Gustav Gloom and the Four Terrors

by Adam-Troy Castro

  Fernie could hardly bear the thought. “But why would he want it, Gustav? He used to be a person, back when he was called Howard Philip October. What could possibly go wrong with somebody, even an evil somebody, that would cause him to want to make the world look like that?”

  Gustav shrugged. “Maybe his mom and dad didn’t hug him enough. Maybe he didn’t get what he wanted for his birthday one year. Maybe he never learned how to keep his clothes from clashing and wanted to simplify things by getting rid of every color except black. And maybe he’s just a big evil bully who wants to wipe out all happiness, everywhere, because it strikes him as a fun thing to do.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t think it matters much. It only matters that he’s a real stinker.”

  They moved on, past more paintings of things that might come to be: bright shiny futures with jet packs and rocket cars and starships zipping around from one solar system to another, strange futures where dolphins walked around on two legs while leading obedient human beings on leashes, immediately upsetting futures with the Gloom house engulfed in flames, and futures easily as disastrous as the one where Lord Obsidian had conquered all, except with catastrophes of different kinds, like wars and falling asteroids.

  Fernie decided that she didn’t like this room very much. “Are there any paintings where you and I rescue my father and sister, and we all live happily ever after?”

  “I’m sure there are,” Gustav said. “This room is like every other gallery in the house; there’s more to see than you could possibly get to in a lifetime, and you can always find what you’re looking for if you look hard enough. But why would you even want to spend time looking for such a thing now?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because it would make me feel better.”

  “I’m sure it would. It would make me feel better, too. But it wouldn’t mean that what you see is going to come true.” He thought a minute. “It’s like . . . well, you can’t see it as one of those fairy tales they tell kids, where the princess finds a prophecy telling her how everything’s going to work out for the best . . . or the worst. There are no prophecies in real life. There’s just stuff that might happen, and might not.”

  “Then let’s try to make sure that the painting with Lord Obsidian’s palace doesn’t happen.”

  “I’m working on it,” he said.

  “What about saving my family?”

  “I’m working on that, too,” he said, and suddenly raised his voice: “Hello, Cousin Cyrus.”

  The shadow that rose from the ankle-deep layer belonged to a frail elderly man, who even made of flesh would have looked like he could have been bowled over by a light breeze. His bushy white eyebrows were so thick that it was impossible to make out any eyes behind them, while his dangling nose and protruding chin came very close to touching. He wore what on a human being would have been a dirty white undershirt and boxer shorts with hearts on them, and seemed genuinely put out to have his rest disturbed by the halfsie boy and outsider girl. “Durn it,” he said with deep irritation. “I was hoping you wouldn’t see me under the mist.”

  “I didn’t,” said Gustav. “But you always sleep in this particular spot.”

  “It’s quiet. Nobody bothers me. I don’t like to be bothered. You’re the only one who comes around, asking for favors all the time.”

  “I’ve never asked you for a favor,” Gustav told him. “I’ve only collected debts.”

  Cousin Cyrus harrumphed. “Any debt I owed you for the few inconsequential services you might have done for me over the years, I paid back long ago.”

  To Fernie’s astonishment, Gustav reached into the chest pocket of his now-tattered suit and pulled out a small, worn spiral notepad, flipping past several pages to one covered with dense, spidery handwriting.

  “According to the accounts,” Gustav said, “you’ve paid me back for helping you chase away the Story Thieves, for rescuing your spirit from the Soul Bunny, and for tracking down your tiny little heart and stealing it back from the display case in Commodore Phantagore’s Museum of Inexplicable Antiquities.”

  “That’s all I owed you,” Cousin Cyrus said.

  Gustav was not deterred. “You didn’t pay me back for that one family movie night when I was six, when you were sitting behind me and wouldn’t stop playing the bagpipes during The Princess Bride Returns, no matter how many times my shadow mother and Great-Aunt Mellifluous begged you to stop.”

