Gustav Gloom and the Cryptic Carousel

by Adam-Troy Castro

  Gustav answered at once. “I think you know it because you were told it.”

  “Ah. Explain.”

  “I think that sometime before last night’s jailbreak, one of Lord Obsidian’s agents came up here to ask all the prisoners who would be willing to join his cause. That only makes sense, because it would be a tremendous waste for him to go to all that trouble and give up so many shadow lives only to free the prisoners who would not take his orders.”

  “True,” said Hieronymus. “And?”

  “I think that because the People Taker was in charge of the operation, and he had a personal grudge against Fernie, he would have made capturing her and her family part of the deal. What’s more, I also think it’s a deal you took.”

  “Also an interesting answer. And just why, dear boy, would you believe that?”

  Gustav said, “The only reason Fernie and her family were anywhere near the Hall of Shadow Prisoners last night was because you had made such a big deal about not answering any of my questions unless Fernie came here to ask them personally. That would also explain why the jailbreak didn’t start until after Mr. What and I got here. It was all a trap for the Whats . . . and you helped spring it.”

  Fernie hadn’t considered any of this at all. The revelation that this was the villain responsible for the ordeal of the last few hours, and the ordeal yet to come, infuriated her so much that, given another second, she would have started screaming at him.

  But then Hieronymus interrupted. “Alas, my poor halfsie boy, nothing in your little theory stands up to close examination.”

  “No?”

  “Not at all. For instance, how could Lord Obsidian’s agents even know that you’d soon come to me to have some questions answered, and thus give me the opportunity to trick you into putting your little friend in harm’s way? Even assuming you were right, and I did make a deal with Lord Obsidian’s forces, then why didn’t they free me, too, while they had the chance?”

  Gustav had no immediate answer to either question.

  “The truthful answer to both those questions,” Hieronymus said, “is that while they did tell me they hoped to capture little Fernie, I didn’t make any deal with them. They didn’t free me because I laughed in their faces. They didn’t free me because I informed them that I had big plans of my own and had absolutely no interest in working for somebody else’s glory. Indeed, I further told them that my first order of business upon ever escaping this cell would be to go after Lord Obsidian and destroy him, for ever daring to suggest that I would accept him as master.”

  Fernie felt her heart pounding in her chest. “I don’t understand. You didn’t summon me here so they could get me?”

  “Oh, no. Of course I did. Gustav was correct about that much. But, you must understand, I didn’t do it as part of a contemptible deal. I did it to stir up trouble and amuse myself seeing how it worked out. I’m happy to report that it was every bit as entertaining as I expected.”

  Behind the bars of his carrier, Harrington hissed, yowled, and spat, almost as if he’d fully understood every word.

  Fernie didn’t blame him. She now hated the dark figure in the inner cell more than she’d ever hated anybody, living or shadow, in her entire life. Next to this, her opinion of the People Taker almost qualified as gentle affection. She tried to come up with a sufficiently nasty name to call him, mentally reviewing the list of bad words she knew but didn’t often use, and the slightly longer list of bad words she knew but would never lower herself to using at all. None of them seemed sufficient, so she was left stammering, “Y-you . . . you . . .”

  “In fact,” Hieronymus continued, almost kindly, as if she hadn’t made a sound at all, “I must confess that I’m happy you escaped the fate of your family, Fernie What. Because once I recognized you for who you are, I knew that you had a most interesting possible future . . . one suggesting that you and Gustav might actually win.”

  Sudden hope overwhelmed her. “What?”

  “Oh,” he said crossly, “don’t be as stupid as your limited vocabulary suggests. There are no prophecies in this life, no magical chosen ones selected by fate to rise up and destroy the evils of their age. That’s simply a comforting lie weak people like to tell so they can just wait for a hero instead of standing up for themselves. I assure you, the overwhelming odds are still that if you and Gustav go anywhere near the Dark Country, you’ll both be captured right away, or get yourselves killed horribly. But there is also proof, somewhere in this house, that it’s just barely possible you might not . . . and that at least one of the possible futures awaiting you if that happens is very, very interesting.”

  “Where?” she demanded.

  “Don’t be silly. Telling you where to find it would ruin my fun.” With all that settled, to his own apparent satisfaction if not to Fernie’s, Hieronymus turned toward Gustav, who had been listening in silence, and reminded him, “This all started because you had some questions for me, about how best to find your own father.”

  Gustav stirred, as if waking from a daze. “Yes.”

  “Under the circumstances, I’ll drop the requirement that Fernie be the one to ask them. That’s already accomplished what it was supposed to, getting her family taken. You may ask away, but get to it. I’m a busy man. I don’t have all day.”

  Considering that Hieronymus was trapped in a cell that was trapped in another cell and had nothing of any real importance to do, this was just about the most contemptuous thing he could have said, but Gustav let it pass without comment. “I have about a dozen questions—”

  “I’ll answer the first six,” Hieronymus decided, “promise to answer them truthfully, and then, perhaps, out of the goodness of my heart, give you an extra added piece of advice for free.”

