Gustav Gloom and the People Taker (9781101620748) Read online

  Fernie, who couldn’t remember ever hearing of any country named Liechtenstein, wondered if it was a real place or an imaginary one. “And?”

  “Like the other houses, it’s got all the bits and pieces of every house that people ever thought about building but didn’t. That’s why it’s so big inside—it’s like a world all by itself. It makes a perfect place for shadows to go whenever they want some free time away from the things they shadow. We also have a pit leading back to the Dark Country where shadows come from, but most of my family avoids that; there’s a big civil war going on down there, so this world’s a whole lot nicer.”

  Fernie, who was still coming up with questions faster than she was getting answers, started to say something else, but Gustav cocked his head and put out a little pale hand to shut her up. He listened some more as if picking one small sound out of the many wild and savage noises spilling from the gray fog of the dinosaur bedroom. Then he shouted, “I see a way through! Follow me!”

  Before she could ask why and where, he had darted into the shadow jungle.

  The immediate reaction to this from the inhabitants of the dinosaur bedroom was a sudden explosion of roars and growls and snarls, complete with the crash of trees and the thud of massive pounding feet.

  Without quite realizing it, Fernie added a gasp and scream to that collection of noises. She jumped to her feet, torn between the sensible need to run away as fast as she could and the awareness that she didn’t have a ghost of an idea which direction that would be.

  Then Gustav called out to her, from what seemed like a tremendous distance away. “Fernie . . . !”

  A long time ago, Fernie had heard courage described to her as temporarily forgetting to be afraid. So, deciding to forget her fear, she ran out into the shadow jungle herself.

  Of course, she remembered her fear again after she’d pounded ten steps and left the entrance to the stairs somewhere in the gray clouds behind her. It was not a nice thing to suddenly remember. Nobody ever enjoys being reminded that they’re running blind into a foggy room filled with the shadows of prehistoric beasts. Or at least nobody ever would enjoy it, if things like that happened to people more often.

  But she was well inside the room and running as fast as she could and stopping would have been even more crazy than entering it in the first place. So she gritted her teeth and ran faster, her Frankenstein’s monster–head slippers pounding against a soft surface that felt like rich forest soil but that was actually upstairs in somebody’s house.

  “Fernie!” Gustav yelled, somewhere ahead of her. “This way!”

  Following his voice, she veered to her right, feeling shadow ferns brush against her face. The ground all around her shook as something she couldn’t see charged at her from behind. She shrieked, dodged a looming shape ahead, almost tripped over what felt like a tree root, and pumped her arms harder as she forced herself to speed up even more. She found herself breaking out of the jungle and entering something that felt like tall grass, running faster than she ever had.

  “This way!” Gustav cried.

  He was not so far away now. Fernie could see his serious little shape through the fog. She was so relieved, even though she couldn’t imagine that they were out of danger yet.

  She ran, his voice leading her through more shifting patches of darkness and light to his side. The dinosaur cacophony continued, but they seemed to have been left far behind, and Gustav had stopped. He wasn’t even breathing hard.

  “See?”

  She punched him in the upper arm. He said the same thing most people who get punched say.

  “Ow!”

  “Serves you right,” Fernie growled.

  “What did I do?”

  “You left me back there.”

  “So? I knew you would follow me.”

  “Through a room filled with shadow dinosaurs!”

  “Apparently so.”

  Every time this boy answered a question, he left Fernie with two more. About twenty of them vied to be the next one out of her mouth.

  “How can you stand this place?”

  “It’s not so bad,” Gustav said. “Don’t you have dangerous things on your side of the street? Earthquakes? Wars? Blizzards? Coral snakes? Loose boards with sharp nails? People who drive their cars up onto sidewalks because they’re too busy trying to pick up the spare change that fell near the gas pedal? How can you stand it?”

  It was the kind of question Fernie’s father might have asked. “It’s not so bad.”

  “Exactly!” Gustav cried as if he’d just won the argument. He started walking.

  Fernie was left wondering whether the house would kill her before she killed him . . .

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PROTECTIVE SAFETY RAILINGS ARE NOT INVOLVED

  The door out of the dinosaur bedroom was not up against a wall but standing all by itself in the middle of the gray fog. Fernie walked around it twice just to make sure it was exactly what it seemed to be: a freestanding door.

  She said nothing. She’d gotten a lot better during her time in the Gloom mansion at just letting stuff like this pass.

  This was fortunate, since making a fuss about the door would have obligated her to make another fuss about the hallway they found on the other side.

  For no apparent reason, it was tilted, with the floor and the adjoining walls leaning forty-five degrees to one side. It was impossible to walk on the floor without falling all the way over against the wall, and just as impossible to walk on that wall without falling all the way over onto the floor. The only real place to walk was the narrow edge where the floor and the wall met, where a thick layer of dust had collected.

  When you’re visiting somebody’s house and nothing in it makes any sense to you and you’ve pretty much done nothing but ask one question after another, you gradually start to figure out that if you don’t stop asking questions, you’ll never get anywhere at all. So instead, Fernie pointed at the fresh cat prints that had collected in the dust, which emerged from the door to the dinosaur bedroom and trotted off into the distance. “These look fresh. Could those be Harrington’s?”

