Lord Obsidian had taken a single step, as if intent on tearing the boy limb from limb, but something stopped him before he advanced any farther: perhaps just irritation, and perhaps just curiosity . . . but perhaps another emotion, one that it was probably not good for a would-be conqueror to have. “Explain yourself, boy.”
“Sure thing, Howie.” Gustav cracked his knuckles. “See, in the poem you quoted, those words, Look on my works, and so on, are found on the pedestal of another statue, a shattered statue, built a long time ago by another big bully who also once wanted everybody to be afraid of him. But in the poem, the statue’s in ruins. The rest has all crumbled. His kingdom’s gone, his dreams of conquest are dead, and the man himself is forgotten. The point of the poem is that he was a big deal for a little while, but he ended up with nothing.”
Lord Obsidian almost seemed relieved. “And that’s your big plan? Finger-wagging based on some words from some foolish poet long dead?”
Gustav suddenly looked very tired. He rubbed the bridge of his nose and said, “You know, Howie, you really are an idiot sometimes.”
The words rippled through the crowd, humans and shadows nudging one another, demanding to know: Did he really say that?
Gustav went on. “Do you really think we’d all be parked in this particular spot right now if I hadn’t wanted us to get here all along?”
His words, gently as he spoke them, hit with the force of a thunderbolt. The human guards elbowed one another, unsure what to do. The shadows murmured. Scrofulous peered from face to face and seemed to remember the promise Gustav had made to him earlier. The Beast whined and cowered and snarled, eager for a chance to attack.
Mr. What gave his astonished shadow guard a nasty look, then scooped up Pearlie and, without meeting any resistance at all, went to Fernie, proud to stand beside his daughters.
Mr. Gloom dropped the look of bereft madness from his face and took a step closer, his eyes welling with something more than hope.
Though still towering in their midst, and still the most dangerous shadow in sight, Lord Obsidian clearly sensed that he was now in danger of no longer being seen as the most dangerous person at this gathering. He snarled, “You’re lying.”
Gustav turned his attention back to Fernie. “Are you okay?”
Fernie’s voice broke. “I’m f-fine. I was only pretending to be crazy.”
Gnulbotz whirled toward her, his eyes widening in shock, and the many squirming little maggots in his mouth all rearing back as if personally offended.
Gustav’s lip twitched. “Really, Fernie, being a little bit crazy is one of the things I like most about you.”
“Being a little bit crazy,” she said, grinning through her tears, “is probably also the reason I like you, too.”
Gustav’s lips quivered with one of his many barely-a-smile smiles. He then turned to Lord Obsidian and asked him, “So, Howie, would you like to know why you’ve just made the second biggest mistake of your life? I realize we’re about to fight to the death, but if you really want to know, I’m in no hurry. I can spare a minute or so to tell you.”
Lord Obsidian was positively trembling with fury. “You have my permission to speak, boy. But every word you say now will invite even-more-protracted suffering for yourself later.”
“Whatever,” said Gustav, who was clearly not impressed.
He started to pace.
“See, Howie, I’ve read every single one of your books. There are copies of all of them in my home library. I’ve had years to study every page, trying to figure out what kind of awful person would do the kind of things you’ve done.
“They’re really not very good books.
“But one of the things I noticed about them was that while you were okay at describing things like otherworldly dimensions and ancient lost cities, you were pretty hopeless when it came to writing about people.
“Whenever you were forced to write about people, it was obvious that you didn’t have even the slightest idea what you were talking about.
“Other people just weren’t real to you, Howie. And I guess that much makes sense, because if other people did feel real to you, you wouldn’t have done all the terrible things you’ve done to them, over the years.”
Gustav shrugged. “Even growing up without people, I always knew more about them than you did. I don’t know why. Maybe because I came from good people. Maybe because I always knew I was one of them, and you always thought you were above them.
“I’ve always known I would someday have a chance to use that against you.
“So when I was in your throne room, destroying all those statues of yourself you found so important, I made a point of telling you, again and again, how silly I found them. I said it so many times that you had to get irritated. I wanted you to be irritated.
“Then I told you how much satisfaction I took in destroying them all . . . and you got so irritated you have done exactly what I wanted. You brought me here.”
Gustav let the meaning of those words sink in, and a large number of Lord Obsidian’s guards and soldiers looked around nervously, already seeing how those words would indeed lead their master to bring the boy to this one place.
None of them saw why this place would be more dangerous for their master than any other place, but they all heard the confidence in Gustav’s voice, the sense that the tide had just turned.
Fernie understood more. She remembered the last thing Gustav had said to Lemuel Gloom’s shadow, when sending him away with the Cryptic Carousel. Gustav had told him to take the vehicle somewhere safe, and wait for a signal—a signal he didn’t have enough information to explain yet, but which he had promised to make sure Lemuel could spot from the air above the Dark Country.
The statue’s head was the only feature of the Dark Country that could be seen above its thick, roiling murk.
It was, she understood with mounting excitement, the only place in the entire land from which a distress signal could be sent.
