The gnarfle seemed to hear him, because that’s when it came lumbering around the corner of the inn and met the nice collection of chewable items who had just dropped from the sky in its vicinity.
A couple of the minions still descending from lines screamed like the littlest of little girls and began scrambling back up. Those on the ground were taken by surprise and were frozen with fear for the heartbeat or two it took for the monster to scoop two of them into its cavernous mouth.
The openmouthed way it chewed reminded Fernie of a boy named Lester Funmuntz, who had sat in the desk next to hers at the last school she’d attended. Lester had chewed gum nonstop, and any moment where his mouth happened to be shut and his wad of gum not visible to everybody in his vicinity could not be described as anything but a fleeting accident. Otherwise his jaw continued to flap and gnash as wide as the hinges of his skull allowed. The only real difference between the gnarfle and Lester Funmuntz was that chewing gum never actually objected to being chewed, and the two shadow minions in the gnarfle’s mouth did little else. They howled and screamed and yelled “Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!” and scrambled to escape and begged their friends for rescue and generally, in all possible ways, raised the biggest fuss possible.
“I almost feel sorry for them,” Fernie said.
“They’re minions of Lord Obsidian,” Gustav replied. “How sorry for them are you willing to be?”
One of the other minions on the ground, evidently a loyal sort, made a halfhearted attempt to grab the outstretched arm his friend had managed to extend outside the reach of the gnarfle’s teeth for a moment in order to pull him free. Instead, he was shoveled in himself. The chorus of anguished shadow minions being mangled between the gnarfle’s teeth increased by one. “Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!”
Anemone shook her head. “This, dears, is why I said it was particularly dangerous for beings of my kind to go anywhere near that barn. The presence of too many shadows can drive gnarfles into a kind of frenzy.”
Fernie was about to snap that the immediate neighborhood didn’t seem any safer for human beings, either. But then two more minions descending from the zippalin swung through the gaping hole in the wall and into the room, rendering that the kind of argument that didn’t have to be made.
The one with the beak nose and the tiny pinprick eyes waved his scimitar and cried, “By all the soup of the abyss, this looks like it will be a mighty haul! Meat and traitor shadows both!”
The other was a pig-faced shadow whose jowls and fat lips shook like jelly beneath eyes like bottomless pits. “And not just that, Scabby-Tongue! Don’t you see the treasure we’ve found here? That’s a little boy in a black suit! That’s Gustav Gloom!”
The pig-faced jowly one lunged for Gustav, who as always managed to be just out of reach when someone with evil intent grabbed for him. He snarled and reached for Gustav again, only to find himself wrestled aside by the hooded Caliban, who seemed to have made up his mind that he was actively involved in this fight whether he wanted to be or not.
The two shadows struggled. Caliban and the jowly pirate teetered at the edge of the hole in the inn wall and might have fallen either way depending on how their battle went, but then two giant twelve-fingered hands reached up from below and plucked the pirate from the air. In an instant, the jowly shadow had joined the writhing mass of unwilling shadows being chewed in the monster’s mouth.
It was harder to see what had happened to Caliban, as he’d fallen from sight, and in the instant his fate became unclear, Anemone cried out, “No!” Her features seemed to shift, the fresh face of the young woman whose shadow she seemed to be giving way, her cheeks becoming puffier and wider. It was only a second before she became herself again, but the slip had been enough to establish what Fernie had begun to suspect: that, like Olaf, she was not the person she’d been pretending to be.
Scabby-Tongue cried out in anger at the chewing of his friend. “You meat bags! I don’t care what Lord Obsidian’s offering for you! He can have you after you’ve been chewed awhile!”
He lunged for the nearest human being, Pearlie What.
Pearlie threw a punch that landed squarely on his nose. This staggered him a little, even though her fist passed through his nose without making any measurable impact.
