Gustav Gloom and the Cryptic Carousel

by Adam-Troy Castro

  Though neither Gustav nor Fernie had touched the controls at all, the carousel music started up and the horses and fish and crabs and octopus-men and all the other creatures began to gallop around in a circle, the tinny music they made as they went seeming far too pleasant to go along with the screams the black storm made as it continued to erupt.

  Whatever the black storm was, it was alive and it was angry.

  “Free!” it cried.

  “All these years after being so cruelly betrayed—free!”

  “All these years of hammering against the walls—free!”

  “All these years, thirsting for revenge—free!”

  Fernie had the sense of years on end of cruel and painful imprisonment, in a space so small and dark that the worst jail ever built looked like a paradise. She tasted memories of an endless time spent hammering away at the jail’s walls, screaming for help, and gradually coming to hate first the friend responsible for this predicament and then the world itself for failing to provide a timely rescue.

  The black storm had just one ambition on its mind, only one:

  “Revenge!”

  Its anger felt different from the malice she’d seen in so many monsters she’d encountered since her first journey inside the Gloom house. Many of those beings had seemed to enjoy being evil, delighting in it because it was something they did well, in the same way somebody else might enjoy being able to play the piano. The black storm was in pain, terrible pain. Pain that had been building up for years and could do nothing else now but explode. It was not exactly evil, but the fury of a creature who had nothing left to lose.

  She crawled toward the box, hoping to slam it shut before the black-cloud creature, whatever it was, managed to complete its escape. A gust of hurricane wind put an end to that idea. She rose into the air and hit the ceiling, as pinned by the rising cloud and as unable to move as Gustav was.

  Outside the control room, the carousel sped up. The animals became streaks of brightly colored light, recognizable only in flashes. They suddenly seemed to be real creatures, galloping around in circles, as wild and as uncontrollable as a rhino or a leopard or a griffin would ever be expected to be. Even as she watched, the salmon seemed to leap past the door, its thrashing tail trailing arcs of river water behind it.

  The sky behind them flickered from light and then dark so quickly that the flickering resembled an old-time movie. This didn’t make sense, either, until Fernie saw that the black storm was making the dials on the control panel spin by themselves. The strange polka-dotted sky was already long gone, replaced by another world seen in darkness and then another one seen at noon and then another one seen at night and then another lit by light that could not have come from any sun.

  In seconds Fernie saw fire worlds, water worlds, upside-down worlds, and one world that she was actually happy to see go away because it looked like a gigantic close-up of a hairy nostril. She saw nothing she could have mistaken for the Dark Country, but also nothing she could have mistaken for Sunnyside Terrace. She and Gustav were being taken farther away from home, and from any chance to rescue her father and sister, with every moment.

  It was only now that she ran out of breath and realized that she’d been screaming for a while. That was unusual. She’d been very scared before and had never, before now, been so scared that she didn’t know she was screaming. Maybe this was an entirely new level of being scared, the kind of fright she had read about in books where people got so scared they lost their minds.

  She was afraid she would go mad herself, but then the toolbox slammed shut, the black storm blew past her, and she caught a glimpse of a tiny disc-shaped object tumbling out the doorway.

  The stool and the toolbox rose into the air, floating in the center of the room as if they weighed nothing; Fernie kicked away from the ceiling and found that she, too, suddenly weighed nothing and could float alongside an also weightless Gustav, as if the air around them were water and they were both just swimming in it.

  It was almost a relief now that the black storm seemed to be gone. At another time, with less at stake, she might have considered it fun.

  But then Gustav said, “Fernie?”

  She said, “What?”

  “Promise me you won’t panic?”

  She hated the way he delivered bad news one small piece at a time. “After everything we’ve been through together, when have you ever seen me panic?”

  “I can’t remember,” he admitted, drifting into the wall and then kicking away from it to return to her side. “But this is also about as bad as I can ever remember things getting for us.”

  She didn’t see why floating around in midair as they were was any worse than being chased by an inhuman ice-cream man or accidentally releasing a giant angry black storm from a toolbox. “Why? What’s happening?”

  “We’re falling.”

  “No, we’re not. We’re floating. Just look at us.”

  “I don’t mean only us,” Gustav said. “I mean the whole carousel. We’re someplace high up in the sky, and we’re falling.”

  Fernie whipped her head to the right in order to look out past the animals racing by just outside the door—and yes, she could see strange red clouds racing by in streaks against an even stranger bloodred sky. She and Gustav only seemed to be floating in air because they were falling at the same speed as the carousel around them.

  He was right.

  This was very bad.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Crash Landing and the Talking Gorilla

  Fernie screamed some more.

  This was not exactly panicking, because there are some situations in which screaming at the top of your lungs is clearly the most sensible thing to do.

  In fact, she had learned in the last few weeks that there were many situations in which screaming was also clearly the best thing to do. Sometimes, trying not to scream required so much of her concentration that she had no room left for thinking; but giving in and screaming herself silly still left plenty of room for figuring out what else to do.