  “That’s not a debt,” Cousin Cyrus protested. “I didn’t like you then any more than I like you now. I was trying to ruin the movie for you.”

  “Did you or did you not say these exact words to me after my shadow mother spent half an hour yelling at you for being so obnoxious: ‘All right, all right already! Sorry, kid, I owe you one’?”

  The elderly shadow opened his mouth, then closed it, then opened it, then closed it again. He suddenly looked very chagrined and very trapped. “Only a halfsie brat would remember that after so many years.”

  “Only a halfsie brat in desperate need of assistance would have to,” said Gustav.

  Still, Cousin Cyrus resisted: “Why don’t you just go to Mellifluous? That silly old woman actually likes you.”

  “She went to the Dark Country yesterday morning, on a secret mission involving the war against Lord Obsidian.”

  Those words surprised Fernie more than anything that had been said during the whole strange conversation. Fernie had met Great-Aunt Mellifluous a number of times and liked her quite a bit, but had never imagined her to be the kind of person who went on secret missions. She had always struck Fernie as more like the kind of person who served tea to other old ladies, talked to them about orchids, and expressed any level of surprise with the words Oh, my.

  Amazed at this latest news about her, Fernie said, “Oh, my.”

  Cousin Cyrus glanced at her for the first time, looked annoyed, and then turned back to Gustav again, as if she didn’t exist. “So? What does that have to do with me?”

  “What it has to do with you,” Gustav said, “is that the Pit to the Dark Country is probably being guarded right now by the Four Terrors or their allies. Any other shadow I sent through the portal to take a message to Great-Aunt Mellifluous would probably be stopped or taken prisoner.”

  “And I won’t?”

  “I don’t see why they’d bother. You’re famous for not caring about anything or anybody. Everybody knows that the person whose shape you wear was a nasty old man the world forgot about as soon as it had a chance, that you’re just like him, and that you want nothing to do with either people or shadows. They even know that you want nothing to do with me. There’s no reason they wouldn’t let you through. They’d never imagine you lifting a finger to help anybody. But you still do owe me one, Cyrus, and you know what it means, in this house, to ignore a legitimate debt. So you will do this for me. You will go down to the Dark Country, you will find Great-Aunt Mellifluous at the headquarters of the Resistance Army, and you will give her my message.”

  A dark anger flared behind those over-hanging eyebrows. It was such a cold, helpless anger that Fernie immediately gave up on all possibility of this shadow being just a crotchety old man of the sort who played at being grumpy but had enough goodness in him to do the right thing if ever given a chance. He was an enemy.

  “What’s your message?”

  “You will tell Great-Aunt Mellifluous that Mr. What and his daughter Pearlie are in trouble. You will tell her that the Four Terrors intend to throw the two of them, and Fernie if they get her, and also probably me, into the Pit. You will tell her that we’re doing everything we can to rescue them from this end, but that if we fail, she will only have a limited amount of time to act before they fall into the hands of Lord Obsidian. And finally, you will tell her that I won’t be here when she gets back, because I’m going down to the Dark Country myself to rescue my father. Do you have all that?”

  Cousin Cyrus’s snarl grew wider, developing fangs. “I have it. But
after this . . . we’re done.”

  Gustav nodded. “Fine.”

  Cousin Cyrus roared his displeasure and flitted away, like a scrap of paper caught in a high wind. He flattened when he reached the set of double doors at the far end of the gallery, to fit through the slight seam between them, and was gone.

  Gustav watched him go and visibly relaxed, revealing only in that moment the tension that had tightened his posture for several long minutes now.

  Fernie said, “That’s your plan?”

  “It’s a backup plan,” Gustav said. “In case we get killed. I’m not saying it’ll be much consolation to us.”

  Fernie chewed on that. “No.”

  “Maybe we can come up with something better.”