Scabby-Tongue drew back his shadow scimitar and slashed it across Pearlie’s midsection. It was such a mighty swing that, had his sword been a solid object instead of a shadow, Pearlie might have been cut in half. This would have been a somewhat more serious prospect for a human girl than it had been for Cousin Cyrus. But she only looked confused for a moment. Then she grinned with the realization that she hadn’t been hurt and punched the beak-nosed minion in the face again. “We can’t hurt each other! He’s nothing! I could do this all day!”
Fernie would have liked that to be true, but she remembered her encounters with other shadows and knew that they could be as solid as they wanted to be at any time. “Don’t be overconfident! They—”
She was too late. Scabby-Tongue had solidified enough to seize Pearlie by the neck and lift her struggling form off the floor.
He might have gone through with his threat and tossed her out the hole in the wall for the gnarfle to chew, but Gustav took advantage of his temporary solidity and kicked him in the behind. Scabby-Tongue hopped up in the air a little, dropped Pearlie to the floor, and whirled on Gustav, who simply kicked him again, this time in a place where nobody likes to be kicked. Fernie finished the job with a powerful shove, which propelled Scabby-Tongue out the hole in the wall.
Like a character from an old-fashioned cartoon, Scabby-Tongue seemed to hang there for a moment, surprised that two children had succeeded in landing such effective hits.
Then Caliban’s hand rose up and grabbed him by the ankle to yank him over the edge.
The gnarfle leaped to pluck him out of the air, and Scabby-Tongue found himself part of the increasingly unhappy mob being chewed in the monster’s mouth.
“Ow!” the writhing shadows in the gnarfle’s mouth cried. “Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!”
Caliban pulled himself back through the hole in the wall to rejoin his allies in the shattered room. “Glad to be back,” he said, more cheerfully than anything he’d said for as long as they’d known him. “I’m so glad that I didn’t end this day being chewed.”
For the first time, Fernie got the impression that he wasn’t exactly who he’d been pretending to be, either.
Pearlie rose to her feet, rubbing her bruised neck. “I hate to say it, but this isn’t going all that badly, considering. How many shadows can that thing chew at once without having to spit any out?”
“Gnarfles don’t spit anything out,” Not-Roger’s shadow said. “I’ve heard of single gnarfles catching and chewing the population of an entire shadow city, all at the same time. It’s not like there wouldn’t be enough room in his mouth. It’s a big mouth, and shadows can be crunched down pretty flat, once they’re chewed enough.”
“What happens to them, if they can’t ever die? Can they escape?”
“You’re a kid,” Not-Roger said, pointing out what Fernie would have considered obvious. “Have you ever gotten so excited running around and doing kid things that the gum in your mouth falls out by accident? Now imagine all your gum kicking and screaming and trying to get out. Imagine a couple of dozen separate pieces of gum in your mouth at the same time, all fighting to get out while you’re so busy trying to catch more gum that you can’t pay proper attention to your chewing. It might take hundreds or even thousands of years, but they’ll all find their way out, even if they then have to take time to smooth out all the bite marks.”
“The Dark Country isn’t just stupid,” Fernie announced. “It’s gross.”
“That it is,” said Caliban. “Given a choice, I much prefer the world of people.”
Unfortunately, the break in the fighting was now over. A dozen more shadow minions, i
ncluding four indistinct ones with no human features and a bunch of others who must have spent their time on Earth being the shadows of phenomenally ugly people, swung into the room waving shadow swords. More shadow minions bunched up behind them, until they all blended together into a thick gray fog. There seemed to be almost twenty of them now, all flashing cruel grins, all eager to add the humans and shadows before them to their haul.
The gnarfle leaped again and seized two entire handfuls, but there were more descending minions than even he could catch or chew before the crowd at the hole in the wall became an actual threat.
As they advanced away from the edge and out of the gnarfle’s immediate reach, Gustav cried, “Everybody retreat!”
