making a dazzle on top of a nearby hill, and even as she watched the shrieking wind was rolling more black clouds toward them like a steamroller.
Colin opened bleary eyes. “Don’t let me die,” he begged her. “Please, don’t let me die. I’m sorry I took it. I’m sorry!”
She had no idea what he was sorry about, nor did she care. “I’m trying to help you!” Her wet fingers kept slipping off the strands. “Oh, God, I’m trying, Colin!”
“Stand away girl!” Ragnar came crashing back through the garden toward them, something heavy swinging in each hand. He set down the two large cider jars and wrenched the aluminum post out the boy’s hand, shredding hundreds of fungal threads with a horrid ripping and popping noise as Colin let out a screech of agony.
Ragnar straightened up, took a quick couple of steps, and flung the metal fence post toward the greenhouse. It wobbled through the air, trailing its wire like a giant threaded needle, but was pushed sideways by the powerful wind and fell to earth several yards short of the wall of dead and dying creatures that had piled up at the structure’s base.
“The gods curse it!” The Norseman turned to Lucinda. “I must go closer, but then the demon will be able to reach me as it caught Simos-unless I can set it burning. That will give me a few moments, I think!” He lifted and uncorked first one of the gallon jars, then the other. The smell of gasoline blew past her on the wind. Ignoring another cry of pain from Colin, Ragnar tore the sleeve off the boy’s wet shirt and crammed it into the mouth of the jar. He did the same thing with the other sleeve, prompting a weaker cry of pain and protest. Colin looked like he had all but fainted.
“Do you have fire?” Ragnar asked Lucinda. “Or any way to make it?”
She stared at him for a long, confused moment, then shook her head. She searched Colin’s pockets; he was in so much pain he scarcely seemed to notice. “He doesn’t either,” she said.
He smiled a grim smile. “Then I have no choice but to try to wade through those griping demon-fingers. If Simos could not do it, then I cannot, but I must try.” He reached out and patted her cheek with his gasoline-stinking hand. “I ask for your pardon, Lucinda.”
She flinched. “Are you going to hit me?”
Ragnar shook his head. “I ask pardon because I cannot sing my death-song well in your tongue, Lucinda Jenkins. Still, it must be sung so it can be heard by those who listen, and they say the gods understand all tongues!” He set the jugs down beside her and trotted through the rain toward the greenhouse. “This will be the second time I have sung it!” he shouted over his shoulder. “Let us hope that again it will be in vain!”
Lucinda didn’t know what he meant.
The monstrous thing inside the ancient greenhouse had long since broken out all the windows and was oozing out of every opening in the corroded metal cage, its uppermost extensions stretching thirty feet or more into the air and branching into hundreds of shapes as weird and alien as snowflakes. As the Viking approached, the starry profusion of shapes shuddered and the entire bulk of the fungus began to swell and rock.
The Norseman’s voice rose, each word loud and heavy as a great stone.
“It gladdens me to know that Odin sets out the benches for a banquet,” he sang, or rather chanted in a deep, booming voice.
“Soon we shall be drinking ale from cups of horn! A hero who is ushered into Odin’s hall does not lament his death, and Ragnar Leather shanks shall not enter Old One-Eye’s hall with words of fear upon his lips…!”
Shiny white strands began to climb the tall Viking’s legs, more and more of them coiling around him until he staggered to a halt several dozen yards from the greenhouse, not far from the motionless, cocooned shape of Mr. Walkwell.
“I have fought against foes in many battles,”
he sang, louder now to best the mounting thunder.
“My sons are gone, and their sons after them,
I myself brought an ending to many men
And now I am a king out of his time!
But I never imagined pale serpents like these
Would be the ending of my life…!”
Ragnar bent and ripped as many of the strands away as he could, then forced himself a few steps forward, tearing the pale rootlike strings out of the earth as he went, snapping dozens of them with each stride. He took a step. He took another step. Against all odds, he was still moving toward the thing, but each step was slower and more labored than the last.
Colin raised his head, clutching his arm against his belly as he spoke through chattering teeth. “Is he… is he g-g-getting close to it…?”
Lucinda watched a moment longer and then shut her eyes in despair. Rain warm as blood ran down her face. “No. It got him. It’s… it’s tangling him up like Mr. Walkwell.”
“It’s my fault… ” Colin said. “I should… I should have told you… that there was something weird… in the greenhouse
… ”
“Lucinda!” It was a new voice. “Lucinda! Where are you?”
She opened her eyes. “Here, Tyler! Over here!”
Something was crashing toward her through the garden rows like a charging elephant; a moment later her brother tumbled onto the muddy ground beside her. “Lucinda! What’s going on? And what’s that? ” He stared at the horrible white thing swelling from the greenhouse like rising bread dough. “This is crazy!”
Even as she tried to form the words to explain, Steve Carrillo came staggering up behind him. Steve leaned over, gasping for breath, and lifted a hand in a shaky sort of wave. “H-Hi, Lucinda.”
“You’re too late, Jenkins,” said Colin bitterly. “You and your dumb friend. We’ve already lost.”
“Ragnar said we needed to burn that thing.” Lucinda spoke quickly before he and her brother started to fight again. “There’s a pole with a wire on it over there, attached to the lightning rod. That was Colin’s idea, but Ragnar couldn’t throw it close enough. Then Ragnar made some gasoline bombs but we didn’t have anything to light them with.” For a moment she felt a sudden twinge of hope, foolish as it was. “Do you have something? Matches?”
Tyler thought hard, his face twisted in worry, then shook his head. “I don’t, Luce.”
She felt as though she were about to dissolve, as if the rain had beaten on her so long she was about to become water herself and flow away. “Oh, Tyler, where were you? How could you run off like that? There were guns… and the manticores are loose… and I think that thing is going to reproduce!” She pointed to the impossible thing growing out of the greenhouse. The strange, tentacle-like shapes extended from the main body like tiny chimneys, hundreds and hundreds of them, each one ending in strands that waved in the wind like seaweed. “That’s what it does! But if it puts out spores with all this wind and rain, it’s going to take over everything!”
“Hey, I have a lighter,” said Steve Carrillo.
“What?” Lucinda and Tyler both shouted it at the same time, so loud that Steve shied back.
“Sure,” he said, looking a little shamefaced. “I borrowed it from my uncle. You can’t make a fire on a night like this without a lighter or some matches and I wanted to make S’Mores. Heck, I thought we were going camping. ”
He had scarcely produced it from his jacket pocket before Tyler snatched it away. Tyler pulled the cider jars close and applied the flame first to one of Colin’s torn-off sleeves, then to the other. The fabric was wet but gasoline had soaked up into it from the jar and after just a few seconds both wicks caught and burned with a blue- yellow flame. Lucinda cowered away, thinking they might blow up any second.
“Don’t worry-that’s not how these things work,” Tyler said. “At least I don’t think so. Steve, you grab that one.”
“Me?”
“No, the other Steve. Look, my sister can barely sit up and Needle looks like his arm’s broken. Come on, dude. Hero time.” But although he spoke bravely, her brother looked pale and frightened, his lips almost blue in the weird storm light.
“Don’t do it,” Lucinda told him. “It already got Ragnar and Mr. Walkwell!”
Tyler only shook his head. He stood up, holding the jug away from his face; after a moment, so did Steve Carrillo.
