Gustav Gloom and the People Taker (9781101620748) Read online

  The shadow girl seemed to be having pizza. Its shadow legs didn’t end where they touched the floor, but instead stretched farther, a pair of straight gray lines reaching past the back of the chair and several feet across the carpet to where they became a pair of shadow feet in shadow Frankenstein’s monster–head slippers, touching the real Frankenstein’s monster–head slippers on the real Fernie’s feet.

  Fernie would have jumped away when she realized just whose shadow this was, but it turned out that she couldn’t move her legs.

  CHAPTER NINE

  FERNIE SAYS, “YOUR HOUSE IS REALLY STUPID.”

  Up to this point, Fernie hadn’t paid much attention to her own shadow or Gustav’s. Somehow, with all the other shadows running around, she hadn’t seen the point. She didn’t know whether they had been following along all this time or taking breaks to run their own private errands.

  Happily munching away at her shadow pizza, Fernie’s shadow looked just like Fernie herself would have looked eating pizza, except that both the pizza and the girl were gray and smoky things that could be seen through. In fact, it looked familiar for reasons other than its resemblance to Fernie. For the first time, Fernie realized that it was the very same girl, or shadow girl, who had defended her from the Beast in the house’s library.

  Great-Aunt Mellifluous followed Fernie’s stare to her shadow self, who was at that moment accidentally letting some hot shadow tomato sauce spill onto her shadow pajamas. “Oh, dear,” Great-Aunt Mellifluous said. “That’s going to leave a spot.”

  Gustav, whose own shadow was still munching away at a meal that didn’t look like anything Fernie had ever seen, told Fernie, “Look at it eat. You must have been hungry.”

  Fernie had been, and now that she stopped to think about it for a second, she remembered that it was pizza she’d been craving. “But the shadow’s eating! I’m not!”

  “Your shadow’s eating for you,” Gustav explained, “because you can’t eat shadow food with a real mouth.”

  Fernie couldn’t taste the pizza the shadow version of herself was eating, but she did feel her stomach getting fuller with every bite her shadow ate. “I didn’t say it could eat for me!”

  “You eat for it,” Gustav said.

  “But I can’t eat shadow food!”

  “And your shadow can’t eat real food,” Gustav replied, “but if you were home and ate so much that you got fat, wouldn’t your shadow get fat, too?”

  Fernie’s mouth opened and closed without making any sound.

  “And,” Gustav continued, “if you stopped eating and got skinny, wouldn’t your shadow get skinny, too?”

  Fernie’s mouth continued to open and close without any sound coming out. The revelation that every time in her life that she’d ever had a bowl of macaroni and cheese she’d been feeding not only herself but the dark shape that followed her around was so amazing that she knew she’d never eat macaroni and cheese again without being reminded with every bite that she was filling up not just her own stomach but another, darker one.

  “My shadow always eats for me,” Gustav said. “It’s not like there’s ever any real food in the house for me. There’s no money here, and none of the shadows could ever go shopping even if there was.”

  Fernie considered that tremendously sad, but that wasn’t what bothered her right now, not with her feet both stuck to the floor as if nailed there. “How come Snooks’s shadow can step away from him and run around by itself and Harrington’s shadow can step away from him and run around by itself and even Mr. Notes’s shadow can step away from him and run around by itself, but mine won’t let me walk away from this spot?”

  “That is odd,” Gustav agreed, a look of worry on his serious face. “I can walk away from mine. Just look.”

  He stepped away from the two shadow legs of his shadow self and strutted around in circles, while the shadow Gustav, completely unbothered by his antics, continued to devour its shadow meal.

  Fernie tried again, just in case she’d been doing something wrong. But as much as she tugged, her feet remained planted where they were, attached to her shadow feet.

  Great-Aunt Mellifluous said, “I must admit, that’s one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen.”

  Fernie grabbed her right leg with both arms and pulled with all her strength. It remained stuck to the floor. “You mean to say that you’ve never seen anything like this before?”

  “Never,” Great-Aunt Mellifluous said. “Shadows all over your world may be able to decide whether they want to stay with their people or leave them behind, but I’ve never at any point in my shadow life seen one that could hold its human in place. Maybe because I’ve never seen one that wanted to.” It turned to the shadow girl. “You’re being rude. Let Fernie go.”

  The shadow Fernie swallowed its latest bite of pizza and spoke in a voice that sounded just like the real Fernie’s, only grayer and angrier. “When I’m done eating.”

  “I said now,” Great-Aunt Mellifluous com-manded.

  The shadow Fernie rolled its eyes and threw down its shadowy pizza slice, which instantly turned into gray smoke and sank back into the surface of the table like a thrown rock sinking into the surface of a pond. The shadow girl disappeared as well, or at least went off someplace where it could sulk in privacy.

  Fernie lifted one slippered foot off the floor and then the other, relieved at being able to move her legs again. The drawback, of course, was that she didn’t cast a shadow right now—and that felt every bit not right.

  When she turned to Gustav and Great-Aunt Mellifluous to see what they had to say about this, she found the pair exchanging alarmed looks.

