Gustav Gloom and the People Taker (9781101620748) Read online

  The shapeless monster jumped again, falling past many levels of walkway before wrapping its claws around the railing on the loop of walkway just over the man’s head. As she watched, it turned its head, located Fernie, and tensed up, less than a second from jumping down the rest of the way.

  Too late, Fernie’s legs unfroze. She spun in place and darted for the library door, knowing even as she reached for the crystal doorknob that she was not nearly fast enough, that the monster had already leaped and would land between her and the door.

  He landed right in front of her with a powerful thud, a wall of fur and muscle and too many arms and legs to count, all between her and the hallway where all she’d had to worry about was being lost.

  It should have been close enough to see now, but Fernie’s eyes refused to make sense of any one part of it, from the mouth that seemed to be as big as the rest of it put together, to the eyes that looked like eyes only until she looked at them, and then looked like other mouths. Its two biggest arms, that were so much bigger than Fernie herself, still looked ridiculously small compared to the rest of it. None of it made sense.

  Fernie couldn’t have described it with a thousand words or painted a decent picture of it with a warehouse of watercolors, the help of the best artist in the world, and a white wall the size of a barn. But as the thing reached for her, taking its time, she suddenly knew where she had seen it before.

  At night sometimes, when she’d been so tired or lazy that she forgot to throw her dirty clothes in the hamper and instead just tossed them onto the back of her desk chair . . . sometimes she woke up and the light coming in through the crack of the door shone on the combination of clothes and chair and made a shapeless but terrible monster.

  Without thinking, she did what she’d always done to make it go away.

  She shone her flashlight at it.

  The result was almost as terrible as letting the thing get her. The circle of light at the end of the beam lit up a part of its face that looked like a bath mat somebody had tossed into a mud puddle. There were more eyes and shapes that looked like angry black worms. But the touch of the flashlight beam made the monster cry out and fall back, smoke rising from fresh burns on its skin. It slammed against the door, still between Fernie and escape as it reached for her with arms like tree trunks. Fernie ducked and felt an awful hot wind pass through the air right over her head.

  “Very nice,” said the man in black. “That’s one fffffine idea that won’t gather dust on these shelves. But it’s only a sssssmall idea, one that won’t save you for more than a few ssssseconds. I’ll still get to take you.”

  There was something about the way he kept saying take that made the word the most terrible thing Fernie had ever heard.

  Using both hands to hold her flashlight before her, Fernie could think of nothing to do but keep it pointed at the monster’s face.

  Then it charged her again.

  Fernie was sure she was dead, but it blundered right past her and slammed into the shelves with a mighty crash. Books flew everywhere. The impossible monster reached one impossible arm around its impossible back to swipe at its impossible shoulders.

  It was only when it staggered back into the center of the floor and toward her again that Fernie was able to tear her gaze away from the awful mess it had instead of a proper face long enough to pay attention to the form riding those shoulders: the strangely familiar dark outline of a young girl, punching it again and again with fists Fernie could see through.

  The beast swiped at this girl shape but couldn’t seem to reach her no matter how hard it tried.

  High above her, the man in black said, “Oh, well. I can always come down there and take you myself.”

  Then somebody grabbed Fernie by her left wrist and yanked, hard. She found herself being pulled toward the shelves with all their unreadable books, caught a glimpse of a pale hand pulling her along, and found herself kneeling in a narrow, cramped little closet just as a panel slid down and locked everything in the library out.

  One tremendous crash later, the panel cracked, but held.

  Fernie shone her flashlight at the face of the boy who had pulled her into the closet.

  “Hello,” said Gustav Gloom.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WATCHING OUT FOR THE DINOSAUR POOP

  Despite its being the middle of the night, Gustav still wore a little black suit with a little black tie. Either he dressed up all the time because he had important business meetings all day, or it was the only thing in his closet and he had to use it for everything.

  Fernie knew that she should have been grateful for being rescued, but the past hour had left her so irritated that she had to spill some anger out in order to make room for actual thinking. So she put both hands on Gustav’s chest, shoved him angrily back against the wall of the closet with a thump, and yelled, “Those are the kinds of things you have slinking around your house?”

  Gustav Gloom wore no expression on his pale little face. “Yes.”

  “Your house? Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are they your family?”

  “Oh no,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to have them for family. They’re more like unwanted visitors.”

  “Why don’t you just throw them out then?”

  “There’s no point. They’d just come back.”

  “Who are they?”

  “I thought they told you. That’s the People Taker and his pet, the Beast.”

  “So what on earth are you doing with a People Taker and a Beast in your house?”

  Gustav Gloom said, “Hiding, mostly.”

  Fernie felt her jaw fall open as if it had been held shut only by a little string and that string had now broken.

  “Or running away,” Gustav said. “That works, too.” He frowned. “You know, I never actually had any long conversations with him, but based on the way it worked out for you, it’s not something I’m eager to try. Why did you?”

  “Because I didn’t know what he was!” Fernie yelled. “We don’t have People Takers where I come from!”

