Gustav Gloom and the Cryptic Carousel

by Adam-Troy Castro

  “I don’t think I’ll like that much,” said Fernie.

  “Silverspinner never cared much about what her toys liked or didn’t like.”

  Fernie pressed her back tighter against the narrow crack behind her, as if just wanting to squeeze into that space only an inch or so across could compress her body enough to make it possible. And then she heard the worst possible thing she could have heard: something breathing behind her.

  She couldn’t bring herself to hope it was Gustav, somehow contriving to find his way into the mountain and join her. She had already heard Gustav’s breathing at its most ragged, and this did not sound like him at all.

  This was something older, something larger . . . something that, from the sobbing quality of its breath, was not any happier than she was.

  Wonderful, she thought.

  She didn’t relish the prospect of being caught between two monsters.

  Outside, Silverspinner said, “Little thing has stopped talking. Little thing thinks Silverspinner hasn’t noticed. Silverspinner is smarter than little things.”

  The rock at Fernie’s back started vibrating, almost as if some horrible angry engine were revving up. She felt a wind from someplace deep inside the mountain begin to blow through the narrow crevice at her back, ruffle her clothes, and whip her hair around her cheeks. The gale grew so hot and thick that it felt more like warm liquid than air, and as it grew thick around her, she recognized it for what it was: the black storm from the carousel’s toolbox, which must have seized on the crevice as a hiding place as secure as the toolbox that had imprisoned it for so many years.

  By choosing the exact same crevice as her own hiding space, Fernie had disturbed the black storm a second time . . . and now was caught between two monsters.

  “Who are you?” the black storm whispered.

  The sheer pain in its voice was so horrifying that it was all Fernie could do to resist fleeing its rage and delivering herself to Silverspinner’s clutches. “I’m . . . Fernie What, sir.”

  “Fernie Whatsir? What kind of name is Fernie Whatsir?”

  Outside, Silverspinner took note of the conversation. “Who is in there with little thing? Silverspinner smells no one. Has little thing already gone mad and started talking to herself? Hmmm! That didn’t take much time at all!”

  Fernie didn’t know why, but she was suddenly very certain that it would be a bad idea to let Silverspinner know about the other presence sharing this crevice with her. “You’re right! I’ve gone mad! I’m talking to myself! It’s taken me even less time than it took you! Wheee! I’m crazy!”

  Silverspinner jabbed her long spider-leg into the crevice again, raising sparks as her pointed claw scraped against stone just a couple of feet from Fernie’s face. Pebbles flew. Fernie felt a sting as one of them struck her on the cheek. She blinked as some of the dust landed in her eyes. It occurred to her that maybe she wasn’t as safe from Silverspinner here as she would have liked to be. If the giant spider-monster could shatter the rock into pebbles, she could also keep hammering away at the crevice, making it wider and easier to reach into.

  Fernie didn’t have any idea how long it would take Silverspinner to pry her loose from the rock, but couldn’t imagine it being anywhere close to ten years.

  “Little thing should not talk to herself,” Silverspinner said. “That is not little thing’s purpose. Little thing is here to talk to Silverspinner.”

  Fernie almost babbled out of desperation to say the right thing. “I understand. I won’t talk to myself anymore. As long as I’m here, I’ll only talk to you.”

  “That is better,” Silverspinner declared. “Little thing might survive a little while, after all. Oh, yes, she might. But right now little thing needs to be quiet. Silverspinner smells the blood of the one who hurt her. Silverspinner needs to pay attention to the sounds he makes so she can go and eat him.”

  Fernie’s heart thumped with sudden, overwhelming fear for Gustav.

  Very little of what Silverspinner had said made sense to her. She didn’t understand how Silverspinner could possibly believe Gustav to be this “one who hurt her,” not when Gustav had already confirmed that he’d never seen the giant spider-crone before; and not when he had never traveled away from his house and yard, and therefore couldn’t have been the one to evict Silverspinner from her prior home. But the exact whys of it didn’t matter. Even if Silverspinner only believed what she believed because she’d gone mad, she had still mistaken Gustav for her mortal enemy . . . and Fernie couldn’t think of any way that even a boy with Gustav’s capabilities could defeat Silverspinner in a fair fight.

  Desperately, Fernie cried out the one thing always cried by kids who see their friends threatened by bullies: “Leave him alone!”

  “No,” said Silverspinner. “Not when Silverspinner sees him trying to sneak up on her. Silverspinner will go and eat him, and then decide what to do with little thing.”

  The narrow crevice shook. More pebbles fell, pelting Fernie on the head and cheeks. Scraping noises, the sound of Silverspinner scuttling across the cliff face, filled the tiny space, then went away, making it absolutely clear that the giant spider-crone had left. Soon the sound of Silverspinner’s voice faded, too, quickly becoming an indistinct murmur, muffled by distant and solid rock.

  Fernie knew that she couldn’t continue to hide while Gustav was in danger. She had to go after Silverspinner herself. At the bare minimum, she could help Gustav by distracting Silverspinner at a critical moment.

  But the black storm was not done with her.