The What girls didn’t need any further coaxing. Fernie and Pearlie barreled out the door of the room behind Gustav and Anemone and Caliban. Not-Roger followed them only as far as the doorway, which he filled, swinging his massive arms at the dark shapes that threatened to bury him. Because they wanted to be solid enough to seize him, he actually succeeded in knocking a few down with a swing and even tossing a few the length of the room and out the hole in the wall for the gnarfle to seize and chew. With his shadow fighting at his side, Not-Roger bellowed, “This is my inn! These are my guests! You . . . are . . . not . . . welcome . . . here!”
Farther down the hallway, Fernie peered over her shoulder to see if there was anything she could do to help them. But no, even during the one glimpse she could steal, they were buried beneath a mass of writhing gray bodies. One of the black lines from the zippalin entered the room, moving of its own accord like a snake, and wrapped around Not-Roger’s midsection, pulling his screaming and cursing form from sight. Not-Roger’s shadow went down under a pile of other shadow minions. Then the hallway behind Fernie was so clogged with advancing black shapes that she could see no more.
Anemone shouted, “Fernie, dear! Come on!”
“Your name’s not Anemone!” Fernie retorted. “You’re Great-Aunt Melli—”
Another black line whipped around Anemone’s belly and pulled her up short. Her face shifted again, and this time confirmed what Fernie had figured out: that Anemone was Great-Aunt Mellifluous, the shadow who had become the closest thing Gustav had to a mother after the disappearance of Penny’s shadow when he was five.
There was no time to ask her why she had hidden her identity or pretended that she had not yet decided to help Gustav and the girls on their quest. For that matter, there was no time to ask the next logical question: who Caliban was if he, like her, was shrouded in disguise. By then he had gone to help Anemone and was busily trying to free her from the black line when another one whipped around him and imprisoned him as well. He only managed to fight the black line long enough to cry, “Don’t give up! You’re not alone!” Then the lines yanked both Anemone and Caliban back and they disappeared into the advancing mob.
Fernie cried, “There are too many of them!”
“I’m aware of that,” Gustav said, as always a million miles away from panic. “I expected a manageable group, not the small army we got.”
Now at the bottom of the stairs, Fernie slammed a door shut behind her, knowing that it would not keep their pursuers at bay for long. “So what are we going to do?”
“Get captured, I expect.”
Fernie and Pearlie both started yelling at once. “But Gustaaaav—”
“But then,” he said, keeping up his explanation even as they barreled down the long twisty hallways back to the room where Not-Roger did all his entertaining, “I knew that much before we even started. Think about it. We need to get captured.”
Pearlie started screaming at him. “What do you mean we need to get captured?”
That wasn’t all she yelled. She yelled some things that were horrible and others that would have been unforgivable in any other circumstance. She yelled with a level of anger that was only reasonable, considering that it came from a girl who had successfully escaped the Dark Country once and had returned with him out of faith that he knew what he was doing and would make sure that everything turned out all right. Now she was even worse off than she was before and about to be captured by Lord Obsidian’s minions, only to hear Gustav announce that it was all part of his plan.
This is exactly the kind of thing that makes people who’d already been through a rough time carry grudges.
Fernie, on the other hand, froze, focusing on the other thing he’d said.
Think about it.
She thought about it and realized to her dismay that Gustav was right. He was more right than anybody she’d ever known, even if what he was right about happened to be too terrible.
They had to be captured.
The Dark Country was just too vast a distance to cross otherwise.
Being captured was the only way for Gustav and Fernie and Pearlie and the shadows traveling with them to get where they wanted to be, past all the land’s monsters and death traps and hidden dangers, without either getting themselves killed or giving up their whole lives to the task of passing its perils alive.
Fernie had no way of knowing whether Gustav had a plan for what to do when they got dragged before Lord Obsidian or just an idea, or if all the plans and ideas were over with. She had no way of telling whether all that awaited them was the same lifetime of slavery they would have suffered if they’d just tried a little bit harder and gotten themselves captured later on. But she felt a terrible calm descend upon her, like a warm quilt on a cold night.
Gustav was right. This was the only way.
