Gustav Gloom and the People Taker (9781101620748) Read online

  Mrs. Everwiner had just gotten to the part of the story about the angry letter she’d written to the newspaper, whose editors were so horrified that a woman of her station would ever have an unsatisfactory experience in a supermarket that they put her letter on the front page beneath a giant headline of the kind most newspapers reserve for warnings about erupting volcanoes. It was even bigger, Mrs. Everwiner proudly assured them, than the headline over the latest story about all those mysterious disappearances that had plagued the town over the past few months: Seven people so far, some plucked from their beds, had all disappeared without a trace.

  Fernie’s father and sister, who were still trapped listening to Mrs. Everwiner’s story, hadn’t noticed the departure and return of the dog’s shadow any more than they’d noticed the absence of Fernie. This was distinctly odd, as Fernie’s father always noticed when his daughters crossed streets, in part because he knew that even the most quiet streets could without warning become runways for airplanes coming in for emergency landings. For as long as Fernie could remember, he’d always watched his daughters carefully to make sure that they didn’t cross any street without looking not only left and right but also up.

  But Fernie couldn’t let go of the one thing she’d seen that was distinctly odder. “Shadow dogs don’t just walk away from their real dogs.”

  “It happens all the time,” Gustav said.

  “You’re crazy.”

  “You saw it happen,” Gustav pointed out.

  “But it doesn’t happen all the time!”

  “If it happens once,” Gustav said, “it can happen more than once. And if it can happen more than once, it can happen all the time. It’s not my fault that you’ve never noticed it before.”

  “I’m surprised enough that it happened even once.”

  Gustav shrugged. “So now you’ve seen it happen once and you don’t have to be surprised the next time it happens.”

  Again, Fernie wanted to stamp her foot. “But that doesn’t explain anything! Shadows can’t run around by themselves!”

  “Who says they can’t?”

  The simple question nearly swept Fernie’s legs out from under her. Because as it turned out, she didn’t have an answer. She couldn’t remember anybody in her life ever telling her what a shadow could or could not do; not even her father, who knew fourteen ways television sets could explode if you changed channels too quickly. No, she realized now, her general understanding of the things a shadow could or could not do had just come into being all by itself. Even so, it still hurt her head to think about. “Even mine?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s a shadow! It does what I do!”

  “You haven’t been watching it carefully enough.”

  “I could watch it all day!” Fernie cried. “It would still only do what I do! That’s what a shadow is!”

  “Then,” Gustav said, “explain the dog.”

  Across the street, Mrs. Everwiner had reached the part of her epic story where the local TV station got involved, devoting the longest segment of the nightly news to her complaint about the cashier, preempting the story about all the missing people entirely.

  The repercussions of Mrs. Everwiner’s one moment of inconvenience at the supermarket just seemed to keep expanding outward, like a stubborn weed intent on overgrowing the entire world. At this rate, Fernie would not have been surprised to find out that wars had been fought over it.

  Pearlie and their dad still feigned interest, unaware that Fernie was involved in a much more interesting conversation just across the street. As much as Fernie wanted to resolve the confusion over what shadows could or could not do, she found herself needing to get back to them, if only for a moment, just to make sure she could return to a world that made sense.

  “Go ahead,” Gustav Gloom said, sounding sadder than ever. “Leave. I can tell you want to.”

  Fernie felt terrible. “Don’t take it personally. I’m just busy moving in. We have lots of boxes to take in.”

  “I’m sure you do,” said Gustav Gloom. “And I’m sure that you’ll be warned not to come over here ever again, because this house is a bad place and there’s nothing but trouble for you here.”

  “Is that true?”

  “It’s what people will say. And they’ll also say to stay away from me, because I live here and that makes me as bad as the house.”

  Fernie felt worse with every word the strange little boy spoke. “Well, if the house is the problem, why do we have to talk here? Why can’t you come across the street with me and meet my family?”

  Gustav Gloom looked at Fernie and flashed one of the oddest expressions Fernie had ever seen: not sadness, but not happiness, either. It struck her as the look a person gets when he knows a joke that’s funny only to him. “I’m sorry. I can’t leave my yard.”

  Something about the way he said it made his meaning clear: It wasn’t a case of being forbidden from leaving his yard by parents who’d promised to punish him if he did; it was a case of being unable to leave, of being confined by the fence and the clouds that cast a shadow over his house like an animal inside a cage.

  Fernie’s mouth hung open. “Are you locked in there?”

  “No.”

  “Then why can’t you leave?”

  “I just can’t, that’s all.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  He struggled to come up with the words. “It’s . . . the only place I can be.”

  “What happens if you try to leave?”

  “I’m not sure I can explain.”

  “Don’t you go to school?”

  “No.”

  “Never even been to anybody else’s house?”

  “No.”

  Fernie blinked. “That’s sad.”

  Gustav Gloom said, “I know.”

  “Do you have anybody in there to keep you company?”

  “Nobody with bodies.”

  Fernie wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly. “What?”

  “Most of them ignore me, but some are family, sort of. It’s okay as long as I stay away from the bad places.”

