Gustav Gloom and the Inn of Shadows

by Adam-Troy Castro

  “They trekked through deserts, through shadow cities, over mountains, past even the lair of monsters who would have attacked and eaten anybody else, but who must have sensed that this pair and their shadows were better off left alone. If this had happened in the world of light, somebody would have dropped from hunger or thirst or exhaustion . . . but both these men had shadows who departed from time to time to scavenge food or rest before returning. For the men, there was nothing but the chase to occupy them. So this went on for the equivalent of years . . . and for a long, long time in the Dark Country, the one spoken of with fear was not Howard Philip October, but the furious husband named Hans Gloom, who would never give up, not for a moment.”

  Not-Roger sighed. “If only he’d walked a little faster! If only he’d ended that evil man while it was still possible!”

  “But he did not,” Not-Roger’s shadow replied, “and those who paid attention to the endless chase started to remark on something that grew ever more disturbing as time went on.”

  “October seemed to be losing weight,” Not- Roger continued.

  “It was not the kind of weight a man can lose by walking long distances. It was more than that. October had not been a fat man to start, but what little meat there was to him seemed to be wasting away with every step he took. His skin started hanging loosely on his frame. Before long it was like an overlarge borrowed suit, with wrinkles and folds and flaps and more hanging loose than seemed even close to ever having fit. Have you girls ever seen a man who’s forgotten his belt and had to use his hand to keep his pants from falling down? October grew to be like that . . . except that it was the skin of his legs that he had to hold on to, to keep it from slipping off his bones.

  “Despite this, October walked like a man who was getting stronger, not weaker . . . and when his eyes finally turned jet-black, those who watched knew that something unnatural had happened inside him. He became so terrible that even his shadow fled, to some part of the Dark Country not known—and no one, flesh or shadow, has seen him in all the years since.

  “When the transformation was complete, October turned around, faced Hans Gloom from a mere ten paces away, and let his skin fall to the ground, like a bathrobe he had decided to discard. He simply stepped out of his old self, leaving it on the ground behind him, and stood revealed as the creature he had become, the shadow who would soon come to be known and feared as Lord Obsidian.

  “The sight was terrible enough for that first look to make Hans Gloom and his shadow stop their endless march for the first time in more miles than can possibly be counted and fall to their knees in horror.

  “Lord Obsidian said, ‘You have waited too long, Hans. You have lost your chance at revenge. Instead, I have become what I always sought to become . . . and I shall do what I have always vowed to do. I will raise an army. I will conquer this place. I will storm the world of light, as well, and make it my own. And if you wonder why I do not kill you now, it is because I want nothing more than for you to see it and know that you could have prevented it.’

  “He bent over, scooped up the skin he had shed as if he still had use for it, and rose laughing into the gray sky . . . while the good man he had long fled was left on the ground, weeping.”

  The story didn’t sound like it was over, but Not-Roger’s shadow seemed to have told as much of it as his heart would bear right now. His head dipped until his bearded chin rested on his barrel chest, and he sat there, silently brooding over his nested fingers, as if remembering events that had once happened to him.

  Fernie was just as silent, because she realized she knew what had happened to the skin the man October had shed. Filled with captured shadows, and still using the name Howard Philip October, that skin had become the terrible creature she and Gustav came to know as the shadow eater and had only a few weeks ago invaded the Gloom house on a brutal search for an artifact Lord Obsidian wanted.

  The oppressive silence began to feel like a weight resting on all their heads, until Pearlie said, “I don’t get it. That kind of thing doesn’t just happen. People don’t just step out of their skins and become someone else.”

  “This is the Dark Country,” Not-Roger grumbled. “Shadow-magic happens here.”

  “But why didn’t it happen to Hans Gloom? He walked the exact same distance!”

  “Ah, well. Some of Lord Obsidian’s followers say that it’s because Howard Philip October was the one born to greatness.”

  “But that’s not what you think,” Pearlie said.

