Gustav Gloom and the Inn of Shadows

by Adam-Troy Castro

  The giant hands clapped shut behind her, missing her but also cutting off all escape as she dove screaming at the gnarfle, aiming her pathetic useless stick at its face.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A Mouth Over Shadow’s Inn

  Nothing had ever given Fernie any reason to doubt that her sister loved her, or for that matter that Gustav Gloom treasured her as well. But had she harbored any doubts at all, they would have been put to rest forever by the shared sound of their cries during the fraction of a second when it must have looked like the gnarfle would be able to grab her.

  The cries stopped as she reappeared, unchewed and no longer carrying her pointy stick, running across the top of the gnarfle’s clasped hands.

  The gnarfle bellowed and spun, jabbing its massive fingers at its teeth in the manner of any crazed beast objecting to recent developments. The pointy stick protruded from between two of its teeth, stuck there like a flagpole planted in soil.

  As Fernie landed back on her feet on ground still strewn with debris from the barn’s shattered wall, she saw that things had changed a little in the second or two she’d been busy. Gustav had turned a shade that was pale even for him. Pearlie had clasped both hands to her mouth in fear. Not-Roger had fallen to his knees in shock. His shadow had retreated a short distance and was only now turning around to see what Fernie had done.

  The shadow companions Anemone and Caliban were now in their midst, having finally made up their minds to come over and take part in the chaos. There was no sign of the three nameless ones. While it was impossible to tell what Caliban was thinking, Anemone’s delicate features had contorted into a mask of fear.

  Fate also provided an update on the last two members of the party not accounted for, in the form of a furious gray streak skipping along the ground. Cousin Cyrus and Nebuchadnezzar were once again tangled in mortal combat, still punching and kicking and biting and scratching with a fury only possible for creatures who couldn’t really do each other any permanent damage. In a second or two they had again faded into the distance, but Fernie had no doubt they’d be back.

  Anemone, who seemed on the verge of tears, cried, “Fernie! What did you do to the gnarfle?”

  “Gave it something to chew on!” Fernie yelled as she put some more precious distance between herself and the thrashing gnarfle. “It won’t last long! We have to run, or hide, or something!”

  Not-Roger didn’t get off his knees. He just shook his head and cried, “That won’t do any good! The gnarfle’s not your worst problem right now. You rang the bell!”

  “I didn’t ring the bell! I was on the ground and the bell almost landed on me!”

  “It doesn’t matter who rang the bell! It only matters that the bell was rung!”

  Behind her, the gnarfle emitted a furious roar and advanced again. Fernie only knew it had resumed the chase because with each step it crunched broken wood beneath its feet, but the sound was enough to remind her that arguments of any kind were best pursued outside the reach of unstoppable monsters who wanted to chew her. She yelled, “Come on!” and started to run, trusting in her friends and the suddenly oddly concerned Anemone to follow her.

  She didn’t run away from the inn, as no other direction offered any hiding places. She just ran back toward the front door. The inn wouldn’t be able to keep out the gnarfle, but it could provide a few precious seconds of concealment while they huddled together and figured out what to do.

  As she reached the open door, she looked over her shoulder to make sure Gustav and Pearlie were following her, and saw to her horror that they weren’t. Only the shadows Anemone and Caliban had followed her. Gustav and Pearlie and Not-Roger’s shadow were still back at the wreckage of the barn. Each had grabbed hold of one of the kneeling Not-Roger’s arms and together were struggling to pull the great bear-size man to his feet.

  The gnarfle, still poking at its mouth with its horrid twelve-fingered hands, didn’t seem in any immediate hurry to grab any of them, but was thrashing about violently enough to grind any wreckage in its path to powder. The extra fanged mouths it had instead of eyes on its head continued to snap open and shut hungrily.

  Anemone grabbed Fernie by the wrist. Her touch was like cold silk, so soft and insubstantial that it was barely a touch at all. “Fernie, dear! They’ll either come or they won’t! You have to save yourself, at least, or your father’s lost!”