  Gustav grabbed her by the wrist. “Come on. We have to get you home.”

  His sudden urgency so completely took Fernie by surprise that she didn’t protest until they’d left the banquet behind and were well along one of the branching corridors, a downward-slanting hallway so steep that running in that direction amounted to little more than controlled falling. By the time Fernie got mad and yanked her arm away from Gustav’s grip, the slope had grown even steeper, and the marble floor even more slippery. The only safe thing to do was to treat it like a slide. She fell on her backside next to where Gustav had fallen on his backside and joined him in plunging down the hall while the doors on both sides raced by too quickly to be seen.

  They slid for so very long that Fernie had to think that they were now far, far underground, if not at the center of the Earth then at least far deeper than any basement had any right to be, unless there were top secret government weapons or a villain’s secret laboratory in it.

  Fernie shouted, “Is this your idea of a shortcut?”

  Gustav yelled back, “What’s wrong with it?”

  The hallway started leveling out, but Fernie and Gustav were moving too fast to stop. Fernie looked ahead and saw the hallway seeming to end at what looked like a big picture window two stories above the street. The new Fluorescent Salmon house of the What family could be clearly seen in the bright glow of the streetlights, even if the black lines of the Gloom mansion’s iron fence made it look like it had been cut into narrow slices.

  As much as she wanted to get home, Fernie did not particularly relish the idea of a shortcut that required her to crash through a plate-glass window. So she yelled, “Gustav!”

  And he yelled, “Whaaaaaaaat?” which might have been him calling her name or might have been the more common kind of what.

  For a heartbeat, the picture window loomed so close that Fernie braced herself for the sound of shattering glass.

  Then the view of the street seemed to lift out of sight like a curtain raised at the last moment. The long slide of a hallway had ended in a sudden drop just short of that picture window, leaving the two kids to fall head over heels into darkness.

  Fernie had just enough time to wonde
r if this was the Pit he’d mentioned before she landed in something spongy and bounced up and down a little before coming to a stop. She almost mistook the surface beneath her for a trampoline or a pile of pillows or something like that, until she stirred some of it by moving her hand around and saw that it was a great big mound of shadow-stuff, about four times her own height and just solid enough to provide a soft landing.

  When she glanced back up at the place she and Gustav had fallen from, she found that she could make out the end of the hallway they’d just slid down, which looked like a square pipe hanging in midair that curved upward until it disappeared in distant murk. A couple of puffs of darkness billowed from the open end and began to tumble downward toward her.

  Fernie suddenly understood something she wished she hadn’t. “That was a garbage chute.”

  “Well, yes,” Gustav replied as if it should have been obvious. “Everybody has to clear their places when they’re finished eating.”

  “But it was the size of a hallway, and it had doors along the walls. Why would there be doors you couldn’t even get to without sliding down the garbage chute?”

  “Not everybody in the family’s lucky enough to get the best bedroom.” He grabbed her by the wrist again and said, “Come on, we need to hurry. If we run through the Gallery of Awkward Statues and the Too Much Sitting Room, we’ll make it back to the parlor, and—”

  Suddenly irritated at him for not giving her any time to think, Fernie yanked her arm away from his and fought her way out of the big mound of shadow garbage on her own. Though for her it was only like struggling through slightly thicker air, she couldn’t stop herself from wondering if any shadow person would think it smelled bad.

  When she was finished climbing down, she stepped out onto solid floor and was able to look around. The area around them was a vast, open, and mostly empty space from which it was possible to look up and see many other hallways and chambers of the Gloom household. Some of the hallways zigzagged, some looped around one another like ribbons, and some went in directions that hurt her eyes to look at.

  Although the mound of shadow garbage was highest where she and Gustav had landed, the gray-black mist remained ankle-deep where she now stood and billowed up in a little puffy cloud when she shifted her slippered foot.

  Gustav arrived next to her and asked, “You ready to go?”

  She gave him a sour look. “You know what? Your house is really stupid.”

  “At least it’s not painted Fluorescent Salmon.”

  She had no immediate answer to that.

  “Come on,” he said, reaching for her wrist again. “The People Taker can be anywhere. We have to—”

  She pulled free and crossed her arms. “You can take me through the Too Much Sitting Room, or whatever else comes next, after you tell me why we had to run away from the banquet in such a hurry.”

  “We don’t have time. You might be in terrible danger right now.”

  “I might be,” she agreed, her arms still stubbornly crossed, “but I don’t think I’ll be in any more danger than I am, and probably a lot less, if I understand what’s going on.”

  Gustav’s grunt was similar to the noise Fernie’s dad made whenever Fernie wanted a reason she couldn’t stay up another half hour to watch the end of a scary movie. Because I said so had never worked as an argument in the What household, no matter how often he said it. He said, “Your shadow was able to keep you from moving.”

  “So? Your great-aunt Mellifluous yelled at it and made it let me go.”

  “It still shouldn’t have been able to do that.”

  Fernie looked at Gustav’s face. It was the same serious face she had seen through the fence, the same serious face that had been her constant companion and, she had to admit, good friend for the last couple of hours . . . but there was something new in his eyes that she hadn’t seen before.

