Instead, he landed, standing, on the polished wooden banister of one of the many staircases that crossed the atrium, and immediately started sliding straight downward, his arms extended for balance.
“That’s impossible!” Carlin cried, some-where behind him. “A boy can’t do that!”
“This boy’s done it plenty of times,” said Gustav Gloom, adding, “it’s great fun.”
The staircases over the grand parlor had been Gustav’s favorite jungle gym for as long as he’d lived. This trick of surfing the railings was one of his favorites. Of course, had he not already lost his shoes, he would have had to take them off. Balancing on a polished wooden railing over a fifteen-story fall is, after all, the kind of thing that really does require socks.
The lower balcony ahead of him loomed and seemed safely free of enemies—until Carlin and Otis popped up at the base of the stairs, waiting for him.
Carlin showed pointed teeth. “We have you now!”
“I don’t think so,” said Gustav, jumping off the side.
He landed on the railing of another set of stairs and began a long, swift slide in the opposite direction.
Ursula swept past him, her lunge missing him by so little that he felt the silky touch of her gown as it brushed the top of his head. The voice that had recently seemed so musical now sounded more like the ear-piercing shriek of a harpy. “You idiots! He’s making a fool of you!”
“I’m not making anything,” Gustav said as he slid toward his next destination. “I’m just bringing out what’s already there. And by the way, you have two minutes now.”
She howled as she and her two companions flew down the staircase after him. Otis, first to almost catch up with him, spread his meaty arms wide and grabbed. But Gustav, acting as if he had eyes on the back of his head, leaped from that railing to the one on the other side of the stairs, and from there into open space again, landing on another nearby staircase and racing up its steps two or three at a time.
Gustav’s uphill run was normally not all that much slower than his falling. He’d been raised by shadows and had won any number of games of tag with them. But his one disadvantage in such games was that he was a boy and not a shadow, and therefore capable of getting tired; he would not be able to keep this up for much longer. But he didn’t have to keep this up for much longer.
And he was going to be given the few precious seconds he needed by the very shadows chasing him.
So he slowed to a stop and allowed himself to gasp for breath as Ursula came in for a landing five steps above him, and Carlin and Otis did the same five steps below him.
Ursula’s beautiful features had seemed to melt. They hadn’t been false, but they had been thin, the same way that the surface beauty of some other quite terrible people was thin; a few short minutes of frustration and rage had made her eyes widen, her lips distort into a grimace, and her jaw set like stone. Her charming face now became a hideous glare that reflected how truly awful she really was.
Even her long silky gown, as much an element of her apparent beauty as her facial features had been, had changed. The fabric now looked grayer, coarser, and filthier. There were holes in it. The edges had gone black, as if the material had been plucked from some fire where it had been set to burn because it was not anything any decent person should have ever wanted to wear.
“What was the point of all that?” she demanded. “All you managed to do was waste our time and put us to a whole lot of trouble.”
Gustav held up an index finger, letting them know that he had more to say as soon as he caught his breath. He inhaled, exhaled, inhaled again, got the air he needed, and said, “But the point of it was keeping you occupied while my terrible butler, Hives, got Fernie across the grand parlor safely. And everything I told you before is still true. You still have a chance to run away and find some place far from this house where you’ll never have to pay for your crimes. It’s your decision.”
Ursula glared at Gustav with the pure fury of a hateful creature who would have been just as happy to kill him as look at him. “I don’t like threats, you despicable . . . little . . . boy. Otis? We don’t need to keep this one. Throw him over the side.”
As the hulking figure of Otis drew close behind him, Gustav shrugged. “Time’s up.”
High above them, something exploded.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE MOST INAPPROPRIATE NICKNAME EVER
A staircase twenty stories above their heads chose that moment to break in half.
This was a shame, really, because it was one of the more ornate and beautiful in the mansion’s considerably varied collection: a sweeping masterwork of marble stairs and beautifully sculpted wrought-iron railings, which extended from one balcony that was not fancy enough to deserve it to another that didn’t even come close to being worth the journey.
The only flaw in its construction was that it was not strong enough to bear the weight of a tyrannosaur who had just leaped to one of those landings from twenty stories even higher up.
