Gustav Gloom and the Inn of Shadows

by Adam-Troy Castro

  From far away came Anemone’s answering cry: “Children! Get down from there now!”

  “Why?” Gustav yelled back. “What’s happening?”

  Not-Roger provided the despairing answer: “You’ve woken my gnarfle!”

  Even as the barn rattled again from the shock waves of the battle inside the inn, the three visitors from Sunnyside Terrace exchanged worried glances.

  Pearlie bit her lip. “I didn’t mean to wake up a gnarfle.”

  Fernie said, “I would have liked to find out exactly what a gnarfle was first.”

  “Given the way our luck usually runs,” Gustav said, “I pretty much expected it to come up sooner or later.”

  Across the alley, Shadow’s Inn rattled and swayed from the violent struggles inside. But the barn shook even more as something trapped under its roof screeched and pounded the walls. Terrible things might have been happening to both places, but there was really no contest which threatened bigger problems, because as vicious as the renewed battle between Nebuchadnezzar and Cousin Cyrus had become, whatever stirred in the barn was clearly far more powerful and far more angry. One of its blows against the barn walls was so strong that the roof seemed to jump off the rest of the structure and then settle back slightly out of place, like a wig worn at the wrong angle. Gustav managed to hold on, but Fernie and Pearlie were both thrown off their feet and sent tumbling down the curve of the roof toward the edge.

  This was the second time Fernie found herself threatened by a probable fall off this particular building in the last few minutes. All in all, she didn’t see anything in this second exposure to the experience that improved the poor opinion she’d had of it the first time.

  She shrieked and scrambled for a handhold, but holding on was next to impossible given how badly the entire structure was shaking, and so she continued to roll until her legs slipped over the edge and she found herself clawing at a roof that seemed to be disintegrating in her hands.

  Just before she fell, she saw Gustav dive across the roof and catch Pearlie, who was closer, by the wrist. That’s good, she thought. But I need to be rescued, too.

  But even Gustav couldn’t be in two places at the same time, and so she fell over the side. Tumbling into open space, she found herself absolutely certain that this wasn’t going to end well at all.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Care and Feeding of Your Pet Gnarfle

  Just as Fernie prepared herself for a bone-rattling collision with the ground, two massive arms appeared out of nowhere and caught her, plucking her from her plunge with an ease that made Fernie wonder just how practiced Not-Roger was in catching people who fell off rooftops in his vicinity.

  Instead of saying something reassuring like “Don’t worry, I’ve got you” or “It’s all right, you’re safe now” or any other sequence of words that might give comfort to somebody who had just fallen off a roof, Not-Roger winced and said, “Ow. My poor back’s going to be complaining about that one.”

  Fernie didn’t say what’s normally expected of a person in this situation, either. She could have said “Thank you” or “My hero” or “You saved my life” or even “I’m sorry about your back.” Instead, she rolled out of Not-Roger’s arms, landed in a crouch, and rose, crying, “What are you doing with a gnarfle, whatever that is, in your barn?”

  Not-Roger averted his eyes. “I’m lonely.”

  “For a gnarfle? Again, whatever that is?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not like I get all that many opportunities to pop off to the neighborhood pet shop for a goldfish.”

  “There aren’t any neighborhood pet shops in the Dark Country,” his shadow confirmed.

  The unseen creature inside the barn emitted another ear-piercing bellow and slammed the walls of its prison yet again. The impact was great enough to make the ground shake. Fernie fell to her knees. Not-Roger braced himself, took a step to his immediate right, and plucked the plummeting figures of Gustav Gloom and Pearlie What from the air, again with an expressive wince over whatever strain this operation put on his lower back.