  “No, girl, I don’t. I think Howard Philip October was just a selfish, evil man, and that Lord Obsidian is just the same man in shadow form. Here’s my explanation: The more he was denied what he wanted, the more that greed and hate festered inside him, the more it ate him up and replaced everything he was with darkness. When there was no longer enough of him to keep his skin on, only the shadow he wanted to be, Lord Obsidian, was left. Hans Gloom was also driven by hate, but it was the kind of hate caused by knowing that the man before him had robbed him of everybody he loved . . . and there was enough of that love left, reminding him of why he fought so hard, to keep that same transformation from happening to him. A rotten person could choose to believe that Hans’s love for his family made him weak. But it’s not something I’m willing to say.”

  It wasn’t anything Fernie was willing to say, either. As far as she was concerned, the story showed only that Hans Gloom had kept a part of himself even in the Dark Country that Howard Philip October had lost long before he ever got there. But the thought reminded her of Gustav, who must have heard all this from his hiding place right outside the window, and again, her heart broke a little at the very idea.

  She didn’t look forward to the rest of the story, which would no doubt explain how Lord Obsidian had raised his army and what happened to Hans Gloom in the meantime. She didn’t think she could take it.

  But as it happened, she wasn’t going to get a chance to hear that part of the story right away, because somebody outside started screaming.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Lungs Are Not Involved

  There are sounds that come naturally when two men throw everything they have into battling each other. They include punches landing on noses, kicks landing in worse places, gasps of pain exchanged just to establish the point system, shouted variations on the worst names anybody could ever possibly call another, and hideous growls added just to underline that all of this was done with significant enthusiasm.

  Cousin Cyrus’s gravelly voice rose to an irritated whine. “Get off me, you self-mythologizing miscreant!”

  The other voice belonged to Olaf, who cried, “Not while a breath of air remains in my lungs, you foul degenerate!”

  “That’s what I mean when I call you an idiot, you idiot! You’re a shadow! You don’t even have lungs!”

  The ensuing thud rattled the ceiling of Shadow’s Inn so hard that the walls trembled and sagged ever closer to total collapse.

  Not-Roger cried, “The noise!”

  Man and shadow were off their stools and well on their way to the door, passing the startled What girls. Both had already left the inn by the time the girls reached the outside. When they did, Fernie was out the door a fraction of a second after Pearlie and knew from her sister’s appalled upward gaze where to look for the source of the fighting.

  The battle between Olaf and Cousin Cyrus had reached the inn’s roof. Olaf had drawn his sword to slash at Cousin Cyrus with a fury that would have carved a flesh-and-blood man into segments. It had the same effect, more or less, on Cousin Cyrus. Each swing cut him in half and left the two parts separated by the width of the slash before they came back together and rejoined just in time to be cut in half again.

  Though the wounds didn’t seem to cause Cousin Cyrus any pain, he wasn’t happy about them, either, and cursed with irritation every time he was halved.

  Whenever he could, Cousin Cyrus l
eaped past the sword’s cutting range to pummel Olaf’s face with his shadowy fists. These didn’t seem to hurt Olaf all that much, either, but each blow reduced Olaf’s already unlovely features to a crater, which each time popped back into place just in time for Cousin Cyrus to crater it again with another punch.

  Gustav was nowhere to be seen. He had probably ducked around the corner of the inn to avoid being seen by Not-Roger. And now the fight had grown so violent that bits and pieces of the inn’s roof crumbled and tumbled to the ground as debris.

  Anemone, the robed Caliban, and the three nameless other shadows of the party were all dots on the horizon, watching from a safe distance with what struck Fernie as bland disinterest. But Not-Roger noted the small mob of shadows now standing around in a place so isolated that even shadows rarely showed their faces here, and he asked Fernie, “Are those friends of yours?”

  Fernie saw no good reason to deny it now. “More or less. I wouldn’t call any of them friends.” She thought about it. “Except Olaf, maybe. He seems to have his heart in the right place, at least.”

