No one’s hurt me. Ragnar wouldn’t do anything to me. Strongest of all, though, to her surprise, was that she wanted to know. For once she wanted nothing more than to get answers to the questions that were swarming in her head like startled bees.
A moment later a shape came springing down the hillside. There was just enough firelight to show its odd, jerky movements. It was dancing , she realized, leaping and capering with arms stretched high as if to clutch at the stars. From the waist up it had the shape of a naked man, slender and muscled, but below that were the haunches and narrow, hooved feet of a deer or goat.
The head dipped down for an instant into the firelight and Lucinda almost screamed. The face was Mr. Walkwell’s.
The animal-man leaped up again, then whirled around and was gone, bounding up the slope with tremendous speed and agility, disappearing over the crest of the hill. Lucinda, her knees suddenly too weak to hold her weight, sank down to the ground beside the discarded boots, the paper that had spilled from them crunching beneath her.
“He’s a… Mr. Walkwell’s a… ” She shook her head, shocked. “What is he?”
Ragnar laughed. “He is one of the Old Ones, child. I do not know the right name for his kind, but the Graekers worshipped them as little short of gods. The Greeks, I mean. Sometimes I still do say the wrong words, despite all my years here.”
Lucinda picked up Mr. Walkwell’s boot. The whole night felt like a dream, but she knew it wasn’t. “The poor man. He has to walk in these-no wonder he goes so slow. Always having to hide what he is.”
“Not always.” Ragnar helped her up and led her across the clearing toward the stone circle in which the fire burned. When she knelt to warm her hands he crouched beside her. “The nights are his-like this one.”
“Is he from… does Mr. Walkwell come from the same place as the dragons and the unicorns?”
Ragnar poked the fire with a long branch. A few sparks drifted up and winked out. “I do not know all of Simos’s story, because he was here long before the rest of us came… but in a way that is true. He is from the same place as the dragons. We all are. But place is not the right word. It is hard to explain.”
“Maybe somebody should try,” she said, but without anger. She had lost it back in the trees. “No one ever tells me or Tyler anything until we find it out for ourselves.” A sudden thought made her heart race. “Tyler! He’s out exploring-I have to find him!”
“He will be well,” the bearded man said. “Nobody will come onto the farm and hurt him when Simos is on guard.”
It wasn’t people getting in from outside she was worried about, but people who were already here-one person, anyway. “Sarah and the others-they said that Mrs. Needle is a witch.”
Ragnar frowned and took a moment before answering. “It is true that where she came from that is what they called her. They would have killed her for it too. But your great-uncle trusts her, and she has helped him, there is no doubt of that. After the fire took his laboratory and all his things I thought he would waste away in sorrow, but since then she has helped him find new life-new purpose.”
Lucinda’s mind was still whirling with questions, but before she could ask anything else Ragnar stiffened and rose. A knife that she had not even seen was suddenly in his hand, glinting in the firelight. A moment later a bizarre, lumpy shape came swinging down the hillside, sometimes upright, sometimes going on all fours. Before she could do more than take a frightened breath, the weird thing came to a sudden halt at the edge of the clearing and split into two pieces, one of which fell to the ground.
Mr. Walkwell straightened and prodded with his hoof at the bundle he had just dumped. He rolled it over, revealing a pale face and slack, open mouth. He looked up from the motionless man at his feet and cocked an eyebrow at Lucinda, who had shrunk back into Ragnar’s shadow.
“What is the child doing here?” He seemed more irritated than embarrassed to be standing in front of her naked, although he was so shaggy he might as well have been wearing trousers. Lucinda could not help staring. Even trousers would not have hidden the fact he had hooves instead of feet, and it was almost stranger to see him without his hat than without pants. Where his hair had blown back from his forehead in matted, sweaty curls she could see pale, circular marks-the place where his goat horns grew, she realized, although he had cut them off or filed them down. With his scraggly beard and the fire reflecting red in his eyes, he looked like the devil himself. Lucinda should have been terrified, but the face was still Mr. Walkwell’s, the man who hated cars and carved wooden toys for children.
“Don’t blame Ragnar. It’s… it’s my fault,” she said. “I was out looking for Tyler. I got lost, and then… I saw the fire… ”
Ragnar crouched beside the man Mr. Walkwell had dumped on the ground. The stranger was wearing dark clothes and a dark stocking cap. “Where did you find him?” Ragnar asked.
“Beside the Junction Road fence,” said Mr. Walkwell. “He only got a few steps past it. I came down on him from behind. He did not have time to see me.”
The old man had just run out to Junction Road, then run back carrying a large man on his back, all in a quarter of an hour or less, Lucinda realized. Here was another thing Tyler had been right about all along-Mr. Walkwell wasn’t just inhumanly strong, he wasn’t human at all.
“Is… is he dead?” Lucinda asked.
Ragnar shook his head. “Simos has only stunned him. We want these people to know they are not welcome, and for that they must live to tell those who have hired them.” He had finished going through the man’s pockets. “Empty, of course. But I will wager that if you find his car, you may also find a telephone with the number for that greedy man, Stillman.” Ragnar sighed heavily. “He is digging to see what he can find, or perhaps just reminding us he is out there. This is a problem that is not going away.”
“I don’t understand,” Lucinda asked. “Who is Stillman?”
“A bad man. A rich man too. He is a descendant of the Tinker family and he wants this farm. Anything else, Gideon will have to tell you himself.”
“If I find the telephone, I will bring it back. I do not understand those things and I do not want to,” Mr. Walkwell said. He looked sternly at Lucinda, as though she might have been about to peddle him a cell phone herself. “It makes my head itch even listening to people talking into one.”
“They hardly work here, anyhow,” Ragnar said. He had pulled off the unconscious man’s clothes, leaving him in only his underpants, socks, and undershirt. He didn’t look very dangerous now. “He is ready, Simos.”
Mr. Walkwell leaned down and scooped the man up like a bag of groceries, then slung him across his shoulder. “I will take him back. He and his master will have something to think about when he wakes up.”
A moment later he had bounded off, so quickly that Lucinda had completely missed the point between going and gone. She could smell him, though, a tang that was not unpleasant, but still made her nostrils twitch.
“As for you, we take you back to the house,” Ragnar said. “You have had enough questions answered for one night, yes?”
Lucinda nodded. Tyler would be safe. How could anything bad happen to him with a magical creature like Mr. Walkwell guarding the farm?
Chapter 20
Last One
T yler wasn’t falling anymore. Now he seemed to be floating in darkness, but floating didn’t come close to describing how uncomfortable he was. He was so dizzy that ordinarily he would have felt sick to his stomach-but he couldn’t find his stomach. It didn’t even seem like he had a body. It seemed as though he was only a brain floating in some jar of dark liquid, eyeless, voiceless, helpless.
But he was still cold-shockingly, shiveringly cold. No body, but still freezing-how unfair could things get?