  “What bad places?”

  “The bad places,” he repeated as if that explained everything. And then, after a moment’s thought, he added, “You need to be careful, too. It isn’t always safe even on your side of the fence. The People Taker goes out hunting at night.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Instead of answering, he cocked his head like a puppy hearing a whistle from far, far away. “I’m sorry. I’m being called. It was nice to meet you, Fernie What. Maybe I’ll see you again.”

  And then he walked away.

  But there was also something very strange about the way he walked away, something about the way the gray mist at his ankles bubbled up around him with every step, the way the air seemed to thicken and turn black the farther he went, until it was hard to make out his black hair and black suit against the darkness that surrounded him even in daylight.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  HARRINGTON THE CAT MAKES AN ENEMY

  That night Fernie enjoyed one of her favorite dreams: the one about the atomic zombies.

  In this dream she was the last girl in the shattered ruins of a once-great city, fighting zombies who were not just zombies, because that had gotten boring after the first four or five times she had the dream, but atomic zombies, who had gotten too close to a glowing meteor from another dream and were now not just dead and hungry but also radioactive and able to shoot death rays from their fingertips.

  Unfortunately, all the zombies in tonight’s episode looked like Mrs. Everwiner, and all she had to throw at them were cash registers.

  The last thing she dreamed before the scratching noise woke her up was the shadow of a Mrs. Everwiner zombie, three times taller
than life, writing an angry letter to the newspaper from the cover of a nearby dark alley.

  Fernie sat up on the air mattress she’d be using for a bed until the moving company showed up with the family’s furniture, noticing that it was still dark outside.

  She wouldn’t have minded being awake for a while, as long as there was something to do, but her new bedroom, with its blank walls not yet adorned with posters of movie monsters and its floor not yet covered with a litter of toys and its space not yet taken up with shelves stuffed to bursting with scary books, was not yet a promising place to spend time when everybody else in the house was sleeping.

  Then the scratching noise began again, followed by an angry hiss.

  She flipped on the flashlight that was her only lamp for now and used it to follow the commotion to the corner next to her clothes closet, where a small but important battle was being fought atop a pyramid of cardboard boxes she hadn’t unpacked yet.

  “Harrington,” she said.

  That could have explained everything. Harrington was a typical cat in that most of the things he did only made sense coming from a cat. A cat will spend an hour licking a spot on the floor that tastes just like every other spot on the floor. Or he’ll pick a desperate fight with a shower curtain that won’t end until it surrenders. Or he’ll crawl into a tight, cramped space and wail until someone notices him, then leave as if he doesn’t know that he was acting trapped just thirty seconds before. These are all things that seem perfectly sensible to cats.

  Harrington seemed to be very angry at the wall. His tail bristling at three times its normal size, his eyes as round as dinner plates, he stared down what looked like a perfectly featureless expanse of wall and slashed at it, angering the wall not at all.

  Fernie asked, “What’s the matter, boy?”

  Harrington meowed that special kind of cat meow all cat owners know, the one that means “I’m not just a dumb cat imagining things. There’s something here!”

  Of course, in order to look at Fernie and meow such a complicated meow, Harrington had to turn his attention away from the thing that was upsetting him so much, which meant that it had a chance to pop up from its hiding place between the cardboard places and swat at his tail.

  The thing swatting him looked a little like Harrington, but it was also as flat as a piece of paper and as dark as the lenses in Fernie’s favorite pair of sunglasses.

  It was not unusual for Harrington to pick a fight with his shadow, since Harrington was a cat and fighting his own shadow was part of the job he signed up for the very day he was born. But this was the first time Fernie had ever seen Harrington’s shadow do something Harrington himself hadn’t done.

  Harrington yowled and became a ball of enraged fur leaping five feet straight up.

  The shadow Harrington jumped straight up, too. Its shadow paw whacked Harrington’s real butt three times in a row before Harrington spun around in midair to fight back.

  The two landed in an angry ball of cat, real fur and shadow fur exploding in tufts.

  Then the shadow Harrington raced out of Fernie’s bedroom, and Harrington gave chase.

  Fernie had just woken up from a sound sleep and wasn’t thinking as fast as she would have in the middle of the day, so it took her a few seconds to remember everything that had happened with Snooks and what she’d been told by Gustav Gloom.

  She hadn’t shared any of the strange conversation with her sister or father; in Pearlie’s case because she wanted to keep the wonderful strangeness of their new neighborhood to herself for a while yet, and in her father’s case because the last thing she wanted was for the safety-minded Mr. What to find out he’d moved his daughters into a place where shadows got up and walked around by themselves. Her father would have immediately piled the whole family into the car to head back to some other neighborhood without haunted houses.

  Life would be boring again.

  But all of that could still happen if Harrington and the shadow Harrington woke everybody.

  Fernie swung her legs off the air mattress and slipped her feet into the slippers she’d made her father buy, the ones that looked like little Frankenstein’s monster heads. They didn’t quite match the little werewolf heads that covered her pajamas, but it was the middle of the night, so she didn’t think she’d run into anybody who’d complain about the inconsistency.

