Pearlie glanced at her in sudden surprise. “You know Cousin Cyrus, too?”
“Not well,” Fernie said, remembering their one prior meeting.
Back at the house, Gustav had invoked an old debt to force the cantankerous and antisocial shadow to take news of Pearlie’s kidnapping to Great-Aunt Mellifluous in the Dark Country. The revelation that Pearlie must have run into Cousin Cyrus at some later point was just the latest thing in this adventure to confuse Fernie What. She asked him directly, “She knows you?”
“Of course she knows me,” Cousin Cyrus snapped. “And I have the deep displeasure of knowing her, too. I had to spend time with her, answering her foolish questions until I was ready to tear my hair out.”
Fernie glanced at Gustav. “I never knew shadow hair could be torn out.”
“That one’s even news to me,” Gustav confessed. He cast a curious gaze at Pearlie and asked, “Where did you meet Cousin Cyrus?”
“In the Dark Country, after Dad was captured by the minions. I was just wandering around lost, feeling doomed, when he showed up to help me.”
This made even less sense to Fernie, as the one thing she had picked up about Cousin Cyrus was that he never did favors for anybody unless he was forced to. “But why would he help you?”
Cousin Cyrus snarled. “Because that annoying old woman Great-Aunt Mellifluous made me, that’s why! The intolerable halfsie boy invoked the last of my debts to him just to get me to take her the message that your silly sister and idiot father were in trouble, but just when I thought I was done with that errand, she turned out to be too busy planning an important mission behind enemy lines to get involved herself, and she invoked one of my many debts to her to make me find this stupid girl and get her out of the Dark Country. I arrived on the scene too late to save your father, which was fine as far as I was concerned—less work for me—but this stupid girl was still around, and I still had to endure all her mewling and whining for as long as it took me to dump her with the refugees and satisfy myself that she was safe.”
Fernie looked at her sister. “Mewling and whining doesn’t sound like you at all.”
“It wasn’t,” Pearlie replied. “He insulted me so much that after a while I stopped being scared and started insulting him right back.”
“Liar!” Cousin Cyrus shouted. “You whined nonstop! Don’t say you didn’t!”
“Maybe a little,” Pearlie said, admitting the horrible truth.
“Either way,” Gustav told Cousin Cyrus, “if you fulfilled your obligation to Great-Aunt Mellifluous, why are you following us now?”
“It’s not because I have a choice, boy. Once I got rid of the stupid girl, I was looking forward to going back to the house and curling up in my favorite pile of dust. But Mellifluous’s spies intercepted me at once and told me, ‘It’s not that easy, you old fool, your debt’s not repaid yet! You can’t just leave Pearlie in the wastelands! You have to stay with her in case she needs help again!’ So I returned to the silly girl and walked ten paces behind her wherever she went.”
Pearlie said, “You never let me know you’d come back.”
“Nobody ever said I had to let you know I was watching over you or endure your witless questions again. That I’ve spared myself while we’ve spent all this time hiking up and down hills.”
There was a moment of silence until Pearlie sighed. “This really isn’t fair. In the fairy tales, the damsel in distress always gets rescued by a nice person.”
“Don’t worry,” said Gustav. “I’m a nice person, and I’m still working on it.” He looked past the glowering Cousin Cyrus at the half dozen more indistinct shadows gathered behind him and said, “And the rest of you? Are you the only refugees who agreed to join us?”
For a moment, the only response was a soft murmur from the crowd that failed to involve any actual words. Maybe they were shy. Maybe they’d never been around solid people of any kind and were unsure about the best way to talk to them. Maybe they were just interested in a good show.
Then one, wearing the form of a delicately beautiful woman with soft cheeks and wide eyes and pale gray hair that billowed around her face like clouds, advanced and spoke in an ethereal voice, with the slightest trace of an accent Fernie didn’t recognize. “My name is Anemone.”
“It’s good to meet you, Anemone. We appreciate your joining us.”
