“Of course not,” Mrs. Everwiner snapped. “I thought we were going to get a respectable family in the neighborhood for once, but he showed his true colors when he opposed my neighborhood beautification campaign, and now further reveals himself by hiding from me in that terrible place. I won’t have it, do you hear me? I won’t!”
Snooks 5’s dangling tongue slipped back inside the right side of his mouth and, unable to remain inside, dropped out his other cheek.
Fernie decided that she’d had more than enough of this. “Let me go. Now.”
It’s not something the Fernie of three weeks earlier might have said so quietly or so dangerously; but that had been before she’d faced down several fiends and monsters who were scarier before breakfast than Mrs. Everwiner could have been in a whole day.
Mrs. Everwiner released Fernie, her bright green eyes widening out of confusion over what had just happened.
Fernie said, “I’m taking my cat to the Gloom house. I promise you that when I see my dad, I’ll tell him everything you said, but I’ll also tell him that you grabbed my arm without permission. I don’t think he’ll be happy about that.”
Mrs. Everwiner seemed to realize that she’d just shown an unacceptable moment of weakness. “I’m not going to let you distort what happened just to cause trouble. I’m going with you to talk to him myself.”
Fernie shrugged. “Okay.”
She turned her back on Mrs. Everwiner, crossed the street, and walked through the open gate to the Gloom estate. The ankle-deep rolling mist that covered every inch of the black lawn swallowed her feet again, feeling less like the creepy presence it had been on her first visit to the property and more like an old familiar friend. She knew that there was nothing out here that could hurt her.
Behind her, Mrs. Everwiner muttered little ooks and acks and icks to express her own deep displeasure at having to venture anywhere that wasn’t painted like a color from a highlighter. It was probably the first time she’d ever passed the front gate of the estate she wanted removed from the neighborhood, and she didn’t seem to like it any more close-up than she had from the window of her own Sparkly Watermelon home. When Fernie looked back over her shoulder to confirm that she was following, she saw Mrs. Everwiner walking as if every inch of ground below the mist were covered with spiders and she had to step carefully to find the few clear spots that wouldn’t mess her shoes by squishing them. She didn’t seem to be worried so much about Snooks 5, who was closer to the ground than she was and whose tail and head suggested a submarine patrolling the ocean at periscope depth. Nor did she seem to notice how Snooks 5’s shadow, whose antics were the bane of the little dog’s life, ran around the little dog in excited circles.
Fernie stopped at the two giant front doors and waited for Mrs. Everwiner and Snooks 5 to catch up. “Still want to go inside?” she inquired.
“More than ever,” Mrs. Everwiner declared. “As long as I’m here, I’m going to see the inside of this horrid place for myself, so I can make a full report to the proper authorities.”
The effort Mr. and Mrs. What had made over the years to teach their daughters the importance of being polite at all times was best proven, at that moment, by Fernie’s failure to respond with a shrugged “Whatever.” She just nodded and knocked on the door. “Hives! I’m ordering you to open up!”
Less than a second later, the Gloom house’s terrible butler opened the door and peered down at Fernie from a height. “Oh. It’s you again.”
Hives, who was hulking and aristocratic and had a nose made for pointing at people like a gun sight and (as was only appropriate for his name) a complexion made up of little spots, made the word you sound the same way a child hoping for chocolate cake would say the word spinach. This was only appropriate, given his job description, as he was not actually a butler, but a terrible butler, whose job it was to always be as supremely unhelpful as possible.
Fernie said, “Hello, Hives. This is our neighbor, Mrs. Everwiner.”
Hives looked the new arrival up and down, allowing his lip to curl in distaste. “Of course she is. And what delightful errand brings you to our front door, madam?”
He made delightful sound like a new word for recently been sprayed by a skunk.
Mrs. Everwiner didn’t seem to notice that Hives was, like all the shadows of the Gloom house, ever-so-slightly transparent. She just sputtered with enough indignation to frighten every rude cashier and inefficient waitress in the entire world. “Well! I can’t say I like that tone of voice much!”
“Good,” Hives said. “Then I did it correctly.”
Then Mrs. Everwiner did something that Fernie had done many times in the Gloom house: opened her mouth in protest, then closed it for lack of any sensible thing to say.
“She wants to talk to my father,” Fernie explained.
Hives, who had been present when Fernie’s father and sister had tumbled into the pit leading to the Dark Country, didn’t bother to explain that they were lost in another world and might never be returned to their lives again. He just intoned, “I’m afraid that Mr. What is not available at the moment.”
“That’s not good enough! I want to talk to him now!”
Hives gave the kind of look he might have reserved for a disgusting stain on a favorite tablecloth. “We all want any number of things, madam, but our chances of being given them are not increased by how loudly we ask.”
Fernie couldn’t help being impressed by that. “Wow!”
Of course, Hives’s reply flew in the face of Mrs. Everwiner’s entire approach to life. Wanting satisfaction loudly was key to her strategy to dealing with other people and had always worked. She threw her chin back so she could look down her nose at the terrible butler, the same way he was looking down his nose at her. “I am not stepping one foot from this spot until you find that awful man and bring him to me!”