  “Of course you do. Where else do you think he started taking people from in the first place?”

  Fernie managed a very quiet, “What?”

  “Out there,” Gustav said, “in the world where you live, he was just a very bad man. He did bad things to people because he liked to. He called it taking them. I don’t know how many he took that way, but it was an awful lot.”

  “What did he do with them?”

  “Nothing they appreciated.”

  “Didn’t they complain?”

  “After a while, they couldn’t.”

  Gustav seemed to be trying so hard to spare her the terrible details that Fernie decided she didn’t need to hear them. “Didn’t anybody try to stop him?”

  “Oh, sure, lots of people. From what I understand, he only hopped our fence in the first place because the police and the FBI and a bunch of angry families were closing in and he needed a hiding place. But that was about the worst thing that could have happened, because after a few days of running around in here looking for a way out, he entered the wrong room and fell into the Pit, all the way down to the Dark Country where Lord Obsidian found him and put him back to work doing what he was good at.”

  This new name, Lord Obsidian, sounded even worse than the People Taker, but Fernie was not quite ready to explore that yet. “Taking people.”

  “Uh-huh,” Gustav said.

  “So he’s been doing this while he’s been hiding in your house.”

  “That’s right. He goes out at night and goes looking for people to take. It’s his job, kind of.”

  Fernie remembered all the mysterious disappearances Mrs. Everwiner had mentioned. “Then why haven’t you done anything to stop him? Why haven’t you called the poli
ce?”

  “We don’t have a phone.”

  “Why didn’t you just warn people? Or ask somebody in the neighborhood for help?”

  Gustav stopped between one step and the next, wearing an expression that could not have been any worse if he’d been hit in the face by a board. “It’s not that easy. People on the other side of the fence—especially grown-ups—don’t always want to talk to me.”

  “I talked to you.”

  “There aren’t many like you.”

  “Okay, so if it was just you,” Fernie asked, “why haven’t you snuck up behind him and pushed him over a balcony or something?”

  “It’s not that easy,” Gustav said. “He has the Beast helping him. I haven’t even been able to get close.”

  “Sounds like a lame excuse to me when there are innocent people being taken.”

  Gustav remained silent.

  “And another thing,” she asked. “What does this Lord Obsidian, whoever he is, do with the people this People Taker . . . takes?”

  Gustav hesitated, then he heaved a sigh of tremendous sadness that struck Fernie as the very first sound he’d made that matched the gray, unsmiling expression on his face.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  Fernie almost protested, but realized that it happened to be true, at least for the moment. Her head was already so crowded with thoughts of People Takers and Beasts and houses bigger on the inside than they were on the outside that she was not yet ready to absorb any more terrifying information.

  Then Gustav said, “Come on. I’ll take you someplace a little safer.”

  She was so grateful to him for saying something that made some kind of sense that she put all her other questions away in a box for later. “Okay.”

  He squeezed past her, did something unseen to the panel, and opened it back up again.

  Fernie feared that the library would be on the other side and that the People Taker and his pet would still be there, waiting to do whatever awful things he had meant by taking her.

  But this time the opening led to a flight of stone stairs, shiny with water dripping down from a low ceiling, which curved up a narrow passage lit by torches. The torches didn’t seem to be having much trouble staying lit even though the water coming down from above was so heavy that it was just a couple of clouds and a flash of lightning away from becoming a thunderstorm. Loud smashing, banging, crashing, and roaring noises, together a lot like how Fernie imagined a prehistoric jungle would sound, echoed from up above.

  Gustav began climbing the stairs. “It shouldn’t be too bad up this way. He’s only a People Taker, so he never bothers the dinosaurs.”

  Fernie had been about to follow him, but now she stopped in midstep. “Dinosaurs.”

  Four steps above her, Gustav said, “Well, yes. We’re headed for their bedroom.”

  “Your house has a bedroom for dinosaurs?”

  “Of course it does. Where else would they sleep?”

  Fernie rubbed the spot at the bridge of her nose that her father sometimes rubbed. She had noticed that this habit of his seemed to help him understand things a little better, but it didn’t help her one bit. Apparently, she didn’t have any brains in her nose.

  She wasn’t doing herself much good here at the bottom of what looked like dungeon stairs, so she put one foot in front of the other and pretty soon she was following Gustav, at least in the sense of walking behind him, if not in the sense of understanding any of this.

  Gustav chatted away. “They’re not really dinosaurs, anyway. They’re dinosaur shadows.”

  He had disappeared around the next bend of the stairs before he seemed to notice that she’d stopped climbing again. His pale little head popped around the curve of the wall to peer at her. “What?”

  Fernie spoke very slowly as if afraid that the words would jam together if she didn’t let them out one at a time. “Shadow dinosaurs . . . like shadow cats.”

  “Well, not exactly like shadow cats. They’re much larger.”

  Fernie grew irritated with him for changing the subject. “I came across the street looking for my cat, Harrington.”