She thought all of this in a second and came to her decision as they burst into Not-Roger’s living room, the horde of shadows just a couple of steps behind them. Pearlie was still yelling at Gustav for not having any plan other than just letting themselves get captured. Fernie silenced her sister by placing a cold hand on her wrist.
Pearlie skidded to a stop, shut her mouth, gave Fernie a wild-eyed stare, and then, meeting her eyes, horribly, got it. “Oh no. Really?”
Fernie said, “Really. For Dad.”
Pearlie gulped, shook her head as if wishing something could possibly make what was about to happen go away, then turned the head shake into a despairing and angry nod. “Okay.” She glanced at Gustav. “For your dad, too. And this better work. If we don’t eventually get a happy ending out of this, I’ll never talk to you again.”
Gustav was unruffled. “Don’t worry. I like you too much to let that happen.”
“Okay,” said Pearlie.
The swarm of shadow minions burst into the room. There were hundreds of them, too many to fight. The ones with faces looked cruel and calculating, and the ones without faces looked like something out of the nightmares Fernie hadn’t had since she was six. Just looking at them, she felt a lot smaller, and a lot more helpless, than she’d ever felt when she was six.
“Let’s at least make it look good,” said Gustav.
“Let’s not,” said Fernie. “Let’s make it look great.”
Clutching hands, screaming at the top of their lungs just to give themselves courage, Gustav, Fernie, and Pearlie ran together out the front door of Shadow’s Inn.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A Gnarfle Way to End the Day
Heroic gestures are a fine thing in theory.
But as soon as Gustav and the What girls were out the door, it occurred to Fernie that as long as they had been resigned to being captured anyway, they might have been better off just waiting around and letting it happen inside Shadow’s Inn.
This would have been easier, for one thing, and it wouldn’t have required them to get back outside, where they’d last seen Cousin Cyrus and Nebuchadnezzar and where the gnarfle was still running around, grabbing up handful after handful of shadow minions and popping them into a mouth that was already as crowded as a train station at rush hour.
“Ow!” the shadow minions in its mouth cr
ied. “Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!”
The landscape in front of Shadow’s Inn teemed with shadow minions, waving shadow scimitars and shadow axes and rushing about in panic as the gnarfle ambled about among them, like a restaurant patron taking an all-you-can-eat buffet too seriously. Its mouth was now gummy with mangled, barely recognizable shadow forms, all bearing highly visible tooth marks and most distorted into curlicue knots from the ordeal of being chewed. Shadow arms and shadow legs dangled from what would have been its lips, had it possessed any lips.
“Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!”
Pearlie What was the first of the three friends to be captured. A long black line from the zippalin snaked down from the sky, seized her by the ankles, and yanked her off her feet. She was not pulled into the air right away for some reason, and instead was swung along the length of what remained of Shadow’s Inn just a few feet off the ground.
Fernie ducked under a minion’s shadowy sword thrust and ran after Pearlie, intent on rescue. Another minion tried to tackle her by the legs, and she simply leaped over him, rolled, and went on, her fingers inches from Pearlie’s outstretched hands. She didn’t focus on those hands, but instead on her sister, with her wide eyes and shiny forehead and gaping mouth. Then she put on a burst of speed, seized Pearlie’s hand with her own, and ran behind her for a while, unable to do anything but keep up.
Then the black line yanked Pearlie skyward. Fernie felt her own feet yanked off the ground as she held on to Pearlie with all her might, and for a fraction of a second thought that it might be okay to just hold on, stay with her sister, and let herself be dragged all the way to the zippalin with her.
But Pearlie was not about to risk Fernie’s life by attempting to hold on to her younger sister at a great height. She dug her fingernails into Fernie’s palm, forcing her to let go.
Fernie tumbled to the ground, scraping her knees and elbows upon landing. She could only look up helplessly as Pearlie screamed down at her, “It’s okay! Keep running!”
Gustav Gloom and the Inn of Shadows Page 12