Gustav Gloom and the Cryptic Carousel

by Adam-Troy Castro

  “I don’t mind,” said Fernie, who couldn’t take her eyes off the giant, colorful globe. Unlike the motes of sawdust, which had defied her understanding, this sight was all too clear, from her textbooks and from science-fiction movies she’d seen. She just didn’t want to believe it. “Gustav, is this . . . outer space?”

  “I think so . . . which would probably make that the planet Jupiter.”

  This conflicted with everything she’d learned in science class. “How come we’re still breathing? How come we’re not freezing to death?”

  “You heard what the instruction manual said about life support. There must be some kind of trick that keeps the air in. I’m pretty sure that, right now, if you stepped off the side of the carousel, for any reason, you’d be very unhappy about that decision for however long it took to not have to worry about being happy or unhappy about anything ever, ever again.”

  Fernie found herself caught between absolute terror and considering the carousel the most wonderful thing in the entire world. “Gustav, your grandfather must have been some kind of genius.”

  Gustav seemed a little startled by this proposition. “Really? You think so?”

  “Of course I think so. Don’t you?”

  “I never thought about it, really. I haven’t had that many other people around to compare him to.”

  “I promise you, Gustav, most people don’t invent stuff like Cryptic Carousels. Most people have enough trouble just setting their alarm clocks.”

  “I’ve heard that, but I’m not certain I understand it. What’s so difficult about alarm clocks?”

  “That’s not the point. The point’s that your grandfather invented something that the rest of the world can only dream about.”

  Fernie was too breathless with questions to stop. “But why did he keep all this to himself? Why would he go to so much trouble inventing something this fantastic and then not tell anybody? Why would he write crazy books about the shadow world that nobody was ever going to understand or believe, and then hide the greatest thing anybody ever invented in a room decorated to look like a carnival that nobody outside the family was ever going to see?”

  Gustav scratched his temple. “He was already rich. I guess he didn’t need the money.”

  “Didn’t need the money? But Gustav—”

  “Also, maybe he didn’t want anybody like Howard Philip October to ever get his hands on it,” Gustav guessed. “You have to admit, realizing that October was a bad guy and keeping him out of the house for as long as he did was also a pretty smart thing for my grandfather to do. His only real mistake as far as that went was not also warning my father.”

  Fernie had to admit that this was an excellent point, given all the trouble that October had gotten up to both before and after changing his name to Lord Obsidian.

  Accepting that explanation, if only for now, was also useful in that it gave her room to accept that she was now farther away from home—and doing something far more amazing—than her adventurer mother had ever managed in a lifetime of travel to the most remote regions of the world. It was a hard thing to believe, she found, and she now understood the wisdom of taking a few practice trips before heading for a place that was going to be even farther away. So she just blinked at the giant, colorful planet filling up the black sky, getting used to the idea. The very large part of her that enjoyed stories about journeys to other worlds found the sight so thrilling that she caught herself releasing a contented sigh. “It’s too bad we don’t have time to land and take a look around. That would be cool.”

  “Not really,” Gustav said. “From what I’ve read of Jupiter, it would pretty much kill us instantly. We wouldn’t even be puddles.”

  “Even if we stayed aboard the carousel?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t really think I want to find out.”

  After a second or two of appreciating the strangeness of it all, she suddenly remembered something that the spectacular sight had knocked fresh out of her mind. “Gustav? What about Harrington? We left him alone at the carnival.”

  “That was his own fault,” Gustav pointed out, “but you’re right. We should go back and get him before we go anywhere else.”

  He returned to the little round room, set all the dials back to zero, and pressed the big red button.

  One bright flash of light later, they were back in the carnival room and once again normal size.

  As it happened, Fernie was looking directly at the place where Harrington had wandered after the sudden disappearance several seconds earlier of the object he’d believed to be a little round toy. Its sudden return, this time as the full-size carousel it had been in the first place, affected him the way most sudden and unexpected events tend to affect cats. From a standing start, he sprang four feet straight up, doubling in size from puffed-out hair alone. Yowling—the sound not nearly as ear-piercing as it had been when Fernie was tiny and her cat a giant—he spun in midair and hit the floor running, so frantic that he didn’t look where he was going and knocked himself silly slamming headfirst into the painted midway backdrop.

  Fernie felt horrible. “Oh, my poor baby!”

  She leaped from the carousel and sped across the sawdust-covered floor, catching up to her pet just as he stood back up, swaying a little from the impact. She scooped him up in her arms and comforted him with little shushing noises as he whined.

  Leaving the carousel himself, Gustav watched the scene and offered an amused, “Mental note: The Cryptic Carousel can be used to frighten cats.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Opening the Tool Chest Seems to Be a Very Bad Idea

  By the end of another hour (an hour that Harrington spent huddled inside the cat carrier and not at all interested in being let out to play anytime soon), Gustav and Fernie had taken the Cryptic Carousel to another six of its preset destinations, each stranger than the last. Staying aboard during all these practice trips, Gustav had not suffered any ill effects, though it remained to be seen what would happen if circumstances ever forced him to disembark in a strange place.

