Gustav Gloom and the People Taker (9781101620748) Read online

  AND THE

  PEOPLE TAKER

  by Adam-Troy Castro

  illustrated by Kristen Margiotta

  Grosset & Dunlap

  An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  GROSSET & DUNLAP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Text copyright © 2012 Adam-Troy Castro. Illustrations copyright © 2012 Kristen Margiotta. All rights reserved. Published by Grosset & Dunlap, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014. GROSSET & DUNLAP is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Manufactured in China.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011046305

  ISBN 978-1-101-62074-8

  This one’s for Harlan Ellison,

  friend,

  teacher,

  inspiration,

  and keeper of the gates of fantasy

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  About the author and illustrator

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE STRANGE FATE OF MR. NOTES

  The neighbors thought Gustav Gloom was the unhappiest little boy in the world.

  None of them bothered to talk to him to see if there was anything they could do to make his life better. That would be “getting involved.” But they could look, and as far as they could see, he always wore his mouth in a frown, he always stuck his lower lip out as if about to burst into tears, and he always dressed in a black suit with a black tie as if about to go to a funeral or just wanting to be prepared in case one broke out without warning.

  Gustav’s skin was pale, and he always had dark circles under his eyes as if he hadn’t had enough sleep. A little quirk of his eyelids kept them half closed all the time, making him look like he wasn’t paying attention. His shiny black hair stood straight up, like tar-covered grass.

  Everybody who lived on Sunnyside Terrace said, “Somebody ought to do something about that sad little boy.”

  Of course, when they said somebody ought to do something, they really meant somebody else.

  Nobody wanted to end up like poor Mr. Notes from the Neighborhood Standards Committee.

  Mr. Notes had worked for the little town where they all lived. His job was making sure people took care of their neighborhoods, and the neighbors on Sunnyside Terrace had asked him to visit the Gloom house because it didn’t fit the rest of the neighborhood at all.

  All of the other houses on Sunnyside Terrace were lime green, peach pink, or strawberry red. Each front yard had one bush and one tree, the bush next to the front door and the tree right up against the street. Anybody who decided to live on the street had to sign special contracts promising that they wouldn’t “ruin” the “character” of the “community” by putting up “unauthorized trees” or painting their front doors “unauthorized colors,” and so on.

  The old, dark house where Gustav Gloom lived had been built long before the others, long before there was a neighborhood full of rules. It was a big black mansion, more like a castle than a proper house. There were four looming towers, one at every corner, each of them ringed by stone gargoyles wearing expressions that suggested they’d just tasted something bad. There were no windows on the ground floor, just a set of double doors twice as tall as the average man. The windows on the upper floors were all black rectangles that might have been glass covered with paint or clear glass looking into absolute darkness.

  Though this was already an awful lot of black for one house, even the lawn surrounding the place was black, with all-black flowers and a single black tree with no leaves. There was also a grayish-black fog that always covered the ground to ankle height, dissolving into wisps wherever it passed between the iron bars of the fence.

  The lone tree looked like a skeletal hand clawing its way out of the ground. It was home to ravens who seemed to regard the rest of the neighborhood with as much offense as the rest of the neighborhood regarded the Gloom house. The ravens said caw pretty much all day.

  The neighbors didn’t like the ravens.

  They said, “Somebody ought to do something about those ravens.”

  They didn’t like the house.

  They said, “Somebody ought to do something about that house.”

  They didn’t like the whole situation, really.

  They said, “Somebody ought to do something about those people, with their strange house and their big ugly tree that looks like a hand and their little boy with the strange black hair.”

  They called the mayor’s office to complain. And the mayor’s office didn’t know what to do about it, so they called the City Planning Commission. And the City Planning Commission called Mr. Notes, who was away on his first vacation in four years but whom they made a point of bothering because nobody liked him.

  They asked Mr. Notes, “Will you please come back and visit the people in this house and ask them to paint their house some other color?”

  And poor Mr. Notes, who was on a road trip traveling to small towns all over the country taking pictures of his one interest in life, antique weather vanes shaped like roosters, had folded his road map and sighed. “Well, if I have to.”

  On the morning Mr. Notes pulled up to the curb, five-year-old Gustav Gloom sat on a swing hanging from the big black tree, reading a big black book.