  So she screamed, and even as she screamed immediately thought of the one logical way out of this predicament. All she had to do, she realized while screaming, was reach the control panel, spin the dials, and press the red button. The carousel would pop out of this place and pop into someplace else, someplace better than high in the air, falling through red skies.

  This, she decided while screaming, was a simple solution that made sense.

  But even as she turned her attention to the control panel, she saw an empty hole where the left dial had been, and remembered the white disk that had been caught up in the wind of the black storm and flown out the doorway when the black storm departed.

  All desire to scream went away, replaced by a terrible, cold dread. What she said next, she said very, very quietly: “Gustav? We broke your grandfather’s carousel.”

  “I saw that,” Gustav said. “I’m sorr—”

  The carousel crash-landed.

  Fortunately for them both, this wasn’t the kind of crash landing that amounts to an earsplitting clatter and everything breaking apart into a million pieces. In fact, it was less like crashing and more like being caught in a net. Their plunge seemed to slow and then stop. They bounced up again, just as hard; then fell again, not quite as far or as fast as they had before. Then they bounced back up again, a little bit, and fell again, a little bit. Finally, they bounced just barely enough to notice; and then fell just far enough for it to be barely worth mentioning.

  By the time the carousel completely stopped bouncing, Gustav and Fernie were tangled in a messy heap on the control-booth floor, dizzy from the wild ride and bruised from being bounced around, but just beginning to share the realization they had somehow emerged from this latest ordeal still alive.

  Gustav was the first to say anything. “Well, that was interesting.”

 
Of all the things Gustav could have uttered at that particular moment, that was quite probably the most infuriating. Fernie exploded. “That’s all you have to say? That it was interesting?”

  “It’s all I can say,” he pointed out, “when it’s all I know so far.”

  “You really don’t have any idea what that thing was? Or what it was doing in your grandfather’s toolbox?”

  “Aside from recognizing that it seemed to be a little irritated, nope.”

  She muttered under her breath and crawled out from under Gustav and a pile of fallen books, steadying herself against the empty shelves as she rose.

  Outside the opening to the control booth, the animals had stopped running in circles and now looked as much like the carnival-ride carvings as they had at the start, but they all bore a strange scarlet tint, matching that of the bloodred sky outside.

  The slice of this world she could see between the carousel floor and the carousel ceiling didn’t make much sense to her from this angle. She saw distant lightning, but heard no thunder. The sky raged with bloodred clouds, churning as if ready to storm at any moment.

  She took a step forward, stumbled over one of Gustav’s fallen books, and muttered angrily about the mess the thing from the chest had made, between the wind of its escape from the toolbox and the bouncing-around of the crash landing that followed.

  It looked, she thought, just like anything that hadn’t been nailed down had gone flying every which way.

  This quite natural observation made her heart jump in her chest.

  “Oh, no! Harrington!”

  She burst out from the control room and stood surrounded by animals frozen in midgallop, looking around wildly. Harrington’s carrier was nowhere to be seen.

  She found herself terribly certain that Harrington was gone forever.

  It was the latest loss in a day that had been full of them, a loss that she could not compare to the taking of her sister and father but that was one too many for her heart to bear. Her eyes started to burn. “Oh, Harrington . . .”

  An unfamiliar gruff voice a few feet away said, “Don’t worry, miss. I’ve got him.”

  She whirled, but saw nobody. “Harrington?”

  Somewhere not very far away, Harrington meowed. It was the same kind of meow he always used to protest human blindness, whenever somebody in the family was running about calling his name and he was, by his estimation, in plain sight watching the silly humans stumble about failing to see him.

  She followed his meow to its source, her search for Harrington’s carrier so intently focused on the floor that she walked right past the correct spot before the same gruff voice that had spoken up before—now originating from someplace right over her shoulder—snapped, “No, miss. Back here.”

  She spun on her heels, and for the very first time since leaving the control booth noticed something very, very important.

  The positions of the carousel animals had all changed; they were all still mounted on their vertical poles, but their arms and legs had shifted and were now all frozen in some other position, at some other moment midstride.

  The most notable of the changes involved the gorilla, who was now no longer attached to his pole and held Harrington’s cat carrier securely tucked under one powerful arm. Harrington peered out from the carrier, wearing the expression you would expect of any cat who had just been rescued by a carnival-ride gorilla. It was a highly specific expression, and anybody who’s ever owned a cat would have recognized it at once as the only expression it could have been:

  This is all your fault.

  The gorilla wore a different expression, a combination of exasperation and deep pride in a job well done. “Here, now. You going to take your pet back or what?”

  Fernie blinked. “You saved him.”

  “Of course I saved him. That’s what old Lemuel built me for, to rescue anybody in any danger of falling off the carousel while it’s in motion. Come on, come on, take your cat back. I can’t just stand here holding him all day.”

