Gustav Gloom and the Cryptic Carousel

by Adam-Troy Castro

  She walked around it twice, just absorbing the details, before the terrible urgency of her search for her father and sister overcame her fascination and she went looking to see where Gustav had gone. She found him sitting on one of the benches so many carousels seem to have, apparently for riders who consider riding on the animals too much of an adventure. In all her life she’d never been able to fathom the impulse that would drive anybody to get on a carousel only to sit on a bench that went around in a circle, nor had she ever seen anybody actually ride a carousel that way, but the benches still seemed to be a common feature, and she now found Gustav sitting on one of them, staring at everything around him as if he’d never seen any of it before.

  There was another bench facing his—another feature common to carousels, as if there were actually people who got on only to ride around in circles and face each other while having a conversation. She sat down on that bench and placed Harrington’s carrier on the floor at her feet while she waited for Gustav to speak.

  After a while, he said, “You can let your cat run around for a little, if you want. There’s nothing in this room that can hurt him. It’s a good room.”

  “Okay,” she said, unlocking the carrier door for Harrington’s sake.

  Harrington stuck his little head out, meowed, went back in, and then darted out onto the midway to roll around on his back and enjoy the texture of sawdust.

  Gustav watched him for a few seconds, then said, “This was my mom’s special place.”

  Fernie asked him, “Which mom? Penny Gloom or your shadow mom?”

  He frowned at that. “You know Penny Gloom died before she could become my mom.”

  “Just wanted to be sure I understood which one you were talking about. Your stories do get confusing sometimes.”

  “I mean Penny’s shadow. My shadow mom.”

  “Okay.”

  “Anyway,” Gustav said, “back when I was a very little kid, she used to bring me here almost every day. She said that the world outside had carousels like this all over the place and that this one was one of the few things she could give me that would be anything like an ordinary childhood. After she disappeared, I stopped riding the carousel. I don’t know why. Somehow, it didn’t seem right with her gone. But I still come here all the time, to sit and relax and read my books while listening to the sounds my grandfather built into the room.” Somewhere out in the fake carnival, a small child cried out in delight. Gustav took notice of the sound and said, “Like that one, just then. Tell me, Fernie, when you visit the places like this in the world you know, can you always hear other kids laughing and shouting like that?”

  As brokenhearted as Fernie felt today, she felt a little more at this reminder of how little Gustav knew of the things she took for granted. “Yes. All the time.”

  “Must be nice,” he said.

  “It is.”

  “I never knew that this,” he said, patting the bench—and then, realizing that he didn’t want her to think he was only talking about the bench, waving at the whole carousel around them—“was more than just a carnival ride. My mom never told me. Maybe she didn’t know everything it could do, or maybe she thought I was too young to understand. To me, it was just a place to be with my mom, and that was all it had to be. Maybe that’ll give us luck, when it comes to rescuing Pearlie and your dad.”

  “I hope so,” said Fernie.

  He took another long look around, bit his lip, and said, “Right. Let’s go take a look at the controls.”

  They got up together and walked to the hub of the carousel, a little round room furnished with a little wooden stool, a padlocked metal toolbox, and a control panel lined with switches, slides, the pull-out plunger from a pinball machine, the joysticks from a crane game, a length of rubber tubing, the head of a spatula, a big red button protected with a white lid, and a row of six dials, each numbered from one to one hundred. There was a set of shelves behind the stool, piled top to bottom with black volumes like the ones Fernie had seen in the house’s library of books that authors had considered but never gotten around to writing.

  “What are these?” Fernie asked.

  “I told you, I like to come here to read. I have a bad habit of just sticking my books on the shelf instead of taking them back to the house library. I’m sure you know how it is. All good books spread out around a house, refusing to stay on their shelves . . . while bad books always stay where they’re put. Help me look. I seem to remember seeing an instruction manual and a book of maps here a long time ago, but I never read either of them myself, and by now they must be buried in all the novels.”

  Gustav sat on the stool and Fernie sat on the locked metal toolbox as the two friends went through the shelves. It was a slow job for Fernie, because, like all the books from the house’s vast library, they were printed on black paper and used shiny black ink that she could only read against that background by holding the pages up to the light and puzzling out the slight contrast. Gustav, who had been reading the mansion’s books all his life, had no such problem and was able to go through about a dozen books for every one Fernie put aside. Still, she soon eliminated a big pile of volumes that might have struck her as worth reading at any other time, including Huck and Tom versus the Brain-Worms from Regulon, Quasimodo versus the Vampires, and one she would have squealed at finding any other time: Neville’s Last Year at School.

  The friends had to go through half the shelves before they found the two written by Gustav’s grandfather: one a slim pamphlet entitled Care and Operation of Your Cryptic Carousel, and the other an immense, dust-covered volume bound in iron hinges, called Lemuel Gloom’s Annotated Atlas of the Dark Country, Second Edition.

  Gustav read the pamphlet quickly and said, “It’s pretty straightforward. Listen to this part: The Cryptic Carousel™ is a multidimensional platform capable of transversing all planes of existence by precise calibration of quantum fields and tachyon emissions in conjunction with controlled rates of rotation along its horizontal and irrational axes.”