  “Only six?” Gustav exclaimed.

  “Yes,” Hieronymus replied. “You now have five left.”

  “So you’re really going to play that game, are you?”

  “Yes. You now have four left. I must say, I’m astounded by how bad you are at this.”

  There was a moment of horrified silence as Gustav absorbed the unforgiving rules of Hieronymus’s game, and Fernie felt all hope for the rescue of her family slipping away. After a few seconds, Gustav made some mental adjustments and asked, “You really think you’re smarter than me, don’t you?”

  Fernie gasped in disbelief at the waste of yet another question.

  Hieronymus said, “Yes. You now have three questions left.”

  Gustav continued: “And am I right in assuming that you have absolutely no intention of giving us any useful information if you can help it?”

  Hieronymus laughed nastily. “Yes. You now have two questions left.”

  “Meaning that even if I did ask you the smartest question anybody in the world ever asked you, you would just give me a yes or no or some other answer so incomplete that it wouldn’t do me or Fernie any good at all unless I had twenty questions just to figure out what you meant?”

  It was all Fernie could do to prevent herself from crying out in panic. But she was beginning to pick up on something else, too: a certain fire in Gustav’s eyes that could only be there if he knew exactly what he was doing and wasn’t nearly as lost as he seemed to be.

  “Yes,” Hieronymus said. “And now you have only one question.”

  Gustav turned toward Fernie and did something that made her heart soar with hope: He winked.

  Then he turned back to Hieronymus and said, “All rightie. My final question is this: If you were absolutely nothing at all like yourself and instead of wanting to play tricks on us to make our lives miserable, you loved us and deeply cared about us and were so completely desperate to tell us everything we needed to know that you wouldn’t leave out a single useful detail whether we asked the proper questions or not, what exactly would you say then?”

  The walls were too far away and too insubstant
ial for Gustav’s words to echo, but they hung in the air even so, by far the most powerful thing in the room.

  And then the air was cut with a single sharp clap.

  It was followed by another.

  And then there was another one after that, the claps coming one after another, in what Fernie was astonished to recognize as applause from the deeply evil shadow in the cage. Hieronymus actually seemed to appreciate being beaten, if beaten he was. Maybe it was more entertaining for him than outsmarting other people all the time.

  Hieronymus Spector applauded until it occurred to him to stop, then said, “The person I really am says, Curse you, Gustav Gloom, you’ve foiled me again. But were I the made-up person you ask about, I’d start by sadly admitting that I can tell you very, very little about surviving in the Dark Country itself. I haven’t been there for years, and have been in this cage since long before this Lord Obsidian of yours showed up. I don’t know where you would find his stronghold, how you would approach it without being caught, or where you would find the specific prisoners you seek, let alone how you would get away once you were done. Those, I’m afraid, are all things you’ll have to find out yourselves. I can help you on one or two minor matters, but I can’t swear to any of them being enough to save your lives or spare you an eternity as his slaves.”

  Fernie could not imagine any news worse than that, but Gustav seemed to have expected it. “Go ahead.”

  “What I can tell you is that the direct approach, going straight down to the Dark Country, is likely the best way to get yourself captured right away. Fortunately, there’s a land that surrounds it on all sides, a land that is neither what Fernie would call the real world, nor what shadows call the Dark Country. It has no real name, but we can call it Dim Land, a stark and barren place from which it should be possible to slip into the Dark Country on foot. Again, I cannot tell you which route is currently safest, or that any of them are safe at all, because I haven’t been there recently, either. I’ll tell you what I can, but can promise that most if not all of my information may be outdated. I’ll direct you to maps, but can assure you that most of those I know about will be useless for the same reasons.”

  He chuckled before continuing. “Given that your question was all about what I’d say if I cared about you, I’d probably start weeping and apologize at this point for not being more helpful, and in so doing force you to spend a few minutes assuring me that I was only doing my best . . . but we both know that I don’t care about you and am only being as helpful as I am because you posed the right question. So we can spare ourselves that pointless part of the conversation and move on to the next bit, the part where you ask me if there’s anything at all useful I do know.”

  “I appreciate that,” said Gustav. “Is there?”

  The figure shifted and concentrated the darkness that composed Hieronymus into his face, which grew darker and larger and more focused until, for the very first time, Fernie could see what he looked like. He had the features of an intelligent, educated, and refined man, the kind who, given the opportunity, could speak with authority on any learned subject. He looked like it would have been all too easy to mistake him as kind, were he not also wearing the expression of a man whose chief interest in other people was determining their weaknesses so he could destroy them.

  He said, “What I tell you next, my halfsie boy, I would have told you anyway . . . because this is dangerous knowledge indeed, and it amuses me to tell you dangerous things.

  “When your grandfather Lemuel first traveled down to the Dark Country to contact the world of shadows and offer his own family home as one of their gateways to Earth, I was the very first being he met there, and for a time the closest he ever came to having a trusted friend among my kind.

  “He was riding a vehicle then, a marvelous machine of his own invention that can take its riders to any place in this world, in that world, or to any world that exists in the realms of concrete or imagination, earth or sky, light or dark.

