Fernie turned her head and saw the fake grass of the house’s fake lawn stretching out before her, with the house inside the house looking very much like it had the first time she’d seen it, without all the terrible damage it had also suffered on that terrible night. It unfortunately also seemed drearier, and more colorless, and in some ways less detailed than the house she had visited.
The sky above her was not blue, but gray. The sun above her was also gray, when it should have been burning yellow. The fake grass she lay on did not feel like fake grass, but more like cold stone, and if she listened very carefully, she could still hear the moaning and wailing shadows in the cell where she’d been tossed, not nearly as distant as she would have liked them to be, but just far enough that she didn’t have to listen to them if she didn’t want to.
This was too dreary a place to be the warm and inviting, if somewhat sad, chamber that Gustav had shown her. But it was very much like that place, or at least more like that place than it was like the Screaming Room she’d been threatened with.
She didn’t for one second believe that this was what she’d been intended to find when she was thrown into the hole in the floor. This was something Scrofulous hadn’t planned for . . . something that even Lord Obsidian hadn’t planned for.
It didn’t feel like a rescue. Not exactly.
But it was something unexpected, and she supposed that she could take some encouragement from that.
So she stood on shaky legs, faced the house, and said, “Hello?”
Nobody answered. But it was impossible to believe that she was alone here. There was a presence of some kind all around her—an interested, observing something that she could feel the same way it was sometimes possible to feel someone looking over her shoulder.
“Hello? Is there anybody there? Where is this place?”
Again, there was no answer.
Maybe the house in front of her harbored some unimaginable horror that would leap out at her as soon as she passed through the screen door into whatever room waited beyond it.
But there was nowhere else to go and nothing else for her to do, so she crossed the lawn, climbed the three creaky steps to the rustic porch, and passed through the screen door into the house beyond, still calling, “Hello?”
Inside, this version of the house looked exactly like the real one had the first time she’d seen it, except all gray, and missing much of the detail she had seen in her visit to the real place. It didn’t feel the same and it didn’t smell the same. When she crossed into the living room, similar to the one where she and Gustav had discussed what happened to his parents, it, too, looked a lot like the place she’d visited, complete with windows open to a painted backdrop of distant cows. But the details were as off on the inside as they were on the outside. When she examined the books on the shelves, she found one she remembered finding there before, The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson. Gustav had said it was a great book. But when she took it off the shelf, it had no texture and weighed nothing in her hand. When she flipped the pages, she discovered them to be blank.
It was going to be boring, trapped here forever, if the books on the shelves had no words in them.
Fernie put the book down and turned to investigate the rest of the room, discovering that the couch was occupied by what looked like a great black storm cloud that seemed to gather some of its substance closer to itself as she approached. It had a vague face, less like a proper face than a cartoon with two dark patches for eyes and another for a mouth.
Fernie had seen a cloud like that before, on a distant world with red skies. The cloud had been a shadow, driven half mad by years of imprisonment, and had been quite dangerous indeed until brought to its senses.
She could only hope that she had as much luck with this one. “Hello.”
The cloud rumbled like distant thunder just beginning to roll in over the hills. “Who are you?”
“M-my name’s Fernie. Fernie What.”
“That is just a name. It tells me nothing. Who are you, Fernie What?”
“I’m a girl from the world of light.”
“You’re also only a child, which is why I have gone to the trouble of shielding you from this chamber’s madness. I wish no harm to children. But still, you have told me nothing.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll try to do better.”
“Who are you, aside from a girl from the world of light?”
“I’m the daughter of Nora and Sidney What, and the sister of Pearlie What.”
“Those names also mean nothing to me.”
“I can’t help that,” said Fernie. “But they’re my family. They mean everything to me.”
The walls seemed to thin, and the distant wailing grew louder. It was a terrible sound, even when it was muffled, and for a second it grew so loud that Fernie almost started screaming herself. She caught a glimpse of what made that sound: hundreds of indistinct shapes, imprisoned by chains of what looked like black smoke, wailing in terrible madness. Then the walls of the house inside the house thickened again, the chained figures were once again lost to view, and the terrible sound of their suffering was distant background noise once more—something that could never be ignored, but could, for the moment, be endured.
“Family is important,” the cloud said, finally.
Fernie became aware that she had fallen to her knees. “Yes. I know.”
“Why are you not with your family, Fernie What?”
“They’ve been taken,” Fernie said, and before the cloud could ask her another question, she quickly slipped in one of her own. “Am I still in the Screaming Room?”
“You are indeed still in that terrible place, Fernie What. But you are also inside of me, a shadow who came here willingly on an errand of mercy. Were it not for this illusion that I have made of my own substance, this shadowy stage set that I have created and brought you into, your mind would now be shattering from the terrible sounds of the shadows who scream without end in this place. So you depend on me for your sanity. But I will continue to protect you, as long as I confirm that you deserve my protection.”
“But I’ve already told you my name and where I came from, even the names of my family. I don’t know what else I can tell you.”
