Gustav Gloom and the People Taker (9781101620748) Read online

  Fernie struggled. The unseen noose around her neck pulled her back. She coughed, used her free hand to search her neck for whatever was holding her back, and found nothing. “This is stupid! How can I possibly be tied down with an invisible rope?”

  “It’s not invisible,” somebody said.

  She whipped her head around and saw her own shadow, which the room’s single candle cast against one of the gray walls. Like her, it was trapped in a chair, but unlike her, it was held in place by a dark black line extending from its neck to a ring set in the nearest wall. Also unlike her, it had both hands wrapped around that cord and was yanking at it with all its might.

  Fernie remembered the banquet hall. “You ate shadow food for me.”

  “You were hungry.”

  Next, Fernie remembered the library. “And you attacked the Beast for me.”

  Her shadow gave the rope another ineffective tug. “You were in trouble.”

  Fernie peered at the shadow cord that leashed her shadow self. “The cord isn’t around my neck. It’s around yours.”

  Her shadow struggled. “About time you figured it out!”

  On the TV screen, Fernie’s dad called out an anxious hello. Beside him, Pearlie declared how much she loved this house. The People Taker extended a friendly hand as he strolled across the parlor to say hello. He wore an apron reading PANCAKE CHEF.

  This struck Fernie as the worst thing he had done yet. Taking people and throwing them into a bottomless pit to become slaves of a guy named Lord Obsidian was evil enough, but promising them pancakes first and not giving them any added an entirely different level of cruelty.

  Fernie thrashed, felt the usual yank on her neck as punishment, and in desperation turned to her shadow again. It was still struggling uselessly with the shadow cord.

  Fernie cried, “Am I only being held here because you’re tied down?”

  Pulling at the shadow cord with all the strength it had, the shadow Fernie gasped in pain and exhaustion before falling back in defeat. “Yes!”

  “That’s not right! I know you can hold me in place for some reason, but you can also separate from me anytime you want! Why won’t you let me go so I can leave and try to save my family?”

  The shadow Fernie gathered up her strength and attacked the shadow cord again. “Because I love you and I don’t want to be separated from you!”

  Though it was just a dark outline, the shadow Fernie’s efforts seemed heroic; Fernie could almost see the straining muscles, the sheen of sweat, the eyes shut tightly in concentration. But it did the shadow Fernie no good. The cord was too strong to be broken that way.

  On the TV screen, Fernie’s family and the People Taker had a nice chat as he led them across the parlor.

  “Don’t worry about all this,” the People Taker assured them. “None of what you’re seeing is really real. I’m a professional special effects man for amusement parks and I was working on something just before Fernie came in. I guess I forgot to turn the projector off before getting started on breakfast! Ha, ha, ha!”

  He’d said the actual words ha, ha, ha, as his laugh was so chilling, it might have been enough to warn Mr. What that something was terribly wrong.

  Mr. What chuckled. “It’s pretty impressive work, Brad! You almost fooled me! Me, I’m a safety expert. I make a living out of seeing all the hidden dangers that people don’t notice!”

  “Really?” The People Taker sounded fascinated. “There much money in that?”

  “There is if you’re good at it!” Mr. What said. “And I’m the best! No hidden danger ever gets past me ever!”

  Fernie had never been the kind of girl who yelled at her dad, not even when he drove her crazy with all his safety talk; but there had been times in her life when she would have liked to, and this was one of those times. As it happened, only the TV set was present, so she yelled at it instead, calling it a big fat dumb stupid-head idiot safety expert. When she was done, she whirled to face her shadow again and saw that it was still struggling with the cord around its neck, still wasting time when the People Taker was on the TV leading Fernie’s father and sister to the Pit.

  Fernie would have given everything she had in the world just for a pair of scissors capable of cutting a shadow cord. If she only had a pair of scissors like that, she could have freed her shadow and talked it into running away with her—maybe even into helping her get back to the Pit before the People Taker did—and finding some way to push him into the Pit before he could do the same to her family. Then they could go back to the Too Much Sitting Room and do something, anything, to get poor Gustav out of that chair.

  There was no possible way, she thought, to get a pair of scissors while she was as leashed as her shadow and might as well be making shadow pictures on the wall for all the good she could do for herself.

  There was no—

  Her last thought had just hit a brick wall and bounced back.

  She looked at her right hand. She looked at the shadow version of herself, still struggling with the cord. She looked at her hand again.

  It couldn’t possibly be that simple.

  She said, “Hey.”

  Her shadow said, “What?”

  “Go back to doing what I do. Just for a second.”

  She held her hand up to the flickering light of the candle and made scissoring motions with her index and middle fingers. On the wall where the shadows were cast, it looked just like a child’s hand pretending to be a pair of scissors. Fernie moved her hand against the light, then moved her shadow scissors up the wall, against the shadow cord that bound her shadow self.

  She closed her index and middle fingers.

  The cord snapped.

  Freed, the shadow Fernie leaped up, spinning frantically as it tried to figure out what to do.

  Also freed, the real Fernie did the same. “You silly whatever you are! Why didn’t you just tell me I could do that?”

