go!” Tyler said. “Help her through, Steve. I’m going to hold the door just in case.”
Steve Carrillo guided the exhausted Grace through the frame of the mirror and pushed her through the reflection, then clambered wearily up onto the mirror-washstand himself. “Jenkins,” he said. “I gotta tell you something… ”
“I know,” said Tyler as he pulled himself up beside him. He could hear something moving in the hallway just outside, and the angry murmur of backward speech. “I know- never again. And I totally agree.”
As the knob began to turn on the office door they plunged through the unsolid glass, Steve first, then Tyler right behind him.
Chapter 40
Lucinda didn’t even know why she was still trying to hang onto Gideon. She was out of strength, while he, deranged by the call of the greenhouse-thing, was still fighting as hard as ever. Colin Needle had tried to help but had failed completely and instead put himself in deadly danger. Even Mr. Walkwell had fallen to the thing. Ragnar, the only person left who might conceivably help, was on the other side of the farm. It was hopeless.
Yes, surrender, a voice urged her, although not in words: the words were all Lucinda’s, as if she was talking to herself, a soothing, reasonable version of her own inner voice… Come here. Join. Become. An impression of completeness beckoned to her, a promise of joy in belonging so powerful it wasn’t even an emotion but a state of being-so wonderful that words couldn’t even describe it. Come. Become us…!
Carrot Girl! Help! Scared!
The new voice in her thoughts, that of the young dragon, Desta, startled her back to herself. She realized she had almost lost her grip on her great-uncle and she grabbed his muddy bathrobe tighter.
Desta? Desta, can you hear me? But Lucinda’s thoughts seemed to drift up and be snatched away as if by the wind: nothing came back to her.
Another lightning flash made the rain seem to hang in mid-air. Shiny white strands of the monster fungus were rising all around the greenhouse, bursting through the soil and reaching toward the sky as if worshipping the storm, and even as these hundreds of strands twined upward, the main fungus body was growing larger by the moment, swelling like rising dough, pressing against the dirty greenhouse windows. Pieces of glass began to burst out of their frames or simply shatter with popping sounds loud enough that Lucinda could hear them even above the rising winds.
Carrot Girl…! The dragon’s thoughts were growing fainter. Help! Scared! Bad animals!
The Reptile Barn! Mr. Walkwell said the manticores were loose in the Reptile Barn! Remembering was like another painful blow. Oh, poor Desta! She did her best to push all the other thoughts away-struggling, deranged Uncle Gideon in her arms, that thing like a pile of rotted marshmallows swelling and oozing out of the collapsing greenhouse, and helpless Mr. Walkwell and Colin Needle…
Oh, God, Colin! He’s trapped holding that piece of metal, and there’s lighting everywhere…!
… and against all that painful clamor in her thoughts, she turned her mind back to the young dragon.
Desta…? It was so terribly hard to concentrate…! Desta, can you hear me? I’m here. Here! She thought she felt a momentary touch of the dragon’s thoughts, like a burst of radio music through a roll of static. Desta?
Carrot Girl… And with the faint call came a sort of vision, as if she was seeing what the dragon saw-shapes scuttling across the floor of the Reptile Barn, the weird, barking noises the manticores made as they hunted-but there was something strange about it, too. If she was truly seeing what Desta saw, the young dragon seemed to be looking down on the scene from above, perhaps perched on one of the catwalks near the top of the vast
