He put the pen down, put his hands behind his head, and stared into the darker spaces of his personal library.
“I’m just not sure it’s worth doing,” said a voice just like his—a voice that Fernie suddenly realized came from the shadow whose memories these were.
“Don’t be silly,” the boy said. “Anything that can be done is worth doing. That’s why it can be done in the first place. That’s why people are not still living in caves.”
“Your parents already think you’re crazy,” the shadow warned. “The other children all call you a lunatic because they’ve caught you talking ‘to yourself’ so much. If you now spend years and your part of the family fortune constructing a vehicle to a world none of them even believe in, they’ll all think you’ve gone totally crackers.”
The boy didn’t seem upset by this. He seemed to regard what the shadow had told him as old news, so much a part of his life that it was no longer worth arguing with. “I’ll just have to prove them wrong.”
“They’ll put you in a crazy house.”
The boy showed the shadow version of himself a genuine affection as deep as any a boy had ever shown for a beloved brother, uncle, or father. He was a handsome boy, with dark heavy-lidded eyes and a firm jaw and a complexion that might have tended toward the pale, but still showed signs of recent time in the sun.
Except for the “recent time in the sun,” he looked very much like an older version of Gustav Gloom.
“They’ll only make trouble about me being crazy if I devote my life to something they can call crazy.”
The shadow said, “But if you’re building your vehicle—”
“I can build my vehicle while doing all the things I was going to do anyway. I’ll complete my education, take over the family finances, find a woman I can love, raise children I love with her, and in short do all the things a good man does. But whenever I have a few minutes, I’ll tinker with something that looks like a toy, something that my family will consider an elaborate hobby. They won’t consider that crazy. They’ll just consider that endearing, even lovable.”
“They’ll consider it eccentric.”
“Yes,” the boy said with a grin: the grin of a mischief-maker who has just conceived the greatest practical joke anybody ever imagined. “But it’s okay to be eccentric.”
The shadow-memory went away, as the others had, following the black storm into the open air. Fernie gasped, not because another pebble chose that moment to hit her on the head but because she now knew exactly what the black storm was and what it had been doing trapped in the tool chest for all those years.
She looked over her shoulder and saw that the storm had congealed still further, now looking more like the shadow of a man than ever: a man whose photograph she had seen, and whose Cryptic Carousel had taken her to this terrible place.
She cried out, “You’re Lemuel Gloom!”
The shadow had gained some control of himself, and now looked a lot more like a man than the raging storm he had been a few seconds before, but he was still rippling at the edges, apparently so traumatized by his many years in the tool chest that it cost him serious effort to keep his shape together. “Lemuel Gloom’s dead,” he said flatly. “He was an old man who had lived a good life, a man who had brought nothing but honor on the name of his family and joy to all who knew him, but the years caught up with him the same way they eventually catch up with all of your kind. I’m only a poor shadow who got betrayed, not long afterward, by someone that old man had been foolish enough to trust—and who has spent all the years since then imprisoned in terrible silence and darkness. Now,” he said, “now that you know who I am,” he continued, his voice rising to a near-shout, “who are you, Fernie Whatsir, and this boy Gustav, to think you have the right to play with the great thing Lemuel Gloom created?”
Under any other circumstances, Fernie might have been too frightened to answer. But that’s when something happened to restore her voice: a distant scream.
She looked up and saw a tiny black boy-shaped speck, arms and legs flailing as if hoping to achieve flight, plummeting toward her.
She only had time to shout a few words, but she made them count.
“He’s not just Gustav! He’s Gustav Gloom! He’s the grandson Lemuel never knew and Lemuel would not want him to die!”
Suddenly things started happening . . .
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Terrible Truth about Silverspinner
Gustav performed a number of activities, like running and climbing and fighting the occasional monster, quite well.
But there were some things he didn’t do all that much better than anybody else . . . among them, he now discovered, falling off mountains.
He had from time to time demonstrated to Fernie that he actually liked falling great distances, as long as he could count on there being a soft landing instead of a hard one. But he really couldn’t be sure that the webbing that had caught the Cryptic Carousel without damage would be able to accomplish the same feat when catching a falling ten-year-old boy. Boys, even halfsie boys, were not as sturdy as flying machines and easier to break. Even into a net, a face-first plunge from many hundreds of feet up was likely to hurt, at the very least.
So for all the terrific feats he had pulled off with Fernie watching, he fell pretty much the same way any fully human boy would have fallen, which is to say thrashing his arms and legs and screaming his little head off.
He went on screaming even after he’d fallen most of the distance and a sudden inexplicable blast of air, strangely darker and angrier and yet more welcoming than the face full of wind that had been ballooning his cheeks since he’d started this journey, erupted from somewhere below him and started to slow his fall.
This was odd . . . which was, in a strange way, rather comforting, because most things in Gustav’s life were odd. The most unexpected thing that ever could have happened to him was a day where nothing odd happened.
Still, even Gustav was surprised to see Fernie caught up in the same wind, and shouting something about grandfathers.
