EPILOGUE
Meanwhile, at That Very Moment, as If Things Weren’t Already More Than Complicated Enough
It was late in the day during a beautiful summer afternoon on Sunnyside Terrace. Birds chirped, sprinkler systems made their little local rainbows, and the sun shone brightly on every surface in sight—if you didn’t count the perpetual cloud cover that shrouded the notorious mansion known as the Gloom house. There were even a couple of children playing outside, though most were indoors with their video games, because they couldn’t imagine that any part of their neighborhood offered anything more exciting to do.
The telephone in the house belonging to the What family had been ringing nonstop for about ten minutes about an hour ago, but then the ringing had stopped, and nothing else at all unusual had occurred until right now, when a taxi came around the corner and pulled to a stop in front of the Fluorescent Salmon home.
The woman who emerged from the backseat had shoulder-length glossy brown hair and bright green eyes. She had a light tan and wore a safari jacket, pith helmet, and flared jodhpurs; her only luggage, which she had not entrusted to the trunk and which she removed from the seat beside her, was a heavy-duty backpack jangling with tin pots, canteens, a sheathed machete, a roll of mosquito netting, a high-zoom camera, and a first-aid kit. Most people would not have been able to lift it, let alone carry it on their backs over hill and dale, but she slung it over her back, paid the driver, and regarded the house before her with profound irritation.
Her name was Nora What. She was wife to Mr. What, mother to Fernie and Pearlie, and she was irritated because her husband had agreed to pick her up at the airport at precisely 1:26 P.M. as a surprise for the girls, who hadn’t expected her to return from her most recent expedition for a couple of weeks yet. But her adventures had gone not just well, but quickly. The filming of her latest TV special had suffered none of the usual problems involving bad weather or local paperwork, and she’d been able to finish days ahead of schedule. Under the circumstances, she’d looked forward to flying home, greeting her husband, seeing how much her girls had grown, and—this was true—undoing whatever damage her husband had done to them with his endless worries about terrible accidents people could have if they didn’t pay attention to safety procedures during every waking moment. Strangely, though, Mr. What hadn’t showed up to the airport, and he hadn’t answered his cell phone or picked up any of her calls to the house. She’d taken the cab to the address where she knew the family had moved during her extended absence, and now stood there, blinking at the house as her taxi pulled away.
She hated the color right off. Mr. What had warned her that it was something called Fluorescent Salmon, and she had prepared herself for whatever hideousness that meant, but the sight was worse than she’d ever imagined, more horrifying than anything she’d ever seen—which was saying a lot for a woman who went swimming with crocodiles for a living.
That old, darker, shadow-shrouded old mansion across the way: that, by contrast, had character. She wondered who lived there and for a moment entertained the kind of thought that always occurs to people who work in television, when they see something that arouses their curiosity: namely, if it was interesting enough to fill an hour, with commercials. She imagined how excited the residents would be, if she showed up at their front door and explained how she wanted to walk through their house, on television. It never occurred to her that the people who lived there might not like that idea, because in her experience everybody wanted to be on television.
She had her first clue when its giant set of double doors slammed open and a large, garishly dressed woman with an ominously tilted hairdo and an unlovely little dog in her arms came barreling out, screaming at the top of her lungs. “It’s a madhouse! It’s a maaaaadhouse! It’s all shadows in there! It’s all shaaaaaaadows!”
Mrs. What watched with sheer drop-jawed amazement as the garishly dressed woman fled out the front gate of the old estate and across the narrow street, not stopping until she disappeared inside the front door of another house with a lawn marred by tire ruts.
“That was interesting,” said Mrs. What.
After a moment, she shrugged and went up to the front door of her own new family home. She rang the bell, which went unanswered. She knocked, to equal lack of response. Then, just as she was getting nicely frustrated, she tried the doorknob—and found to her surprise that it turned, opening up into a nice sunny living room with the kitchen/dining room off to one side.
“Hello?” she called. “Honey? Girls?” After a moment: “Harrington?”
Maybe it was a practical joke or something. Maybe they were all hiding in a closet, giggling to themselves as they prepared to leap out and give her a big scare.
She ran back to the central hallway, finding the two rooms that belonged to Fernie and Pearlie and the master bedroom her husband had set up during her absence. Even without the family photos all over the place, she would have recognized the house as her family’s just from the book tented upside down on the mattress in the master bedroom; after all, her husband was one of the very few people on the planet who would have read a manual of emergency safety procedures for relaxation. But nobody was home.
Returning to the front of the house, frowning with confusion and the first stirrings of genuine worry, she didn’t have any idea what to do until she glanced at the little breakfast nook, and at long last saw the envelope marked MOM in Fernie’s handwriting.
Relief lit up Mrs. What’s face as she rushed to rip open the envelope, expecting a wholly reasonable explanation. She was less sure when the envelope turned out to include not the brief note she expected but an entire stack of paper.
But how bad could it be, really?
The shadows gathered behind her as she sat down at one of the table’s four matched chairs and began to read.
Acknowledgments
You would not now be seeing this book without the persistence of agents extraordinaire Joshua Bilmes and Eddie Schneider of the Jabberwocky Literary Agency. You would not now be reading it in its present form without the input of the members of the South Florida Science Fiction Society Writers’ Workshop, a group that includes Brad Aiken, Dave Dunn, Dave Slavin, and Chris Negelein. You would not now be enjoying the same experience free of verbal land mines and other clutter without the ace red pens of copy editor Kate Ritchey and editor Jordan Hamessley. You would not now be oohing and aahing over the illustrations without the genius of artist Kristen Margiotta. You would not now be seeing any books from me at all without the patience, love, and constant encouragement of my beautiful wife, Judi B. Castro. You would not now be seeing a human being with my name and my face were it not for my parents, Saby and Joy Castro.
This time out I would also like to express my deepest admiration for the muses that first helped form mine: Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Sheckley, Harlan Ellison, Harry Harrison, Ray Bradbury, Rod Serling, Hugh Lofting, “Ellery Queen” (who is in quotes for a reason), and the great, tragic Charles Beaumont. As it happens, I also write these words not two weeks removed from the passing of one of the twentieth century’s great imaginations, a man whose footprints were huge and trail long: the great Richard Matheson. Long may his pages turn.
Gustav Gloom and the Cryptic Carousel Page 14