Gustav Gloom and the Four Terrors

by Adam-Troy Castro

  The arms of Gustav’s shadow reached up through the murk and dragged him back down into darkness.

  As the murk bubbled from the epic battle taking place below, Mr. What slipped off the side of his plank, his legs disappearing into shadow-stuff. He grabbed hold with his arms, pulling himself up on his stomach, but the force of his struggle made the plank dip toward darkness and pulled both of his girls closer to the edge. They screamed at him to hold on, but he saw the trouble they were in on his behalf and instinctively did the only thing a father could do: let go, so his daughters would have a chance at life. He started to slide down the length of the plank toward an endless fall.

  Pearlie and Fernie both screamed, “DADDY!”

  Gustav’s shadow slammed against the underside of the plank, not just righting it but driving it a few feet into the air. Mr. What bounced into the air a few feet above it and landed straddling the plank again. Judging from the sound he made and the expression on his face, it was not the most pleasant experience of his day. Still, he was able to muster enough strength to begin to pull himself along toward his daughters.

  Gustav’s shadow disappeared beneath the surface again, and the sounds of two shadows in furious battle resumed.

  Across the room, the People Taker reeled from punch after punch from Hives’s angry fists, landing with actual force against his pale, hateful face.

  “I wasn’t always a terrible butler, sir! I used to be a pretty good boxer!”

  Fernie and Pearlie pulled their father onto solid ground. He was exhausted and out of breath from his struggles with the plank, but otherwise unhurt, and for a moment would not let go of them, murmuring, “I’m sorry, girls, but we really do have to move . . .”

  A few feet away, the People Taker fell back, and Gustav leaped on his shoulders, adding his own small blows to the terrible butler’s powerful ones. The tide had turned, three shadows and one very strange, very determined boy seemingly seconds from driving the terrible taker of people to his knees. Then Hives fell back, gasping, eyes bugging with the realization that the People Taker had somehow managed to hurt him . . . and Gustav fell to the ground, also hurt, for the moment too out of breath to fight back.

  The People Taker screamed in fury and knee-walked over to Gustav’s side, joining his fists together high above his head in preparation for a final attack on the boy he now seemed determined to slay with a single blow. Mr. What’s shadow and Pearlie’s shadow instantly wrapped themselves around his arms, trying to hold them back, but it was clear that even between them, they didn’t have the strength to even slow down what was about to happen; and Gustav was too dazed, for the moment, to get out of the way.

  He did not hear the two What girls racing toward him from behind.

  They ran side by side, each carrying one end of the long plank that had until a few seconds earlier held their father over the Pit, the plank forming what amounted to a solid wall between them.

  On the floor, Gustav saw what was about to happen and looked away.

  The People Taker must have thought that Gustav was flinching from the blow he was about to receive. But enough of a twinkle must have shown in Gustav’s eyes to warn the People Taker that something very unfortunate was about to happen to him. He glanced over his shoulder just in time to see his entire field of vision obscured by a galloping plank. An ugly brown knothole, dead center, must have looked like a furious wasp going for his eyes.

  The People Taker cried, “Fffffernie! Fffffernie!”

  The center of the plank smacked him full in the face and knocked him down.

  It didn’t knock him out, but it knocked him silly enough that it took him a second or two to rise to his knees, and even then it was only in time for the same plank to slam him again after the girls turned around and repeated their run in the opposite direction.

  This time the impact left a lightning-shaped crack in the plank, radiating from the knothole.

  It didn’t do much better for the People Taker’s face.

  He started to rise again, but his body had different ideas. After a moment he just fell flat on his back, knocked into the sleep of the evil.

  Exhausted, the two sisters dumped the plank on top of him, the midpoint balanced on his chest and the raised end addressing the ceiling like a seesaw.

  In the silence that followed, Pearlie managed, “I don’t ever want to come back to this room.”

  “Neither do I,” Gustav gasped. He rose on unsteady legs and stumbled forward to hug them both. “By and large, it’s less fun than any room in the house, except maybe the Hall of Incredibly Pointless Board Games.”

  Hearing that, Fernie dropped all her other questions and declared, “Okay, that one I’m pretty sure you just made up.”

  “I’m afraid he didn’t,” sniffed Hives, who rejoined them nursing a terribly swollen nose. “You haven’t played a boring game of checkers until you’ve played the one where the red and black pieces get along. They don’t even jump one another. They just circle the board and sing.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  *EXCEPT

  And so, for a few seconds at least, it seemed as if they’d all won themselves an uncomplicated happy ending. They’d entered a dangerous place, faced great perils, defeated great villains, and enjoyed a wonderful reunion when it was all done.

  None of them realized, quite yet, that happy endings aren’t always that easy to come by. Sometimes they insist on being difficult. There are always other problems, and this was particularly true in the Gloom house, where some of the problems went back for years and others were being born every minute.

  The first loose end, a small one, announced itself only a few seconds later, when Gustav’s shadow popped up from the murk in the Pit, his shadow clothes as ragged and torn from battle as Gustav’s own. He glided over to reunite with his boy. “Sorry, everybody. Nebuchadnezzar got away. I chased him as far down as I could, but had to turn back when I realized that we were halfway to the Dark Country and that he was trying to lead me to Lord Obsidian. It’s sad, but I think he’ll be working for the bad guys for a little while longer.”