  “You stupid girl!” This came from Cousin Cyrus, who lifted his teeth from Olaf’s ear long enough to shout a cranky warning. “He doesn’t have his heart in the right place! He’s a spy for Lord Obsidian!”

  “I’m no spy!” Olaf cried. “You’re the spy!”

  Not-Roger sidestepped to avoid a piece of scrap wood dislodged by the battle, which tumbled downward spinning like a boomerang and embedded itself in the dirt at his feet. “Either one of them could be a spy,” he noted, not seeming to take the damage to his home at all seriously. “You could be a spy. I could be a spy. Any one of those other shadows could be a spy. This country’s at war. In wartime, you can’t throw a rock in any random direction without hitting a spy. For all I know, all of you are spies.”

  “Maybe none of us are spies,” Pearlie countered.

  “That’s also a possibility,” said Not-Roger. “The only thing that’s never going to happen here is none of us ever being accused of being a spy, because in a war, everybody gets treated like a spy whether they are or not.”

  Up above, Olaf and Cousin Cyrus had grabbed hold of each other’s ears and used them as handles to shake each other’s heads, a tactic that made both forget where they were and sent both on an unstoppable biting-and-gouging roll down the inn’s sloping roof. They fell together over the side, plummeted together toward the ground, and hit the earth together with an impact that hurt neither but still raised a cloud of dust. Fernie and Pearlie and Not-Roger erupted into coughing fits, but the same dust didn’t silence shadows who didn’t need to breathe in order to speak. Olaf and Cousin Cyrus continued to accuse each other of being spies even as the clouds around them continued to swirl.

  “I would break in,” Not-Roger’s shadow remarked, “but I don’t know which one is telling the truth.”

  The dust dispersed. Cousin Cyrus lay facedown on the ground, throwing punches at dirt he imagined had Olaf in it. But Olaf had slipped away and scrambled back up to the roof, where he now retrieved his shadow sword, got his bearings, and stood for a moment, posing against the gray sky. He thrust his chin out and began to lope along the roof, headed in the direction of the barn. Something had changed about his posture. He no longer looked like a shadow trying to live up to the memory of a human hero; he looked like one who knew exactly what he was here for and was determined to get on with it.

  “Oh no,” said Not-Roger.

  “He’s headed for the barn!” said Not-Roger’s shadow.

  Fernie remembered Anemone’s dire warnings about the barn. “What’s in the barn?”

  “Never mind what’s in the barn,” Not-Roger snapped. “It’s still asleep, at least. Worry more right now about what’s on the barn!”

  The only thing on the barn was the bell tower, which suddenly seemed to loom tall as the most dangerous location in the vicinity.

  It was no longer funny that two peculiar and half-crazy shadows bickered over who was and who wasn’t a spy. There was no telling what would happen to any of them if Olaf reached the barn and succeeded in ringing that bell.

  Fernie started to run, pacing Olaf as well as she could, but falling behind with every step because he was a shadow capable of a shadow’s speed and she was a human being who could run only as fast as legs could move.

  Olaf reached the gap between the inn and the barn, and with almost no effort at all leaped the distance, alighting on the barn as gently as a snowflake landing on a leaf.

  For a fraction of a second he seemed to cast a shadow of his own. It made the leap just behind him, but was oddly smaller than he was and made an audible thwap when it hit the same roof.

  Fernie’s heart leaped when she realized that the smaller shadow was not a shadow at all, but a boy in black who had somehow made it to rooftop level to pursue Olaf as only he could.

  Any doubts she might have had about Olaf turning out to be an enemy went away as he whirled in place and thrust his shadow sword at Gustav’s belly.

  Gustav darted backward to avoid the strike, and for one very terrible heartbeat teetered on the edge of the roof, pinwheeling his arms to resist what might have been a fatal fall. This presented an irresistible target for Olaf, who came after him with another thrust. Gustav, who was not actually off balance at all, neatly sidestepped the sword, spun around Olaf’s back, and kicked the attacking shadow in his backside. The kick didn’t knock Olaf over the edge, but did make him stumble and leave a huge dent in his rear end, which made him look extraordinarily silly and slowed him down enough for Gustav to kick him again.

