Pearlie receded into the sky, becoming first a smaller version of herself, and then a dot, before she was gone.
Counting two occasions back at Gustav’s house, this was the third time Fernie had seen her sister taken away from her. It was not an experience she’d enjoyed all that much the first two times, and it did not much improve with repetition.
She whirled around, searching for Gustav. She spotted him an amazingly far distance from the house, staying ahead of a small mob of shadows who didn’t seem to be able to surround and catch him no matter what they did. It must have been a terrible novelty for these minions to find themselves pitted against a halfsie boy who was as hard to catch as the most slippery shadows were.
But Fernie had proven herself hard to catch more than once, and she wasn’t about to be captured any more easily than he was. So when dark forms gathered around her, she darted through the one hole in their ranks and ran in the one direction none of them would have guessed that she was willing to run.
She ran screaming toward the gnarfle, which was just stomping through all the chaos, scooping up one shadow minion after another and shoving them into its toothy and already overpopulated maw.
The screams of the shadows already being gnashed and chewed between those teeth were about as terrible as anything Fernie had ever heard. They were upset and put-upon and frightened. Quite a few of the shadow minions cried out for their mothers, which would have been an interesting development at any other time, as Fernie had never once in her life suspected that shadows had mothers. She supposed, distantly, that this only made sense, as she’d already met one who identified herself as a great-aunt.
But she didn’t have any more time to think about it, because there it was, just up ahead, its twelve-fingered hands flexing and grasping and reaching out to her.
She threw herself to the ground.
Just above her head, the shadows who’d been chasing her screamed as they overshot her and found themselves within the gnarfle’s grasp. It stepped over her to get at them, seizing them out of the air and ramming them into its mouth in writhing bunches.
It chewed. It chewed noisily. It chewed wetly. The only reason Fernie couldn’t accuse it of bad table manners was that there was no table in sight.
It also hummed while it chewed. It was a happy gnarfle.
The wadded-up shadows in its mouth yelled, “Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!”
Another black line came rolling down from the sky, intent on grabbing her the way another had grabbed Pearlie. Fernie was tempted to just save herself some time and trouble and let herself be taken, but she wasn’t ready to let that happen yet, not when she’d just spotted something that interested her very much only a short distance away.
She would never be able to say how she managed to spot this one thing out of everything else she had to occupy her attention, but she did spot it, and the sight was enough to make her curl her hands into fists as she rose to confront what she saw.
A very long time ago, Fernie’s mother had shown her a funny old movie about a bunch of silly people racing around the world. At one point, they stopped in a distant country where a bunch of even sillier people found themselves having a violent disagreement in a bakery. Everybody started throwing pies at everybody else’s faces. It was very funny to watch what felt like thousands of custard pies flying back and forth and for both good guys and bad guys to get splattered with cream. But the most important part of the scene was the way the hero of the movie walked through the door and for a while quietly walked through the center of the madness without being hit by a single pie.
Fernie knew what it must have been like for the hero of that movie. She was in the center of even greater madness, in a battle populated by what felt like hundreds of shadows flying back and forth to catch her while also trying to avoid being caught by the gnarfle. There was also Gustav Gloom, who had retrieved one of the rapiers and was currently doing a fine job keeping at least six of the minions at bay in a heroic duel she honestly would have liked to see more of if she hadn’t had something more important to do.
But none of this touched her. None of it even came close to mattering as she walked through it all toward the spot where, alone and almost as untouched by the battle as herself, Nebuchadnezzar knelt.
The shape-changing shadow, responsible for kidnapping her father and sister in the first place and for bringing all this current trouble on by disguising himself as a friend, already looked like he’d been through a war. He had transformed back into his favorite disguise, the helpless little pigtailed girl, but seemed to be having trouble maintaining it. There were holes in him, holes that went all the way through him and would have allowed daylight to pass through him had there been any daylight nearby that wanted to do such a thing. The little girl’s face was mashed all to one side.
Cousin Cyrus looked almost as messed up as Nebuchadnezzar. He lay on the ground at the shape-changer’s side, keeping a tight grip on his enemy’s wrist while continuing to throw his weak punches.
“Let go,” Nebuchadnezzar complained as his face crumpled again from yet another punch from the not-quite-defeated Cousin Cyrus. “There’s no point in fighting me anymore, you stupid old coot. You’ve lost. Lord Obsidian’s minions have come and the foolish children are doomed.”
“Not . . . as long as I . . . still owe . . . debts . . .”
Not far away, a tiny shape flew into the sky, dragged upward by another of the zippalin’s black lines. It was Gustav, who had either figured that it was time to be captured or had been captured against his will before he was entirely ready to go. He didn’t cry out, so Fernie took what satisfaction she could in pretending to herself that he’d given up deliberately.
She wasn’t worried, because she had every intention of seeing him again very soon.
His capture just meant that she had only a couple of heartbeats before the remaining shadow minions took stock of what still needed to be done and all came for her, gnarfle or no gnarfle.
The dust the fight had stirred up seemed to be shielding Nebuchadnezzar, Cousin Cyrus, and Fernie from the minions for now, but to her it didn’t seem to be the main reason why none of them were coming after her right now. No, she was being left alone, seemingly invisible to everybody right now, even unseen by Nebuchadnezzar though she was only a few feet away from him.