  “That’s okay,” Gustav said. “If we had to lose Nebuchadnezzar, then at least we captured this guy.” He toed the unconscious People Taker with one of his stocking feet.

  Fernie glanced down at the People Taker, who was still breathing but not moving much, lips snarling from whatever vile dreams people takers experience after being knocked unconscious with boards. A second loose end occurred to her. “What are we going to do with him? Are we supposed to turn him over to the police?”

  “I wish we could. He must still be wanted for all his terrible crimes outside the fence. But I’m afraid that Lord Obsidian’s given him certain abilities that would prevent any human prison from ever being able to hold him. And we can’t put him in the Hall of Shadow Criminals, either, not even if we build a special cell meant for a person instead of a shadow; not after we learned that Lord Obsidian can free prisoners from there anytime he wants. We’ll have to come up with something else. And we have to do it before he wakes up, or we’ll just have to fight him all over again.”

  Hives rolled his eyes. “Perhaps we can take him to a chair in the Too Much Sitting Room?”

  Fernie winced. She remembered the Too Much Sitting Room, which still struck her as one of the very worst places in the Gloom household, and—for all the terrible things the People Taker had done to too many people—it seemed like too vicious a punishment, even for somebody as evil as him. She said, “That’s cruel.”

  “So’s he,” pointed out Hives.

  “Isn’t there someplace you can put him that will hold him for at least a little while, until you can figure out something permanent?”

  The terrible butler considered that. “Oh, certainly. There’s the Room of Being Delayed Indefinitely, the Patio of Staying Put, and the Express Elevator to Somewhere Between Floors; none of those places are meant to hold dangerous criminals, but any one of them should be able to keep him out of mischi
ef until we get around to discussing other options. I don’t think it’ll be much of a problem, young miss. After all, I’m a terrible butler. I’m used to putting people through endless inconvenience.”

  Fernie shuddered. “I sure wouldn’t want to go to the Room of Being Delayed Indefinitely.”

  Hives allowed himself the slightest bit of a smile. “It’s one of my favorites, young miss.”

  Behind them, Mr. What, who was the worst off from their shared ordeal, stood leaning against one of the stone walls, catching his breath. “It does sound like your kind of place, Hives.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Mr. What shook his head, gathered up his strength, and began to shuffle toward them, following a curlicue of a route that crossed itself at several points and came perilously close to the edge of the Pit he had so narrowly escaped. He muttered something about nobody ever listening to him about safety railings and changed direction to join his daughters. Then he stumbled over his own feet and lurched forward, taking a step that ended with his foot coming down on the raised the plank on the People Taker’s chest.

  The third loose end to make itself known in just the last couple of minutes announced itself when the other end of the board shot up and smacked him hard in the face.

  “Ow!” he cried, stumbling backward.

  It was almost funny until Fernie saw him back up against the Pit, his arms flailing, the heels of his shoes teetering on the edge.

  Pearlie, who was closest to him, yelled, “Dad!” and rushed to help him.

  She was just fast enough to seize him by the wrist.

  He was grateful enough to grasp her with his other hand.

  For a heartbeat, it looked like she would succeed in pulling him back.

  Instead, she was pulled in when he fell.

  It happened so quickly that there was nothing anybody in the room could do. Fernie’s father and sister tumbled screaming into darkness, their cries audible far longer than they would have been if they were only traveling a real-world distance. And then those cries were echoed by the screams of the two shadows who belonged to those two people, who flew past Fernie and Gustav and Hives and also dove into the Pit, chasing their lost people into the world where only shadows are meant to live.

  Fernie’s blood went cold. For almost a full second she refused to accept what she had just seen. Then the terrible nightmare of it all came crashing down on her. She screamed and went after them, ready to jump into the Pit if she had to, not making any more detailed plan than that; only knowing that her family had disappeared before her eyes and she could not let them go without at least trying to save them.

  Gustav brought her down with a tackle. “Fernie, don’t!”

  She fought to free herself. “Let me go! Don’t you see? We have to go after them!”

  She expected his next words to be a protest that they couldn’t, that her father and sister were already gone, but instead he cried, “And we will! I promise! Don’t you remember? I was going down there anyway, to save my own dad! I’ll save yours, too! But this is not the way! Lord Obsidian will get you if you go that way!”

  Furious, she hit him a few times, crying that she didn’t care, but her punches grew weaker, and she was finally left sobbing like a baby in his arms. He could only say, “We’ll get them back, Fernie, we will, we will, we will.” He promised her that as soon as he could make the arrangements they would pull off a rescue against overwhelming odds, and her father and sister would be safe.

  He promised all this as if there were any way he could possibly be sure.

  He almost sounded like he was sure. But she could tell from the hitch in his voice that he was not.