  Gustav nodded. “That’s the way to the dining room. He must have thought he could beg something to eat there.”

  That did sound like Harrington, even if it also sounded like almost every other cat who had ever lived. So they set off, Gustav leading the way and Fernie following along.

  He turned out to be incredibly agile. He hopped from floor to wall and from wall to floor like a monkey. Keeping up wasn’t the easiest thing Fernie had ever done, because she’d never practiced walking in a place like this, and the narrow edge between the floor and the wall wasn’t as wide as a human foot wearing a cumbersome Frankenstein’s monster–head slipper. The only way Fernie could manage the trick was to walk with one foot on the tilted floor and the other on the tilted wall, trying not to slip.

  It was enough to make her think about everything her father would have had to say about the terrible accidents that could befall a person in a house where corridors were built this way. And of course her father would have covered the Gloom house in protective safety railings.

  Fernie didn’t know how she would go about ridding Gustav’s house of its various dangers, but she was pretty sure that protective safety railings wouldn’t be involved.

  She worried about how her father would feel if something bad did happen to her tonight. He was a good dad most of the time, even if he spent his days dividing the world into places where people could get hurt by walking or sitting or standing still. He didn’t deserve to be sad when he was already so busy being frightened. And it would be even worse for Pearlie. If Fernie didn’t make it home, Pearlie would turn forty before she was ever allowed to leave the house by herself again.

  And then there was Mom to worry about.

  Mom was o
nly in the country a couple of months out of the year. She was famous for becoming the first woman to ever attempt to climb Mount Everest all by herself, blindfolded. It was one of the bravest things anybody had ever tried to do, and Fernie’s mom had not only done it without an ounce of fear, but survived, making it all the way to the summit and back in record time, during a blizzard, without ever removing the blindfold from her eyes.

  But that was Fernie’s mom: living a life of endless adventure, laughing in the face of danger. She and Fernie’s dad managing not only to meet but also to have anything to talk about was just one of life’s little miracles.

  Mom would be upset, too. She was a good mom when she was around, even if she wasn’t around much. And if Fernie got hurt tonight, she would probably blame herself for being off on some mountaintop. Fernie didn’t want that. After all, she hardly needed another parent worrying about keeping her safe when the one she did have worried so much, he made her use protective covers on paper clips.

  By the time Fernie began to pay attention to where they were again, they had been following the paw prints for about ten minutes. Dark shapes, vaguely resembling people but stretched out to many times their natural length, had begun to emerge from the various doors lining the corridor and floated alongside them, chattering away in strange languages Fernie didn’t know and some that she wasn’t even certain could be called languages at all. A very small number of the shapes spoke in sentences Fernie understood, saying things like “Hi, Gustav,” and “Oh, good, you found her” and “Tsk, tsk, what’s a girl like her doing out this time of night?” and, again, “The People Taker is loose.”

  Then one particular shape circled Gustav twice, seemed to hug him, and surprised Fernie by fluttering back her way to embrace her as well. “Fernie!” it cried. “I’m so glad that Gustav found you! I heard you’d come for a visit and was so afraid that the People Taker would get you first!”

  Its hug felt like a cool wind just before a summer rain. Fernie asked it, “Have we met?”

  “Not really. Well, sort of. In a way. It’s open to interpretation.”

  That was helpful. “Who are you?”

  “I’m the shadow of a man named Mr. Notes. He visited here once. I’m afraid he wasn’t a very nice man, and I was pretty much already fed up with his behavior when we came here a few years ago, so I didn’t go with him when he left.”

  Fernie wasn’t sure she liked this information at all. “So the real Mr. Notes doesn’t have a shadow anymore?”

  “Well,” the shadow Mr. Notes said, “it’s not like he made following him around all the time a barrel of laughs.”

  Fernie was still struggling with the concept. “So he doesn’t cast a shadow at all now?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “What happens to him when he’s out in the sun?”

  Gustav Gloom and the runaway shadow of Mr. Notes both answered that one at the same time. “He gets hot.”

  Even as Fernie wrestled with this, the corridor grew more crowded from the many dark shapes joining the mob. Soon the air was so thick with them that they began to merge together, forming a great gray cloud that no longer looked like it was made up of people, but instead like a thunderhead that had not yet decided to drop its first drop of rain. The shadow of Mr. Notes was whisked away in the crowd, and the others seemed to realize how jammed together they were, because their many different voices started to say things like “Oops” and “Pardon me” and “Hey, stop shoving” and “Excuse me, madam, you have your elbow in my eye.” Forcing her way through it began to feel less like walking around inside a house and more like being waist-deep in warm water and trying to get to the other side of the swimming pool.

  Then all of a sudden the tilted corridor opened out into a vast dining room, less like a proper room than a wider corridor extending left and right as far as the eye could see. An endless oak banquet table, just as long, sat in the center of the room, its ends invisible in the distance. The shadow shapes of crystal chandeliers hung from the arched ceiling every twenty feet or so, not so much casting light as making places where it was less dark.

