Gustav Gloom and the Cryptic Carousel

by Adam-Troy Castro

  “She can try,” Lemuel’s shadow said, without much concern. “But before she does, can I tell these children how much she’s been lying to them?”

  This was a new development that made the giant spider-crone rear back, affronted. “Silverspinner didn’t lie!”

  “Maybe she didn’t realize she lied,” Lemuel’s shadow conceded. He gave a little shrug, along with a dismissive wave of his hand. “That’s usually the way, when somebody’s also lying to herself. But I heard enough of the story you told Fernie to understand that you don’t remember it quite the way it happened.”

  “There is nothing wrong with Silverspinner’s memory!”

  “Oh really. What did you tell Fernie again? That you lived on a mountain and ruled the people of the villages around it, eating one occasionally and the rest of the time forcing them to do whatever you commanded? That they were your toys and your slaves and your food, helpless before you until Lemuel Gloom arrived on his carousel, defeated you, and brought you to this place where you’ve been imprisoned ever since?”

  “That is what happened!”

  “It’s how you choose to remember it,” Lemuel’s shadow declared. “But you deserve to remember it the way it really happened.” He glanced down at Gustav and Fernie, offered both a warm smile, and said, “And before you even try to make a meal of them, both of these brave children deserve to know the truth, too.

  “You see, my dear Gustav Gloom and Fernie Whatsir, it is true that for too many years, Silverspinner lived on her mountaintop, enslaving and preying on the people of the villages below. It’s also true that she was the bane of their lives, and that they knew no peace as long as she lived above them, forcing them to obey her whims even as she took their best and strongest to feed her belly. But what she hasn’t told you is that she was once one of thousands of creatures exactly like her, who ruled that entire world and all the people on it as brutally as she ruled her own little part of it.

  “What she hasn’t told you is that by the time we passed over that world on Lemuel’s carousel and swooped down to take a look, those brave people had decided they’d had more than enough of living under such a reign of terror, and decided to fight back.

  “What she hasn’t told you is that they fought a long and determined war to free themselves, beating her kind back one brave step at a time.

  “What she hasn’t told you is that she was the only one of her kind left . . . and that when we showed up, she was hiding in a cave, afraid to come out because all of the people of the villages she’d victimized were gathered outside, arguing about which one deserved the privilege of being the one to finish her off.

  “In short, children . . . Gustav’s grandfather Lemuel didn’t defeat Silverspinner. She was already defeated.

  “He didn’t hurt her. He just shot her with a dart so she’d go to sleep.

  “He didn’t bring her to this world to punish her. He brought her to this world where there was enough food for her to eat, because she’d only been doing what was natural for creatures of her kind, and he thought it would be more merciful to let her live out the rest of her long life in peace.

  “What she hasn’t told you, children, is that Lemuel Gloom was not just a brilliant man but a kindhearted and compassionate one. Despite everything she’d done, he never considered himself her enemy.

  “Lemuel Gloom did what he did because, even though she was a monster, he felt pity for her.”

  What followed was a moment of awful silence, as everything Gustav and Fernie had experienced over the last couple of hours suddenly rearranged itself in their heads to form a different and much sadder shape.

  But that only lasted a second.

  Then the weight of everything Lemuel’s shadow had said landed on Silverspinner’s back, and she screamed, not in anger or fury or even hunger, but in actual pain.

  “No!” she shrieked. “No one feels pity for Silverspinner! No one feels anything for Silverspinner but fear!”

  She leaped at them, her furious claws spearing downward.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Even Less Pleasant Thing Waiting Far Below

  Lemuel’s shadow yelled, “Now, children! Run!”

  He flew at Silverspinner’s face, covering her many eyes and, for the moment, blinding her. It threw off her charge, so the sickle-shaped claw at the end of her leg sliced through the air over Gustav’s head.