Gustav went on. “I knew that a guy like you wouldn’t ever be able to resist breaking my spirit by bringing me to the most impressive statue you had, the one I’d already seen from a distance.
“Seriously, Howie. You were so easy to manipulate that I almost felt sorry for you. I didn’t even have to say all that much more after that, to get you to think that sending for all my captive friends and family was your own good idea instead of mine.
“You never knew it was because that would save me the trouble of running around looking for them after I got finished kicking your butt.”
Gustav spread his hands, palms outward. “And so here we are, exactly where I wanted us to be: the place where I’ll finish the job my father started.” His gaze darted briefly toward Hans Gloom, whose face now radiated so much pride in his son that the shadow soldiers all around him looked even darker in comparison to his shining light. “That is, if it’s okay with you, Dad.”
Hans Gloom’s voice broke. “You’re doing fine all by yourself . . . son.”
Lord Obsidian’s face whipped toward the man he had long considered his greatest enemy, the man he had believed to be a broken shell. Fury stained his gray features, but there was even more uncertainty now, even more fear . . . and in that moment, there was not a single being on the platform who failed to see it.
Then he turned back to Gustav and snarled, “I commend you, boy. You are too conniving to trust as a servant. You would clearly just find some way to push me aside and rule in my stead. So I will just have to kill you and all your friends. But before I do, you need to clear up the one thing you left unexplained. You called bringing you here the second biggest mistake of my life. What, in your foolish opinion, was my first?”
Gustav had already reached into the remains of his jacket and removed a small object. “Oh, that,” he said. “You never should have killed Penny Gloom.”
The obje
ct between his fingers was a whistle.
The next two things to happen occurred simultaneously.
First: Lord Obsidian snapped a command at the Beast. “You! Kill the What family! Now!”
And second: Gustav blew the whistle.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Great Battle Begins
The Beast, as always happiest now that it had somebody to attack, burst from Lord Obsidian’s side and leaped at the three gathered members of the What family.
As it grew to fill the air before them, it changed from its usual awful self to something even more awful, all mouth and claws and swirling darkness. It was so horrid in its outline that even the shadow guards cringed in sudden terror at the sight of it.
Fernie had been able to outrun the monster in the past, but never without a tremendous head start.
She cried out, firmly expecting this to be the very last second of her life.
Then something flung her and Pearlie aside at the last instant. They went flying, sprawling onto the platform floor.
Fernie landed hard, scraping her knees, realizing even as she skidded to a stop that it had been her father who shoved her and Pearlie out of the Beast’s path, placing himself between them and danger.
She cried out, “No, Dad—”
But even as she rolled over on her back to face what she had firmly expected to be the most horrible of all sights, another surprise awaited her.
The Beast was not ripping her father apart, but instead rising into the air at the end of a lasso.
The lasso was a cable hanging from the base of a colorful merry-go-round that had suddenly materialized in the air over them.
She cried out, “The Cryptic Carousel!”
It was indeed the marvelous vehicle invented by Gustav’s grandfather Lemuel.
In the next second it gave a sudden violent spin, the carousel animals turning into streaks of bright color and the lassoed Beast becoming a foul gray blur circling the carnival ride at the end of its rope.
Then the Cryptic Carousel released the line, and the lassoed Beast went flying off into the far distance, its furious roar growing ever more faint as it became a dot dropping into the murk from a height.
Pearlie said, “Well, that much was easy, at least.”
The calliope music the carousel played cut out, and the amplified voice of Lemuel Gloom’s shadow boomed through the high-altitude air: “Now!”
The robotic carousel animals, designed to provide defense and protection for the strange vehicle’s passengers, now did their job, leaping away from their respective poles and into the midst of the enemy.
Whinnying, the carousel unicorn speared two shadow guards and ran off into the distance, with them still squirming together on its horn.
Roaring, the carousel lion took on three of the human guards and backed them off with its slashing claws.
The carousel salmon tumbled from the sky, mouth-first, and swallowed one guard up to the waist, leaving him stumbling around on confused legs while the fish thrashed on top of him.
The carousel zebra, rhino, ostrich, and octopus-man hit the platform, right into a knot of screaming and confused minions, scattering them like bowling pins.
The battle was already far too complicated for Fernie to understand all at once, but she saw little puzzle pieces of it that, if she survived, she might be able to fit into some kind of sense later.
As far as she could tell, all of this took place at the same moment:
Not-Roger lifted a squirming human guard over his head and flung him at two others, bowling them over.
Scrofulous wandered about in the midst of the chaos, clutching his scroll and muttering to himself, “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear . . .”
Mr. What picked up an abandoned sword and touched his fingertip to the end of it, immediately wincing and drawing it back with the kind of thoughtful expression that he always wore when doing his job as a safety expert, possibly figuring out some kind of safeguard that could be added to a sword to make sure it couldn’t ever accidentally cut anybody.
Hans Gloom ripped his leash away from his guards, placed a hand on the shoulder of a guard facing the other way, turned the man around, and socked him in the jaw, knocking him down.