  Fernie’s shadow glared at her . . . and, for a moment, just like Great-Aunt Mellifluous, didn’t look like a shadow at all. It had form and substance and a face, all of which looked just like Fernie’s except darker and smokier and more transparent. The only bright parts of it were its eyes, which had so much life in them, so much inner strength and wild energy, that it startled Fernie to realize that they looked just like her own. “Sorry,” the shadow Fernie said. “I didn’t think of it.”

  Fernie had to admit that there was something about being captured and tied to a chair that was capable of reducing even shadows to shadows of their usual selves. But there was no time to worry about it now. She whirled around, grabbed the chair by its back, and ran from the room, using the same dark passage the People Taker had used to carry her in.

  Her shadow followed her along the stone wall, its outline turning rough and bumpy wherever it was distorted by the uneven stones. “No, Fernie! Not that way! I have to lead you out of the house!”

  Fernie wanted that more than she’d ever wanted the sum total of gifts she’d ever received for all her birthdays, but there was still something she wanted even more. “No, thanks.”

  “I know how you feel,” the shadow Fernie said. “But I’m telling you, you can’t stop him. You saw the way he beat Gustav. Even before Lord Obsidian got him, he was stronger and faster and more dangerous than you could ever hope to be, and he came out of the Dark Country with strength that no man should ever be allowed to have. If you get in his way again, you’ll just give him another chance to take you. It’s safer to just let me show you the way out.”

  “I know,” Fernie said, breaking into a run as she reached a flight of stairs she had last traveled as a prisoner under the People Taker’s arm.

  “You’re headed back to the Pit room,” Fernie’s shadow noted as the real Fernie carried her chair down those steps.

  “Yup.”


  “You know I can stop you,” Fernie’s shadow said. “I stopped you at the banquet hall and I could stop you now. It would be for your own good.”

  “So would saving my family.”

  “You don’t even have a plan. Please. You could get away.”

  Knowing that she didn’t have the time for this conversation but also aware that she could not escape it, Fernie stopped between one step and the next, put the chair down, and pointed an angry finger at her own shadow’s face. “Do you really think that would be a happy ending?”

  “No. But you could live.”

  “Yes, I could live. But let me tell you what would become of me if I lived after not even trying to save my father and sister. It wouldn’t be all bad. My mother would come home from her adventures and take care of me, but as hard as she’d try, I’d never smile again. I’d never make any friends because I wouldn’t deserve any. I’d never do anything that was the slightest bit fun because I wouldn’t deserve that, either. I’d have nightmares every night for the rest of my life. I’d spend all my free time sitting in dark rooms with all the shades drawn and all the lights off, forever, because wherever there’s no light there are no shadows, and as much as I could help it I wouldn’t ever want to see any shadow ever again. Especially,” she said, jabbing her finger at her shadow, “if you didn’t do something to help me save them, you. That’s how I would live. And living that way is not worth it.”

  Fernie said all of that in as close to a single breath as she could, because there wasn’t much time left and slowing herself down long enough to breathe could have been the difference between a father and a sister living with her in a Fluorescent Salmon house and a father and a sister lost to the Dark Country.

  Her shadow floated before her, looking stunned. Then, after a moment, it said, “Okay.”

  Fernie thrust her chin out. “Okay what?”

  “Okay okay.”

  “Are you gonna help me?”

  “I said okay.”

  “I didn’t know what kind of okay that was. It could have been some other kind of okay.”

  “No, it meant okay. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Fernie said.

  She picked up the chair again and resumed her charge to the rescue, her bemused shadow following close behind. She still didn’t have the slightest idea what she was going to do when she saw the People Taker again, but it didn’t matter. He was in trouble now.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE BATTLE OF THE SMASHING COUCHES

  Seeing before it the boy who had engineered that whole embarrassing business with the Statue of Awkward Liberty, and being, like most of the world’s most terrible monsters, excessively concerned with its own dignity, the Beast gathered up all of its impossible strength and resentment at being made to look stupid and attacked.

  The first slash of its claws could have sliced a school bus in half.

  It was a little surprised when the swing cut nothing but air and didn’t end with various pieces of little boy stuck between its claws. That was all right. Every monster is used to fighting the kind of people who insist on fighting monsters and knows that many of them have some surprisingly good moves. The boy had pulled off an impressive dodge, but it was not the kind of thing that even a boy raised by shadows could possibly do more than once. He seemed to recognize that he was doomed. Just look at him: falling to his knees, throwing his arms over his head in what looked like a desperate attempt to protect himself from being crushed like a bug.

  There’s only one possible answer to that for a self-respecting Beast, and that was to go ahead and crush the boy like a bug.

  The Beast thought this was an absolutely terrific idea and would have given itself a medal for it had it ever imagined the giving of awards for rending and tearing. After all, crushing puny boys like bugs was one of its favorite activities. It considered itself very good at it, and given the powers of speech it would have been able to deliver a fine scholarly lecture on all the best ways to smash them into nice, flat puddles.