  They had found themselves at the South Pole, or some place like it, with nothing but ice stretching an infinite distance in every direction. They had hovered over a medieval castle at the center of a huge battle between knights in gleaming steel armor and an enemy army that wore nothing more protective than boxer shorts covered with little red hearts (which would have been strange enough if the guys in the underwear hadn’t been winning). They had seen an orange world under a striped sky where giant purple mushrooms hopped around on their roots, which was not nearly as strange as the sound they made with each hop, a very human-sounding cry of “Yahoo!”

  Now they found themselves floating in the center of an endless void, surrounded on all sides by an ocean of what looked like millions of black polka dots, each one about the size of a manhole cover, floating against a white field. Gustav and Fernie walked around the carousel’s edge, searching for an angle that would provide them with more of an explanation for this strange place than any other, but the view remained the same on all sides, and no immediate explanation offered itself.

  “I once read a line in one of my books,” Gustav said after a while. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

  “Who’s Horatio?” Fernie wanted to know.

  “I don’t remember exactly, but it was obviously the guy who the other guy in the story was talking to.”

  Fernie had been able to figure that much out for herself. “But what’s it mean?”

  “From what I was able to figure out, the universe is a really big place filled with more strange stuff than anybody would ever expect or even be able to understand. I guess that, if he’d ever been here, the guy who said those words could have made the same point by telling Horatio, If you had a Cryptic Carousel, you could fly to a place where the sky is filled with black po
lka dots, but it wouldn’t have sounded as pretty.”

  Fernie only knew that she’d heard more than enough about Horatio. “Gustav, do you know what kids in the backseat of their cars do when their parents take them for a drive and it takes too long to get where they’re going?”

  “No, I don’t. I’ve never been in a car. What do they do? Take a nap?”

  “They start whining: Are we there yet?”

  Gustav blinked. “Isn’t that a silly question, though? Don’t they realize that they wouldn’t still be in the car, driving down the road, if they’d already arrived at wherever they were going?”

  Fernie allowed herself a slow count to five. “Gustav. That’s not the point. Isn’t it time we started heading for the Dark Country?”

  He thought about that for a second. “You’re right. We’ve had enough practice. It’s time to get this show on the road.”

  Well past time, Fernie thought, but she didn’t say that out loud.

  “The problem,” Gustav said as he led her back to the little central room with the control panel, “is that while we clearly know how to get to different places, we haven’t yet figured out which setting goes to the Dark Country, or better yet the Dim Land just outside the Dark Country that Hieronymus talked about. It’s not the kind of thing we want to figure out by trial and error. That would take forever.”

  “Doesn’t the instruction book get into that?”

  “No, not any more than the instruction book for driving a car would also list the directions to every single solitary place you could ever want to drive it. We need the actual directions to where we’re going, and that’s something we haven’t found yet.”

  Fernie’s heart sank a little. “But they could be anywhere!”

  “Not really.” Gustav picked up the heavy padlocked toolbox and placed it on the stool. “The good news is that Grandpa Lemuel would want to keep all the important navigation information close to him while he was flying the carousel anywhere, so I’m pretty sure that the proper number combination that will send us to the Dark Country must be written down in here. The bad news is that we don’t know where he left the key to open it. That could be anywhere in the house.”

  This was getting worse with every second. “There must be some way to break it open.”

  “If it were a normal toolbox, sure. Unfortunately, we’re talking about a man capable of building a Cryptic Carousel. I don’t think I want to risk breaking open any of the locked boxes he left lying around. He might have given this one some way to defend itself.”

  “So we need the key,” said Fernie.

  “Again, sure. It’s possible that my grandfather put it in his pocket the last time he left this room and stored it someplace where we’d never find it in a million years. But I think it’s more likely that it’s hidden somewhere on the carousel itself. But where?”

  The two friends shared a few moments of baffled silence, and then spoke in unison: “One of the animals.”

  They got up and left the little control room and started working their way around the carousel, trying to figure out if any of the animals seemed an obvious hiding place. They looked at the rearing brown horse, the amoeba, the octopus-headed man, the leaping fish, the dolphin, the sea horse, the giant crab, the gorilla, and even at the dull benches, but none of them seemed more likely a hiding place than any other.

  After a few seconds they began a physical search, beginning with the gorilla, a big male saddled in the act of belligerently beating his chest. His big fanged mouth was wide open, but no key presented itself in there. Nor were there any keys anywhere on his back, on his arms, or in the stirrups of his saddle. Gustav probed every inch of the great beast looking for a hidden compartment, but found nothing. Nor did Fernie when she stood on the animal’s back and shimmied up the pole, all the way to the carousel ceiling. Just checking every possible place around the gorilla took five minutes, which meant that it would likely take hours to check every other animal around them, with no guarantee that there was any key to be found.

  Gustav and Fernie had just moved on to the giant saddled crab when Harrington suddenly meowed in his carrier.