  Another downward slash from another of Silverspinner’s legs ripped through the webbing at Fernie’s feet, cutting a ten-foot trench in it that was almost more terrible than a direct hit might have been . . . because it had cut through her thin webbing entirely and revealed what lay beneath it: a bottomless fall ending in more churning red clouds.

  Something terrible moved just beneath those clouds, something with a shape those clouds almost completely hid from view, something with restless spiked tentacles that looped around in curves big enough to swallow entire human neighborhoods. It was so horrible that Fernie didn’t want to look at it, but it was so big she couldn’t turn away, and without thinking found herself taking a step toward the hole . . .

  Gustav tugged her shirt and pulled her away, breaking the spell. “Didn’t you hear what he said? Come on!”

  She spared one last glance at the battle between Silverspinner and Lemuel’s shadow. Lemuel’s shadow wasn’t doing the giant spider-crone any damage, but he was terrifying her with his constant charges at her eyes; and she wasn’t doing him any damage, either, her desperate swipes and slashes passing through his transparent form as harmlessly as any solid object passing through a cloud.

  Even so, their battle was still so savage and uncontrolled that Silverspinner’s razored claws, thrashing in every direction in a failed attempt to strike this creature she could not touch, ripped even more gouges in the web below.

  Fernie wasn’t willing to leave Lemuel’s shadow behind any more than she’d been willing to leave Gustav, but even as she hesitated for lack of anything useful to do, she saw a couple of those gouges tear themselves a little wider without Silverspinner’s help.

  Fernie felt her stomach lurch with terrible realization.

  Silverspinner had cut through some vital threads.

  Her web—the web they were all standing on—was ripping itself to pieces.

  “She can’t hurt him!” Gustav cried to get Fernie to move. “He’s only giving us a chance!”

  That was all Fernie needed to hear. She turned her back on the battle and joined Gustav on their shared flight across the webbing, which seemed to grow looser and spongier with every second.

  A ripple passed under her feet and bounced Fernie high in the air. She shrieked, traveled higher and faster than she ever would have dreamed possible, hit the loose web in a roll, and was up on her feet again within seconds.

  “That looked fun,” said Gustav, who’d kept up.

  “I’m not having fun!” Fernie cried.

  “Later, you’ll say you were!”

  Fernie would have hotly denied this, but even as she ran realized that she might well live to misremember this experience the same way Silverspinner misremembered her encounter with Lemuel Gloom. But right now it all reminded her of every bad dream she’d ever had about the ground falling to pieces beneath her feet.

  The carousel loomed ahead, trembling as the ripples passing through the web made it bob up and down like a boat in heavy water. It seemed impossibly far away. Fernie risked a glance over her shoulder and saw fissures spreading and splitting across the web with every second, the terrible red clouds below visibly turning violent as that gigantic tentacled whatever-it-was down below grew excited at the prospect of the creatures on it falling through and providing it with a meal.

  Lemuel’s shadow had broken away from the fight and was speeding low over the remains of the web, with a speed that only a shadow could attain. Not far behind him, Silverspinner hopped
off her back and started to give chase. Because of what he was, Lemuel’s shadow ran far faster than even a giant spider-crone ever could, but Fernie could tell it was going to be close.

  “Start it up!” Lemuel’s shadow cried. “I’ll be right there!”

  The spider-crone’s voice, crazed and enraged and as mad as a jar of hornets, screeched, filling the alien air: “Silverspinner hates them all! Silverspinner will eat them all! She is not something to be pitied! No, she’s not!”

  Gustav was first to reach the carousel, which lurched just as he got on, tossing him over the unicorn’s back. Fernie got there a few steps later, racing past him just as he hit the floor rolling. Another ripple made her stumble as she passed the upright gorilla. Harrington, once again secure in his carrier under the gorilla’s arm, yowled at her, making the cat sound for “A fine owner you are, leaving me in a fix like this!”

  “You almost lost him again!” the gorilla scolded her. “The carousel is bouncing around so much the carrier almost went flying over the side! If I hadn’t caught him, he would have been done for!”

