“Of course not, child. Not at first.” He heaved a broken cage up onto the cart. “What was I to think? It was strange enough that I had escaped the doom that was upon me. When I came to this place, I saw only a farm at first.”
“Oh, tell me about it.” Lucinda went back for another bucket of mash. “I really want to hear.”
“How did Gideon find his way around?” Tyler asked. “Was it really that Continuascope thing? How did it work?”
“That craft is beyond me-and anyway, the device is gone.” He shook his head. “Sometimes it seems that everything good in this place has been lost.”
“What do you mean?” Lucinda asked. “This place is amazing!”
Ragnar lifted several of the heavy sacks off and dropped them to the ground with a dusty thump. “The friends I’ve met here tell me we Norsemen are a gloomy lot. Still, I cannot help thinking this house and perhaps all the magic of this place is cursed. Certainly it has seemed so since the night Gideon’s wife disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” Lucinda thought of the room so full of pictures of the dark-haired woman that it had seemed like a religious shrine. “I thought she died.”
“Nothing so simple.” He frowned. “She was swallowed by the Fault Line.”
For a moment Lucinda couldn’t speak-she felt cold all over. “Swallowed?”
“That is what I call it. I do not speak Gideon’s tongue of science. She went in and she did not come out. It was the most ill-fated night of all.”
“Where?” Tyler demanded. “Where was she when it happened?”
Ragnar gave him a strange look. “I do not know. Some where in the Fault Line. It is the family’s gift-but it is also a curse, I sometimes think.” He looked up suddenly, his face stricken. “I am sorry! Gods, I am a fool.”
“Why are you sorry?” Lucinda asked.
“Because I have called your family cursed.”
Lucinda had to think about it for a moment before she understood. “Oh, right. I keep forgetting that we’re related to Gideon.”
“Not to Gideon, in truth,” Ragnar said. “To his wife. And through her to Octavio himself.”
Now Tyler was the puzzled one. “What does that mean?”
“You are of the Tinker clan. Grace was a Tinker-Octavio’s granddaughter. Gideon and Grace never had children. You are not related by blood to Gideon, but to Octavio.”
“So is that why we’re here?” said Tyler, slowly. “Me and Lucinda? Because we’re old Octavio’s blood relations?”
Ragnar heaved up another bunch of feed sacks. “I do not know why you are here, boy. Gideon has many thoughts he does not share with me. Still, I am glad you two came. It has brought some new life to this place-life that was needed.” He looked almost wistful.
Lucinda felt as though she was suddenly seeing things clearly that she had only glimpsed before through a fog. “So Gideon married into the family.”
“Yes. It was against Octavio’s wishes, at least at first.” Ragnar said. “Gideon came to work with the old man and help him build his device, but he also fell in love with Octavio’s granddaughter, who he had seen grow from a child to a woman. There was much anger, at least at first, when the two of them married.”
“Octavio was angry?”
“So I am told, but he came to accept it at last. And for some years things were good. Then came the bad night when Grace vanished into the Fault Line and was lost. That same night, Octavio Tinker’s heart failed and he died.”
“Oh my God!” Lucinda said. “That’s so terrible! How did it all happen?”
Ragnar shook his head. “I was not there. It is not my story to tell. Already I have talked and talked-talked too much. We have work to do. Besides, what more do you need to know? The whole sad story is in these words-Gideon lost his wife and his thane on the same night.”
“His thane? What’s that mean?” Tyler asked.
“Ah, it is not a word of your time, but mine. The one who held his oath-his lord, you might say.”
“This is America,” Tyler told him. “We don’t have lords.”
Ragnar’s half smile returned. “Words change-men do not. In all ways Octavio was Gideon’s lord. But it was the loss of Grace that crippled him. He searched years for her, until the Continuascope was lost too.” He looked around, then lowered his head a little between his big shoulders and said quietly, “He was already a little mad, I think, when the Continuascope was lost in the laboratory fire and he could not even search for her anymore.” He shook his head.
“So she just disappeared into the Fault Line,” Tyler said slowly. Lucinda could not help noticing the strange expression on her brother’s face-he was lost in thought, staring at nothing, as if he was on the last level of some game and completely absorbed. Why was he zoning out when they were finally getting some answers?
“Why did Gideon bring you and the others here?” she asked.
The big man snorted. “You would rather talk than work, I see. He brought us because he needed workers to keep the farm going… workers who will keep the secrets.”
Tyler abruptly stood up. “I have to go back to the house!” He turned and headed off at a trot.
“What about your chores, boy?” Ragnar called.
“I’ll be back, honest!”
Lucinda stared after him, wondering what was going on. She had a sinking feeling that she was going to wind up doing his share of the work as well as her own.
A hot, sweaty hour or so later Ragnar finally sent her back to the house to get lunch while he went to talk to Mr. Walkwell about some fencing.
Lucinda was rinsing the worst of the dust off her face and hands at the faucet outside the Sick Barn when she felt the hairs at the back of her neck begin to rise. She even looked around to see if someone was standing behind her, but no one was in sight: she was alone with the concrete bulk of the huge barn. Then the weird, powerful sense of someone else’s feelings flooded into her again, bringing a sense of loss as sudden and shocking as being doused with a bucket of cold water.
Lost… lost… lost…!
Her first impulse was to run away-but how could she run away from thoughts in her own head?
Lucinda lifted her hands to her cheeks and found they were wet. The force of the misery-whoever’s misery it was-had brought her to tears.
Go away, ghost, she thought desperately. Leave me alone!
But it would not go away, and she spun in helpless circles, holding her head. It was only then, as though she had turned toward the sun with eyes closed and felt its heat, that she realized she could tell where the painful, unhappy thoughts were coming from.
The Sick Barn.
Lucinda looked around but there was still no one in sight. She walked slowly to the front of the great concrete tube. The overwhelming sense of someone else’s misery was growing a little less, but it still battered her mind like a strong wind.
The door to the Sick Barn was open, propped with a stone so it wouldn’t latch shut. Lucinda poked her head in, heart beating fast and prepared for almost anything, but there was little to see. In fact, except for the huge bulk of Meseret sprawled in sleep, tethered to the floor with massive bands of canvas, and some movement in some of the smaller pens and cages, the place seemed empty. But who had left the door propped? And whose terrible, mournful thoughts had invaded her mind? Was it the ghost in the library mirror? Or something worse-some horror conjured up out of its natural time and place by Gideon’s Fault Line?
And then Meseret’s great, red-gold eye flicked open, as if a gypsy fortune-teller had lifted the cloth cover off a crystal ball. The long, narrow reptilian pupil widened a little and several ideas thundered in her brain at the same time.
NOT EGG THIEF. WHAT WANT HERE? SAD SAD SO SAD!
Lucinda didn’t hear individual words, but instead felt the meanings with the suddenness that a splash of paint would shout “Red!” As the alien ideas cascaded over her, a sudden, clear understanding came with them: the voice she had been hearing in her head, the mournful thoughts that she had mistaken for ghosts, had come from Meseret.