  Fernie said, “That doesn’t sound all that straightforward to me.” In fact, it sounded exactly like her only other exposure to Lemuel Gloom’s writing, a book she had plucked off one of the family’s shelves with a sentence that had gone on for several pages and included a miniature traffic jam of mathematical equations colliding in symbols she’d never seen before.

  Gustav didn’t seem confused at all. “Maybe I’m just more used to reading this kind of stuff than you are. My grandfather left behind entire shelves of it. Here, let me skip forward a bit: The carousel, blah blah blah, boring boring boring, at its lowest settings designed to rotate in place like the carnival ride it resembles, blah blah blah, fully equipped with over fifty thousand preset destinations, as well as onboard systems capable of providing full life support even in the most extreme environments, blah blah blah. Shielding and defense mechanisms capable of withstanding even the most extreme hostile conditions, which is good to know, but, blah, blah, blah . . . Okay, this part’s good: The controls can be mastered in a matter of minutes, but first-time users are advised to try out a couple of the simpler destinations first just to accustom themselves to the special challenges involved before they attempt any of the advanced settings.”

  Fernie might have been fascinated by this at any other time, but right now she couldn’t stop thinking about her father and sister, tumbling into endless darkness and utterly dependent on her and Gustav to save them. “This isn’t getting us to the Dark Country any faster.”

  “No, it’s not,” Gustav agreed, “but figuring out what we’re doing first is going to help us get there safer. We can afford a test ride. You ready?”

  “I’ve been ready all along, Gustav.”

  “Okay. It’s a carousel, after all. Let’s take it for a spin.”

  He put the pamphlet down on the console in front of him, took a deep breath, and turned his attention to the ro
w of six dials. He ran his index finger over the tiny numbers, left all six dials set at zero, lifted the plastic shield, and pressed the big red button beneath.

  Joyful, if tinny, calliope music began to play. The many lights lining the carousel’s canopy began to blink on and off in waves, the horses and other wooden creatures on their poles began to move up and down, and the platform began to rotate, just like every other carousel Fernie had ever seen. The control booth itself remained stationary as the various animals bobbed around them in circles, but even so, the movement of the ride made the fake carnival setting outside seem real somehow, almost as if the games and refreshment stands on the fairground were actually open for business and there were actually crowds of people just out of sight, looking for the next fun thing to do on their night out. Fernie caught a whiff of popcorn scent and found herself wishing she’d thought to eat breakfast or pack provisions for the journey to come.

  Gustav said, “This is the slowest setting. I rode it much faster than this, even as a baby.”

  He turned the last dial up to one, pressed the red button again, and the ride sped up, the gentle trot of the horses becoming a loping canter. With the last dial turned up to two, their run became a full-on gallop. The animals passed by in streaks of furious color, intent on getting somewhere even if all they accomplished was running in circles. They made the sounds the actual animals would have made during such a stampede: whinnies, bellows, roars, and the drumbeat of all those hooved and clawed and padded feet striking the earth. But there was also a growing sense of energy in the air, a crackling anticipation that reminded Fernie of the way the air feels just before angry storm clouds let loose their baggage of rain. For the first time, Fernie found herself not doubting that the carousel could actually do what Grandpa Lemuel’s instruction manual promised.

  “One more number,” Gustav shouted, “and we start seeing some of the things the carousel can really do!”

  “I’m ready!” Fernie cried.

  Gustav turned the last dial to three and pressed the red button.

  There was a burst of bright light—

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Harrington Finds a Great Cat Toy

  The carousel didn’t seem to be spinning anymore, but the world outside the ride was so strange to Fernie’s eyes that for long seconds she could make no sense of what she was seeing.

  The air was foggy and filled with tumbling debris the size of baseballs. The ground was waist-deep in what looked like irregular, light brown rocks the size of basketballs, threatening to spill over onto the merry-go-round platform. It wasn’t the kind of landscape that made Fernie eager to run out and explore. Whatever it was extended as far as the eye could see, until the field of boulders was swallowed up by fog.

  “Well,” Gustav said, “this is certainly different. Let’s take a look.”

  He hopped off the stool and ventured out onto the carousel floor, winding between the various frozen animals with the familiarity of a boy who had been visiting them all his life.

  Fernie rushed after him, protesting. “Wait! I just remembered. You can’t ever leave your yard without starting to give off smoke like a vampire in sunlight. If that’s some other planet or something, won’t it kill you right away?”

  Gustav stopped between one step and the next. “You’re right. I’m pretty sure I’m okay on the carousel, since it’s part of the house. I’ll also be okay once we get to the Dark Country, since that’s so full of the shadow-magic that keeps me alive at home. But I don’t know what’s going to happen if I venture out into that.”

  “I don’t think either of us should go out, then.”

  “We’re not going to,” Gustav assured her. “I’m just going to see what I can see.” He stopped at the saddled thing with the octopus head and peered out into the fog and murk, blinking. “No. I’m afraid it doesn’t make any more sense close-up than it did far away. That’s disappointing.”

  “No reason to stay, then.”