  “It is that vehicle, Gustav, that will take you where you wish to go and will therefore deliver you to the most treacherous place you have ever known. The most helpful thing I could ever do for you is tell you how to recognize that machine for what it is, because once you know that, you will have a slim chance of saving your father and Fernie’s. It is also the worst thing I could ever tell you, because it is much more likely that this knowledge will get you killed. In the end, I tell you only because, either way, the results will likely be . . . interesting.

  “You have ridden this machine many times yourself, Gustav, starting long before you could walk . . . though never once in your short life have you ever suspected that it was more than the toy it seemed to be. Never have you ridden it anywhere except in pointless circles.

  “If you now wish to travel to the Dark Country yourself, you will need to ride this machine again, this time first recognizing what you ride as the miraculous brainchild of your grandfather’s special genius.

  “Do you know what I reference, my halfsie boy? Do you know where to find your only hope of rescuing two families?”

  Fernie glanced at Gustav and was stunned to see him trembling with sudden understanding.

  He said, “Of course . . . !”

  Hieronymus chuckled. “That is about all I can tell you, my children. It is barely enough to get you started, and certainly not enough to save you from a horrible fate, but it is all I can personally offer as far as the way to the Dark Country is concerned. Of course, more help might be available, if you look in the right place . . . and that is where I offer my one unsolicited extra piece of advice:

  “Think breakfast.”

  That seemed to be all there was. Hieronymus drew back, satisfied, and after a few moments spent waiting for him to say something else, Gustav and Fernie glanced at each other and prepared to take their leave.

  Hieronymus coughed. “Aren’t you going to thank me?”

  “No,” said Gustav.

  “I didn’t think you would. Still, it would have been nice, since I don’t expect to ever see you again. Even if you do succeed in your quest, and return to your life here, I do plan to escape soon, and that would render this the very last civil conversation you and I will ever have, as we will be truly mortal enemies in the future.”

  Gustav did not react to Hieronymus’s announcement of an imminent escape. “So?”

  “So I will take this opportunity to thank you, Gustav Gloom. I will likely kill you next time we meet, but the worst I can say of our past relationship is that you have always been . . . entertaining.”

  “Thanks,” said Gustav. “But I wouldn’t be so sure about how our next meeting will turn out, if I were you...”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Harrington Has Fun in the Sawdust

  What followed was another lengthy trek through the house’s more obscure regions, though Gustav clearly had a specific destination in mind.

  The sights they passed on the way included a deeply irritating room he called the Chamber of Immediate Unpleasant Interruption.

  Fernie made the mistake of starting to ask Gustav why it was called that, but she only managed to say, “But why is—” before the ceiling opened up and she was hit with enough cold water to fill a dozen bathtubs.

  She didn’t like this any more than Harrington, now drenched and spitting in his carrier, liked it. She would have started yelling, but then Gustav took her by the arm and warned, “Ickier stuff comes down if you complain about it. Trust me. I know.”

  So she kept her mouth shut and stewed in irritation as they left that room, traveled the usual confusing mix of secret passages and endless corridors, and eventually ended up at a colorful door covered with bright cartoon stars and exclamation points.

  “Looks fun,” she said, without much conviction.

  “Yes,” said Gustav as he opened the door for her. “It’s always been one of my favorite places.�
��

  What she saw next made her gasp.

  Fernie had already been to one other room designed to look like some outdoor location. This one was designed to look and feel like a carnival fairground on a pleasant summer evening. The walls bore the painted facades of booths where carnivalgoers could buy funnel cakes, cotton candy, or candy apples from vendors, or test their skill at knocking down bottles to win giant stuffed bears. The floor was covered with wood chips and sawdust, the air smelled a little like popcorn and nearby elephant rides, and the painted, starry night sky was filled with the simulated sound of distant children laughing or shouting as they dragged their indulgent parents toward the next in a series of thrill rides. There was even a delicious breeze coming from somewhere, just cool and tangy enough to be the best kind of breeze for a night out.

  It was all fake, though, just window dressing for the only part that was at all real: a great, colorfully painted carousel, populated not just with wooden horses of brown and black and chestnut but creatures she had never seen wearing saddles either on or off merry-go-rounds. As she walked around the circular platform, she found a smiling dolphin and a winged horse and a confused unicorn and a giant leaping fish and one delightfully icky spider and a very gooey, nasty, octopus-headed man she supposed to be some kind of monster, as well as something invisible she only knew was there because the saddle it wore could be seen floating in the air all by itself. All of this wonderment surrounded a little round central control room with a panel covered with buttons and switches.

  Fernie hadn’t been a fan of carousels for years. The instant she’d grown tall enough to exceed the minimum height line at her favored amusement parks, she’d moved on to her true love, crazy loop-the-loop roller coasters of the sort that were especially fun to ride after drinking strawberry milk shakes. But she had to admit that this carousel was downright beautiful. Every surface was covered with spangles and brightly colored lights, the animals all looked so real they practically breathed, and magic seemed to shine from every rivet.