Gustav Gloom and the Castle of Fear

by Adam-Troy Castro

  But this was far too big to be the Cryptic Carousel.

  This was what the Cryptic Carousel would have looked like if it ever happened to grow as large as a mountain.

  “No!” Lord Obsidian screamed. “Not my statue! Not my beautiful statue!”

  Gustav flashed the sunniest grin of his entire life, because he’d just figured out who was responsible.

  “Fernie,” he said, with sincere admiration. “You really do know how to make a beautiful mess . . .”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Face-Off Above the Dark Country

  The spinning Cryptic Carousel, now the same diameter as the giant sculpted head on the Howard Philip October statue, had the same effect on the statue’s face that an industrial sander would have had on any other ugly lump.

  Standing at the control panel, Lemuel’s shadow remarked, “I’ve got to admit, this is even more satisfying than dunking Silverspinner in the waterfall.”

  Fernie said, “Yup,” but really, she felt disappointed. Having always looked forward to being tall someday, she had been secretly kind of hoping that her own growth, which matched the growth of the carousel around her, would have given her more of a taste of what it would have been like to be a giant. But inside the control hub, there was really nothing to make her feel any different. As far as she was concerned, Lemuel’s shadow was the same size he had always been, and the control panel was the same size it had always been, and the battered toolbox was the same size it had always been, and she was the same size she had always been. Only the view out the sides of the carousel was any different, but not all that spectacular. It had largely been a glimpse up the sculpture’s nostrils, which went away as soon as the carousel’s edge bit into the giant October’s skin, and then the view became a close-up of boulders flying upward.

  Fernie took a little more satisfaction in knowing that Lord Obsidian’s army of reinforcements, a massive solid wave of black that had been rising up the statue’s body like an army of ants climbing an upright ear of corn, had stopped at the waist when they saw what was going on above them, and then retreated, terrified by a force that dwarfed even their evil master.

  It would have been even nicer if she could have used the carousel’s new size, and her own, to join the battle. But if she did, everybody still on the giant stone head would have seemed far smaller to her than the tiniest of tiny ants, and she probably wouldn’t have been able to hop out and stomp on Lord Obsidian without also stomping on Pearlie, Dad, Not-Roger, Mr. Gloom, and Gustav with the very same step.

  “The face is almost gone, Fernie. Want to saw off the arms next?”

  “We don’t have time,” she said. “We have to get back and help our friends.”

  Lemuel’s shadow saw the wisdom in this and hit the combination of buttons that should have returned the carousel to its intended size.

  Instead, the lights went out . . .

  “OCTOBERRRRRR!”

  The cry came from behind Gustav, at the instant the giant head-quake ceased.

  It was the cry of a man who had been pushed to his limits and was not willing to take any more—a cry so fearsome that Gustav knew at once why the human Howard Philip October had fled the owner of that voice for so long.

  Flat on his belly because of the quake, Gustav peered over his shoulder and saw Hans Gloom standing alone, the anger he had carried with him for so long radiating from him like heat from a sun. He held a soldier’s shattered sword in his right hand, and had curled his left into a fist so tight that the skin of his knuckles had turned white.

  He looked different. Only a few minutes before, he had been forced to flee Lord Obsidian because that was his only choice against a figure that much more powerful than himself. But now he seemed bigger, more powerful, more of a threat. Maybe it was the shadow rising behind him, a hooded and faceless figure that looked like there was no place on any world that suited him more.

  The sight was so formidable that the carousel animals retreated, and even Lord Obsidian’s remaining minions, human and shadow, parted on either side, afraid to charge.

  Lord Obsidian, who’d been about to make another grab for Mr. What, turned around and faced his old enemy, a foul delight on his crescent-shaped face.

  Behind him, Mr. What staggered to his feet and ran to Pearlie, embracing her with the fervor of a man once again astonished that he was still alive to do it. Great-Aunt Mellifluous, who had managed to break free of her own opponent during the quake, took a step or two closer to them, but then stopped, clutching her hands together as she saw another phase of the battle about to begin.

  All eyes fell on Gustav, the only person lying between two old enemies.

  Lord Obsidian released a heavy sigh. “Very well. I suppose this is most appropriate. Get out of the way, boy. Give yourself a few extra minutes of life. Let me deal with this old business first.”

  Gustav rose to his feet and once again dusted himself off. “No.”

  “I don’t hand out chances like they’re candy, you foolish child. Take this one. I’ll be happy enough to kill you once your father lies dead.”

  Again, Gustav said, “No.”