Anemone shook her pretty head. “You haven’t shown us you’re worth joining.”
“We’ve come this far,” Gustav pointed out.
The answer to that was gentle laughter. “You have only succeeded in walking into danger, not out of it.”
“So?”
“So there’s a fable among our kind of a mountain goat from your world who tried to leap from one crag to another, but instead fell into a bottomless valley. On every ledge he passed on the way down, he saw others of his kind watching his plunge. He called out to them, saying, ‘Why not follow me? This is easy! After all, I’ve come this far!’ You see, he thought that was an admirable accomplishment. He didn’t know that the true test of his ability to survive would be the ground.”
“He sounds like a pretty stupid goat,” Fernie declared.
“Indeed. That is the very point. But in traveling as far as you have, you three may be no smarter. It is clear to us that you know nothing of the perils that still await you. We know that you will blunder into them, regardless of where you choose to enter the Dark Country. We’re willing to follow you to see if you possess the qualities you will need to survive them, let alone find and confront Lord Obsidian. But we’ll have to see more before we offer any assistance or make any promises.”
Fernie wasn’t at all happy with that. She came close to telling Anemone that she and her companions weren’t welcome if all they were willing to do was follow around at a respectful distance without ever trying to be useful.
But Gustav regarded the remaining five shadows, considering what help they might be able to provide at some later point. He didn’t offer them another stirring speech. He just nodded and said, “All right. You can follow us until you make up your minds. But I’d appreciate names for the rest of you, if any of you have them.”
Only two of the remaining five shadows admitted to having names. One, a robed figure whose face remained indistinct except for a white dot that seemed to be the tip of a very long nose emerging from the darkness of his otherwise all-concealing hood called himself Caliban, and added that he strongly doubted that Gustav and his companions would survive in the Dark Country for more than five minutes. “I believe you are a waste of my time,” he concluded. “But I am willing to be proved wrong.”
The other, a dark-eyed, straggly haired and bearded fellow bearing a shadow sword and wearing a helmet equipped with two long horns that curved together like parentheses, introduced himself as the shadow of an ancient warrior known to friends and enemies alike as Olaf Who Smells So Awful That He Can Make Invading Enemy Armies Collapse in Stunned Amazement. Advising Gustav and his friends to call him Olaf for short, the shadow went on to explain, “My human wasn’t the most talented swordsman who ever lived, but he didn’t have to be. He really did smell as awful as advertised, and by the time he got close to any enemy, most of them were too busy curled on the ground being sick to fight back. As a result, his tribe never lost a battle. Unlike these others, I’ve already made up my mind to fight on your side, but unfortunately, I won’t be as formidable as he was, as I only wear the real Olaf’s shape and not his powerful odor.”
“That’s okay,” Pearlie said. “Honestly.”
The remaining three shadows, vague outlines who could not even be distinguished as male or female, explained that they’d never been the shadows of any human beings and had never seen the point of ever developing any human personalities. They didn’t have opinions, either, which is why, like Anemone and Caliban, they were just waiting to see how Gustav and the girls
fared before making a decision on whether to help.
Gustav didn’t seem disappointed or surprised to find their shadow companions offering such an ambivalent show of support. “Would you object to answering a question from time to time? Like, for instance, what you know of this spot, below us?”
“It is called the Rarely,” Anemone replied, “among other reasons because it is rarely visited and rarely thought about and rarely worth the trouble of crossing.”
“Which means that it probably isn’t being guarded,” mused Gustav. “Is it safe?”
The shadow woman cocked her head. “Rarely.”
Gustav seemed to have expected that, because he nodded, turned away from her and, after a long silent look at Cousin Cyrus that communicated nothing Fernie was able to see, told the girls, “All I can tell you is that I don’t see any immediate dangers down there, and that there’s a small light burning a few miles away that might or might not be friendly. We might be able to pick up some information there. At the very least, it’s something to head for.”
