Gustav Gloom and the Four Terrors

by Adam-Troy Castro

  The good news was that, while the hallway separating the monster from Fernie and Pearlie was distressingly devoid of any doors that might have offered an escape route, there was one last side passage, leading off to the left no more than ten paces away. At the rate the monster was moving, beating it to that only possible escape would not be a problem.

  For the trapped Fernie, anything even a step away might as well have been on the other side of the world. But she wasn’t the only person here whose life was at stake. “Pearlie! You can still get away! Run!”

  Pearlie moved closer. “No.”

  “There’s no reason for you to stay!”

  “Yes, there is,” Pearlie said. “I call it being your big sister.”

  The monster was still too far away right now to tell what it looked like—only that it seemed to absorb all the light around it, and that its mouth flashed shiny white fangs as long as Fernie’s forearms.

  Fernie resisted giving her trapped hand a desperate yank that would have cut it to ribbons. “Pearlie, I’m not kidding here! You’ve got to go!”

  “No,” said Pearlie.

  Fernie wanted to scream at her for being so stupid, but the next approaching footstep shook the floor so violently that she had to brace herself just to avoid falling. The iron hand interpreted it as an attempt to yank herself free, and punished her in the way that only it could.

  Pearlie blew on the emergency whistle three more times, again not succeeding in making any noises more helpful than Uncle Warren’s cheese burps. Appalled, she looked at her watch again and said, “Eleven minutes. I don’t think Dad and Gustav are coming back.”

  The monster filling the corridor was now much closer, and almost to the side passage that represented the only possible escape, but it was still impossible to discern its shape, only that it had powerful legs and a tremendous head, and that its teeth were far longer and sharper than Fernie wanted to think about.

  She didn’t believe it would have any trouble at all swallowing her and Pearlie in a single gulp.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE ONE THING SMART PEOPLE DO WHEN THEY’RE BEING CHASED BY MONSTERS

  All of a sudden, the iron hand loosened, and Fernie’s hand slid free, marked with ugly red scratches a lot like the ones she’d suffered when Harrington had been playing with her favorite pen and she’d been a little too insistent about trying to get it back.

  She stumbled a step away from the door, not knowing what had happened, wanting to run from the approaching monster while there was still a chance, but not wanting to leave her father and best friend behind in the Hall of Shadow Criminals. She might have remained frozen with indecision until the approaching monster was upon them, but then the door rolled aside and the familiar voice of Gustav Gloom cried, “Girls! Do what I say and run!”

  Fernie was so close to bolting out of sheer panic anyway that she didn’t think of turning around to confirm that her father was with him. She just ran, a step behind Pearlie, who ducked into the side corridor to their left and began to pick up speed.

  Just before she ducked into the same side passage herself, Fernie glanced up at the approaching monster, which was almost upon the intersection. Like so many of the shadows of the Gloom house, it looked like a real thing now that she had a chance to see it close up, allowing her to see more details than just its general outline. She saw that its skin was scaled, that its eyes were dark blots recessed beneath bony, overhanging brows, that its mouth was wide, and that despite its attempts to hunch over as it forced its way through a corridor much too small for it, its spine still scraped along the ceiling, carving a deep furrow with every step it took. The teeth looked longer and more worth avoiding than ever.

  It was only after she made it into the side passage, arms pumping as she raced after the fleeing form of her sister, that Fernie realized it was a shape she knew.

  It was, impossible as it was for her to believe, the shadow of a Tyrannosaurus rex.

  Fernie already knew that there were shadow dinosaurs in Gustav’s house. She hadn’t actually seen one before now, but had heard them during her hurried visit to the dinosaur bedroom.

  Seeing one close up, feeling its meaty breath on her skin, and hearing it bellow in frustration as she scurried away down the side passage a step before it would have eaten her were just the kinds of things Gustav had so recently promised her father they’d be avoiding this trip.

  “Gustaaaaaaav!” she yelled. “You’d better have a good explanation for this!”