  It had fallen silent during the last part of Fernie’s conversation with Silverspinner, but now it swirled around her again, impatient to resume their own pressing interview. It was more like the hot air of somebody breathing down her neck than an actual wind, except that it didn’t just breathe down her neck but instead blasted her on all sides. It was as dark as any shadow Fernie had ever encountered.

  “Not so fast, Fernie Whatsir!”

  “Please!” Fernie cried. “Whoever you are, I don’t have the time to talk to you right now. Gustav’s in danger!”

  “I don’t know any Gustav! Was he the halfsie boy on the carousel with you?”

  “Yes! That was him! You have to help him before she gets to him!”

  “He’s a halfsie boy poking around someone else’s property! He can fend for himself until I get my answers. Who are you, Fernie Whatsir? How did you get your hands on the carousel? Did he give it to you?”

  The black storm’s voice was a little like the angry harrumph that dark clouds always seem to make just before splitting the sky apart with lightning. It was the most furious, most damaged, most heartbroken voice Fernie had ever heard, and for the first time Fernie saw that it came from a face, an elderly, heavy-browed face that struck her as just within the borders of familiar. She got the impression that she might have been able to recognize that face if the cloud that formed it stopped churning, but the cloud kept shifting and twisting and distorting every time she thought she was close to an answer.

  Another hot gale blasted her face with the angry demand, “Tell me!”

  She could only answer with questions of her own: “You first! Who are you? What’s your name? How did you end up in that toolbox for us to find?”

  “I am the one asking questions!”

  Sometimes, Fernie had learned, when there’s too much around to be afraid of, fresh threats don’t have the power to frighten any further. So she just yelled, “I don’t care! I can’t answer you if I don’t even know what you’re talking about! Tell me who you are!”

  The black storm screamed in fury and blew a small hurricane at her face, one that for a heartbeat made her think that she was about to die. But as the wind filled her eyes and ears and made her cheeks puff out like balloons, Fernie realized that she was seeing pictures in it, pictures that were even now becoming movies in her
head. The terrible deafening wind in her ears, the cold press of rock against her back, the hammering of her own heart, and the horrible awareness that Gustav was still in danger all stayed the same. But all around them, and on top of them, was a memory so vivid, it was like she was there with it, watching it happen.

  It was the memory of a shadow . . .

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Hobbies Are Not So Crazy

  Fernie felt grass against her bare back.

  It wasn’t her own bare back, but the back of the shadow whose memory now played in her head. And yet it felt the same way summer grass always felt against her own back when she lay upon it on a beautiful sunny day: warm and cool at the same time, and wonderful, with every blade tickling her.

  It was such a realistic sensation that for what felt like long minutes lost in the vision she found herself treasuring the feeling, and wondering whether she’d ever get to experience it again. At the moment, it seemed unlikely. She was, after all, trapped in a cave in a strange world, between a giant hungry spider-crone and an angry storm cloud; and even if she ever got out of this place, she still had the Dark Country in her future. Warm summer days and beds of soft grass were a prospect so distant that it was possible she’d seen the last she would ever see of either.

  Then she realized that the shadow whose memory this happened to be was looking up at a young boy.

  For a moment she mistook the boy for Gustav Gloom. It was an easy mistake to make. The boy was about four years old and looked a lot like Gustav, down to the soulful eyes and button nose. But in other ways he wasn’t like Gustav at all. This boy with the bright sun shining behind him, with the spray of a lawn sprinkler making arcs behind him, wasn’t dressed in a formal black suit, as Gustav always was, but in bathing trunks, and his skin showed enough of a tan to establish that he spent a lot of his time in the sun. It glistened from recent time under the water, but he’d had enough of that for now and was busily playing a game that all small children played from time to time, one that Fernie was still not too old to play herself.

  He was making his shadow dance.

  He put his hands on his hips and then on top of his head and then stretched his arms out at his sides, just to watch his shadow do the same things.

  Fernie, looking up at him through the eyes of that shadow, felt a little of what that shadow felt: a deep patience mingled with love. The shadow had watched over this boy since the day he was born, and had come to consider him a younger brother of sorts. One who needed as much looking-after as the shadow could manage.

  The boy stuck out his hand and waggled his fingers. The shadow did the same. The boy jumped up and kicked both legs. The shadow did the same. The boy spun around, began to stop out of dizziness . . . and then instead of stopping, spun one last time before checking to see what his shadow was doing.

  This, against all odds, took the shadow by surprise. He reacted a fraction of a second too late—and the boy did what many adults would not. Instead of dismissing the evidence of his own eyes, he believed what he saw and collapsed on his butt in sheer astonishment.

  “You’re alive!” the boy exclaimed. “You can’t fool me! You’re alive!”

  Fernie knew exactly how wonderful and terrifying that discovery was, because it had only been a few weeks since she’d learned the same thing about her own shadow. But then, the boy in the memory was a childish four and she was a very grown-up, experienced, and wiser ten, so she supposed that it must have hit the boy a lot harder than it hit her.

  None of this told Fernie who the boy was or how his shadow had ended up trapped in a toolbox on the Cryptic Carousel. But then the black storm churned again, becoming for a moment just an angry cloud sharing this little crevice with her.