  Either Gustav or Fernie or Pearlie would have chosen this moment to ask him what a gnarfle was, but that had to wait, as the viciously entwined figures of Nebuchadnezzar and Cousin Cyrus shot past all of them in a blur. Nebuchadnezzar had taken the form of a giant python, and multiple coils of his long sinuous body were wrapped tight around Cousin Cyrus. Cousin Cyrus had his right arm elbow-deep in Nebuchadnezzar’s mouth, as if trying to grab his enemy by some interior place and tug him inside out. They skipped across the ground like a flat stone tossed across the surface of a placid lake, raising a little cloud of dust with each impact as they receded into the far distance.

  A few months earlier, this would have been the most remarkable thing that either What girl had ever seen. It would have been the subject of frenzied discussion for weeks, if not months, afterward. They might have continued to discuss this really very odd event even after becoming very old women, sitting before the fireplace in their rocking chairs.

  Now, with the barn continuing to shake itself to pieces with every fresh blow from the creature inside, it was nothing more than an interruption of more pressing business.

  Fernie whirled, as if the murky nothingness around them could possibly provide any answers, and grew wild with anger at the sight of Anemone, Caliban, and the three nameless shadows, who had kept their distance all this time and still showed no inclination to come any closer. In fact, no; now that she looked, she could see that the nameless ones were actually striding farther away, shaking their dark heads as if to confirm that they’d watched all they could and had made up their minds that Gustav’s cause was not worth joining. In seconds they’d be out of sight and no longer potential allies.

  Caliban and Anemone seemed to remain undecided for the moment, but they were still specks in the distance that might as well have been a million miles away for all the hope they offered.

  That left Not-Roger and his shadow.

  Gustav beat Fernie to the question. “You need to tell us about the gnarfle.”

  Once again, the crazy tangled forms of Nebuchadnezzar and Cousin Cyrus skipped along the ground in their midst, kicking and gouging and insulting each other as if there were no other concerns worth talking about.

  Not-Roger said, “Aren’t you more concerned about the fight between your two shadow friends?”

  “They’re not friends,” said Fernie, “and—”

  She stopped speaking with the word and as another rattling kick or punch or just random assault from the gnarfle left a huge lightning-shaped crack snaking along the entire barn wall.

  Gustav continued for her: “You said it’s your pet. Can you control it?”

  “Gnarfles are not the kind of pets you control,” Not-Roger’s shadow said. “They’re the kind of pets you feed.”

  Fernie had one of those, too, the black-and-white house cat Harrington, but she feared that his independent ways weren’t exactly the kind of uncontrollable qualities Not-Roger’s shadow meant.

  Another earsplitting bellow from inside the barn led to another smash and another piece of the wall flying off. The barn looked like it now had only minutes of life remaining to it.

  Pearlie wondered out loud, “Will it hold him?”

  Not-Roger provided a sad shake of his head. “No enclosure in or out of the Dark Country can possibly contain a gnarfle once it wants to get out. They’re the most dangerous predators there are, to creatures of both light and dark.”

  After only a few weeks of adventures with Gustav Gloom, Fernie had already grown weary of being told that every new monster they faced was worse than all the ones before it. “We’ve already defeated something that ate shadows once.”

  “Not quite,” said Gustav, who could sometimes get picky over details at the most inconvenient times. “I mean, it was called a shadow eater, because that’s what it
filled its belly with, but not because it wanted to eat them. It didn’t, really. It just imprisoned them and put them to use for its own purposes. I—”

  Another bang rattled the barn wall, and the lightning-shaped crack spawned a number of smaller but somehow even more worrisome cracks, rippling from ground to roof like open wounds. The barn no longer looked like it had five minutes of life left to it. It would be lucky to last two.

  Not-Roger’s shadow spoke quickly to cut Gustav off before he went further into his explanation about the creature he and Fernie had already disposed of. “Gnarfles don’t eat shadows, either. They wouldn’t want to, anyway. They don’t have throats or stomachs. But they do have flat blunt teeth that they like to chew things with. A hungry gnarfle can catch a slow-moving shadow, or one who’s been fed to him as punishment, and chew him for a long time . . . like what the people in the world of light would call weeks or months or years.”