  A rich feast that seemed to include roast turkey and glazed ham and bowls of spaghetti and cupcakes and hamburgers—all also made of shadow-stuff, unfortunately for Fernie’s growling stomach—sat piled on the table, also for an infinite distance in either direction. The hundreds of shadow shapes emerging from the various doors and open hallways on both sides of the room wasted no time claiming the empty seats and attacking the meal with great abandon. Most of them had terrible table manners.

  Many of the assembled shadows cried out to greet Gustav as he and Fernie entered. One said, “Hey, kiddo! You’re late for dinner!” Another said, “How are you doing? Who’s your friend?” A third warned, “You do know the People Taker is loose, right?” A fourth worried, “Do I have a piece of spinach stuck between my front teeth?”

  Gustav waved. “Hello, everybody! Anybody seen a cat?”

  A dozen of the nearest shadows answered all at once, few of their comments helpful. One said, “You mean, ever? Yeah, I saw one in 1933.” Then another, closer to Fernie than all the rest, spoke up in rich, cultured tones that would not have been out of place coming from the mouth of a queen.

  “You must be talking about the black-and-white cat that came trotting through here a few minutes ago.”

  Fernie couldn’t help crying out, “Yes! That would be Harrington! Did you see which way he went?”

  “Come here, dear. Let me take a look at you.”

  Fernie couldn’t tell which of the shadow diners was speaking, but Gustav took her by the arm and led her over to the appropriate seat.

  Up until this moment, all the shadows Fernie had met in Gustav’s house were just clouds of darkness in the shapes of whatever cast them. But this close up, beneath the light of the chandeliers, the faces and features of all the diners grew clearer, picking up more and more detail until they looked not much different from how the real people whose shadows they were might have looked in dim light.

  The one who’d called them over was a chubby-cheeked, shiny-faced lady with kind eyes, round shoulders, what Fernie had always privately called floppy old-lady arms, and a neck with several chins. It wore a necklace that the flesh-and-blood woman must have bought in skinnier times, because the string between the pearls was stretched close to the breaking point. Apparently shadows worry about losing weight, too, because it was having a salad.

  It asked Fernie, “What’s your name, dear?”

  “Fernie What.”

  Endearing herself to Fernie by not immediately doing the Fernie what? thing, the shadow woman gave her the warmest of all possible smiles and said, “It’s a genuine delight to meet you, Fernie. I’m Gustav’s great-aunt Mellifluous, and I’ve always wanted Gustav to have a playmate of his own kind.”

  Fernie almost told Gustav’s great-aunt Mellifluous that she and Gustav weren’t really playmates, at least not yet, because none of what they’d done together so far fit anybody’s definition of play. “Thank you, ma’am. I don’t mean to hurry you, but my cat—”

  “Did just run by,” Great-Aunt Mellifluous said, “and did scamper off into one of those hallways behind us.”

  Fernie wasn’t looking forward to chasing Harrington down another endless hallway but supposed that it couldn’t be helped. “I should get after him then.”

  “However,” Great-Aunt Mellifluous said, hurrying to get it in before Fernie and Gustav were out of sight, “I’m afraid I must ask you to give up on finding him tonight.”

  Fernie began, “But I don’t want to go home without him—”

  “Oh, I’m certain that you love your cat very much and that you’re a responsible young girl who takes good care of her pet. Still, we know that he’s somewhere in the house, and if you went home to bed where a girl your age should be this time o
f night, I’m sure that Gustav would be able to catch him within a day or two and look after the poor dear until the pair of you can be joyously reunited.”

  Fernie didn’t want to give up just yet. “He could still get hurt.”

  “And so could you,” Great-Aunt Mellifluous said gently.

  Hearing an adult, even a shadow adult, point this out gave Fernie pause.

  “I’m certain that he’s a very nice cat,” Great-Aunt Mellifluous continued, “maybe even the best cat you’ve ever known, but he could be the greatest cat who ever lived and you’d still be far more important to your family than he is. Trust me, dear, you don’t want to be wandering around this place while the People Taker is loose.”

  “Gustav already rescued me from him once tonight,” Fernie admitted.

  A shadow man in some kind of red military uniform who was eating an entire shadow roast pig on the other side of the table, and getting the shadow gravy all over its long white shadow mustache, put down the entire roast hog it held in its hands and snapped, “Then you should know that he’s dark and cruel and dangerous and has no problem with taking a little girl down to the Dark Country and handing her over to Lord Obsidian to live forever as his cannon fodder.”

  Fernie had to agree that this wasn’t something she was at all likely to enjoy. She was about to ask the most pressing of all the questions she’d been carrying around—who this Lord Obsidian was—when she noticed something that took her breath away, in its own way as amazing as anything else she’d seen so far.

  Two high-backed wooden chairs had appeared on either side of Great-Aunt Mellifluous. The table itself had stretched to make room for them, teeming plates of shadow foods popping up at the new place settings. A pair of very recognizable shadows, one a young boy and one a young girl, had leaped out of nowhere to claim those seats and were even now devouring their meal with great abandon.

  The shadow boy, who looked just like Gustav, was having food Fernie didn’t recognize at all.