Gustav raced toward the battle, yelling, “Dad!”
The Cryptic Carousel dove for the crowd, forcing shadows and humans alike to cry out and dive for the floor.
The carousel rhino rammed one of the shadow guards, knocking him over and making him lose his grip on the glass jar he held. It shattered on the ground, freeing a dark cloud of mist that first became a frightened Anemone, then blurred, shifted shape, and re-emerged as a grim-faced Great-Aunt Mellifluous.
Lord Obsidian cried out in rage and advanced through the chaos, making a beeline for his old enemy, Hans Gloom.
All of that happened in one second.
So many things of similar craziness happened in the next second that neither Fernie nor Pearlie knew where they should go themselves to make the most helpful contribution.
Their father gave his recently acquired sword an experimental swing, just to see how it felt, and without realizing it, cut an advancing Krawg in half. “Sorry,” he said automatically, though he probably wasn’t. Krawg re-formed, and Mr. Gloom cut him in half again, getting used to the idea.
Gnulbotz tried to grab Gustav, only to close his hands on empty air as the boy leaped through his grasp.
Lord Obsidian extended his grotesquely elongated fingers toward Hans Gloom, but one of his human servants got in the way, and Obsidian grasped him by mistake. The man screamed and aged about eighty years in a heartbeat, finally crumbling into a pile of ash. Obsidian dropped him and slashed at Hans, who evaded him and dove through the crowd, trying to find a sword he could use.
A dozen of the remaining shadow guards converged on the shouting Great-Aunt Mellifluous, swarming her in numbers so great that in less than a second she disappeared from view.
Not-Roger grabbed a fallen human guard by one arm and one leg and spun him in circles, using him to drive away half a dozen others.
Three of the shadow guards slipped away from the chaos, cradling their glass jars. A carousel zebra brushed one and caused him to drop his charge, which shattered and released a cloud of darkness that immediately re-formed into Pearlie’s shadow.
Pearlie cried, “Who do we help first?”
Fernie yelled, “No time to make plans! Just do whatever makes the most sense!”
Even as the girls entered the battle, an angry Lord Obsidian stormed through it all, calling his guards fools and brushing them aside in his determination to deal with Hans Gloom. Each human guard he brushed aside crumbled into ashes at his touch, demonstrating the chief risk of working for world-conquering maniacs: They don’t repay their followers’ loyalty with any of their own. The human guards who saw what Lord Obsidian was doing screamed and ran, less interested in quelling the revolt than they were in keeping away from their master’s touch.
Hans scrambled across the platform floor on his hands and knees, at one point darting between the legs of the carousel’s winged horse. He emerged on the other side to find himself facing an angry human guard charging him with a spear. Hans grabbed the spear behind its point, jabbed the guard in the face with its handle, and claimed the weapon for himself. He spun it in his hands and brandished it at Lord Obsidian, who had simply stepped over the winged horse in a single step and now glared down at his old enemy with the booming arrogance of a giant facing down a child.
Gustav raced through the crowd, desperate to get to the father he had never known.
Pearlie and her shadow attacked one of the human guards protecting a jar. Pearlie dove to grab him by his ankles, at the same time her shadow tried to wrest away the jar. The guard turned to avoid Pearlie’s shadow but got his legs twisted up by Pearlie’s grip. He fell face-first. T
he jar sailed through the air, hit the ground, and shattered into a million pieces. Another cloud of swirling darkness popped out and re-formed itself. Penny Gloom’s shadow whirled about to find either her strange son or the man she had spent so many years loving and protecting.
Fernie found herself facing a filthy human guard, clad in chain-mail shorts, who jabbed his rusted sword at her face and said, “At least I’ll get to kill one of ye for the master!”
She ducked under his sword, yanked his chain-mail shorts down around his ankles, and ran past him while he was still stumbling about trying to figure out what had just happened.
Up ahead, Lord Obsidian wrapped his terrible hands around the spear wielded by Hans Gloom, and coldly snapped it in half. “First, you! Then the interfering brats!”
Above them all, the Cryptic Carousel rose back into the air, tilted like a hat worn at a jaunty angle. It now was crawling with shadow and human minions of Lord Obsidian who had managed to grab on during its dive and were struggling to board so they could seize control of the vehicle.
The carousel gorilla, an old friend of Fernie’s, was the only carousel animal still aboard and not directly involved with the battle below. He stomped and kicked at the minions clinging to the carousel’s side, but could use only one arm because he needed to keep a certain familiar cat carrier tucked under his other.
Harrington’s spitting and yowling could be heard even over the shouting of the mob. He was not a happy cat, though it was impossible to know, if he were free, whether he would have found some place to hide or joined the battle himself.
Gustav, leaping on and diving off the charging carousel rhino’s back, knocked his father to the ground and away from Lord Obsidian’s grasp.
Both the younger and the elder Gloom scrambled into the busiest part of the confusion, leaving Obsidian spinning in place as he searched for somebody more convenient to kill.
Unfortunately, the tyrant spotted Fernie.
Gustav Gloom and the Castle of Fear Page 10