  Down below, Not-Roger stopped in his tracks, his mouth falling so far open that it almost qualified as a wonder that his jaw didn’t pop a rivet and fall off. “My word! That’s Gustav Gloom!”

  Fernie figured the secret was out. “Uh-huh.”

  “B-but . . .” With equal amazement, Not-Roger turned to Pearlie. “That means you must be Fernie What!”

  “Nope,” said Pearlie. “I’m just her older and even tougher sister, Pearlie.”

  Not-Roger’s shadow blinked a number of times in rapid succession. “There’s a tougher sister?”

  Up on the barn roof, the dent in Olaf’s rear end popped back out. Outraged, he slashed at Gustav again, his shadow sword flashing with a swing of the sort he’d repeatedly used to cut Cousin Cyrus in half. The damage Olaf had done on those occasions had been temporary, because Cousin Cyrus was a shadow who had no blood that could be spilled. There was no telling what would happen to Gustav if a swing just like it struck home. Gustav seemed to know it, too, because he leaped over the slash and let it pass by harmlessly underneath him.

  Down below, Not-Roger clutched Fernie by the shoulders. “You can’t be here, girl, not any of you! Haven’t you heard that Lord Obsidian’s put special priority on catching you lot?”

  “Yes, we did hear that,” Fernie said. “But here we are anyway.”

  Up above, Olaf screeched with rage as Gustav remained just out of his reach, but got control of his sudden seeming hatred of the halfsie boy and seemed to remember whatever he knew about swordplay. Instead of wild, uncontrolled swings, he concentrated on short, on-target jabs, each of them aimed at Gustav’s heart. Gustav could only dodge these by retreating, one step at a time, but each retreat brought Olaf closer to the bell tower that seemed to be his goal. Long before that, Gustav would be trapped with a wall at his back.

  Cousin Cyrus, who had risen back to rooftop level while the girls and the shadows were giving all their attention to the fight, wrapped his arms around Olaf’s neck and managed to pull him a few steps away from Gustav.

  Olaf spun in his grip. The sword slashed, separating Cousin Cyrus’s head from his shoulders. This was no more fatal or permanent than any of the other damage Olaf’s sword had done, but it was effective at getting rid of Cousin Cyrus for a while. His headless body fell backward and came
apart like a puff of smoke, while his head sailed off behind the inn, loudly complaining about the nonsense he had to suffer through whenever somebody forced him to get involved.

  Fernie still didn’t fully understand why Cousin Cyrus would fight so hard for the life of a boy he claimed to despise, but she didn’t have time to stop and think about it right now.

  Instead, she declared, “Nerts to this.”

  She twisted her way out of Not-Roger’s grasp and ran back along the wall to the inn’s entrance. A quick stop inside and she emerged carrying the two tarnished rapiers she had seen hanging from the study wall. She held each from the grip under its curved hand guard and looked like a girl ready to engage in swordplay herself, though she had never once held a sword of any kind in her hand and had gotten all of her practice at the sport dueling her sister with yardsticks.

  Not-Roger was very put out that two of his possessions had just been drafted as weaponry. “Hey. Those are mine.”

  Fernie handed the rapier in her left hand to her sister, who immediately cut the air with a whining slash just to test it out. “Sorry. They’re not worth as much to you as my friend is to me. I’ll pay you back if I have a chance. What’s the fastest way to the barn roof?”

  “You can’t join the fight,” Not-Roger’s shadow protested. “The more people on the roof, the noisier it gets!”

  “It’s noisy now!” Fernie snapped.

  “You can’t let it get any noisier!”

  Fernie didn’t see why the noise made any particular difference, but she said, “It’s going to be a lot louder than this if that bell rings!”

  Not-Roger fell back, his mouth agape at the very prospect.