  He came down a step. “Why would you think your cat was over here?”

  “I saw his shadow chase him here.”

  “Oh,” he said. “That makes sense.”

  “How does that make sense?”

  “It just does,” Gustav Gloom said. “Cats are always starting fights with their shadows. They’re much better at seeing their shadows move than people are. I’d better help you find him.”

  This was, of course, exactly what Fernie had wanted in the first place, but right now it was only as useful as a hamburger stand on the ground to a hungry girl riding the roller coaster: a good place to wind up eventually, but not at all helpful when she still had to ride wherever the tracks took her.

  Getting more of the big picture with every sentence, she said, “I ran away from some other shadows in the front hall and saw a few hundred others in that other big room up front. Another one, a girl’s shadow, attacked the Beast for me, just like that.”

  “There are a lot of shadows here,” Gustav said. “Most of them don’t talk to me much, but sometimes they do me favors. Maybe one took a liking to you.”

  “Shadows live here.”

  “It’s not so unusual,” he said. “They live in your house, too.”

  “But you’re not a shadow.”

  “Do I look like a shadow?”

  “No,” Fernie said. “You just look like a kid who never gets any sun.”

  “That’s what I am, more or less.”

  “So how did you end up being raised in a shadow house?”

  Gustav shrugged. “I was adopted.”

  The invisible string holding Fernie’s jaw shut seemed to snap again. She closed her mouth with more difficulty than that act had ever given her and continued to follow the strange, pale boy up the next four turns of the spiral staircase until they reached the top, the bedroom of the shadow dinosaurs.

  It wasn’t anything at all like what Fernie had imagined. Somehow she’d pictured a typical boy’s bedroom ten stories tall, with furniture to fit, including bunk beds eight stories tall, a gigantic wicker toy chest, and bright blue wallpaper with rocket ships on it. She’d even imagined a tyrannosaurus rex in a striped red T-shirt and khaki shorts sitting at a gigantic desk playing video games. She hadn’t really expected any of this because it would have been ridiculous, but it was the image that had come to mind, and it wasn’t all that unreasonable given how much very real ridiculousness the Gloom house had.

  Instead, what she saw when the top of the staircase opened up into a much larger room was a dark gray mist over what felt like, but didn’t even come close to looking like, a dense tropical jungle. The air smelled like the elephant house at every zoo she’d ever been to, which as far as Fernie was concerned answered a question she’d never before this day had any reason to ask: whether shadow dinosaurs made shadow dinosaur poop. Fernie wasn’t sure that she wanted to venture into that murk, where the only warning she would have of any nearby hungry mouths would be when she suddenly found herself inside one. “Can we take a break here until I get used to this?”

  “How long will that take?” Gustav asked.

  “How about just until I get used to knowing that I’ll never get used to it?”

  “Okay,” Gustav said agreeably. “But when I say we have to hurry up and go, we have to hurry up and go. Otherwise the dinosaurs may be a problem.”

  After a moment, Fernie sat. “How many of them are out there?”

  He said, “All of them.”

  Had she possessed a dinosaur throat of her own right now, her own growl would have been the most ill-tempered in the room. “But how many is that? Four? Five? A hundred?”

 
Gustav shrugged. “I don’t know exactly. However many real dinosaurs there ever were, that’s how many shadow dinosaurs we have.”

  “There must have been millions of dinosaurs. How can they all fit in one dinosaur bedroom?”

  “Shadows don’t really take up space,” Gustav said. “They can walk through one another and over one another and be in the same place at the same time. Overcrowding isn’t something that bothers them.”

  Fernie said, “But the dinosaurs died a long time ago. Why would there still be shadow dinosaurs?”

  “They’re shadows,” he said a little peevishly as if he was beginning to get tired of repeating this simple point. “They don’t really live or die, and they don’t go away just because the things they shadowed went away. They’re around as long as they want to be.”

  Fernie said, “Then the same thing would be true of all the shadows of all the people who ever lived. They would still be running around somewhere, even if the people they shadowed died long ago.”

  “Right,” Gustav said.

  “Tell me again why you think this is safer than the library.”

  “The library’s not all that bad. I get books from there all the time. It was only bad today for a while because the People Taker took his Beast hunting for you there. I bet you if we go back later it’ll be just fine.”

  “But you took me from a room with one beast in it to a room with I don’t know how many shadow dinosaurs in it. How’s that safe?”

  “I didn’t say it was safe,” Gustav Gloom said. “I said it was safer.”

  Fernie thought back and, yes, that was exactly what he had said. It was safer, she supposed, in much the same way that a kid throwing a rock at you is better than a bigger kid throwing a bigger rock at you.

  She heard a tremendous crash, and a flock of shadow birds scattered, cawing just to make their own opinion known. “What kind of house is this?”

  “A shadow house,” Gustav Gloom said as if explaining something obvious. “One of only about ten houses like it in the whole world. I don’t know where all the other houses are, but I heard once that they have one in Liechtenstein.”