  Pearlie’s eyes widened. “Like gum.”

  “Well, yes. I’m told it’s highly unpleasant.”

  The gray blur composed of Nebuchadnezzar and Cousin Cyrus bounced by again, this time in the opposite direction. Cousin Cyrus had his hands on Nebuchadnezzar’s eyeballs, which he’d stretched out of their sockets like rubber bands. Nebuchadnezzar had turned his hands into scissors and was cutting at Cousin Cyrus’s body, making holes that filled in almost as soon as they were made. All of this was visible in a glimpse before the blur rocketed into the air high above and became a roaring storm cloud, made up of two figures that couldn’t stop calling each other names.

  Gustav glanced away from that battle, which he couldn’t do anything about right now, and returned to the problem of the gnarfle. “What about flesh-and-blood people? Do gnarfles chew them, too?”

  Not-Roger brightened, as if happy for the chance to relay an interesting fact. “Oh sure. A gnarfle will chew anything. But a person wouldn’t live through the experience for years, the way a shadow would. A person would be pretty much goo after the first couple of gnashes.”

  Pearlie said, “I’m beginning to think this is a very stupid place to have this conversation.”

  Clawed fingers emerged from one of the bigger cracks in the wall and started ripping at the wood to enlarge the hole. The hand itself must have been the size of the barn door. Each of its twelve fingers would have been frightening enough just because of their size, even without the glowing red eyes blinking in the same spots where human beings have fingertips.

  All in all, it was the kind of sight that made it easy to understand why this creature was called a gnarfle. Some names just fit, and the possessor of that hand couldn’t have been called anything else.

  Fernie took a single step back, knowing that it was silly because she could have broken into a run and still not gotten a safe distance away before whatever was left of the barn collapsed into wreckage. “I don’t want to be chewed,” she said. “There’s got to be something we can do. How did you even catch this one in the first place?”

  “Not by being brave,” said Not-Roger, whose sun-deprived complexion had gone even paler at the sight of those red-eyed fingers. “I’m afraid that the only way to catch a gnarfle is to find one that’s just fallen asleep and build a barn around it while its eyes are still closed. You do the job right and it’ll feel so cozy in there that it’ll sleep for centuries, as long as nobody makes enough noise to disturb it. The Dark Country’s dotted with barns where people keep their sleeping gnarfles. It’s just the way things are done here.”

  Fernie’s preference for things that made sense might have suffered mightily during her strange friendship with Gustav Gloom, but was still very much alive. “Okay, so once you have it locked in a barn, just how lonely do you have to be to then consider it a pet and go on living next to it?”

  Not-Roger looked hurt as he spread his massive hands in apology. “The Dark Country can be a lonely place. And as dangerous as they are, they look really, really cute when they’re sleeping.”

  Fernie was still digesting that and trying to determine the best possible way to express just how appalling she found it when Gustav, inexorably moving on to the next mystery, asked, “Is that why it’s so important that nobody ring the—”

  That’s when the roof of the barn blew off.

  The entire curved roof, loosened by the gnarfle’s restless thrashing, flew off the four walls that supported it and fell to fragments in the air. Planks rained down like spears, one embedding itself in the earth not six inches from Fernie’s toes. She dove for safety and came within an even narrower margin of being struck by another. Smaller splinters the size of toothpicks rained down on her back, stinging her through her shirt like darts.

  She knew more were coming and would have buried her head in the dirt to avoid the rest as best she could, but there were walls being ripped down behind her. So she scrambled to her knees and then to her feet and almost took the first step in the latest in a series of runs for her life.

  It was only almost because Gustav yelled, “Fernie! Stop!”

  Only for Gustav—and, okay, her father and mother and sister—would Fernie have paid attention and not run when an insatiable monster and an exploding house were involved.

  It was a good thing she did, too, because the next thing to embed itself in her path was the bell.