  Another sigh from Lord Obsidian, whose next look over Gustav’s head, to meet Hans Gloom’s eyes, was almost affectionate. “You should be proud, old friend.”

  “I wish I had the right to be,” Hans Gloom replied, in tones just as deceptively friendly. “But thanks to you, I was never there to raise him. Whatever he’s become, he’s become without my help.” He turned his attention to Gustav. “I love you, son. I may not know you yet, but I love you. I loved the idea of you before you were born and all those years I thought you were dead. I love you even more now that I see what a brave and true boy you are. And this is the only order I may ever have a chance to give you, as your father. Get out of the way and let us do this.”

  “No,” Gustav said, more loudly, in the first act of disobedience he had ever shown his one living, flesh-and-blood parent. “I haven’t come all this way to let you face him alone.”

  Hans’s smile was broad and strong and full of joy. “I never said I’d be facing him alone.”

  As if in illustration, the hooded shadow behind him grew even larger, a storm cloud raging with what must have been years of pent-up fury.

  Gustav still hesitated. Despite everything he had been through and everything he was capable of, he was still a boy, and boys don’t always know the right thing to do. He didn’t move at all until Penny Gloom’s shadow, murmuring, “It’ll be okay,” broke from the ranks and took him by the arm to lead him out of the way of what had to happen.

  Not far away, Not-Roger, who was reunited now with his own shadow, leaned in close to mutter something to Pearlie, who had just been once again reunited with hers.

  “Wait. I’ve been keeping track. All the other shadows except Hans Gloom’s are accounted for. Caliban must be his missing shadow. Musn’t he?”

  Pearlie had guessed the same thing some time before, but now found herself unsure. “I don’t know. I think so. Maybe.”

  “But I don’t get it. So what if Hans Gloom has his shadow back after all this time? Having my shadow doesn’t make me unstoppable. Having yours doesn’t do you that favor, either. How could being reunited with his possibly make any difference?”

  Pearlie What didn’t understand it, either . . . but just when Gustav allowed himself to be led out of the way under protest, she suddenly did.

  She grinned as she realized exactly what lay beneath Caliban’s hood. “It wouldn’t. That’s not Mr. Gloom’s shadow at all . . .”

  Elsewhere, Fernie and Lemuel’s shadow both found themselves trapped in a Cryptic Carousel that had lost all power and was now plummeting like any other object incapable of flight.

  She screamed, “This isn’t supposed to happen!”

  “All those rock chips we just carved from October’s statue! O
ne of them must have gotten tangled up in the gears, or something!”

  “What do you mean, ‘or something’? Don’t you know?”

  “Not really! It could be anything! Maybe some mouse got in back at the house and chewed on the wires and we’re only seeing the problem now! It’s not like this thing has had a tune-up recently!”

  “Can’t you do something!?”

  “I can do any number of things,” Lemuel’s shadow said. “I just don’t know if any of them can stop us from crashing . . .”

  Lord Obsidian strode toward his old enemy in no particular hurry, his long legs covering the distance in no time at all, his impossibly long arms drawing back for a blow that would drive most men to the ground.

  For an instant, it looked like Hans Gloom and Caliban intended to stand there and let it come. But at the last instant they parted, Hans darting left and Caliban darting right. Hans swung his sword and sliced at Lord Obsidian’s left knee. The blade only rebounded off Obsidian’s substance, the impact not hurting him at all . . . but it didn’t seem to be the attack Hans was counting on. That attack, taking place at the moment Obsidian was distracted, was Caliban’s. The hooded shadow flung himself upward, grabbing Lord Obsidian by both wrists and shouting, “No more!”

  Furious, finding Caliban a greater danger than the human being at his feet, Lord Obsidian ripped his arms free of Caliban’s grip and flung the shadow aside. His swing was so powerful that Caliban should have sailed into the distance and plummeted into the Dark Country’s mists, but instead the hooded shadow reversed direction in midair and flew back with the speed of a comet, this time racing toward Lord Obsidian’s face.

  “I told you!” Caliban yelled. “I have had more than enough of you! No more, I tell you! No more!”

  Caliban became a sticky blob of ink adhering to Lord Obsidian’s face. More specifically: He looked like a sticky blob of ink pulling in the material of Lord Obsidian’s face. Shadow-stuff swirled between them, some being pulled toward Lord Obsidian and some being pulled toward Caliban—but for the first time, the shadow lord who had replenished himself with the material of other shadows was clearly facing another being capable of doing the same trick.