  Gustav yelled back, “Can it wait?”

  The corridor resounded with a horrible crash. Fernie risked stopping long enough to turn around, and after a fleeting glimpse of Gustav racing by her, saw the cause. This side corridor where they had retreated was narrower than the one they had left, and had a much lower ceiling. The tyrannosaur, who had already been walking with its head down, now had to force its gigantic frame into an even smaller space.

  It had trouble changing direction wherever there wasn’t enough room to turn, and the intersection between the wider passage and this narrower, smaller passage was a cramped space indeed. The tyrannosaur poked its massive head into the smaller space, advanced, encountered a wall, backed up, entered the narrow corridor at another angle, got a little farther in before encountering a wall, and backed up again.

  The main problem seemed to be the tyrannosaur’s giant tail. It could only bend so much, and it stuck out so far behind the monster’s legs that it kept slamming into the wall of the other corridor and made getting any farther into this one too clumsy to manage in one try. The tyrannosaur could only advance by degrees, moving forward and backing up and moving forward and backing up, each time turning a little more so it could eventually face the right way to head down the passage where Fernie stood.

  Something about the creature’s presence here, at this moment, didn’t make sense to her, even in a house where so much didn’t make sense to her. In this house, there was something that didn’t make any sense every ten feet. But Fernie had the idea she was missing something, something important. She found herself staring at the advancing monster, tilting her head first one way and then the other, as if changing the angle of what she saw would suddenly make it right.

  The tyrannosaur grew impatient and used its giant head like a battering ram, making craters of the walls near the junction and tearing itself an easier entrance to the side corridor. Part of the ceiling collapsed down around its head, raising clouds of dust. Its great nostrils flared, clouds billowed, and the tyrannosaur forced itself farther into the side passage, ripping a giant bite from another section of ceiling and crunching it to pieces in its jaws just so there’d be more room for its SUV-sized head.

  Somewhere far behind her, Pearlie screamed at her to run. Gustav yelled that if she didn’t wake up, she was going to die. Fernie didn’t hear her father’s voice also calling for her, and that seemed wrong, too: the kind of wrong that was terribly, terribly important but couldn’t fit in her head any more than the tyrannosaur could.

  “Dad!” she cried. “Where are you?”

  The tyrannosaur bellowed as loudly as an entire herd of elephants and forced itself ten feet closer to her, its head ripping a deeper furrow in the ceiling while its broad shoulders tore gouges in the walls on both sides. It was almost upon her now, its comically small arms clutching at air. It was so close that Fernie could have taken two steps toward it, reached up with one arm, and tapped it on the chin—though that certainly didn’t seem like a good idea for a girl whose immediate plans did not include becoming somebody else’s lunch.

  The cavernous nostrils snuffed, expelling a cloud of mist that drenched her.

  The thing roared again, and then, impossibly, spoke.

  “I’m coming to get you, Fernie What . . .”

  All of Fernie’s paralysis vanished in an instant.

  She let out an eek.

  She was not proud of eeking, but she eeked, anyway.

  She threw up her hands and eeked and ran
away as fast as she could, aware from the sounds of destruction behind her that the tyrannosaur who’d just called her by name was willing to tear down all the walls in the house to reach her.

  She ran and headed toward the dim place where the passage turned to the right not far ahead. Pearlie and Gustav were both there, yelling at her that she wasn’t moving quickly enough. The sounds of destruction pursued her, little pieces of debris peppered her legs, and still she ran, screaming, wondering why her father wasn’t up there with Pearlie and Gustav.

  It all seemed to be part of the same puzzle, but she didn’t have time to think about it, not with that terrible dinosaur coming to get her. She was still wondering what had gone wrong, still trying to put the clues together in her head, when a furious Pearlie, seizing her by the wrist, yanked her around the bend.

  Her older sister fumed. “What’s the matter with you, anyway? You see a monster like that coming after you, and you don’t have anything better to do than to stand there staring at it?”