“Very well,” said Hives, which—as Fernie knew from her own experiences with the terrible butler—was not actually the same thing as saying that he had any problem with Mrs. Everwiner’s continuing to stay in that spot for as long as she could stand to, even if she was rained on. He turned to Fernie and added, “And is there anything you require, young miss?”
Fernie had learned that the only way to get Hives to do anything while he was being a terrible butler was to give him a direct command. “I order you to take me to Gustav.”
“Very well,” Hives said, stepping aside so Fernie could enter. He offered a last nod for Mrs. Everwiner’s benefit as he closed the door. “Have a nice wait, madam.”
Hives preceded Fernie down the impossibly long entrance hall with its long line of dangling chandeliers and its endless gallery of stern-faced and important portraits. “What an intolerable woman.”
Fernie didn’t contradict him. “She won’t wait out there forever. She’ll knock again in a few minutes.”
“I am fully aware of that inevitability, young miss. After all, it’s what you did when I made you wait just last night. But I am well accustomed to dealing with overly insistent, unwelcome visitors like Mrs. Everwiner, and have found that those as arrogant as she never quite learn the most useful way to make their wishes known. When she knocks on the door and demands to be let inside, I shall open the door for her, tell her ‘wait here,’ and leave her again, this time just inside the entrance. When after that she gets upset enough to call for me again, I shall lead her to a comfortable room where she can sit down, tell her to ‘wait here’ again, and abandon her once more. When she finally demands that I procure Mr. What right away, then I will tell her the strict truth: that you have gone to find him and will be returning with him as soon as you can.”
Despite herself, Fernie was actually touched by the terrible butler’s faith in her. “But what if she gets so upset she orders you to bring her to my father right away?”
“I shall find some way to disobey that one order, young m
iss, as the only way to obey it would be to take her down to the Pit and throw her in . . . which might be tempting, but would cross the line between being a terrible butler and being a terrible person. No, if it comes to that, I believe that I can delay her, escorting her from room to room and subjecting her to one unendurable wait after another, until she finally orders me to let her leave . . . which is, after all, what I want from her in the first place.”
Fernie pursed her lips and thought about all the terrible dangers she’d faced on her own various journeys through the Gloom house. The thought of Mrs. Everwiner, who unlike Fernie and Gustav wouldn’t be able to escape the worst of them by running very fast, trapped here alone with nothing but her useless dog to help her, wasn’t very funny at all. Despite how obnoxious the woman was, Fernie worried about her. “Will you keep her from getting in too much trouble?”
“I assure you, young miss, however much she provokes me, I shall make sure that she is subjected to no worse than an endless day of long waits and pointless aggravation.”
She felt mollified. “Thank you, Hives. Maybe you’re not such a terrible butler, after all.”
He stiffened. “That was a mean thing to say, miss.”
“Sorry.” She thought of something else that Hives had promised to take care of the last time she’d seen him. “What have you done with the People Taker?”
The People Taker was, of course, the brutal villain who had chased Gustav and Fernie all over the house a couple of times now, and who had been knocked out cold just before the accident responsible for Fernie’s father and sister falling into the Pit.
Hives said, “Well and truly sorted out for the moment. I dumped him in the Room of Being Delayed Indefinitely. He’ll be nicely miserable there until I get around to building a more permanent enclosure for him. He will not be escaping any time soon.”
“And Ursula and Carlin and Otis?” These were three out of the four members of the Four Terrors, last seen being swallowed whole by a tyrannosaur named Fluffy.
“I have heard from Fluffy, who has sent along his assurance that all three of them have been safely, ah, deposited in a secure place. I believe that we need not worry about any of them, either.”
Fernie wished that made her feel safer, but her experiences in the Gloom house had left her unwilling to take such promises for granted. So she simply said, “Okay.”
They walked in silence (except for the regular meows from the cat carrier), almost reaching the grand parlor at the center of the house before Hives stopped at a floor-to-ceiling portrait of a uniformed nineteenth-century British naval officer who might have been the very picture of dignity had he not, for some reason, been clamping a fish between his teeth.
Hives clicked a latch on the portrait, revealing it to be a hidden door. A servant passage, one of many narrow secret corridors that maids and butlers had once used to travel from room to room without ever being seen, stretched out into the distance, leading to the far regions of the house. She could see a distant speck, which she recognized as her friend Gustav Gloom, approaching her, backlit by a spot of bright light at the other end of the passage.
Hives said, “I took the liberty of summoning the young master from his business when you knocked on the door. I’d escort the two of you to your destination myself, but I fear that I can already hear that Everwiner woman knocking again and must get back to her right away so I can busy myself not seeing to her needs.”
“Thank you,” Fernie said.
He hesitated a second longer, then said, “I wish you the best of luck, young miss,” before walking away in a hurry to prevent her from thanking him again.
He left her standing there, Harrington’s carrier in one hand, while the distant speck at the end of the hidden corridor grew to fill the space and gradually became her best friend, Gustav Gloom.