  Even if Fernie had wanted to see whatever it had to show her next, she had no time for it, not with Gustav in immediate danger.

  So she bolted, scrambled out of the little side alcove, and speed-crawled back to the ledge.

  When she reached the ledge she darted out of the way just before the black storm erupted from the crevice, exploding outward in its fury at being forced to chase her.

  The furious storm cloud flew twenty or thirty feet into open space before breaking apart, thinning in the way that flocks of blackbirds do when they decide all at once to change direction. Fernie watched as it came back together, spun, seemed to spot her, and launched itself back toward her, the furious but strangely familiar face popping out again as it led the charge.

  There was no time to search for Gustav or Silverspinner. Fernie had only a fraction of a second to pick a direction and go. So she leaped to her feet and began to climb, this time not concerning herself with safety, just focusing on putting as much distance between her and the pursuing storm as she could.

  That turned out to be not all that much.

  The storm blasted her back even as she clung to the rock.

  Another memory took shape.

  This time she saw through the eyes of the shadow as it hung on a wall at the top of a dimly lit set of stairs, overlooking an older version of the same boy as he sat on the first landing listening to two adult voices in the room below. There was a man and a woman, and they spoke some language Fernie didn’t know, but the shadow understood every word they were saying, and the boy clearly did as well. He was upset, clinging to the railings on the banister as if they were the bars in a cage, and holding back tears with what must have been heroic effort.

  The woman downstairs said, “. . . brain specialist.”

  The man downstairs said, “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I’m not saying he’s crazy, Josef. He’s a kind, generous, intelligent little boy. But he’s ten now. And it’s not normal for a ten-year-old boy to still have imaginary friends. Do you know how cruel the other children are? The names they call him?”

  The man grunted. “There is no problem with a boy having a good imagination.”

  “There’s a difference between having a good imagination and not knowing the difference between reality and make-believe. Our son doesn’t, Josef. He’s delusional. He needs help, and it’s only going to get worse if we don’t . . .”

  The memory faded as the black storm blew past Fernie and left her clinging to the rock, stunned by the sympathetic pain the shadow had felt for the strange little boy. She remembered how she’d doubted her own eyes the first time she’d seen a shadow move by itself, and knew how lucky she was to have a father who had seen the same thing with his own eyes and knew she wasn’t crazy.

  Fernie turned her head as much as she dared and saw that the black storm was behind her, looping around for another go. She could tell that it was moving far too quickly for her to even think of avoiding it. It would show her what it had to show her even if she scrambled up the cliffside faster than she’d ever climbed anything before. But she also saw that it had changed shape in the last few seconds. It had contracted, pulling in the cloud in order to form the vague shape of a man.

  This, for some reason, scared Fernie more than anything else that had happened so far, and she might have remained where she was, frozen by fear, if not for the handful of falling pebbles that chose that moment to land on her head.

  They were just grit, not heavy enough to hurt, but she automatically looked up to see where they came from and spotted the monstrous Silverspinner, so far above her that she didn’t seem all that much larger than any everyday spider. She was in close pursuit of a tiny, agile, black-suited figure that could only be Gustav Gloom.

  Gustav wasn’t doing nearly as well at staying ahead of Silverspinner as Fernie would have liked. He moved across the rock so quickly and so easily that he might have been part spider himself. But even a halfsie boy like Gustav was still only a boy, and Silverspinner, for all her madness, was so much more.

  Fernie’s heart broke at the realization that she would never be able to reach her friend quickly enough to make a diff
erence. She could only call to him, hoping that her voice would do some good: “GUSTAV! YOU CAN DO IT!”

  There was no way for her to tell whether her words had carried that far, or whether that small bit of encouragement had helped him.

  Then the black storm roared back, this time with a force that almost tore her free of the cliff. The wind made her shirt whip like a banner on its pole and ripped a gasp from her throat, even as another shadowy memory took over.

  Now the shadow whose eyes she saw through was in a vast book-lined room, trembling against a wall as the same boy, now older and in his teens, scribbled on a sheet of blank paper. The shadow wasn’t trembling because it was scared. It was trembling because the boy was writing by candlelight, making every shadow in the room dance with every flicker of the flame. Fernie could sense the shadow’s deep pride in the boy, a feeling that the boy was the seed of a great man.

  Whatever the boy happened to be writing, he’d written a lot of it. The stack of completed sheets beside the one he was writing on now was already two inches thick. He read his words aloud as he penned them, but only a few of them were enough to confirm that they didn’t add up to anything Fernie understood. They mostly seemed to be math, a higher and more complicated form of math than anything Fernie had ever learned in school, that didn’t even have any numbers she recognized. She supposed that many of the boy’s equations were years ahead of anything she’d learned yet, maybe even years ahead of anything she’d ever learn . . . and she was good at math.

  Finally, the boy lapsed from mathematics and back into English, ending a sentence that had begun with his dense calculations with the words, “and, for these reasons, there remains no reason why, with the construction of the proper vehicle, the world I speak of, and any number of others, cannot be within the reach of Mankind.”

  He jabbed the paper with the tip of his pen in order to make a particularly insistent period.

  “The. End.”