  Fernie yanked her hand out of Anemone’s grip, which was not horribly difficult given that Anemone was a shadow and Fernie’s hand was able to pass right through her. Freed, she was ready to run back to her friends and certain death, but then she saw that she no longer had to. Their tugs and pleas had succeeded in coaxing Not-Roger to his feet and getting him to lumber along beside them as they raced for the same open doorway where Fernie stood.

  “Inside!” Not-Roger cried. “Inside!”

  Nobody needed any additional persuading. They all fled inside, slammed the door shut behind them, and made their way back to the same shabby living room where Not-Roger and his shadow had told the tragic story of Hans Gloom and Howard Philip October to Fernie and Pearlie. Anemone, Caliban, and Not-Roger’s shadow didn’t need to breathe, of course, but Gustav, Fernie, Pearlie, and especially Not-Roger were all gasping, their eyes haunted at the thought of how close they’d all come to being chewed.

  Not-Roger and his shadow sank onto the stools they’d used before, while Fernie and Pearlie took the two others meant for people. Gustav remained standing for the moment, though he didn’t look like he very much wanted to. Anemone and Caliban hovered.

  Not-Roger spoke first. “You don’t need to worry about the poor dear coming after us right away. Gnarfles are all appallingly stupid. He’s probably already forgotten that he just saw us run inside. We won’t be safe from him forever, though. It won’t be long before it occurs to him to start gnawing on the house.”

  “That’s no consolation for Cousin Cyrus,” Fernie said. “I may not like him much, but he’s proven himself one of us . . . and he’s still out there, fighting Nebuchadnezzar. Either one of them could be snatched by the gnarfle at any time.”

  “True,” Not-Roger’s shadow admitted. “But there’s nothing any of us can do for him right now. When two shadows get into a fight that vicious, it’s almost impossible to separate them until one wins or loses.”

  “Sort of like cats,” Pearlie said.

  “Or human beings,” Gustav said, a dark look in his eyes. He was probably remembering the story of his father and Howard Philip October.

  Anemone did everybody the tremendous favor of breaking the silence that followed. “Fernie, dear? I’ve never seen anybody, human or shadow, get away from a gnarfle when it was that close. I didn’t think it could be done. I know you couldn’t have done it serious damage with that little piece of wood. What did you do, exactly, dear?”

  It was exceedingly odd for the uncommitted Anemone to call Fernie “dear,” but Fernie skipped asking her why and offered an answer instead. “The only thing that stops me from eating when I’m too hungry to stop is getting something stuck between my teeth. It’s one of the most annoying sensations I know. When something gets stuck, I suck on it and probe it with the tip of my tongue, and if it’s really hard to get at I use a toothpick or my fingernail on it, and I don’t start eating again until I get it out. I hoped a gnarfle would act the same way.”

  Anemone gave Fernie the same kind of look Fernie would have given a dandelion that started singing “Happy Birthday.” “So your big plan was to leap at a gnarfle’s mouth, hoping to embed a sharp stick in between two of his teeth?”

  Fernie shrugged. “I didn’t have any better ideas.”

  “It’s not something I would have thought of,” Gustav said with admiration. “I don’t have all that much experience with food.”

  Not-Roger’s stool creaked under his bulk as if he somehow weighed more than he had the last time he
used it. “It was a brave and clever thing, miss. If we had a future, I’d look forward to telling your story to all my future guests. But we don’t. The bell rang.”

  Gustav said, “I think it’s about time somebody explains why that’s so important.”

  Not-Roger sighed. “Well, you’ve got to understand, in the old days anybody who built a barn around a gnarfle always installed a bell tower above it as well. It would never ring a note unless the gnarfle broke out, and when that happened the toll could be heard for miles and miles around, alerting all shadows in range that they should run for the hills in order to avoid being chewed.”

  This was the first element of the Dark Country’s odd arrangement involving barns and gnarfles that had succeeded in making even a lick of sense to Fernie so far. “So?”