The wind buffeted him and Fernie, slowing both to a stop mere feet above Silverspinner’s web. Then the black storm broke apart all at once, just in time to safely deposit both Gustav and Fernie on their feet.
This was exactly last on the short list of things Gustav had ever expected to happen if he ever fell off a mountain.
He blinked. “That was interesting.”
“More than you think!” said Fernie, gesturing at the black storm as it tried to pull itself together into the shape of a man. “That’s—”
“I’m sure it’s something I need to know,” Gustav said, “but we don’t have time.”
He reached into his jacket pocket and took out the broken dial, which he’d managed to retrieve and had been keeping safe throughout what had been a hair-raising several minutes of being chased all over the mountainside. “We have to get this back to the carousel before Silverspinner reaches us!”
As sensible as this point was, Fernie was still bursting with her news. “But, Gustav, he’s—”
The air rang with a terrible sound from high above: the frustrated screams of Silverspinner, racing down the side of the cliff face even faster than Gustav had managed to fall.
Silverspinner was still too far away for the two friends to see the spider-crone’s face, but her shouting was already audible, and she seemed very put out.
“I think it’s time to run,” Gustav suggested.
This was, of course, also a sensible idea.
And so the friends ran, as they had run so many times before; as they had run from the Beast in the Gallery of Awkward Statues, and as they had run from the shadow eater on the balcony above the Gloom house’s grand parlor, and as they had run from the Four Terrors in the adventure that had started them on this journey.
They ran and the black storm stayed
with them, keeping pace as if determined to be over them whenever Fernie finally had time and breath to explain why it had suddenly decided to become an ally.
Gustav hadn’t lied before. He was perfectly certain that the reason was important to know. But he also knew how fast Silverspinner could move, from long minutes of being forced to climb higher and higher to stay out of her way, and he knew that neither he nor Fernie would be fast enough to stay out of her clutches if she got close enough.
He knew this because he hadn’t fallen off the mountain.
He’d found himself cornered against an outcropping with no easy handholds, had seen Silverspinner about to get him, and had jumped.
Had Gustav been like most people, this would have amounted to a deliberate leap to his death. But no—he’d jumped because staying where he was meant having only a second or two before getting eaten by a giant spider-crone, and jumping was a preferable alternative in that it gave him a few seconds longer to try to come up with a plan.
No actual plan had materialized on the way down, but that was okay. From all available evidence, it had been the right thing to do. Things had worked out just fine.
Of course, whether they would continue to work out just fine depended on if they managed to get back to the carousel before Silverspinner caught up.
He wasn’t entirely sure this was possible.
Even as he and Fernie ran, he glanced over his shoulder and saw the spider-crone stop by the same ledge where he’d told Fernie to wait for him. She paused and was planting all her legs against the rock for what seemed about to be a giant leap.
As far away as she was, even now, Gustav had no trouble determining that she’d be able to leap down to her web and overtake them, in at most one or two bounds, because whatever else she was, she was a spider, and spiders do that kind of thing.
So he shouted the only thing he could. “Fernie! Catch!”
He threw the dial, as if it were one of the plastic flying-disc toys that Fernie had introduced him to on one of his picnics with the What family, and was gratified to see Fernie catch it on the fly.
She shouted back, “What am I supposed to do with this?”
“Don’t wait for me! Fix the control panel and start up the carousel! I’ll distract Silverspinner to make sure you get away!”
She cried, “WHAT!?!?”
He didn’t wait to argue with her, but instead pivoted on his heel and headed back toward the cliff, intent on giving Silverspinner another target while Fernie fled to safety.
Her cries of protest echoed behind Gustav as he ran as fast as he could, the spongy web giving his strides bounce and making his run more like a series of leaps. He kept an eye on the cliffside and saw Silverspinner note his change of direction and change her mind about her own course. Instead of jumping, she just skittered down the rock, her spider-legs blurs beneath her as her more human arms clutched each other in hungry anticipation.
The very worst part of the sight was the mandibles at either side of her mouth, snapping together with impacts as loud as gunshots.
Gustav stopped running a short walk from the place where the webbing met the mountain, not because he’d run as far as he could but because he saw that Silverspinner was going to beat him to that spot anyway.
This she did, lowering herself to the web and advancing toward him with what amounted to wariness. Her fist-sized nostrils flared, and her row of bulging red eyes blinked, finally narrowing to determined slits when she was less than ten feet from him and towering over him like a small house.
She said, “Silverspinner does not understand.”
“Well,” Gustav replied, his voice ragged and out of breath but betraying no fear at all, “maybe you can tell me what you don’t understand and I’ll do what I can to explain it to you.”
“Silverspinner smells the blood of the one who hurt her, the one who took her away from her toys. She knows that blood is in you. It is what made her so afraid when she first sensed your return to this place. But the closer she gets to you, the more she smells other smells. The blood of the one who hurt her is not the only blood you have in your veins. How come your blood has changed?”
“You’re big and scary,” Gustav said, “but you’re also not all that bright if you’re too stupid to figure that much out.”