The result was a little bit like throwing a bus off the top of a tall building onto a stacked pile of clean dishes.
Not only did the marble steps shatter, not only did the ironwork twist and snap and tumble, but the entire staircase ripped away from its two endpoints and tumbled in pieces toward the parlor floor.
On its way down, it also snapped a rickety rope bridge, which didn’t slow it down at all, shattered a set of stone stairs that didn’t do much better, and demolished a number of other structures, ranging from one beautiful set of mahogany stairs to one rather flimsy one made of tissue paper that was itself already covered with holes from the handful of foolish explorers who had tried to use it in the past.
Each staircase collapsed under the weight of wreckage from above, a hammering drumbeat that somehow didn’t drown out the one sound louder than all the destruction: the delighted, high-pitched “Wheeeeeeee!” of the tyrannosaur.
Ursula craned her neck back and saw the oncoming wave of wreckage. “You intolerable little urchin! What have you done?”
Gustav said, “You’re not the only one with powerful friends.”
Otis, who had been as paralyzed by the sight of the wreckage tumbling toward them as Ursula was, made a weak grab for him . . . but Gustav had already ducked between his legs, hopped back onto the banister, and begun a swift downward slide to safety.
The hovering Carlin whirled in place as Gustav slid past him, ready to resume the chase. But then one of the first major falling objects, a stone planter from the landing of the staircase the tyrannosaur had smashed first, slammed into the path, punching a neat hole in the steps immediately before him. Carlin drew back in terror, instinctively looked up to see what might be coming next, and found his gaze drawn by the most prominent feature of the debris tumbling toward him: the gaping, fanged mouth filling his personal sky.
He managed a terrified “No!”
With a mighty gulp, the tyrannosaur snatched Carlin out of the air and swallowed him whole just before impacting the stairway headfirst. The entire structure shuddered and tore free of the balcony at its lower end, dropping ten feet on that side but somehow remaining attached to the balcony at its highest point. Gustav reached the end of his slide and leaped off, hitting the next balcony down with a somersault that ended with him back on his feet and running.
Up above, Otis was in trouble. He might have been okay if he’d been hovering like Ursula. As it happened, he’d been standing on the stairs, his full weight—or whatever shadows use for weight—on his own two feet. As the stairway dipped, he tumbled, rolling down the stairs with a cry indignant enough to inform all the shadows and human beings in earshot that he considered this moment a tremendous blow to his dignity.
The tyrannosaur, who had grabbed hold of the damaged structure with his powerful jaws, had pulled himself back up onto the steps, and now lowered his massive head to catch Otis out of the air. Otis sailed right down the creature’s throat without a moment of assistance f
rom the teeth or tongue.
The tyrannosaur stood up, shaking himself thoroughly to free his scales from some of the dust and debris. A particularly large chunk of masonry bounced off the top of his head, almost knocking him down, but he recovered, his eyes narrowing as he observed the floating figure of a beautiful woman in a gray and burned gown.
Ursula turned to flee.
A steel beam punched through the steps behind her as easily as a pencil poking through paper, and it snagged one of her gown’s longer strips of silk, yanking her back in midstep.
Far below, the leading edge of the debris began to hit the grand parlor floor. The air filled with the din of a thousand screaming shadows, running for cover in every direction as hundreds of tons of wreckage slammed into the floor all around them.
Wherever the screams could be understood as words, it was clear that most of the shadows down below weren’t terrified as much as loudly annoyed. The main sentiment fell in line with the exclamation of one fat shadow wearing a tuxedo, top hat, and pair of monocles (one for each eye, a pretty clear demonstration that he’d missed the whole point of monocles): “Oh, great! The boy’s wrecking the place again!”
Ursula, on the other hand, was terrified. As soon as the trapped strip of her gown ripped free of the wreckage, she took to the air again, screaming, “I’ll get you for this, Gustav Gloom!”
Her long gown, sailing behind her like a banner, proved as irresistible to the tyrannosaur as a bit of ribbon dangled for a playful kitten.