  Fernie tried to steady herself against the salmon’s pole, fell again when another terrible shudder shook the entire structure, and stood just in time for Gustav to snatch the dial from her hand and dart the rest of the way to the carousel’s control room.

  The next few seconds were filled with the sound of Gustav hammering the dial back into place as Fernie rose and watched the scene outside, praying for Lemuel’s shadow to make it to safety in time.

  Large sections of the web now hung in tatters, the rips spreading and spawning new rips that in turn spread even more. One of those caught up with Silverspinner, creating a great empty space beneath her. Shrieking, the giant spider-crone fell through the hole—but then pulled herself back up, her inhuman face twisted into the most bitter snarl Fernie had ever seen.

  “Silverspinner . . . will . . . not . . . be . . . pitied!” she cried, her pincers snapping. “Silverspinner . . . will . . . be . . . feared!”

  Not far ahead of her, Lemuel’s shadow flitted aboard the carousel, slipping between the animals with the grace of a being who had ridden here so many times that he could have tracked their relative positions even with his eyes closed. “Fernie Whatsir! Why haven’t you and Gustav taken off yet?”

  “We were waiting for you!” she managed.

  “That’s silly. You’re people, not shadows. You can die. You should always run if a shadow gives you a chance to run.” He cried out, “Gustav, my boy! Don’t you have that dial back in place yet?”

  There was more hammering from the control room. “Almost!”

  “Almost?! What kind of answer is al—”

  The entire structure shuddered, and not in a good way, not in any way that would have indicated that the carousel was ready to take off. It shook the way something like it shakes when a giant spider-crone leaping half the length of a football field crashes into that vehicle from above. “Silverspinner remembers this toy! Yes, she does! This toy brought her to this terrible place! Now this toy will take her back to the world she came from, so she can eat all the nasty little things who—”

  The entire carousel tilted to one side, slipping through another giant rip in Silverspinner’s web. For long seconds it dangled on edge, like a flipped coin stuck in a crack in the sidewalk. Fernie screeched and tumbled toward empty space, clutching at carousel animal after carousel animal in a desperate attempt to save herself. A furry hand, the gorilla’s, snatched her by the back of her shirt, leaving her feet kicking and dangling above the terrible drop.

  Miles below, past the tattered remnants of Silverspinner’s disintegrating web, the scarlet clouds bubbled and boiled, and more impossibly huge tentacles broke the surface, reaching for the tidbit the giant whatever-it-was expected to tumble into its grasp at any moment.

  Fernie had been in airplanes, flying over major cities. She had looked from a height like this height and seen the cities spread out like Erector Sets. Whatever that thing was down there, it was bigger than those cities. Its tentacles were like bendable skyscrapers that, even as far down as they were, might have been able to reach up and pluck the carousel from the sky.

  Of course, in a second or two, those tentacles wouldn’t have to strain themselves all that much. The carousel was about to fall into their clutches.

  This was bad enough, but then a head that was itself bigger than anything Fernie had ever seen rolled over in the clouds, surfaced like a whale coming up for air . . . and an eye the size of a battleship opened.

  Fernie refused to absorb any detail about that eye except that it saw her and that she really wished it had not. People sometimes tell other people they have nice eyes. People had said this to Fernie. This was not a nice eye. This was a very, very, very, very evil eye indeed.

  Fernie yelled, “You know, this really would be a great time to get this thing moving!”

  “We’re working on it!” Lemuel’s shadow cried, somewhere high over her head. “Hold on!”

  Fernie was about to retort that hold on wasn’t exactly the most helpful piece of advice anybody could give her, in part because she was not holding on but being held on to by the robot gorilla. But then the carousel slipped through the hole in the web and started to fall.

  Fernie screamed as the terrible thing with the terrible eye reached up from the terrible clouds with its terrible tentacles for no doubt terrible reasons.

  Then there was a burst of brilliant light.