Silverspinner’s huge mouth-pincers snapped together angrily. “The one who hurt Silverspinner will answer her now if he wants to take another breath.”
Gustav took that breath, as deep and appreciative a breath as any he’d ever taken, because as long as it might have been his last, he knew that there was no harm in enjoying it. It tasted wonderful, the same way air always tastes early in the morning, when the dew rises and the breeze has not yet turned acrid with local traffic.
He let that air fill him and said, “I only see one possible explanation, Silverspinner. If I’m correct, the blood of the one who hurt you, the blood of the one who took you away from the people you considered your food and your toys, the blood of the one who brought you to this terrible place and left you here to be alone forever is in me, all right. Would you like to know why?”
Silverspinner snarled. “Tell Silverspinner.”
“His blood is in me because it was also in the blood of a good man, my father, Hans Gloom . . . and it was in him because, even before him, it was the blood of the great man who invented the Cryptic Carousel, the man who traveled to other worlds, and the man who found and defeated you. It’s the blood of my grandfather, Lemuel Gloom . . . and if you learned from your just punishment at his hands to be afraid of him, then you should show enough common sense to also be afraid of me.”
Silverspinner’s row of ten big red eyes, each less like a recognizable eye than a glass globe filled with swirly red ink, each blinked once in turn as she considered this information. For a second or two, she seemed unsure whether to charge or to run . . . and then a certain evil craftiness entered her expression, and something approaching a smile curved the part of her mouth that looked a little human.
She said, “But this Lemuel Gloom is not with you now, mmmm? No, he’s not. Lemuel Gloom is far away, is he not? Oh, yes, he is, tiny child; far away, or too old to help you, or dead. Lemuel Gloom is not here. You . . . are . . . alone.”
Her words hung in the air like daggers.
Then Fernie What said, “No, he’s not.”
Gustav hadn’t heard her coming up behind him, but here she was, taking her place at Gustav’s right side. Her hand sought and took his. She held the dial he had gone to such trouble to retrieve in her other, against her chest.
Gustav stared at her with outright horror. “Fernie, the whole point of a distraction is that you’re supposed to use it to get away!”
“I’m not stupid,” Fernie said. “I know what a distraction is. I don’t need you to explain it to me.”
“But then why didn’t you—”
“Shut up,” she suggested.
Gustav had never been the kind of boy who felt despair easily. He was, after all, the very boy who had, just a few minutes before, jumped off a cliff in the distant hope that it might work out for the best. But now he felt that terrible emotion welling up inside him, obliterating every ounce of hope he had.
After all, why wouldn’t he? Despite all his bluster to the contrary, he really did have no plan for defeating the monstrous spider-crone. He’d just thrown out a lot of hot words, hoping they would slow the monster down enough for Fernie to get to safety. But instead of taking advantage of that sacrifice, she’d returned to him, dooming not only herself but also her sister and their two fathers.
For a heartbeat, Gustav felt everything he had fought for trembling at the edge of a deep, dark hole with no bottom.
Then a voice he didn’t know said, “She’s not alone, either.”
A shadow Gustav didn’t know descended to stand before them all in the shape of a m
an. Only a few puffs of darkness, not yet gathered back from the untidy storm he had become, surrounded him, none of them larger than dimes.
What remained was the shadow of a robust young man, wearing a fine three-piece suit with a vest and a pocket watch on a chain. Despite his youth, he had a bald head and eyes surrounded with a generous fan of smile-lines. He also wore a light beard—gray because he was a shadow, but fiery red in the life of the actual young man—that flared to white points at both sides of his mouth.
Gustav knew that beard. Photos of the man who owned that beard graced the back covers of a number of books on Gustav’s shelf. They had entered the family collection by the simple method of being owned by the very man who had written them. The photos Gustav owned all showed a man of far more advanced years—but a shadow could appear to be any apparent age he chose to be, and this shadow had chosen to be no older than thirty.
Gustav gasped. “Grandpa Lemuel!?!?”
Lemuel Gloom’s shadow was too busy staring down Silverspinner to meet Gustav’s astonished gaze. “You should know better than that, my boy. I’m not your grandfather. I’m just the shadow who traveled with him for a while. But I was with him, watching, during every great moment of his life. And you’re right, Gustav: You do have his blood. I saw it in you when you proved willing to sacrifice yourself to save your friend.”
Fernie gave Gustav’s hand a tight squeeze.
The towering Silverspinner had watched all this with a combination of bafflement and impatience that had kept her silent while both these unexpected reunions played out. She didn’t seem to have understood the parts about friendship, bravery, and loyalty, which were as alien to her personal experience as the bottom of the ocean is to a camel. But she’d also been able to pick from the large collection of ideas she didn’t understand one simple revelation she understood perfectly—and that gave her heart enough to raise her two foremost spider-legs in triumph. “Even the shadow man is not the one who hurt her. She is in no danger. Silverspinner can play with these new toys as much as she wants. She can eat one of the children and take her time playing with the other.”
Gustav Gloom and the Cryptic Carousel Page 10