  Gripping her flashlight, she headed into the hallway. The house was dark, and neither cat nor cat shadow seemed to be making noise anymore, but she wanted to make sure that everything was okay. So she moved on toward the kitchen, first peeking her head into the bedroom next to hers, which belonged to Pearlie. Pearlie’s eyes were shut and her mouth was wide open. As Fernie watched, she paused midsnore to close her mouth and swallow.

  Fernie moved farther down the hallway and passed her father’s bedroom, where he was snoring, too, the manual of office safety procedures he’d been reading before bed lying facedown across his chest. As always, he slept with one hand resting protectively on his first-aid kit in case an emergency arose and he needed it during the night.

  It occurred to her that this was not the first time that he looked lonely—he had since her mother had left on her latest expedition.

  Either way, it didn’t look to Fernie like her father or her sister were going to be waking up anytime soon, which was a good thing. She could straighten out this whole business without bothering either of them. She padded away down the hall and entered the combination living room and dining room next to their new kitchen.

  Harrington stood on the shelf by the picture window, his back arched, his tail puffy, a low growl rumbling at the back of his throat.

  Fernie didn’t know why Harrington was so frozen with fear until she followed his gaze to the light from the window all the way to the opposite wall where it covered a space almost big enough to qualify as a movie screen. The image on that wall was the shadow Harrington as big as a full-grown tiger. Its breath felt hot on Fernie’s skin, and when it swiped at her for daring to look it in the eyes, she felt the wind of something heavy and clawed cutting the air in front of her face.

  The shadow Harrington tensed and pounced.

  Fernie wrapped her arms around her head and ducked, just as the dark and imposing shape seemed to fill the room. She felt a slash on her right arm and almost cried out before the shadow cat thumped against the floor behind her.

  As she turned, she saw the three claw marks on her right wrist, just behind the rip the shadow cat had torn in her pajama sleeve.

  She spun and saw Harrington become a black-and-white blur as he fled toward the kitchen, the shape of the much larger and much more dangerous shadow Harrington in close pursuit behind him.

  She was watching as Harrington leaped up to the sill of the kitchen window and as the looming form of the shadow Harrington, no longer quite as big as it had been but still wild and angry and more than a match for a cat who for all his life had only needed to meow to get fed twice a day, leaped at him.

  Earlier tonight, Mr. What had made a point of leaving the inner glass pane up a crack, saying that fresh air cleans all the germs out of an empty house, and it’s not good to leave a new house crawling with all the germs from whoever lived there last.

  The safety precaution allowed Harrington to rip a hole in the screen in order to get away from the shadowy monster cat. He yowled and shoved his head against the mesh, widening a small tear that had been there already, and was half in and half out of the window in a heartbeat, his hind legs and pudgy rear end wriggling as he forced himself through the opening.

  Fernie yelled, “No, Harrington! Stop!”

  She leaped to the window just in time to see Harrington cross the white circle of light under the nearest streetlight, a black-and-white bullet that should have cast a shadow but somehow did not. The shadow Harrington also raced across that same light, a pat
ch of darkness in the shape of a cat that should have had a cat but somehow did not.

  The cat that cast no shadow and the shadow that cast no cat both slipped in between the bars of the fence that surrounded the Gloom house and disappeared into the shifting patches of deeper darkness.

  “No!” Fernie cried.

  There was no time to wake up her father or even Pearlie for help. The whole story would have gotten bogged down in the part about the giant vicious monster shadow cat. Fernie might have made them believe her after a dozen or more tries, but all that time Harrington would be lost, out of his mind with panic and getting further into whatever trouble awaited him.

  So she just gripped her flashlight tighter, opened the front door, and ran outside in her werewolf-head pajamas and Frankenstein’s- monster slippers.

  She stopped only once at the curb to look left and right and (because her father would have wanted it) up before crossing the street . . .

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “THE PEOPLE TAKER IS LOOSE”

  Fernie What stood at the iron fence and shone her flashlight into the darkness. It didn’t help much.

  She waved the beam around. “Come on, Harrington! Want some noogums?”

  Noogums, the family term for the smelly, brown canned glop that constituted most of Harrington’s diet, was one of the human phrases he definitely understood, along with good cat, bedtime, and—thanks to Fernie’s dad—emergency safety procedures.

  Normally, a cry of noogums brought Harrington running. But the only cat answer from within the shifting darkness of the Gloom property was a distant wail followed by an angry hiss.

  “Harrington! You come back here right now!”

  As anybody who owns a cat could have predicted, that didn’t work even a little bit.

  Fernie swung the flashlight beam across the Gloom yard, finding nothing between the fence and the house but the smoky blackness that Gustav seemed to have instead of a lawn. It was only when the light passed the Gloom family’s front door that she spotted a familiar shape cowering on the front steps just before the two giant front doors. It was Harrington, whose eyes glowed green the way cats’ eyes do when light hits them just right. The second he saw that he was being looked at, he let out the most pitiful of all possible meows, which was very pitiful indeed.