“Then let me ask the questions. You have the smell of someone who’s been in the Dark Country for a while, but I also sense sunshine not very far in your past. Tell me, child: How did you come to be brought to the Dark Country against your will?”
This, at least, was something Fernie could answer. “I didn’t come here against my will. I came here on purpose, with my sister and my best friend in the whole world.”
“Why would innocent children throw their lives away in such a foolish manner?”
Fernie said, “To rescue two good men.”
“It doesn’t appear to have been a very successful rescue.”
“Not at the moment,” Fernie admitted. “But I’m not willing to say it’s failed yet.”
“Why not?”
“Because the best friend I mentioned is the bravest and smartest person I’ve ever known. Because he fights monsters and beats them. Because when he’s asked to do something impossible, he shrugs and he blinks and he figures out a way to make it happen. Because when everything’s at its worst, he’s always at his best. Because he’ll get us out of here. He will. Just you wait.”
The cloud made a thrumming noise . . . which made no sense at all to Fernie until she thought of the sound people make while drumming their fingertips against a tabletop. It was thinking.
After long seconds, the cloud asked her what sounded like a very sad question: “Do you mistake this for a fairy tale, Fernie What? Are you just another foolish, empty-headed little girl who’s read too many stories and puts too much faith in being rescued by some invincible hero?”
Fernie had the sense that the shadow-being before her had lost someth
ing very precious at some point in its past, and that everything rode on the answer she gave it.
“No. If I’ve learned anything at all since this whole mess started, it’s that I’m a hero. I don’t need to go looking for any. But even a hero can put her faith in a friend.”
“He must be some friend, Fernie What.”
“He is.”
What followed was a dead silence, while the shadow creature figured out where next to take the interview. Fernie was afraid that once it started up again, the questions would keep going until she was forced to recount everything that had happened since the moment she first spotted Gustav through the iron fence that encircled his yard. So she asked another one of her own. “Why does this place look so much like the house where Hans and Penny Gloom lived?”
The cloud drew back. “You have already seen the house inside the house? How?”
“Gustav Gloom showed me. He’s my best friend.”
The cloud turned so dark in the next second or two that Fernie wondered if she’d just angered it in some way. “You . . . are Gustav’s best friend? You are not lying to me? Gustav has a best friend from the world of light?”
“Yes. Of course he does.”
The cloud trembled, though whether in fear, or rage, or madness, or some other emotion that only a shadow enduring imprisonment in this terrible place could feel, was something Fernie had no way of knowing.
“I didn’t recognize you,” it said. “You . . . You’re the one from the painting.”
Fernie had no idea what the cloud was talking about. “What painting?”
The cloud suddenly rolled off the couch, revealing what its presence had been hiding: the figure of a silver-haired man, a real man and not the shadow of a man, curled in sleep. She had barely a second to consider the only person he could possibly be, the long-missing Hans Gloom, before the cloud shadow was upon her, wrapping limbs of black smoke around her shoulders.
For a moment she was terribly afraid that by mentioning Gustav’s name, she’d awoken a horrible enemy, in this place where Gustav had so many enemies.
But then she realized that the tendrils of smoke had just pulled themselves together to become arms, and that the indistinct cloud had just pulled itself into the shape of a pretty young woman whose face Fernie had seen in photographs and paintings.
“Oh, thank you,” the shadow woman said, in a voice that no longer sounded like a distant storm cloud but now resembled the weeping of a young mother who’d been consumed by worry for far too long. “Thank you, thank you, thank you, Fernie.”
“For what?”
“All these years trapped here I’ve been afraid that my beautiful boy, trapped there, in that house, behind that fence, would never find any friends to care for him. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Fernie, for being his friend and letting me know that he turned out the way he has.”
Fernie pulled back and looked the shadow woman in the face. “I know you.”
Fernie’s new protector was indeed Penny’s shadow, the one who had rescued an unborn child from the twisted wreckage that had taken the Penny of flesh and blood.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m Gustav’s mother.”
CHAPTER SIX
What Pearlie and Not-Roger Find in the Dungeon of Those Who Await
Elsewhere, Not-Roger said, “I miss my shadow.”
Pearlie What replied, “I miss mine, too.”
“I know,” he sighed, “but I suspect it’s different for you. From what I gather, you’ve pretty much always had other people around you—your sister, your father, Gustav, any number of others. Your shadow was just something that followed you around and didn’t speak up much. For a long time my shadow was the only friend I had, the only person I knew who I could do things with.”
“Like what?”
“Well, you know that game I Spy?”
Pearlie happened to hate that game, but her dad insisted on playing it on long car trips. “Sure, you pick something you can see from where you are, and say, ‘I spy, with my little eye, something starting with the letter . . .’ and you say the letter the thing starts with. Then the person you’re playing with has to figure out what you’re thinking of.”
“That’s the game, all right,” said Not-Roger. “We must have played that thousands of times during our years running the inn. Of course, it wasn’t the most challenging game ever, because my shadow always picked the letter S, and the inn was such an empty place that the only things he could possibly be thinking of were other shadows.”