The tyrannosaur clamped his jaw tight on the trailing end and yanked. Ursula spun toward him, like a yo-yo does after somebody’s yanked on its string. The yards and yards of silky clothes swirled around her as she spun, screaming, toward the tyrannosaur’s mouth.
He opened wide and chomped.
Then the stairway collapsed underneath him.
Fernie What cowered in one of the side corridors as the debris of a dozen broken staircases shattered against the parlor floor. There was something hypnotic about all the destruction, something that she might have seen as fun if she hadn’t been worried about her good friend at the center of it all.
She barely noticed all the shadows rushing past her to escape the disaster, from the elegant ladies in evening gowns and dashing men in tuxedos muttering angrily about the uncouth atmosphere in this establishment to the scruffier types in the shadows of T-shirts and torn jeans who exclaimed, “Whoa! What a great way to end a party!”
Beside her, Hives flinched as one wooden staircase hit the ground almost whole, then shattered as it struck, sending splinters whirling in every direction. “Oh, dear. I hope nobody’s expecting me to clean that up.”
Emerging from a narrow door behind him, looking tired but triumphant, Gustav Gloom said, “I don’t know, Hives. Would you?”
“I’d really prefer not,” the terrible butler said.
The next sound was a loud thud as two massive clawed feet landed on the tiled floor just outside the passageway, making a pair of craters where they hit. “Gustav? Buddy? You in there?”
Gustav took Fernie by the hand and led her out of the sheltered hallway and into the grand parlor, where she stood blinking through heavy clouds of disturbed dust. Above her, the tyrannosaur struggled in vain to use his tiny forearms to free a long strip of gray silk from between two of his front teeth. There was no Ursula at the strip’s end, just a rather nasty-looking rip.
The tyrannosaur spotted her and ceased his exercise in flossing. “You’re Fernie What, right?”
“Right,” she said, feeling somewhat inappropriately shy at the belated introduction. “And from what I hear, you’re Fluffy.”
“I don’t understand you at all,” the tyrannosaur complained. “Why did you call me twice and then run from me both times I came to your rescue? What was the point of Gustav arranging for my help beforehand if you were going to do something foolish like that? Do you know how hard it is for somebody my size to fit into some of those tiny corridors, let alone keep up with somebody who insists on running away and hiding?”
Fernie felt terrible. “I’m sorry, Fluffy. Gustav never bothered to tell me the whistle was for calling you. To me it just looked like the whistle wasn’t working and some random scary monster was chasing me.”
Though Fernie hadn’t been able to put a finger on the feeling that nagged at her outside the Hall of Shadow Criminals, it had been the convenience of the dinosaur showing up after the emergency whistle was blown.
He snarled his irritation. “Didn’t you hear me say, ‘I’m coming to get you, Fernie What’? What did you think that meant?”
“I thought you were coming to get me for lunch.”
The tyrannosaur sniffed. “As if you even smell like something I would eat.”
Fernie had felt very silly back at the Gallery of Possible Futures when Gustav finally explained who Fluffy was. The emergency whistle had of course worked perfectly all along, which must have been one reason why the disguised Nebuchadnezzar had seized his opportunity to yank it off Pearlie’s neck when they were underwater.
Of course, the whistle couldn’t give Fluffy more detailed instructions, such as how to spring a trap for the Four Terrors on the stairwells above the grand parlor. So Gustav had sent Hives with a message about a detailed plan that could only be set in motion when the terrible butler returned from that errand and was able to see to Fernie’s safety.
“Anyway,” Fluffy told Gustav, “I did what you asked and ate them. I only saw three of them, so that means the fourth is still running around here somewhere, but at least I got those three.”
Fernie wondered out loud, “Are they dead?”
“What?” Gustav asked, and then, absorbing her question, shook his head. “Oh, no. I’ve told you many, many times that it’s very, very difficult to kill a shadow. If it weren’t, I wouldn’t have asked Fluffy here to drop so much heavy wreckage on all the innocents in the grand parlor. That didn’t do much more than inconvenience them. Being eaten by Fluffy won’t do much worse to Ursula, Carlin, and Otis.”
“They’re just stuck in my stomach,” Fluffy explained.