Fernie remembered to be frightened and then promptly did her best to forget it again. “Might as well get on with it, I guess.”
“Pearlie?”
Pearlie was even less enthusiastic about it. “Why not? I don’t have any other plans for the afternoon.”
Gustav nodded, then turned toward the Dark Country and started his descent into the endless bubbling layer of shadow-stuff just a short walk down the slope.
The girls found it a difficult walk, but not for the same reason walks are usually described as difficult. The slope wasn’t too steep, the ground wasn’t too slippery, and there weren’t any loose stones or protruding roots to send them tumbling down the mountainside like that other girl from the silly nursery rhyme whose family had been shortsighted enough to place its only well on the top of a hill. (Fernie hadn’t even gone to nursery school before she first started finding that rhyme ridiculous, in part because she was a smart girl and knew that nobody ever digs a well on the top of a hill.)
The girls found the descent difficult only because there was something about the churning sea of shadow-stuff before them and the way it hid everything else beneath it from view that gave their legs an argumentative personality of their own and made it necessary to win a debate with them, at the rate of once every step or so. No, Fernie’s legs kept saying, you really don’t want to go where you’re making us go. Yes, Fernie kept silently telling them, I do. No, her legs kept insisting, we think you haven’t thought this all the way through. No, she had to answer, I think I have.
Nothing, though, was quite as loud about its disapproval of the destination ahead as her stomach, which seemed to perform somersaults of angry protest. It acted like it wanted to leap out of her mouth and scurry away into the distance, screaming, “Flee! Flee!” Fernie had missed being able to eat food in the more than a week she’d been relying on her own shadow, wherever it was, to keep her alive by eating for her, but when she considered how jumpy her belly was, she found herself grateful that there wasn’t any real food in it. That was the last thing she needed.
The top of Gustav’s head disappeared beneath the rolling clouds, and Fernie found her feet about to step into the same darkness.
Pearlie grabbed her hand and murmured, “I can’t believe I’m going back there.”
“Well,” Fernie managed, in a voice so faint that calling it a whisper would have been giving it too much credit, “I can’t believe you’re going back there, either.”
“It’s got to be the dumbest thing either one of us has ever done,” said Pearlie.
The mists swallowed them without even seeming to notice. The shadow companions followed the girls and were also swallowed. The mountaintop the friends had abandoned went back to being what it had been before their arrival: a high, silent, lonely place in the sky, unaffected by any of the desperate battles fought by any who traveled far below.
CHAPTER SIX
Olaf and Cousin Cyrus Don’t Like Each Other Very Much
“I thought it would be dark,” said Fernie.
“It is dark,” replied Gustav.
“I mean, too dark to see, like in a closet with the door closed, or a house when the neighborhood’s blacked out. I expected to be tripping around like a blind person without a flashlight.”
“Blind people don’t use flashlights,” Pearlie pointed out.
Fernie had heard the silly thing she’d just said even as it left her mouth. “You know what I mean.”
“Yes, I do,” Pearlie agreed. “And blind people still don’t use flashlights.”
“Whatever. The point is, I thought it would be dark, and it’s not dark. It’s just kind of . . . dreary.”
It was indeed. Upon passing the top layer of mist, Fernie had indeed seen nothing but impenetrable blackness all around her, and had spent a few seconds worrying that she’d have to turn back and get no closer to her imperiled father than she was already. But then the darkness seemed to lift, she started to be able to pick out shapes, and the details filled in. What she saw now was a gray valley, extending as far as her eyes could see, with differently shaded patches all crowded together in the far distance. There wasn’t a single patch of bright color anywhere; even her own sister’s hair, a brilliant red most of the time, had gone pale and dreary, as if all the life had been removed and nothing but the vague suggestion of color had been put back in.