  “Oh, I didn’t say that. If we let something this harmless scare us off, we might as well give up on braving the Dark Country, which is likely to be far worse, long before we even get there. Besides, it looks like it’s about to get more interesting.”

  Before Fernie could ask Gustav what he meant, she saw what he’d seen: a towering black shape, the size of a small hill, emerging from the distant fog. Whatever it was—tsunami or locomotive or giant monster of the sort that destroyed cities in her favorite movies—looked immense enough to roll over all of Sunnyside Terrace without feeling even the slightest inconvenience. A pair of glowing, jewellike eyes, each the size of her family’s car, glittered like headlights, piercing the fog. Fernie gripped the pole on which the polka-dotted unicorn figure was mounted and steeled herself for the moment when the vast thing came into view, certain that it would turn out to be something too horrible to be endured by mortal eyes.

  Then she noticed the slit pupils in those eyes.

  Then a face the size of a barn became visible through the fog, over the sleek, graceful body racing toward the carousel with deep excitement, and Fernie realized that she recognized the specific pattern of the white and black fur surrounding those eyes.

  She cried out: “Harrington!?”

  The giant cat, running with head lowered down below his shoulders, flicked his ears but didn’t slow down. His own responding cry sounded less like a meow than a cruise ship’s horn as it came rumbling into port.

  “I guess we’ve changed size,” Gustav said.

  “Why would we change size?”

  “I suppose that there’s no sense in being able to travel anywhere if some of the places you want to travel are cramped little places where the carousel wouldn’t fit. I guess those boulders around us must be grains of sawdust from the carnival floor. I should have recognized them already, but they’re a little hard to identify at this size.”

  Harrington’s front legs were now a pair of furry tree trunks, half-buried in sawdust and extending to well above the carousel’s ceiling. When his head came down so he could peer at the tiny moving people inside, it might as well have been the moon deciding to come down to Earth. He blinked. Another deafening meow, and he cocked his head in a manner that suddenly, and terribly, struck Fernie as very, very familiar.

  One of Harrington’s favorite toys was a hollow plastic ring, open on its outer edge, and containing a little rubber ball stuck inside on a track. It was a one-trick toy, but that was okay as far as Harrington was concerned, because he was just a cat and didn’t need many more tricks than that. He could spend hours lying on his side next to the ring, poking his long legs through the hole in its side to make the ball race around. To Harrington, the ring was better than any video game ever invented.

  Now Gustav and Fernie had given Harrington a little round object, open at its outer edge, with little objects moving around inside.

  A giant paw darted in through the side of the carousel between the giant amoeba on a pole and the giant sea horse on a pole and knocked Fernie on her back.

  “Why did he do that?” Gustav cried.

  “He’s a cat!” Fernie cried back.

  “I’ve never had a cat of my own.”

  “Take my word for it. This is something cats do!”

  Harrington’s paw invaded the carousel again, this time popping claws and seizing hold of the pole above the giant octopus-headed man. He tugged, and the entire carousel slid across its bed of giant sawdust, raising clouds of the stuff. Gustav spun on the pole he had grabbed for support. Fernie slid dangerously close to the edge. The giant Harrington yowled and fell on his side so he could peer through the gaps in the carousel and better see the little moving things he was grabbing for. He yowled—nearly choking Gustav and Fernie with his noogums-breath—and tugged on the pole again, coming close to tilting the carousel on end.

  Gustav had tried to get back to the control booth, but the most rece
nt tug had knocked him to his knees. “Can’t you just say no to him or something?”

  “What part of ‘He’s a cat’ do you not understand?”

  The giant Harrington decided to attempt another strategy, backing away from the uncooperative carousel and crouching, his rear end wiggling as he got his hind legs ready for a leap. For Gustav and Fernie it was going to be like being in a pickup truck parked on the railroad tracks when the locomotive slammed into it at full velocity. Fernie could only close her eyes and, knowing from her years of experience as a cat owner that it wouldn’t do any good, cry out, “No, Harrington! Don’t!”

  Harrington must have heard her cry somehow, because he stopped . . . but then he yowled. This was no small thing. He had always been a loud yowler, as cats go. When he yowled, it was because he was upset or angry or frightened or hungry, and he didn’t see much point in keeping any of those a secret. There had been times when he’d accidentally gotten himself stuck in a closet and his yowls had been easy to hear everywhere in the house, even when Pearlie was playing music real loud. But this yowl, amplified by his relatively huge size, was the yowl to beat all yowls. It was a little like a fire alarm if you had its speaker stuck up against your ear. Fernie cried out and covered her ears, but was sure that another yowl that loud would deafen her.

  There was a burst of bright light Fernie could see even through her closed eyelids, followed by blessed silence.

  She opened her eyes and uncovered her ears and saw that the land of giant grains of sawdust and giant cats had disappeared, replaced now with a view that was an endless darkness on one side of the carousel, and on the other an immense globe lined with messy but colorful horizontal stripes. The silence was extremely welcome, even if it wasn’t total silence due to the ringing in her ears.

  Gustav appeared at her side and helped her up. “The next setting up,” he confirmed. “I’m sorry I didn’t warn you, but I figured that we needed to be somewhere Harrington wasn’t, as soon as possible.”