  Mr. Notes was not happy about having to walk past the boy to get to the house because he didn’t like little boys very much. He didn’t like little girls very much, either. Or, for that matter, most adults. Mr. Notes liked houses, especially if they matched the rest of their neighbo
rhoods and had great weather vanes shaped like roosters.

  Mr. Notes was so tall and so skinny that his legs looked like sticks. His knees and elbows bulged like marbles beneath his pin-striped, powder-blue suit. He wore a flat straw hat with a daisy in the band and had a mustache that looked like somebody had glued paintbrush bristles under his nose.

  He opened the iron gate, expecting it to groan at him the way most old iron gates do, but it made no sound at all, not even when he slammed it shut behind him. He might have been bothered by the lack of any clang, but was even more upset by the odd coldness of the air inside the gate. When he looked up, he saw a big, dark rain cloud overhead, keeping any direct sunlight from touching the property.

  He did not think that maybe he should turn around and get back in his car. He just turned to the strange little boy on the swing and said, “Excuse me? Little boy?”

  Gustav looked up from the big fat book he was reading, which, like his house, his clothes, and even his tree, was all black. Even the pages. It looked like too heavy a book for a little boy to even hold, let alone read. He said, “Yes?”

  Some conversations are like leaky motorboats, running out of fuel before you even leave the dock. This, Mr. Notes began to sense, was one of them. He ran through his limited collection of appropriate things to say to children and found only one thing, a question that he threw out with the desperation of a man terrified of dogs who tosses a ball in the hope that they’ll run away to fetch it: “Are your mommy and daddy home?”

  Gustav blinked at him. “No.”

  “Is—”

  “Or,” Gustav said, “really, they might be home, wherever their home is, but they’re not here.”

  “Excuse me, young man, but this is very serious. I don’t have time to play games. Is there anyone inside that house I can talk to?”

  Gustav blinked at him again. “Oh, sure.”

  Mr. Notes brushed his stiff mustache with the tip of a finger and turned his attention to the house itself, which if anything looked even bigger and darker and more like a giant looming shadow than it had before.

  As he watched, the front doors swung inward, revealing a single narrow hallway with a shiny wooden floor and a red carpet marking a straight path all the way from the front door to a narrower opening in the far wall.

  Whatever lay beyond that farther doorway was too dark to see.

  Mr. Notes sniffed at Gustav. “I’m going to tell your family how rude you were.”

  Gustav said, “Why would you tell them that when it isn’t true?”

  “I know rudeness when I see it.”

  “You must not have ever seen it, then,” Gustav said, “because that’s not what I was.”

  Mr. Notes could not believe the nerve of the little boy, who had dared to suggest that there was any problem with his manners. What he planned to say to the people inside would ruin the boy’s whole day.

  He turned his back on the little boy and stormed up the path into the house, getting almost all the way down the corridor before the big black doors closed behind him.

  Nobody on Sunnyside Terrace ever figured out what happened during Mr. Notes’s seventeen minutes in the Gloom mansion before the doors opened again and he came running out, yelling at the top of his lungs and moving as fast as his long, spindly legs could carry him.

  He ran down the front walk and out the gate and past his car and around the bend and out of sight, never to be seen again on Sunnyside Terrace.

  When he finally stopped, he was too busy screaming at the top of his lungs to make any sense. What the neighbors took from it, by the time he was done, was that going anywhere near the Gloom house had been a very bad idea, and that having it “ruin” the “character” of the neighborhood was just the price they’d have to pay for not having to go anywhere near the house themselves.

  Mr. Notes was sent to a nice, clean home for very nervous people and remains there to this day, making pot holders out of yarn and ashtrays out of clay and drawings of black circles with black crayons. By happy coincidence, his private room looks out upon the roof and offers him a fine view of the building’s weather vane, which looks like a rooster. It’s fair to say that he’s gotten what he always wanted.

  But one strange thing still puzzles the doctors and the nurses at the special home for people who once had a really bad scare and can’t get over it.

  It’s the one symptom of his condition that they can’t find in any of their medical books and that they can’t explain no matter how many times they ask him to open his mouth and say ah, the one thing that makes them shudder whenever they see all his drawings of a big black shape that looks like an open mouth.

  It was the main reason that all the neighbors on Sunnyside Terrace, who still said that “somebody” had to do something about the Gloom house, now left it alone and pretended that it had nothing to do with them.