  The corridor up ahead stretched as far as Fernie’s eyes could see, every step of it lined with doors: tiny mouse-sized doors, cat flaps, giant stone gates, glass office doors with transoms, doors shaped like cartoon lightning bolts, and doors that looked like somebody without much artistic talent had taken a dull crayon and drawn a door with his eyes closed. Gustav stood beside one open door, out of which streamed a flickering orange light. Despite that, he looked paler, thinner, and somehow grayer than usual, as if whatever happened to him and Mr. What in the Hall of Shadow Criminals had robbed him of the usual sharp contrast between his pale skin and black suit.

  Mr. What was nowhere in sight.

  Fernie stumbled over her words. “The dinosaur . . .”

  “I saw it,” Pearlie said. “I didn’t stop and turn around so I could get a good look, but I did see it. That’s why I was running. Smart people run when they’re being chased by monsters. Stupid people don’t.”

  Fernie couldn’t help resenting being spoken to that way, because in the few weeks they’d all been living across the street from the Gloom house, she was the member of the family who’d spent the most time here, and she didn’t need her big sister to tell her that running from monsters was a good thing. As far as Fernie was concerned, she had more than enough personal experience with that activity.

  It was just that this time, there was something . . .

  The crashing and tearing sounds resumed behind her, cutting off the thought before she could finish it. “Where’s Dad?”

  “He’s okay,” Gustav said, making Fernie feel about a million times better in the span of two words.

  “But why isn’t he here?”

  “I’ll tell you in a little bit,” said Gustav.

  “That’s not good enough, Gustav! Where’s—”

  Another savage roar and another cacophony of crashing noises behind them established why Gustav might not have been willing to indulge in a long complicated explanation right now. A cloud of dust and debris, wafted aloft by tyrannosaur breath, turned the air gritty around them, making Fernie cough; it was not the first time she’d coughed in a house that in some places could have welcomed a battalion of maids bearing an entire armory of feather dusters.

  “He’s going to keep coming,” Gustav said, “until he loses our scent. We have to move quickly. Don’t ask any questions. Just follow me and don’t stop until I say it’s okay to stop. Okay?”

  The girls both gave their okays.

  Gustav ducked through the open door that radiated the orange light. The girls ran after him and down the long circular stone stairway on the other side. The wedge-shaped steps, narrowing to points at the center of the circle, were moist and dotted with slippery patches of moss; there were no railings to hold on to, and the orange light from the torches burning on the wall flickered so much that it was hard to see where the steps were. Still, Gustav moved with the speed that only a boy raised by creatures as fleeting as shadows could, and the girls had to take the treacherous steps two or three at a time just to stay in sight of the dark little shape forever disappearing around the bend.

  They were about half a dozen turns down by the time Fernie noticed that the lit torches grew fewer and farther apart the farther down they went, and that as a result, the stairwell was getting darker.

  The stairs were by now so much a direct violation of every rule their father had about staircases—they had to be well lit, they had to have railings, they needed to be dry, and they should never be taken at a headlong run—that the girls stopped on their own, even though they both had enough wind left to run much farther.

  Fernie called, “Gustav?”

  He was somewhere just ahead of them, out of sight. “What?”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To catch up with your dad.”

  “Why isn’t he with you?”

  A pale sliver of Gustav’s face, the only part of him visible past the sharp line where a deeper darkness began, appeared from around the next bend.

  “I’m sorry,” Gustav said. “We got separated. But he’s okay, I promise you.”

  Fernie didn’t know why, since she’d never had any reason to doubt Gustav before, but she found herself not believing him.

  Pearlie spoke her worry aloud. “He’s not okay, Gustav.”

  The one visible side of Gustav’s face formed a frown. “Why would I lie to you about something like that?”

  “I don’t think you’re lying,” Pearlie told him. “But I don’t think you know our dad the way we do. He worries about us all the time. He checks on us if we’re making noise, and he checks on us if we’re being too quiet. If some kind of emergency’s come up and he can’t get to us right away, he’s not okay. He’s not okay. Wherever he is, I promise you, he’s going crazy with worry.”