  She felt her thrashing legs hit the carousel floor, which was no longer at her side but beneath her. She blinked to see that the view out the side of the vehicle had changed. She could no longer see Silverspinner, or that immense octopus creature with that terrible staring eye . . . but instead, a bright blue sky over an ocean that might have looked just like any of the oceans on Earth, were it not bright pink.

  It was a shade of pink so over-the-top that Fernie was downright surprised that she’d never seen it used for any of the houses on Sunnyside Terrace. If the Gloom house could have been painted this shade of pink, Mrs. Everwiner would have immediately dropped all of her objections to the place. The pink sea rolled by majestically several hundred feet below, so clearly not part of the world with Silverspinner and that thing with the awful eye that Gustav’s next excited words, shouted from the control room, struck her as just a little bit insulting to her intelligence.

  He said, “We got it working!”

  She said the most sarcastic thing possible: “Really?”

  “Yes, really! We even have the hover switch set so we won’t fall like we did before. It’s going to be a great convenience!”

  Standing beside Gustav in the control room, Lemuel’s shadow added, “Yes, the old man added a lot of special features after he put together that instruction manual. It only mentions some of the things the carousel can do. I suppose I’m going to have to give the two of you some lessons if you’re going to continue riding around in this thing.”

  It was getting hard for Fernie to hold on to the fright that had overwhelmed her just a few seconds earlier; the ocean was just so beautiful, and the perfumed scent it gave off even this high up so relaxing, that she took a deep breath and allowed herself to think that everything was going to turn out all right after all.

  She took Harrington’s carrier from the gorilla, this time remembering to thank him first, sat down on the wooden bench, and let Harrington out. She looked out upon the ocean and enjoyed the quiet for as long as it lasted. She couldn’t be happy, not exactly; not with her father and her sister still in danger somewhere. But she wasn’t ready to go on to the next battle yet, and so she took comfort in the breeze and in the purr of her otherwise quite ruffled cat, and waited for the others to come out of the control room and join her.

  This they did as soon as they realized that she hadn’t come in to join them, both boy and shadow sitting on the opposite bench an
d waiting with growing concern for her to say whatever it was she had to say.

  She didn’t look at them, but instead continued to look out upon the water and watch the pink waves roll. After a moment, she said, “It looks like the medicine my dad drinks from the bottle whenever his tummy hurts.”

  Gustav said, “There’s such a thing as bright pink medicine?”

  “Yup.”

  “Really?”

  “Yup.”

  The boy who had taken an attack by a giant spider-crone as just another element of his daily life was strangely unnerved by this information. “Wow.”

  Fernie was still looking at the pink ocean. She asked Lemuel’s shadow, “You’ve been to this world before, right?”

  “Yes. I was with Lemuel on all of his journeys.”

  “Is that water down there?”

  “No, Fernie Whatsir. It’s something a lot stranger than water, and, unfortunately, it’s nothing you’d ever want to drink or swim in. But don’t worry; it acts like water, and won’t bother us as long as we stay at this altitude and mind our own business while we get our feet back under us.”

  “Okay,” said Fernie.

  A brief uncomfortable pause followed. Harrington hopped off Fernie’s lap and made his way to Gustav’s, purring especially loudly as his halfsie friend stroked his chin. He didn’t seem all that disturbed by any of the recent excitement, and he soon hopped off Gustav’s lap to join Lemuel’s shadow, sniffing him cautiously before closing his eyes and falling asleep by his new shadow friend’s side. Petting Harrington with a gentle hand that managed to ruffle his new friend’s fur without quite touching him, Lemuel’s shadow went on: “Now I have a question, Fernie Whatsir. How come neither you nor Gustav here have shadows? Did you leave yours somewhere?”

  “Back home,” Fernie said. “It’s kind of a long story.”

  “Ah. So’s mine. Who goes first?”

  Gustav said, “You can start with why you keep calling my friend Fernie Whatsir.”