  They walked on, passing a painting of two people: a tall, handsome man she thought she recognized as Gustav’s father Hans, and a beautiful redheaded woman she would have assumed to be Gustav’s mother had she not once seen a picture of Penny Gloom and known her to be beautiful in a completely different way. This painting depicted Hans and the strange, unknown woman in mountain-climbing gear atop a pillar of rock with a vast brown desert far below. It looked like a terrible drop if either one of them slipped. Fernie’s father would have recommended the introduction of safety railings.

  But she couldn’t stop thinking about Cousin Cyrus. “You know, Gustav, my own cousins are much nicer.”

  “I’m sure they are. But your family’s all people. Mine aren’t. It’s like I’ve told you: Most of them think I don’t belong and wouldn’t lift a finger to help me. Some even hate me, and would have killed me a long time ago if I hadn’t been protected by others like my shadow mother or Great-Aunt Mellifluous. I’m not saying we’re in this alone; we’re not. But we have to make do with the advantages we have, and,” he said, pointing at the set of double doors up ahead, “we have to do that before we open those doors.”

  “Why? Why those doors?”

  “Because they open up on a balcony overlooking the grand parlor. We’re going to have to cross it in order to get to where your father and sister are being taken, and that means I can think of no better place for the Four Terrors to be lying in wait for us than on the other side.”

  “Oh,” said Fernie.

  Gustav said nothing as the pair of them walked toward the double doors.

  Fernie had the feeling that things were going to get very bad for them very quickly as soon as those doors were opened.

  Gustav moved to a cord hanging by the side of the door and gave it a quick yank.

  Fernie felt a distant, deep vibration, like the loudest moment in the sound track of the next theater over.

  Almost immediately, the hairline crack between the bottom of the door grew dark and filled with a line of utter blackness . . . blackness that flowed into the room, rose, and filled out until it became the looming figure of a familiar, scowling, spotty butler.

  Hives sniffed. “I do hope this is worth my valuable time.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  GUSTAV GOES SURFING

  Twenty minutes later, Gustav Gloom left the Gallery of Possible Futures and stepped out upon the balcony alone.

  His sad eyes surveyed the battleground before him with the critical view of a boy who had often needed to search the rooms of his house for the best places to evade monsters.

  He was two balconies above a grand parlor teeming with activity. Down below, hundreds of shadows wandered to and fro, chattering in languages that ranged from some known to Man to others that could be formed by no human tongue. Some danced; others drifted aimlessly as if they’d traveled a long distance to get to this place and then forgotten why they’d come; a few fought duels over casual insults, their shadowy swords clanging and giving off little black sparks as the duelists shouted things like “Have at thee, sirrah!” There were also shadow paperboys hawking the latest extras about the terrible prison break at the Hall of Shadow Criminals; the headline of one within Gustav’s sight read FOUR FLEE; FEAR FOLLOWS.

  Some, a very few, of the house’s many residents took note of Gustav as he approached the railing. They said things like “Oh, look, it’s the boy.” Or “I wonder what he’s going to break today.” Or “Just look at what he’s done to that suit.” Or, most unnervingly, “I wonder if he knows who’s looking for him.”

  Gustav spent a few seconds standing at the railing and looking at the parlor’s splendid collection of staircases: the short circular ones that connected some floors to the next, the sweeping ones that stretched from the ground floor to balconies ten or twenty levels higher up, the rickety ones that dangled over the parlor floor at bizarre angles, clearly treacherous because they were missing more steps than not.

  On each of those levels, he knew, there were hundreds of doors, thousands of possible destinations, maybe an infinite number of places to get lost and never be seen again.

  It was wonderful. It was terrible. It was home.

  He spotted Ursula’s familiar figure, wandering around on the floor far below; she clearly wasn’t mingling, like so many of the others, but hunting, her long gray-white hair and long white gown streaming out behind her as if driven by a powerful wind that affected no other shadow in sight. She passed within sight of some of the shadows reading newspapers about her escape, but none among them seemed to notice or care, either because most shadows didn’t pay much attention to current events or because they preferred to mind their own business.