  Fernie reached for Harrington’s cat carrier, relieved despite herself when the gorilla loosened his grip enough for her to slide it free.

  Once she had the cat carrier in her hands, she said, “Thank you.”

  The gorilla said nothing. He was just a motionless carousel animal again, frozen in midstep like the rest of them. Fernie waved her hands over his eyes, just to see if she could get any reaction from him, but he didn’t even blink.

  Gustav, who had followed Fernie from the control booth and had caught the entire exchange, shook his head. “My grandfather was a very strange man.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Fernie. But she wasn’t done. She tilted her head for a moment as she studied the mute and frozen ape before her, then slid Harrington’s carrier back under the gorilla’s arm.

  The gorilla’s grip immediately tightened to protect Harrington. Simulated life returned to his bestial face, and he inquired, “Is there some kind of problem?”

  “I just wanted to thank you.”

  The gorilla rolled his eyes. “That’s not necessary, miss. I wasn’t going to let anything happen to your cat. I’m a robot gorilla, not a robot monster.”

  “You didn’t seem to hear me when I said thank you the first time.”

  “I heard you. I’m just not built to waste your time by saying ‘you’re welcome.’ I’m like the rest of this lot—built for one thing and one thing only, all to make your ride on the Cryptic Carousel a safer and more enjoyable experience.”

  Fernie felt a surge of excitement. “So the rest of these animals—they all come to life when they have to?”

  “Sure, they do,” the gorilla replied, as if this were the most evident thing in all the world. “Did you really think a great man like Lemuel Gloom would think to build himself a vehicle for traveling to far-off worlds and other planes of existence without putting in some systems to take care of things in case emergencies came up? Don’t be silly. All of us are built to do something, from fire extinguishing to insulting unpleasant visitors. Even the benches over there were built with a specific purpose in mind.”

  Fernie glanced at the wooden benches, which again struck her as only the lamest possible way of riding a carousel that anybody had ever considered. “Such as?”

  “They’re to sit on,” the gorilla said. “Come on, can you take your cat now? He’s not exactly the lightest feline in the world.”

  On cue, Harrington released the most indignant meow of a life that had known more than its share of indignant meows. That’s a lot, as most cats spend at least part of their day letting everybody around them know that they have just found fault with something, and Harrington had always been a particularly judgmental feline in that regard. His meow now seemed to be a heartfelt complaint about the indignity of being called fat by a gorilla.

  Gustav covered his mouth with one hand.

  Fernie felt a blush spread across both cheeks. It’s sometimes strange the way people react to little things when there are more important matters to concern them. For all she had to worry about now, including the black storm that had escaped from the toolbox, the strange red sky of this place where they now seemed to be stranded, and all the obstacles to fixing the carousel and getting on with the rescue mission, she found herself strangely embarrassed that a talking robot carnival-ride gorilla had just called her cat fat. She could still feel her blush burning on her face as she once again took the carrier out from under his arm, returning the ape to immobility.

  She placed Harrington’s carrier by the gorilla’s thumbed feet and said to Gustav, “You laughed. Don’t try to deny it.”

  “I never laugh,” Gustav protested. “I don’t even smile.”

  “Right. Where are we, anyway?”

  “I dunno. Let’s take a look.”

  The two friends took a walk around the carousel’s edge, just to see where
they’d crash-landed.

  Unfortunately, the world where they’d landed didn’t make any sense from any angle Fernie could see.

  The carousel had fallen into a soft pink material that looked a little like cotton candy stretched out to form a net about the size and shape of a football field. All four of the net’s corners were tied, or attached in some other way Fernie couldn’t see, to gigantic rocky pillars that rose from impenetrable mists far below and continued to rise, farther than she could hope to see, into the red and cloudy sky high above. The material that made up the net between them was flexible stuff, whatever it was. The center, where the carousel had landed, sagged underneath its weight, and every step Gustav and Fernie took on the carousel’s turntable made the net ripple in all directions, while the carousel itself bobbed like a quarter dropped on the floor of a bouncy house.

  A flock of birds, or something else capable of flight, circled high above, their exact distance hard to judge because it was impossible to tell how big they were. They had batlike wings and long tapering tails. They might have been dragons. Fernie got the impression that she wouldn’t want to see one up close.

  Nor did she want a closer look at the creature that clung, apparently sleeping, to the farthest of the four rocky cliff faces. It wasn’t hanging on the side facing the net, but just around the curve of the cliff, so only part of its broad, curved, and very hairy back protruded from behind the rock, slowly inflating and deflating as it snored away in what Fernie could only hope would turn out to be a very, very long nap.

  From the small part Fernie could see, the creature seemed to be considerably larger than Fernie’s house. Of course, for all she knew, once that thing woke up and got around to investigating this side of the cliff for food, that curved, hairy back could very easily be revealed as a much smaller part of its body, like maybe a fingertip.