  “So there aren’t nearly as many gnarfles as there used to be in this region due to the great gnarfle plague a few centuries ago . . . but bells don’t die of plague, so there are just as many of those lying around hither and yon. Lord Obsidian put out the order that they can also be rung to alert his forces of runaway slaves, either human or shadow. Our problem is that, while the Rarely might not be visited very often and my little inn’s always been considered beneath his notice before, it’s still technically within the territory he’s managed to conquer. Considering how fast shadows move in general and the even faster vehicles Lord Obsidian has invented for them, I can’t imagine it would take one of his patrols more than a few minutes to answer the call. They’ll drag us all off to his vile mines.”

  Fernie suddenly had absolutely no trouble understanding why Nebuchadnezzar had tried to get at the bell. He might have been chased off for a while back at the Gloom house, but after all this time he was still pursuing his old mission for the People Taker: capturing the What family for Lord Obsidian.

  Gustav said, “It might not be so bad. If they arrive and see the gnarfle running around, they’ll figure it was what set off the bell and probably want to leave in a hurry. They might miss us entirely.”

  “Like the bunch that got Dad missed me,” Pearlie said.

  Not-Roger’s shadow replied, “That they might, miss. But they might also check the house just to be sure, and would it really be all that tremendous an improvement for us if they got sloppy, overlooked us, and left us here with the gnarfle?”

  Gustav considered that. “No, it wouldn’t. But you said they’d probably be here in minutes?”

  “Yes.”

  “By ground or sky?”

  “Probably sky,” said Not-Roger.

  “Good,” said Gustav.

  Fernie had heard that tone of voice from him a couple times before, most notably on a long and danger-filled night some time ago when he’d explained the difference between coming up with an idea and coming up with a plan. An idea, he’d explained then, comes first, and is what you have when you’ve first thought of something that might work. A plan, he said, always comes later, and is how you’re going to make it happen.

  From the purposeful way he ran from the room and down a narrow hallway leading toward the part of the house Cousin Cyrus and Nebuchadnezzar had wrecked during their battle, Fernie could tell the idea had already occurred to him. Maybe he had a plan, too.

  Not-Roger’s shadow broke the silence that followed Gustav’s departure. “It would have been nice if your friend first took a second to tell the rest of us what he was up to before he leaped into action like that.”

  “I’m used to it,” Fernie said, immediately realizing that she actually was. “Come on!”

  She pursued Gustav down the corridor, catching a glimpse of him as he turned right at the next corner and left at the corner after that. By the time he had made three course changes, Fernie heard other footsteps behind her and knew that, as expected, Pearlie and Not-Roger had followed as well. She was in too much of a hurry to look back to see if Anemone and Caliban and Not-Roger’s shadow were still with them, but didn’t see how that mattered, even if Anemone had fallen into the odd habit of calling her “dear.”

  The inn seemed to have more space on the inside than its outside would suggest, but not in the manner of Gustav’s home, where that actually happened to be true, but rather in the way that certain old rambling houses have. The areas Gustav ran into were even dustier, emptier, and more poorly built than the living room had been, looking like they’d never been used at all and therefore raising the question of why they’d ever been built in the first place; probably because Not-Roger had had nothing but time on his hands and so many years to fill that he had to keep building to avoid going mad.

  Gustav headed up a wildly askew flight of stairs, all cracked and broken and tilting to the right in a manner that suggested it had either been built to look like that or been knocked out of alignment by the fight between Nebuchadnezzar and Cousin Cyrus. He seemed to want the location where the two battling shadows had broken through the wall, and as he burst into a room littered with wreckage from the shattered walls and marked with an especially big crater leading out into open air, he stopped, peering upward.

  As the others all bunched up behind him, he pointed upward. “There they are.”

  Fernie saw nothing special: just the dark gray, ominous cloud cover that the Dark Country had for sky.

  Then she noticed a small spot, no bigger to her eye than a single speck of dust, growing larger as it approached.

  In less than a second, it looked the size of the sun at noon in the sky over Sunnyside Terrace. Then the size of an apple held at arm’s length. Then the size of a Frisbee.