Fernie’s eyebrows knit. “And that takes care of them forever?”
Gustav and Fluffy shared an embarrassed glance.
“They’ll find their way out,” Fluffy said after a moment. “But it won’t be for a while, and I’m not sure it’s nice to talk about exactly how.”
Fernie realized that she honestly didn’t want to. “Won’t we have to deal with them all over again then?”
“Oh, no. When the time comes, I’ll be sure to, shall we say, deposit them back in a cage. It shouldn’t be a big problem. I’ve done it before.”
Behind them all, Hives sniffed. “On that lovely note, young Master Gustav . . . will that be all?”
“No,” Gustav said. “I need you to stay here for a few minutes.”
“Very well.” Hives turned to leave. “Stay right—”
“I mean,” Gustav said hastily, “I’m ordering you to stay here.”
The terrible butler returned, rolling his eyes in exasperation to show how much he would have preferred to be elsewhere.
Gustav took on the manner of a general detailing the plans for an upcoming battle. “All right. Here’s the problem, everybody: We’ve just done very well getting rid of most of our problem, but that only means that Fernie’s father and sister are in even more trouble than they were before.”
Fernie had a sinking feeling. “Why?”
“Because if Nebuchadnezzar and whoever he’s working for ever think that their side is going to lose, even for a moment, they won’t wait to lose. They’ll just decide to be satisfied with what they already have and throw Pearlie and Mr. What into the Pit while they still can. So we can’t afford to march in with superior numbers. Fernie and I have to go alone so they still think they can win.”
Fluffy’s face wasn’t able to form many facial expressions as he didn’t have any eyebrows, and any attempt to smile or frown just worked o
ut to more ways for a tyrannosaur to look hungry. But he did manage to look concerned now. “Doesn’t that mean actually making it possible for them to win?”
“Yes,” Gustav said. “It does mean that.”
The swift defeat of Ursula and the others had left Fernie hoping that the worst was over; now she knew that the worst was yet to come, and felt a chill that penetrated to her bones.
Fluffy still didn’t get the point. “So the plan is for the two of you to walk in alone, and for them to think they’re winning, and then for Hives and me to rush in like the cavalry and beat them up?”
“No,” Gustav said. “That can’t be the plan. Because, again, if they ever believe that there’s even a slight chance of that happening, they lose all reason to not throw Pearlie and Mr. What into the Pit now. They have to know, know and trust, that we’ve left all help behind. They have to know, know and trust, that we’re coming alone and not planning any tricks.”
Fluffy stomped his foot. “But I have to be able to help!”
“You can. Just not the way you hoped.” Gustav turned to Fernie. “May I have the whistle, please?”
Fernie silently handed it to Gustav.
He held it out to Fluffy. “Please. In the name of our friendship, take this to the farthest possible part of the house. Hide it somewhere I’ll never find it. Promise me now, loudly enough for every shadow in this house to hear, that you’ll never answer any distress signal from this whistle ever again.”
Fluffy hesitated, then lowered his massive face to Gustav’s outstretched hand and lapped up the whistle with a tongue the size of a car door. Then he straightened up and let out one of the mightiest roars Fernie had ever heard, a roar that shook the rafters and brought even more debris from the damaged staircases high above tumbling to the parlor floor. “HEAR ME, ALL SHADOWS WHO ROAM THESE HALLS, WHETHER FRIEND OR FOE OR POWERS IN BETWEEN! I, FLUFFY, THE SHADOW OF THE MIGHTIEST PREDATOR TO EVER WALK THIS EARTH, HEREBY PROMISE THAT THIS WHISTLE WILL NEVER AGAIN SUMMON ME TO THE AID OF MY GOOD FRIEND GUSTAV GLOOM! I MAKE THIS SOLEMN VOW IN THE NAME OF ALL THE BEASTS WHOSE MEREST FOOTSTEP ONCE MADE THE GROUND THUNDER! THIS WHISTLE’S CLAIM ON ME IS DEAD!” He closed his mouth, took a deep breath, and then added, “PINKY SWEAR!”
Gustav Gloom and the Four Terrors Page 10