  It curled two of its terrible shapeless hands in a pair of boulder-size fists and brought them down in a mighty hammering blow. The parlor echoed with a terrible crash of splintered tile and powdered stone.

  The Beast peered into the crater its fists had made of a section of parlor floor and would have been perfectly satisfied were it not for the absence of any crushed little boys.

  It seemed that this kid actually could dodge the Beast’s blows, which would have been worrisome enough, if not for a more pressing question: Why had the child bothered with all that stuff with falling to his knees and throwing his arms over his head and all but daring the Beast to try to smash that one particular spot if he wasn’t going to be considerate and let himself be hit?

  The Beast suddenly felt something scrambling up one of its arms.

  It was the boy.

  The Beast found this extremely annoying, not to mention puzzling, because no flesh-and-blood boy should have been able to climb a creature made of shadow, even if that creature had made itself solid enough to hurt him. It just wasn’t in the rules. The Beast had never seen the list of rules, but it knew that there were rules and it knew that this broke all of them.

  This annoyed the Beast so much that it reached over with one of its many other arms to pluck the little boy off and crush him into chunky boy juice. But by the time the Beast had grabbed for the spot where the boy had been, he had scrambled onto its shoulders. By the time the Beast grabbed for him again, the boy had scrambled farther and was wrapped around the creature’s neck. By the time the Beast grabbed at its neck, the boy was past the neck and was riding the top of its head.

  The Beast roared with confusion.

  In the Beast’s experience, flesh-and-blood things couldn’t touch shadow things that didn’t want to be touched and certainly should not have been able to climb them like a ladder.

  A possible answer flitted across the Beast’s tiny mind before sinking into the murk of its stupidity. Maybe the boy was somehow neither flesh nor shadow but something else, something the Beast had never even heard of, something the Beast had never once paused to consider.

  The Beast was still thinking about how ridiculous this was when it felt the first sharp pain on the top of its head. Its next roar was one of distress, and for the first time the Beast began to realize that it might be in serious trouble. It didn’t enjoy that idea even one bit.

  Gustav hung on to the top of the Beast’s massive head, clutching shadow-stuff. The way the Beast was bucking and running around in circles, he needed both hands just to stay put, which meant that as far as pressing his attack was concerned, there was really only one thing he could do.

  He took a bite.

  Shadows have a taste all their own, and this one tasted a little like the mud at the bottom of a duck pond that’s never been dredged.

  The Beast cried out in pain and grabbed for him again. Gustav scrambled down the Beast’s spine to that annoying place in the center of everybody’s back that no one can ever scratch unless they have a long stick or a very good friend.

  He took another bite.

  Now thoroughly indignant, the Beast spun around two or three times to look for some way of dealing with this annoyance and then picked up one of the parlor’s many dusty couches in one of its hands and tried to use it as a flyswatter. By this time, Gustav was no longer on its back but had climbed back to the top of its head.

  The Beast smacked itself over the head with the couch.

  The couch broke in half.

  Gustav had seen the dusty old antique being swung in his direction and dropped down over the creature’s sloping forehead. He rode the narrow strip of darkness between what should have been the eyes, remaining there even as the wreckage of the couch plummeted past him.

  The Beast roared in frustration and rage and cast abo
ut for more things to hit itself with. It found another couch, this one plucked from a conversation pit where a dozen shadows in elegant dress had been sitting together and enjoying fond memories of their latest trip to Liechtenstein. The shadows dove for safety as the Beast seized their couch and whomped itself over the head hard enough to reduce the poor antique to dust.

  It didn’t notice that Gustav had already jumped off and was running as fast as he could.

  He was halfway to the corridor where the People Taker had escorted Fernie’s father and sister when he heard more smashing furniture behind him. He could tell that he’d gained only a few seconds. But he didn’t care about that. He cared more about something that he hadn’t had time to realize until now.

  Since the People Taker had returned to the parlor without Fernie, it almost certainly meant that he was already done with her, that she was probably already plummeting into the Pit and facing a lifetime of slavery at the hands of Lord Obsidian. Her whole life had been ruined just because she’d happened to move in across the street from Gustav Gloom. Her whole life had been destroyed just because Gustav had been content all these months with hiding from the People Taker instead of doing something about him.

  It was too late to save her. It would probably be too late to save her family. But it would not be too late to make the People Taker pay.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  MR. WHAT KINDLY OFFERS HIS SERVICES

  Fernie’s dad had always prided himself on his deep understanding of life’s many dangers and on his remarkable ability to take in a complicated situation and boil it down to its most important elements. This was, he thought, what made him such a sought-after safety expert.

  It was with his vast well of knowledge in the field of personal safety that he stood with his older daughter, Pearlie (who for some reason kept tugging on his arm, whispering “Daaaaaad” with a sudden whiny insistence that was utterly unlike her), and his odd new neighbor Brad Gloom (who for some reason stood grinning at him, his lips growing wider and wider to reveal teeth that were far pointier than they needed to be) in a room that did not look like a kitchen (and was instead a kind of shadowy dungeon, complete with a stone-lined bottomless pit at its center) and asked, “Did we make a wrong turn?”