  Gustav licked his lips and peered over their heads. “The tyrannosaur—”

  Pearlie put her hands on her hips. “I don’t hear it coming anymore. Fernie, do you still hear it coming?”

  Fernie realized that she hadn’t heard either the damage the monster made or its unnerving promises to come get her since entering the stairwell.

  “So all we know,” Pearlie continued, anger building in every word, “is that there was some kind of prison break and that you got separated from our dad somehow, after promising him that none of us would be in any danger.”

  Gustav glanced at Fernie, as if hoping she’d talk some sense into her older sister. “But I’m taking you to where he’s going to be . . .”

  The sudden whininess in his voice, so different from the way he usually sounded, was enough to persuade Fernie that she really needed to demand an explanation right now. She folded her arms over her chest and said, “Pearlie’s right. I think you need to tell us what’s going on.”

  Gustav didn’t move for several seconds. Then he sighed in defeat and climbed the several steps separating him from them. Even as he moved into the direct light of the nearest burning torch, the sense Fernie had gotten before, that he was even paler and more colorless than usual, grew sharper and harder to deny.

  Then Fernie realized that she could see the flickering of the torchlight on the moist walls, not just behind him but through him.

  “Touch me,” he said.

  Fernie reached for his cheek.

  Her fingers passed right through him. It was as if he wasn’t even there—though he was as much there as the beings with whom Gustav Gloom had spent all of his short and unquiet life.

  Fernie exhaled, thinking she understood. “You’re not Gustav. You’re Gustav’s shadow.”

  This wouldn’t have been so bad if it were true, since Gustav’s shadow had been, on at least one other occasion, as helpful as Gustav himself.

  But then he shook his head, with a sadness great even for a boy who had known so much of that feeling in his life. “No, Fernie. I’m Gustav, all right. I’ve just been turned into a shadow.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  GUSTAV IS A SHADOW OF HIS FORMER SELF
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  The two girls both exploded with a flurry of questions, both of them speaking over the other and burying most of what either of them said behind a jumble of desperate babble.

  Fernie cried, “How did you get turned into a shadow? And where’s my dad? What’s with that dinosaur? Who escaped from the prison? Why didn’t your emergency whistle work? What’s gone wrong?”

  But even as she said that, Pearlie cried over her, “What happened to Dad? And what do you mean, you got turned into a shadow? Why are we being chased by a dinosaur? Why didn’t your whistle work? What’s gone wrong? Is our dad going to be okay?”

  They glanced at each other, not just aggravated and terrified, but suddenly mortified into silence.

  Gustav held up both hands to halt the barrage of questions. “I don’t know why that dinosaur’s running around loose or what it wants with us. I don’t know why the emergency whistle didn’t work; maybe it got broken somehow while I wasn’t looking. I don’t know exactly how many prisoners escaped. Your dad and I had to rush ourselves to safety when the prison break began and didn’t have time to keep track. I don’t know where your dad is now, but I do know where he’s heading, and I’m pretty sure he’ll be safe until we get there.”

  This was the kind of answer Fernie had heard too many times from Gustav Gloom. “You haven’t explained how you turned into a shadow.”

  Gustav shrugged. “I’m not sure about that, either, but I have some ideas. Can I go into more detail on the way?”

  Fernie and Pearlie glanced at each other, had an entire conversation of the sort certain sisters can have without ever saying a word, and made a silent decision.

  Fernie said, “We’ll follow you. But I need to take a look at my hurt hand first.”

  “Okay,” said Gustav.

  Fernie had been so busy running for her life and then asking unanswered questions that the cuts on her hand had forgotten to hurt. Now that she looked at it, the throbbing started anew. There were red scratches on the back of her hand, extending up her wrists; none of them were bleeding badly, and none of them were deeper than past ones Harrington had given her while still a playful kitten yet to know the sharpness of his own claws, but they were still ugly, and they still hurt.