The two of them had been imprisoned in the Dungeon of Those Who Await for about half an hour, as far as Pearlie could tell, and so far all she could say about it was that it was large and difficult to cross. This was because the floor in the dungeon was not flat, but was instead a strange arrangement of steps that sometimes headed up and sometimes headed down and sometimes forced travelers to walk up three steps, then down four, and then up another six, and then down another three, and up another twenty, just to get to some random high point that should have been only a short walk away in the first place.
Every surface was lined with shadows and human beings who had given up on trying to get anywhere in this confusing place and now huddled wherever they’d happened to stop, gathered like thousands of visitors in the bleachers of a stadium where there was nothing to look at but others who, like them, had run out of hope.
It was impossible to imagine why anybody, even a world-conquering type like Lord Obsidian, would ever need so many prisoners, but Pearlie and Not-Roger had already asked that question of one of the hopeless figures they encountered, the shadow of a skinny old man with a beard that fell all the way to his ankles.
“I used to be one of his closest advisors,” the bearded shadow had sighed. “Alas, I made the mistake of once—once!—advising him that perhaps he might be wrong about something. He saw this as an unacceptable moment of rebellion, and threw me in here, telling me that I would have to wait until he thought up something he could do to me that could possibly be terrible enough.”
Pearlie had protested, “That can’t be the same reason everybody’s here!”
“Why not? Lord Obsidian probably doesn’t even remember one-tenth of all the human beings and shadows he’s thrown in here for what he imagined to be the short time it would take him to think of some particularly vile fate to punish them with. And if you’re one of them, girl, you might as well hope that nobody ever reminds him of you. This place, awful as it is, is much better than anything he could ever come up with.”
This taught Pearlie and Not-Roger nothing except what they already knew: that Lord Obsidian was a terrible person.
“Why is he so mean?” Pearlie asked aloud. It was the same question she and Fernie had asked a number of times, in a number of ways, since first learning of Lord Obsidian’s existence. “What exactly does he think he’s getting out of it? What does he think he’s winning?”
Not-Roger shook his head. “Ah, girl. I seem to remember people asking those questions about any number of bullies and villains, before I got banished from the world of light. As I told you, I wasn’t a very nice man when I lived there, and they were asked more than once of me.”
Pearlie had not found out exactly what Not-Roger meant when he said he hadn’t been a very nice man, though lies and thievery seemed to have been somehow involved. “Well, maybe you can answer me, then. What did you get out of it?”
“I don’t remember, exactly. It’s been such a long time, after all. But I seem to recall that I never really thought I was winning the game of life unless somebody else was losing. After a while, being happy and making other people unhappy was all mixed up in my head, and I tended to think that one was the same as the other.”
They climbed to the top of one pyramid of steps, where the wheezing Not-Roger, exhausted by all this hiking, had to sit down and rest. Pearlie looked out upon the throng
s, and for a few moments felt despair and loneliness wash over her like a wave.
“I was hoping to find my dad here, but I don’t see him anywhere.”
Not-Roger said, “Try looking for your house keys.”
“My house keys are back in the world of light.”
“You should look for them, anyway.”
“What would be the use of that?”
“Well, I may be wrong about this, mostly because it’s been such a long time since I had anyone or anything worth losing, but I seem to remember that looking for the things you’d misplaced was always a frustrating business. For instance, I was forever losing my screwdriver and never having any luck finding it in any of the places where I would normally expect to find it.”
“So?”
“After a while, I would always give up on looking for my screwdriver, and look for something else instead. I’d decide I wanted a piece of cake, and open my refrigerator to see if I had any. And there, right up front, would be a nice big delicious frosted cake, and right there, stuck in the frosting, would be the screwdriver I’d been using the day before to cut the cake into slices.”
This didn’t help. “Why would you use a screwdriver to slice cake?”
“Probably because I’d misplaced the cake knife, which, if I recall correctly, I’d been using the day before that to rake leaves. It doesn’t matter. The point is that if you’ve misplaced something you really care about, and can’t find it in any of the obvious places, it sometimes makes sense to look for something else instead, because that’ll lead you to all the places you never thought of looking before.”
Pearlie said, “I am not going to waste any time looking for my keys.”
No, she decided, what she needed was to keep track of this impossibly confusing room, and find a way to make herself a map that she could use to figure out all the stairs leading up and stairs leading down, and tell the difference between those she’d already searched and those she had yet to search.
To do that, Pearlie needed a pen, even if the closest thing she had to paper was the palm of her hand. As it happened, she’d actually had a favorite pen, a blue-and-white ballpoint with attached highlighter, in her jeans pocket on the night that Gustav Gloom had asked for the family’s help in talking to the shadow criminal known as Hieronymus Spector. And though the need for a writing implement hadn’t come up since, she had occasionally reached into her pocket and found it waiting there, a comforting reminder of a world she had begun to fear she would never know again.
Gustav Gloom and the Castle of Fear Page 4