  How could he be? The Dark Country was so far away; the forces of Lord Obsidian were still fighting an awful war down there; the journey to that place was nothing any mere boy, even a halfsie boy, should ever be able to accomplish; and even assuming Fernie’s father and sister would be found in a place that large, there was still no way she could think of to ever be sure that they could find a way back. Thinking about it, she was once again certain that Gustav was only saying what he knew she wanted to hear. He was lying to her.

  “Fernie,” he said insistently.

  She could barely make out his face through her haze of tears. “What?”

  “There’s something else. Remember Cousin Cyrus? I sent him to contact Great-Aunt Mellifluous and tell her that your father and sister were in trouble. Once he gets through with that message, they’ll have a friend in the Dark Country long before they even get there. That’s another thing you can hold onto.”

  “Cousin Cyrus didn’t . . . strike me as the kind of person we can count on.”

  “He isn’t. But I promise you, he always pays his debts. It’ll give your father and sister an edge before we show up. And we will show up, Fernie. We’ll show up and we’ll make it right. I promise you.”

  It wasn’t much. It was just a promise: a promise he really had no business making, because it was not a promise that anybody could make. It was as empty as his promise earlier that a quick errand inside his house would be perfectly safe.

  But right now, that promise was all she had.

  And he was Gustav Gloom. He had pulled off the impossible before.

  More than anything else, she wanted to curl up in a ball and disappear forever. But she had a choice right now: giving up, or believing in her friend. So she wiped her eyes, even though she knew that more tears would be coming before this was done, and she asked:

  “How?”

  EPILOGUE

  WHAT MAKES WINNING POSSIBLE

  It took almost an hour for Gustav and Fernie to stir themselves from the scene of Fernie’s terrible loss and make their way back to the front door of the Gloom house.

  Since there had been no further adventures on the way, the journey might have taken less time, but they needed to stop several times because Fernie kept sitting down every time she thought of the terrible moment she had failed to prevent. Gustav kept telling her that it was going to be okay. He kept saying it so much that it just became background noise, like a radio that’s been playing for so long that anybody not actively listening to it forgets that it’s on.

  There were only the two of them now. Gustav’s shadow had gone off to help Hives put the People Taker away in the Room of Being Delayed Indefinitely. Fernie’s own shadow remained missing, and that was yet another loss; the shadow girl was not just a part of Fernie herself, but had in some strange way also started to become a friend, and having to worry about her was yet another burden on top of many that were terribly hard to bear. Pearlie’s and Mr. What’s shadows had both followed their people into the Pit and showed no sign of returning any time soon. Fluffy was wherever he’d gone to “deposit” the other members of the Four Terrors. There were other shadows all about, many skulking around quietly as if wanting to maintain a decent silence in light of what had happened, but they might as well have been a million miles away. The Gloom house still felt very large and very empty, less like a place with life in it than it ever had.

  By the time they reached the door, Fernie was so lost in her own thoughts that she hadn’t said anything for almost an hour, no matter what was said to her, and Gustav expressed worry that she wouldn’t be able to do what needed to be done.

  “No,” she said, surprising them both. Her eyes burned from recent tears, but they were dry now, and didn’t hurt nearly as badly as her injured hand. “I can’t just go off with you to the Dark Country. I have to go get Harrington first, so he isn’t left in the house by himself without food or water. And I have to leave a note for my mom, so she’ll know what happened if . . . if we don’t come back.”

  “You’re right,” Gustav said. “You should probably do that.”

  She hesitated. “You are sure about this? That there is some way to get down to the Dark Country and back?”

  “My grandfather went down there years ago,” Gustav said. “He had to, to make contact with the shadow world. He
went and made the deal with them to make this a shadow house. I don’t know how he did it, but that’s what I wanted to ask Hieronymus Spector about in the first place. We just have more reasons to ask him now, that’s all.”

  “And he did tell you before all this happened, when this was only about your father, that he would only talk to me.”

  Gustav looked away. “Yes.”

  “And he didn’t say why.”

  “No. But I think I know why now. I’m afraid it’s a terrible reason, Fernie. It’s one of the things we’re going to have to talk to him about when we see him.”

  Fernie didn’t ask for an explanation. She just took a deep breath, tasting dust, the air of the old house, the livestock smell of Fluffy, her own sadness . . . and maybe, just maybe, behind all of that, the slightest tinge of hope. “Okay. I won’t be long. We’ll talk to him as soon as I get back.”

  The front door opened, revealing the misty front yard, and beyond it, the brighter colors of Sunnyside Terrace, with the Fluorescent Salmon house of the Whats looking like a big sparkling fruit on the other side of the street. It seemed more like home than it ever had, but it also seemed a million miles away.

  Fernie had a thought that also seemed to come from a place a million miles away: What if I never see them again?

  It wasn’t the kind of thing she had time to think about right now.

  But she did have time to remember that Gustav was her friend and that it was just like him to want to protect her. Just to be sure he didn’t get any fancy ideas of that kind, she whirled around and pointed an accusing finger at his face. “I’m warning you. You’d better not talk to Hieronymus or go down to the Dark Country without me. I’d better not come back and find out you’re already gone. Not even if you think it’s for my own good. I’m serious.”