Although the misty shadow-stuff that submerged them could now be seen through, thicker tendrils of it sometimes drifted by, like patches of dye that hadn’t been properly mixed with the rest of the formula. She was able to see quite far even so, even to the immense, impossibly tall legs of the Howard Philip October statue, towering over the landscape an unthinkable distance away. As horizons went, it was so far away that she didn’t think even a lifetime of walking would be enough to get her there. It would take a long time, she felt, just to get to that one bright spot Gustav had mentioned.
Everything close to her looked empty, drained of color and of life. But it didn’t seem to be pitch-black, as she’d expected.
Gustav said, “You’re wrong. It’s too dark to see.”
“But I can see.”
“You could see in my house, too, even in the places that would have been far too dark for you if you were depending on light alone. You could see even in the places where there was no light at all. That’s because it’s not just your eyes seeing everything you’re looking at. It’s also your head.”
“Huh?”
“It’s one of the more helpful things about shadow-magic. Have you ever been in a dark place, where you really couldn’t see anything, for a long time? Like, for an hour or more?”
Fernie remembered an infamous game of hide-and-seek from very early in her childhood when she had huddled in a wardrobe in the back of a closet, thinking that she was doing really well. At the same time, unknown to her, Pearlie had forgotten all about the game and had gone into the basement to play with plastic dinosaurs. Fernie had waited so long that she’d grown bored and then tired and had finally curled up into a deep nap, completely missing her sister’s tears, her mother’s calls, and her father’s vocal fretting until her family was about to report her missing to the police. “Yes.”
“Well, while you were in that darkness, didn’t you start to see shapes? Faces? Little bursts of light that weren’t there? That was shadow-magic trying to work inside your head to help you see. It didn’t work very well because all it had to work with was the weak, watery darkness people encounter in the world you know. What you walked through in my house, and what we’re walking through now, is darkness of an entirely different kind—darkness so dark that it’s not just the absence of light but the exact opposite of light, which is something few people have experienced. Wait until we get deeper into the Dark Country. From what I hear, there are places so dark that they feel almost bright.”
He turned around and again started to lead them forward. But then he pivoted on his left ankle, swung his right leg around like a crane seeking a fresh weight to lift, and returned to the girls. His habitual frown now bore the stamp of sudden worry. “Excuse me. Did one of you just cackle evilly to yourself?”
Fernie hadn’t heard anything. “Not me.”
Gustav frowned. “You’re right. I’ve heard you laugh a bunch of times, and it didn’t sound one bit like any of yours.”
Pearlie said, “It wasn’t one of mine, either.”
“No, it wouldn’t be. This didn’t sound like a girl laugh at all. It sounded like a nasty, bitter, cruel, evil-old-man laugh.” He peered over the heads of the girls at the handful of shadows following them, and in particular at Cousin Cyrus, who was peering at his own feet in the manner of a poor student hoping the teacher wouldn’t call on him in class. “Cousin Cyrus? That was you, wasn’t it?”
Cousin Cyrus tried to avoid his eyes, but soon seemed to realize he couldn’t manage that trick forever and glared back in contempt. “I didn’t cackle evilly.”
“It sounded just like one of yours.”
The elderly shadow scratched his shoulder, and then his rump, and then the small sliver of belly that his dirty undershirt failed to cover. “Wasn’t me.” He pointed at Olaf. “It was him.”
“Liar!” cried Olaf.
Gustav glared at Cousin Cyrus. “Should I believe you?”
“I don’t give one good loud fart whether you believe me or not. I don’t owe you any dang explanations.”
“No,” Gustav agreed. “If you were anybody else, you wouldn’t. But I know you, Cyrus. You hate everybody. I can’t imagine your cackling at anything but a terrible secret.”
Cousin Cyrus lowered his big scraggly eyebrows enough to hide both of the cold and unpleasant eyes behind them. “It was him. But this is going to be one long and tedious trip if you’re going to insist on stopping to blame me for every stupid random noise.”
Gustav Gloom and the Inn of Shadows Page 5