  Fear.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE GALLERY OF AWKWARD STATUES

  Gustav Gloom didn’t have the time to stop and explain, but it would take less time than not stopping to explain. So he spoke quickly.

  “That shadow I mentioned before, Lord Obsidian? He’s not satisfied with shadows having a world of their very own and a few houses like this in your world. He wants to conquer the Dark Country, declare himself king, then invade your world and take over. He won’t be satisfied until shadows walk around like people, and all the people of the world are dragged along the ground after them like shadows.”

  Fernie had to admit that didn’t sound like much fun at all. At the very least, it would be hard to stay clean. “But how was any of that made worse by what happened upstairs?”

  “Before now, he would have wanted the People Taker to get you just because he wants prisoners and slaves. But once your shadow showed that she was able to keep you from moving, you became something he could learn from, something that can teach him what he needs to know in order to get what he wants. We have to get you out of this house and back home before he can find you.”

  Fernie hugged herself for warmth even though the air around them was neither warm nor cold. “You’ll keep looking for Harrington?”

  Gustav looked offended. “I wouldn’t dream of not continuing to look for Harrington.”

  Fernie did something she didn’t expect to do: She wrapped him in a tight hug.

  Gustav took to being hugged about as well as a tree would, except that a tree would not have given the impression that it might have preferred to run away. Nor would any tree have made as many attempts to figure out what to do with its arms.

  Come to think of it, Gustav didn’t take to being hugged even nearly as well as a tree would.

  Fernie released him, wiped her eyes, and said, “Okay. The way out. What comes next? The Too Much Sitting Room?”

  “First the Gallery of Awkward Statues and then the Too Much Sitting Room and then just one flight of stairs to the parlor, where it’s just a short walk to the front door.”

  None of that sounded as bad as hallways that doubled as garbage chutes and misty bedrooms with shadow dinosaurs in them. “Okay.”

  They fell into an uncomfortable silence as they walked, Gustav thinking about whatever a boy raised by shadows thinks about, and Fernie wondering if she’d ever see her home again. Aside from all the corridors and rooms visible in the murk high above their heads, there didn’t seem to be any walls in sight. The room was just an endless plain, knee-deep in swirling darkness, offering no obvious way out except for picking one featureless spot in the distance and heading for it in the hope that it might turn out to be a somewhat less featureless spot than the featureless spot where they were.

  Gustav said, “There’s the first one.”

  He pointed at a mountainous white shape, still little more than a speck in the distance.

  “That looks about ten miles away,” Fernie complained.

  “I know,” Gustav said, “but it’s really not as big as it looks.” Just to prove his point, he leaned over, plucked the white speck off the ground with his thumb and forefinger, and tossed it over his shoulder.

  This made Fernie’s head hurt about as much as everything else that had happened in Gustav’s house put together.

  They continued walking. Another white speck appeared in the distance, this one growing larger and fatter and more clearly not just a speck as Fernie and Gustav approached it.

  Before long it revealed itself as a sculpture—and not just any sculpture, but one of those massive, looming, white marble sculptures of a heroic-looking, muscle-bound man. Fernie had seen a number of sculptures like that in museums and in movies set in museums, and had always been impressed by the way the figures in the sculptures were constantly doing noble things like waving swords or standing at podiums making speeches or holding the Earth over their heads.

  This one, though, didn�
��t look nearly as important.

  The statue depicted a man, as muscle-bound as a mythical hero, stooping to examine the sole of his right foot to see whether he’d stepped in something.

  It was such a realistic marble sculpture that Fernie could tell that he had. It wasn’t just that it looked gooshy and smeary, but his stone face was also contorted with disgust at the smell.

  “Ewww,” said Fernie, pleased.

  “It’s one of my favorites,” Gustav agreed.

  They walked on. The shadowy mist covering the ground started to lift, gradually revealing a floor of white and black tiles. More statues appeared. There were dozens of them, and then hundreds. They all seemed as solid as real statues, even if they were only the shadows of statues that had never been. Most of them were white like marble, but others had the gray or green look of statues cast in metal. None of them were striking heroic or noble or even thoughtful poses, but were instead frozen in place doing things that most statues in museums would rather die than be caught doing.

  There were statues of people sneezing, statues of people scratching their elbows, and statues of people picking their noses. There were many statues of people who might have been fine subjects for statues had they not been caught with their eyes half closed and with their mouths half open, less like sculptures than snapshots taken at the wrong fraction of a second.

  Fernie understood. “It’s like the library. The books in that place are all the shadows of ideas nobody ever had. These are all the shadows of statues that nobody ever bothered to sculpt.”

  “I don’t know why,” Gustav said. “I like them.”

  “They’re not exactly the kind of statues you find in museums, though.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said with the boredom of a boy who had never been to one.

  “Do you also have a separate room of music that nobody ever bothered to play?”

  “Of course not,” Gustav sniffed. “That would be just plain silly.”

  This struck Fernie as the strangest thing he had said all night. “Why would that be sillier than anything else?”