Sometimes, she thought, things happen in a certain way only because they have to.
“Cousin Cyrus,” she whispered.
Nebuchadnezzar whirled. He hadn’t heard Fernie approach at all.
Cousin Cyrus scowled up at her. “What . . . do you want . . . from me now, girl? Haven’t I . . . already done . . . enough for you brats?”
“Yes,” she said. Time seemed to have slowed down, and all doubt in her appeared to have fled. “You’ve done everything you had to. I can’t release you from any debts you owe to anybody else, but speaking as Pearlie’s sister, I release you from the debt you owed her. You don’t have to punish Nebuchadnezzar anymore. You can let go of him. And I thank you.”
“It’s about bloody time,” Cousin Cyrus muttered, releasing Nebuchadnezzar so he could flit off into the distance and smooth out his own dents in peace.
Nebuchadnezzar’s little-girl eyes widened in astonishment as he rose from the dirt to face down the angrier and somehow far more fearsome little girl before him. “What on earth would you do that for, you foolish little—?”
Fernie punched him in the face.
It was an ineffective blow, in that she was a very solid girl and he was at the moment about as easy to strike as a rain cloud. Her fist passed through him harmlessly. But he had been through a lot already in the last few minutes, and instead of doing the smart thing and simply flitting away leaving only scornful laughter behind him, he made a terrible mistake and did what Fernie had somehow known he was just angry enough to do. He snarled and turned solid enough to punch her back.
The blow landed on Fernie’s shoulder instead of her face. It knocked her half a step back, but that was okay. She’d been willing to take the punch and any pain that came with it in order to have something solid to grab. This she did, seizing Nebuchadnezzar by the wrist and pulling him with her as she spun around and started running, with him held before her at arm’s length.
Nebuchadnezzar still had enough time to slip from her grip, turn into anything he wanted to be, and fly away triumphant. But he did none of these things. He was too paralyzed by the look in her eyes, and possibly by the same sense Fernie had, that this was exactly how the history between them had to end. “No! No!” he cried. “You can’t! It’s too cruel! I don’t want to be chewed!”
The gnarfle was now just a few feet away, its giant mouth chomping up and down as its terrible hands spread wide apart to grab its next treat.
Fernie had just enough time to say, “Then you should have left my family alone!”
Then she threw Nebuchadnezzar at the gnarfle’s hands.
He changed shape at least four times before the gnarfle’s massive hands slammed shut, catching him. He became the little girl from the Hall of Shadow Criminals who had so sweetly promised to be Fernie’s friend. He became the version of Gustav Gloom he had once pretended to be, the one who was mean and cruel and who Fernie had not liked at all. He became the friendly shadow of an ancient knight called Olaf, who according to legends had defeated entire armies with his terrible stench. And then, just before the gnarfle captured him, he became the shape that was probably closest to his true nature: a thin, hollow-eyed nothing of a man who did evil things because he wasn’t special enough to do anything better with his life.
It was in this last shape that he entered the gnarfle’s mouth screaming.
Then the big flat teeth came down and rose back up and came back down again, turning Nebuchadnezzar into something that reminded Fernie of what she saw whenever her sister tried to disgust her by opening her mouth to display a pile of thoroughly chewed French fries.
The only difference, of course, was that the French fries wouldn’t have been yelling at the top of their lungs and begging for mercy.
“No! No! Save me! Please! Ow! I promise I’ll be good! I’ll be your friend! Ow!”
This was the cruelest thing she had ever done to anybody, and it didn’t feel bad at all.
In fact, it felt pretty good.
Then one of the black lines from the zippalin came down, whipped around her waist, and yanked her into the sky.
She may have been the only human being ever captured by them who went smiling.
EPILOGUE
Last Stop Before the Real Monsters
The word meanwhile doesn’t make a lot of sense in this situation, because the Dark Country and Sunnyside Terrace are two different worlds entirely, and time doesn’t exactly work the same way in both places. These things can be hard to measure.
To people living on Sunnyside Terrace, the hours had passed at about the same rate they always passed. The sun had set and the first stars had started to shine in the deep indigo sky. Most people had started settling in with their televisions, a much smaller number with their books, and a smaller number still with other diversions.
The door of the Fluorescent Salmon home opened, and Nora What stepped out. She was still dressed in the same safari jacket, jodhpurs, and pith helmet she’d been wearing when the cab dropped her off at home earlier that day, the same clothes she’d worn when she’d read the strange letter from the younger of her two daughters and when her own shadow had spoken to her and driven her into a very undignified faint. She looked a little pale for a woman so tanned by the sun, but her eyes were set and focused, and her brows were knit together in a single furious line. She was gone from home a lot because of her job, but nobody who knew her had ever said that she wasn’t a mother.
As she crossed the street and headed toward the Gloom house, she passed under the streetlights, revealing that there was only one shadow with her: her own. There was no visible sign of Fernie’s shadow, or Mr. Notes’s shadow, or Hives. But the backpack she had donned bulged in odd ways, and anybody standing close to her would have discerned impatient shushing noises coming from within.