  And that was this: No matter how bright it is around him, wherever he happens to be, Mr. Notes no longer casts a shadow.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE ARRIVAL OF FERNIE WHAT

  Like always, Mr. What was careful to make sure his daughters weren’t worried.

  He said, “Don’t worry, girls.”

  Neither ten-year-old Fernie nor her twelve-year-old sister, Pearlie, who were riding in the backseat while their dad drove to the family’s new home on Sunnyside Terrace, had said anything at all about being worried.

  They rarely said anything of the sort.

  But their dad had always been under the impression that they were frightened little things who spent their lives one moment away from panic and were only kept calm by his constant reassurances that everything was going to be all right.

  He thought this even though they took after their mother, who had never been scared of anything and was currently climbing the Matterhorn or something. She was a professional adventurer. She made TV programs that featured her doing impossibly dangerous things like tracking abominable snowmen and parachuting off waterfalls.

  “I know it looks like I made a wrong turn,” he said, regarding the perfectly calm and sunny neighborhood around them as if giant people-eating monsters crouched hidden behind every house, “but there’s no reason for alarm. I should be able to turn around and get back on the map any second now.”

  The What girls, who looked like versions of each other down to their freckled cheeks and fiery red hair, had spent so much of their lives listening to their father’s warnings about scary things happening that they could have grown up in two different ways: as scared of everything as he was, or so tired of being told to be scared that they sought out scary things on general principle the way their mother did.

  The second way was more fun. Right now, Fernie was reading a book about monsters who lived in an old, dark house and took unwary kids down into its basement to make them work in an evil robot factory, and Pearlie was playing a handheld video game about aliens who come to this planet to gobble up entire cities.

  The final member of the family, Harrington, wasn’t worried, either. He was a four-year-old black-and-white cat enjoying happy cat dreams in his cat carrier. Those dreams had to do with a tinier version of Mr. What making high-pitched squeaks as Harrington batted at him with a paw.

  “Uh-oh,” Mr. What said. And then, quickly, “It’s no real problem. I just missed the turnoff. I hope I don’t run out of gas; we only have three quarters of a tank left.”

  Mr. What was a professional worrier. Companies hired him to look around their offices and find all the horrible hidden dangers that could be prepared for by padding corners and putting up warning signs. If you’ve ever been in a building and seen a safety railing where no safety railing needs to be, just standing there in the middle of the floor all by itself as if it is the only thing that keeps anybody from tripping over their own feet, then you’ve probably seen a place where Mr.
What has been.

  Mr. What knew the hidden dangers behind every object in the entire world. It didn’t matter what it was; he knew a tragic accident that involved one. In Mr. What’s world, people were always poking their eyes out with mattress tags and drowning in pudding cups.

  If people listened to everything he said, they would have spent their entire lives hiding in their beds with their blankets up over their heads.

  Mr. What switched on the left-turn signal and explained, “Don’t worry, girls. I’m just making a left turn.”

  Pearlie jabbed her handheld video game, sending another ugly alien to its bloody doom. “That’s a relief, Dad.”

  “Don’t hold that thing too close to your face,” he warned. “It gives off lots of radiation, and the last thing you want is a fried brain.”

  Fernie said, “Gee, Dad, can we have that for dinner tonight?”

  “Have what?” he asked, jumping a little as the car behind him beeped in protest at him for going twenty miles an hour under the speed limit.

  “A fried brain. That sounds delicious.”

  Pearlie said, “That sounds disgusting.”

  Coming from her, that wasn’t a complaint. It was a compliment.

  Mr. What said, “That was very mean of you, Fernie. You’ll give your sister nightmares by saying things like that.”

  Pearlie hadn’t suffered a nightmare since she was six.

  “And Fernie, don’t make a face at your sister,” Mr. What continued, somehow aware that Fernie had crossed her eyes, twisted her lips, and stuck her tongue out the side of her mouth. “You’ll stick that way.”

  Mr. What had written a book of documented stories about little girls who had made twisted faces only to then trip over an untied shoelace or something, causing their faces to stick that way for the rest of their lives, which must have made it difficult for them to ever have a social life, get a job, or be taken seriously.

  Fernie and Pearlie had once spent a long afternoon testing the theory, each one taking turns crossing her eyes, sticking out her tongue, and stretching her mouth in weird ways while the other slapped her on the back at the most grotesque possible moments.