  There was nothing unusual about Harrington meowing in his carrier, as he usually meowed quite a bit whenever he was in it, but this particular meow made Fernie wonder whether it might not have been better and kinder to leave him at home.

  That thought led to the next logical thought, a mental image of her house’s ugly Fluorescent Salmon color, and that made her look at the leaping fish on the carousel.

  She considered Gustav’s grandfather the very definition of a genius if ever there was one. A man like that would be proud of being clever; he would do little things just to keep himself amused, even if he never shared the joke with anybody else.

  Behind her, Gustav said, “What are you looking at?”

  She exhaled and realized that for several seconds now she’d been forgetting to breathe. “Gustav? Is that fish supposed to be a salmon?”

  He turned his head to look at it. “You mean like the color of your house? I don’t know.”

  “Is it possible that the fish is supposed to be a salmon?”

  “I guess. I wouldn’t know. I’ve never seen a salmon.”

  Fernie stood up, hands on hips, staring at the giant, saddled, leaping fish. She thought of images she’d seen in nature documentaries, of fish that looked very much like that one leaping up white-water rapids to reach the spawning grounds upstream, while hungry grizzly bears stood on rocks swatting at them, hoping for lunch. After a moment of struggling to find some reason why not, she said, “It’s jumping out of water. I think I’m right. I think it is supposed to be a salmon.”

  “Okay,” said Gustav. “So it’s supposed to be a salmon. Why is that important?”

  “The key’s there,” Fernie said.

  She ran right over to the giant leaping fish and started to search. There was no key in its gaping mouth, no key anywhere on its saddle or its slick, scaly skin. Had she not been absolutely certain that the key had to be somewhere on the salmon’s body, she might have given up and moved on to the next closest merry-go-round animal, but she could feel the key somewhere nearby, even if she couldn’t see it. After several minutes, she discovered a barely noticeable slot on top of the salmon’s head that looked just like the kind of slot she would have expected to find on a coin bank. It was exactly the kind of slot you would drop a key into when you wanted to put it away after using it.

  A few seconds later she discovered that the salmon’s eyes, unlike the gorilla’s eyes, weren’t part of the carving, but separate objects that rolled in their sockets.

  She pressed both eyes at the same time and was rewarded with the metallic clink of a small object dropping from a hidden storage space inside the head and being deposited in the fish’s mouth for her convenience.

  She reached in and removed a shiny brass key.

  She didn’t have to tell Gustav, because by now he was standing next to her, his somber little face trembling with what was as close as he ever came to celebration. “What did it being a salmon have to do with anything?”

  Fernie stared at the key as if she’d never seen one before. “Your grandfather was making a little pun. Hieronymus told us to think breakfast. Well, do you know one name for the little pieces of salmon that some people eat for breakfast?”

  “No,” Gustav said patiently. “I told you already. I’ve never seen a salmon. What’s one name for the little strips of salmon that some people eat for breakfast?”

  “Lox,” Fernie replied.

  She was deeply satisfied, just this once, to be the one who made Gustav’s jaw drop open instead of being the one whose jaw dropped open at something he had said.

  The two friends ran back to the little round control room, where Fernie slipped the key into the padlock on the toolbox. It was a very old lock that must have stiffen
ed up a little since the last time it was used, because it resisted the very idea of being influenced by something as intrusive as a key, but all Fernie had to do was rattle the key a little, and the padlock suddenly decided that it wasn’t an argument worth having. The padlock popped open and hung from its little loop, waiting for either Gustav or Fernie to take the next step and remove it.

  For several seconds, neither did.

  Gustav said, “Fernie, I don’t know what’s in there.”

  She said, “Isn’t that why we have to open it?”

  “Yes. But you know the way things tend to work in my house. We can find anything in there. It could be something wonderful and it could be something terrifying. We need to be ready for anything.”

  “There’s only one thing that would be terrible,” Fernie said.

  “What?”

  “If it’s nothing. If Hieronymus lied . . .”

  There was no real point in finishing the sentence. They both knew that if the chest was empty, or if it contained nothing but tools, then their chances of pulling off a successful rescue any time soon had just plunged to some place terribly close to zero.

  Hope could be inches away, but the same was just as true of absolute despair.

  Gustav’s hand trembled as he reached for the open padlock, lifted it free of its latch, and placed it on the shelf in front of all the big black books. He placed his hands on the box, took a deep breath, and started to open the lid.

  This, right away, seemed to be a very bad idea.

  The lid flung itself open with a bang, exactly as if something very powerful and very irritated had chosen that moment to kick it open from the inside.

  A black storm erupted from the chest.

  It was as if a thousand thunderstorms and one unusually powerful sandstorm had all been packed together in a tiny space for so long that they’d gone half-mad and could only spill over one another in their desperation to be free.

  The wind was enough to knock Fernie flat on her back. Gustav, who’d been facing the box when it flew open, was hit harder. The force of the black storm’s escape was powerful enough to lift him off his feet and fling him against the control-room wall, where he stuck with his arms and legs pinned by the sheer pressure of the storm’s escape.