  It didn’t look like any bell Fernie had ever seen. For one thing, it wasn’t cracked like the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. For another, it wasn’t cast of metal or shaped all that much like a bell at all. It resembled a skull with empty eye sockets and grinning teeth, and it smoldered like something that was trying to decide whether to burst into flames or not. She wouldn’t have recognized it as a bell at all if it hadn’t tolled the instant it struck the earth, with a thick reverberating clang that knocked Fernie off her feet and left her gasping amid a shower of splinters.

  Not-Roger emitted the kind of howl that a man can only make when he’s seen all hope destroyed before his eyes. “You rang it! Oh no, you rang it! We might have been okay if it was only the gnarfle we had to deal with! But now we’re in so much trouble that being chewed could only be an improvement! We’re doomed!”

  Fernie was just about to ask what could possibly be more troublesome than being chewed—being blown into bubbles, maybe?—when the last remains of the barn fell to pieces.

  A shape rose from the wreckage.

  Up until now Fernie had thought she’d encountered the most frightening shadow monster ever in the form of the People Taker’s pet, the Beast.

  But the Beast had been far too vague a thing to focus on or to see as real.

  The gnarfle, by comparison, was a very specific thing. It was almost all head, and its head was almost all mouth. The mouth was too cavernous a space to allow any room for a stomach or intestines farther in, making it easier to believe that it was a creature that couldn’t eat but could instead only chew. There were too many square teeth for the space, piled up in all directions as randomly as a deck of dropped playing cards.

  Instead of the eyes that one would expect to find farther up on its head, there were two smaller mouths that snapped open and shut and open and shut with a hungry scraping click each time. They didn’t look any more capable of digesting what they chewed than the big mouth did, but Fernie knew at once that it would be just as unpleasant to find herself bitten by them.

  Where a normal head would have had ears, the gnarfle’s head instead possessed two stubby arms that each ended in giant twelve-fingered hands that also opened and shut and opened and shut as if they couldn’t bear the prospect of a moment spent not grabbing and mangling something.

  Fernie had already noted the glowing red eyes the gnarfle had on the tips of its fingers, but discovered now that they were even more horrible when they all rolled in one direction and that direction happened to face her.

  She shrieked the only thing that came to mind. “Gustav! The Dark Country is
really, really stupid!”

  She was given a moment’s reprieve as the entwined forms of Nebuchadnezzar and Cousin Cyrus slammed into the ground between her and the monster, then saw where they were and split apart to run in opposite directions.

  The gnarfle blinked its many eyes, as if it found this interesting.

  Then it advanced. Despite legs that were as short as its arms, it cleared the wreckage of the barn wall with no difficulty at all, scrambling up the small mound of debris and descending the other side without losing so much as a single step.

  Gustav and Pearlie and Not-Roger and Not-Roger’s shadow and (much farther away) Anemone all screamed for her to run, but Fernie knew as surely as she’d ever known anything that if she wasted time standing up and choosing a direction and even starting to run away that she would immediately be grabbed by those giant hands and find out what it was like to be chewed.

  So she did the only thing she could.

  She groped blindly for something to throw and by sheer luck came up with a long jagged splinter of wood about the size and shape of the stakes the heroine of her all-time favorite television show had used to carry into battle.

  It would have been nice to believe that this piece of wood would prove as effective against gnarfles as her heroine’s stake was against vampires, but Fernie could feel that it was already ragged and splintery and would almost certainly break in half if she tried to stab the monster with it. It was a pathetic weapon. Really, it was almost a useless one.

  The gnarfle stopped before her, the eyes on the tips of its great twelve-fingered hands peering at her with the same kind of interest Fernie would have given a nice slice of pizza . . . the kind, she supposed, with the extra-chewy crust.

  Then those hands swung toward each other and Fernie in a blur, intent on trapping her between them before popping her into that giant mouth.

  Fernie did the last thing any daughter of a world-renowned safety expert would ever normally be expected to do.

  Instead of running away from the danger, she ran toward it.