  By then, she could discern its form. It wasn’t round, but rather cylindrical. For some reason that must have made sense to its designer, Lord Obsidian, it curved downward on both ends, like a frowning mouth. Maybe he was so determined to wipe out all joy in the Dark Country and on Earth that even the vehicles used by his servants had to look unhappy. Maybe it was just the shape that worked best. But either way, it was up there, and it seemed to sneer down at the people and shadows hiding inside the inn as if it deeply disapproved of their existence.

  Gustav turned to Not-Roger and asked, “Is that the vehicle you were talking about?”

  Not-Roger had gone back to sounding like all the hope had gone out of his world. “Yes. That’s one of Obsidian’s slave ships, all right. It’s a zippalin: like a blimp from the world of light, only designed to move as fast as a jet plane.”

  Gustav nodded. “Thanks for confirming it. Meanwhile, have the rest of you noticed that it’s approaching us from that direction,” he pointed toward the zippalin, “and we last saw the gnarfle outside the inn in this direction?” He pointed back downstairs. “They might not even be able to see it from where they are.”

  Before anybody could absorb this, he stepped up to the great big hole in the wall and started waving and yelling.

  “HEY! YOU BIG FAT STUPID MINIONS! WE’RE DOWN HERE!”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Hole in the Wall Gang

  What followed this bizarre behavior on Gustav’s part was a fine demonstration of just how much faith the What girls had in him.

  It was especially impressive in the case of Pearlie What, whose capture by Nebuchadnezzar and current ordeal in the Dark Country had both occurred after Gustav made one of his all-time biggest mistakes by promising her father that a short visit to his house would be safe.

  The girls would only do what they did now, instead of asking Gustav just what was wrong with him, if they still trusted him.

  But they did, and so they jumped up and down and hurled abuse at the approaching zippalin.

  Fernie yelled, “YOU STUPID MINIONS! YOU ONLY WORK FOR LORD OBSIDIAN BECAUSE YOU’RE TOO UGLY TO GET A BETTER JOB!”

  Pearlie, remembering a line from a funny movie she’d been so determined to permanently commit to her memory that she’d once watched it five times in one day, hollered, “YOUR FATHER WAS A HAMSTER A
ND YOUR MOTHER SMELT OF ELDERBERRIES!”

  “What a distinctly odd thing to say,” murmured Not-Roger’s shadow. “Is smelling of elderberries even a bad thing?”

  Up in the sky, the zippalin pivoted like a turning face and appeared to consider the noisy and quite possibly mad denizens of the inn.

  Vertical lines dropped from its belly, not making any sense to Fernie until she realized that they were climbing ropes spun from shadow-stuff, stored aboard as coils and released by the crew whenever they wanted to descend and attack something. Two dozen shadowy forms began to descend those lines, moving with the speed of creatures who had no bones to break and therefore didn’t have to worry about getting hurt if they lost their grip and fell.

  “COME ON!” Gustav hollered. “WHY ARE YOU ALL MOVING SO SLOWLY? ARE YOU SCARED WE’LL BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU?”

  One of the minions had already descended far enough for his voice to be audible. “Oi! Just ’oo do you think you’re talking to, you little meat bag?”

  The minion released his line and tumbled toward the wreckage of the barn, landing there in a puff of dust before standing again to face the inn with a triumphant and evil grin. He was a particularly misshapen shadow, with tiny legs, a massive chest, and a head that would have gotten any art student working with modeling clay thrown out of class for not having the slightest idea what a head was supposed to look like. “Oi’m gonna enjoy seein’ this one in the mines. Silly mugger don’t know well enough to keep his mouf shut!”

  More of his fellow minions also released their lines and sank gently to the ground. One landed right next to the first and beamed with the shadow equivalent of big, greasy, food-encrusted teeth. “We’ll teach him that, Scrawbers, we will, we will! He’ll learn to bend the knee!”

  A dozen shadow minions now stood inside the wreckage of the barn, looking eager for the brutality to come.

  As they left the field of debris and began to approach the inn’s only door, Gustav murmured, “Here, gnarfle, gnarfle, gnarfle . . . !”