None of her neighbors were around to see this. This was not entirely a good thing for her, since if she’d had the chance to meet or speak to any of her neighbors, they might have told her what she’d missed while lying unconscious after her faint: that this had been a very odd day at the Gloom house. Strange lights had flickered in the usually dark windows, the walls had rumbled from noises that sounded like every item of furniture in the house shattering all at once, and a number of shadows had simply fled out the front door and drifted down the street, anxious to be anywhere but there. It all added up to an odd and disturbing afternoon around a house that was sufficiently odd and disturbing already.
Unfortunately, the only neighbor talkative enough to insist on telling her all this, one Mrs. Adele Everwiner, was currently in her car and breaking all the speed limits fleeing to her sister’s home in another state. So nobody told her. The information wouldn’t have stopped Mrs. Nora What even if somebody had told her, but it would have been nice to be warned that things at the Gloom house had changed for the worse.
She entered the property through the open gate and made her way across the foggy front lawn to the pair of giant front doors. She took a deep breath, gathered her courage, and knocked.
A distant voice inside cried, “Hold on! I’m coming!”
She waited. Then she waited some more. Then she waited longer still.
A man opened the door. His eyes and his smile were far too big for his face, and he was so pale that he probably should have spent some more time in the sun, but other than that he looked friendly enough. He wore a green button-down shirt decorated with a pattern of bananas, red parrots, and big tall drinks with little umbrellas in them. He said, “Sorry it took so long! I was in the game room, way on the other side of the house. How are you today?”
Mrs. What suddenly felt very silly. “Hello. I’m—”
“No,” the man said, “let me guess. I think I know who you are. I’ve seen your TV specials. You’re Nora What, right? Fernie’s mom! It’s such a pleasure to meet you! I’m your new neighbor, Brad Gloom!”
“Thank you,” Mrs. What said automatically, because it was what she always said whenever anybody told her they knew her TV specials. Then she said, “I’ve just come back from Africa.”
“Have you?” Brad Gloom exclaimed. “How charming!”
“Very,” Mrs. What said, cutting off the inevitable questions about where she’d gone and what she’d done. Then she said, “I’m looking for my family?” phrasing it as a question.
Brad Gloom was, of course, not named Brad Gloom at all. There was no Brad Gloom. The man standing before Nora What was better known by now, to the other members of the What family and to the shadows of the Gloom house, by his title, the People Taker. He happened to be a very dangerous person, more monster than man. But as far as appearances were concerned, he was Brad Gloom, who looked faintly ridiculous and, more importantly, completely harmless in his banana-and-parrot-and-umbrella-drink shirt.
Brad Gloom said, “Oh right. I’m sorry, they’re inside. We’ve been having so much fun in the game room that we must have lost all track of time. Today was the day they were supposed to go to the airport to pick you up, right?”
“Right,” said Mrs. What.
“I bet they’ll be perfectly horrified when they find out. Come on in. I’ll take you to them.”
Mrs. What hesitated, perhaps in response to the rustling noises coming from her backpack, some of which came very close to sounding like whispers. After a moment, her eyes turned awfully cold for such a nice woman being offered help by someone she was supposed to consider a friendly neighbor. “Thank you.”
Less than
five seconds later, the doors closed behind her, and night on Sunnyside Terrace returned to silence.
The slave hold of the zippalin was a place of oppressive gray fog, half-insane muttering from huddled figures behind iron grates, captive shadows swirling in cages of pure light, and the cruel laughter of minions taking joy in the misery of the tears of those they’d captured.
“Don’t worry,” said the massive round-shouldered minion using the tip of a shadow spear to prod Fernie What along a creaking walkway to cells in the darkest depths of the ship. “It may not be the luxury your lot is used to up there in the world of light, but ye won’t be in your cage for long. We’ve got special orders for your little band and will be delivering you directly to the castle of our master before you know it.”
“That’s a relief,” said Fernie. “I was afraid I’d have to wait a long time. I didn’t bring anything to read.”
“Ye’ll wish ye’d been given the option to wait, my pretty. Being a slave in his mines is like a nightmare that never ends, but being delivered to Obsidian personally is a frightful thing that happens only to the unlucky few. I hear tell he has enemies who have fed themselves to gnarfles rather than get within a hundred leagues of him. If I were you, I’d save meself some time and start howling for mercy now.” He cackled. “It won’t help, of course, but there’s no sense putting such things off to the last minute. You—”
“I wish you’d just shut up and put me in my cage already. You’re boring.”
This seemed to hurt the fat minion’s feelings a little, probably because it was the one big speech he ever got to say and he’d put so much work into honing it for the greatest possible fearsomeness that the worst possible thing any prisoner could do was shut him up in the middle of it. He grumbled to himself, no doubt finishing up all the really ominous bits under his breath, then directed Fernie to a set of ugly steel boxes with mesh windows and padlocked doors. Another cackling minion who crouched atop those boxes, playing idly with a spear, undid the lock so the fat one whose feelings Fernie had hurt could toss her in.
Gustav Gloom and the Inn of Shadows Page 13