Gustav’s clothes had been ripped to tatters by the previous night’s adventures, and he’d taken advantage of Fernie’s brief visit home to change into a brand-new black suit and red tie, otherwise identical to the outfit he wore every day. He’d bathed and washed his face clean of the layer of dust and dirt it had collected when the staircases collapsed, but otherwise looked like the same pale, unsmiling, strangely serious little boy he had always been.
It hadn’t even been an hour since he’d seen Fernie last, but he hugged her anyway and said, “How are you doing?”
“I’ve been better,” she said honestly. “Every time I think about Dad and Pearlie, stuck down there in the Dark Country, I start to cry.”
“I know how you feel,” said Gustav. “But you should remember that they might not even be in the Dark Country yet. Remember, it takes people who tumble into the Pit a long time to fall. I don’t know exactly how long, but for all we know, they might not land for hours or days or even weeks.”
“That doesn’t make me feel a whole lot better.”
“I know,” he said thoughtfully. “I sometimes wonder how people who fall into the Pit manage to pass the time before they land. I don’t think you can just scream and wave your arms begging for help for all that time. It would get old. I think you have to find a way to make a project of it, maybe sing songs or something. If I had advance warning, I’d make sure I was carrying something to read.”
Fernie gave him a special look.
What followed was a demonstration that it was possible for a boy who had never stood outside in sunlight to turn a couple of shades paler than he already was. “Sorry. I’m just saying.”
“Any sign of my shadow?” Fernie asked.
“No. I’ve sent out my own shadow to look for her, but haven’t heard any word back. I don’t think there’s any real cause to be concerned, since shadows can usually take care of themselves, but finding out where she is would certainly mean one less thing to be worried about. In the meantime, we have things to do. Want me to carry the cat carrier?”
Fernie appreciated the offer, because Harrington had gained some weight of late, but she found that she didn’t want to be separated from yet another member of her family, even for a minute. She shifted the carrier and said, “No, thanks, I’m fine. What’s next?”
“What’s next,” Gustav said, “before we do anything else, is we go finish up the errand we started last night, before we were so rudely interrupted by the Four Terrors.”
“Yes,” Fernie said. “Let’s talk to Hieronymus Spector.”
CHAPTER THREE
The One Thing Hieronymus Liked Most about Cats
The Hall of Shadow Criminals was a terrible prison where beings who had committed grave crimes against either human beings or shadows were held forever in cages made out of solid light. It housed any number of unspeakable criminals too dangerous to ever be allowed free, among either people or shadows . . . which is why it was so unnerving for Gustav and Fernie to have recently discovered how relatively easy it had been for Lord Obsidian’s forces to break in and free four of its most dangerous residents from their cells.
As Gustav and Fernie made their way through its blocky maze of floating stone walkways, trying to ignore the bottomless drops that separated them, it was hard for them not to wonder about just how long it would be before Lord Obsidian sent another small army up through those openings to free the monsters still locked in their cages. Even Ursula, Carlin, and Otis, so recently free and out conducting their mischief and now back in repaired cells waving their fists at the two friends as they walked by, could be on the loose again very soon.
The most isolated of the hall’s many cells of light was also the largest, because its inhabitant was so dangerous that one cage had not been considered enough for him; instead, he’d been locked in a cage inside a cage, both of which appeared to be crumbling into pieces from the sheer effort of holding him. He bore the shape of a man, but was surrounded by other patches of shadow, as if he was so evil, he created more darkness just by existing. They kept ripping at the walls
around him, dimming the light with every touch. Both cages looked like they were only minutes from falling apart under his constant assault, but a closer look revealed that they were also healing between each of his attacks . . . which would have been comforting if not for the clear impression that he inflicted his damage slightly faster than the cells could repair it. It was a close race that might go on for years, but he was winning it.
The first words he spoke, when Fernie and Gustav reached the floating stone island where his cell stood and faced him, were: “How interesting. You’ve brought a cat.”
Harrington hissed at him. It was the kind of sound he made only when he was deeply angry or deeply frightened, or when he didn’t like something on sheer principle. From the sound, he seemed to be making it right now for all three reasons . . . and Fernie had to admit to herself that she knew exactly how he felt.
“I just love cats,” Hieronymus Spector remarked. “I’m not particularly fond of petting them or playing with them, and I despise anything that can be described as cute, but I adore the way the little beasts occasionally return to their owners carrying a dead mouse or bird as a gift. It strikes me as the most honest gesture any house pet could ever make. What about you, Fernie What?”
Fernie remembered the one time Harrington had slipped out of the house for three hours and returned, meowing as if with pride in his accomplishment, bearing a headless sparrow in his mouth. “I think it’s gross. How do you know my name?”
“Isn’t it your name, Fernie What?”
“Yes. It is. But the last time we met, Gustav stopped me from telling you my name. How come you know it now?”
The dark shape inside the two cages of light cocked his head as if in deep amusement. “How do you think I know it, Fernie What?”
She didn’t have an immediate answer.
Hieronymus cocked his head a little more, this time addressing Gustav. “How do you think I know it, Gustav?”
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