  He didn’t see Carlin or Otis anywhere, and knew it was likely a waste of time to look for Nebuchadnezzar, who could be wearing any shape. But it was enough to have seen one of them.

  So he leaned over the balcony and shouted down at her. “Hey, you!”

  Ten thousand sets of eyes, Ursula’s among them, peered up at him. Most looked away at once, muttering things like “Oh, it’s just the boy.” But Ursula’s lips curled into a smile. It was the kind of expression that on someone else’s face might have been charming, but on hers seemed to lower the temperature in the house by twenty degrees.

  “Oh!” she cried. “You’re giving up! How wonderfully considerate of you!”

  Gustav gripped the railing. “I have a message for you, Ursula. For all of you.”

  “How sweet! Don’t keep it to yourself, dear.”

  “You still have time to give my friends back, unharmed. After that, you can leave this house, go somewhere that doesn’t have any people, and never hurt anybody again.”

  Her amused titter was like the chiming of little bells. “And if we don’t?”

  “Then,” Gustav said, “in five minutes we’ll all see how loudly you can scream.”

  Her eyes widened a little at that, but then the ridiculousness of that promise sank in, and she started to laugh . . . first with more gentle tittering, then with incredulous giggling, and finally with cruel belly laughs. Her hilarity quickly spread to many of the shadows around her. Some of them hadn’t been paying attention to the conversation but just wanted to join in on the fun; others thought Gustav was every bit as silly as she did and wanted to join her in making sport of him; and a very small few, either smarter or more experienced than the others, laughed at her for not taking the little boy’s dire promise with the seriousness it deserved.

  She might not have laughed so long and so hard if she’d noticed just how many of the drifting shadows didn’t laugh at all, but instead retreated into the many side passages rather than stay in the parlor during whatever was going to happen.

  Spotting Carlin and Otis was a little like spotting a friend in the seats opposite yours at a crowded football stadium; harder, in fact, since human friends dress in different colors and have differently colored hair and do not blur together in a gray fog the way shadows do when they’re all crowded together in one place. But Gustav had been raised in this house and had better eyes for spotting individual shadows than most would have ever imagined.

  He’d spotted Carlin and Otis taking advantage of his exchange with Ursula to glide up a pair of stairways at
opposite ends of the parlor. Even as he watched, they both reached the top of their respective staircases and turned onto the balcony, flying toward him at waist height. Carlin approached from the left, Otis from the right, both distant shapes at the ends of long, straight walkways but both moving fast enough to be on him in seconds.

  Ursula started rising, her gown somehow hanging far lower than a gown should have hung on a woman her height, if she ever planned to walk around without tripping on it. Her gray-white hair flowed behind her like a banner. She, too, would be upon Gustav in heartbeats.

  Gustav didn’t wait. He hopped up on the railing and jumped straight up, farther than any non-halfsie boy could have jumped, grabbing the lip of the balcony above his and pulling himself up onto the next floor.

  Ursula thought this hilarious. “Oh, dear! Oh, my! You think you can get away from us that way?”

  “Wasn’t my whole plan,” said Gustav.

  He climbed past ten more balconies, rising more quickly than many birds can fly. Below, Carlin and Otis had taken to flight themselves and now rose by Ursula’s sides, each just a little below her.

  Ursula seemed to be having the time of her life. “You’re so generous with choices, dear, that we should offer you one. If you don’t want us to get you, you could always just let go and fall! I promise, we won’t try to catch you. It’ll be worth it for us just to see you hit the ground.”

  “That’s generous of you, too,” said Gustav. “You have three minutes now.”

  Rather than continue to climb up, he jumped down and to the side and grabbed the railing one floor below, just long enough to alter his course and launch himself into the open space over the parlor.

  Ursula had been right; a fall from this height could kill him.

  But he had no intention of hitting the floor.