  Lord Obsidian shrieked and tugged at the blob and pulled out a long string of it and let go long enough for it to snap back and get a better grip on him. Whatever he did, Lord Obsidian could not get rid of it, and as his terrible fingers clutched at his face yet again, they succeeded only in finding and pulling back the material of Caliban’s hood.

  Everybody, friend and foe alike, gasped as they saw the face of the shadow screaming at Lord Obsidian that he had had enough.

  As Penny had realized, it did not belong to Hans Gloom.

  Instead, the features of the shadow who had called himself Caliban were that of a balding man with a large chin and forehead, whose visage had until recently towered over the Dark Country on the very statue where this battle was taking place.

  It was the face of Howard Philip October.

  Watching, gasping with all the others, Pearlie remembered the story Not-Roger had told them about Hans Gloom pursuing Hans Philip October through the wastelands of the Dark Country. October’s shadow, horrified by what the human version was becoming, had fled, and never been seen again.

  She had learned something from one of Gustav’s acquaintances, the shadow of an unkind man named Mr. Notes: that shadows were not necessarily like the people they resembled. Mr. Notes and his shadow hadn’t been alike. The man had been petty and unkind, and the shadow well-meaning and decent, causing the shadow great mortification until the day he decided he wanted nothing more to do with the man and left him, forever.

  Why had she ever assumed she would never see a case like that again?

  Elsewhere, Lemuel’s shadow said, “Hold on. This is going to be close.”

  The enlarged Cryptic Carousel, which had been about to crush the castle on impact, leveled out and instead flew over it, skimming the plains of the Dark Country. On its way it passed over teeming armies comprising many, many thousands of shadows, stretching from horizon to horizon like a gray wave as they launched their counterattack on Obsidian’s forces. They all cheered the carousel as it passed, a sound that was all by itself almost loud enough to drown out the other sound that had started to grow in the distance: the anguished scream of something not human.

  Fernie had heard that sound before. “That’s Lord Obsidian. We’ve hurt him again.”

  “You should be proud of that,” Lemuel’s shadow said. “When the history of the Dark Country is written, they’ll sing songs of the day the statue lost its face and all good shadows knew the time had come to rise up and fight.”

  Fernie had trouble imagining such a song. The shadow lost its face, la-la, it’s time to win the race, la-la . . .

  She shook away the silly thought and said, “We have to shrink the carousel down to its proper size and get back to our friends.”

  “Yes,” Lemuel’s shadow said. “If I get the opportunity to check out the engines and clear out whatever small piece of statue grit is clogging the intakes, I’ll be sure to do that. It probably won’t take much more than a minute or two. But I think we’ll be crashing first.”

  The carousel lurched, and slammed into something that made a horrid crunching noise before bouncing back into the air. Lemuel’s shadow said, “Well, there goes a hill nobody’s going to be using anytime soon. Hold on. This is going to be rough.”

  They slammed into the Dark Country’s earth . . .

  Many miles away, watching Hans Gloom battle Lord Obsidian with Caliban’s aid, Not-Roger said, “I still don’t understand this. Even if it is his own shadow, it’s still only a shadow. What makes his shadow so unstoppable?”

  Great-Aunt Mellifluous patted him on the wrist. “All by himself, his shadow isn’t. His shadow was never able to stop him from committing his crimes; nor was his shadow ever strong enough to step forward and fight him, in all the years October has been Lord Obsidian. This required Hans Gloom’s involvement, and with October’s shadow in hiding and Hans Gloom on the run, we were never able to arrange getting the two of them in one place, until now.”

  “But I still don’t understand—”

  “Obsidian’s not just being fought by one man and one shadow. He’s being fought by a very special combination of beings: one man who was once his best friend and later his greatest enemy, and the shadow who embodies the better man he could have been. All at once, his best friend, his worst enemy, and the conscience he scorned. It’s a deadly combination for a being whose greatest strength was always his belief in himself. Now shush your dear heart, and watch.”

  For Fernie, surviving the crash was a nice surprise.

  Like a flat rock skimming the surface of a pond, the enlarged Cryptic Carousel had skimmed along the surface of the distant region known as the Rarely, scooping out a massive trench as it went, before finally coming to a stop at the base of the mountains that surrounded the land on all sides. (At this size, the carousel was actually as tall as some of those mountains.)

  Fernie had survived the experience intact and had not been knocked unconscious, but for a few seconds she’d been a little too overwhelmed to do anything but lie where she was and recover as Lemuel’s shadow entered the console and shouted up progress reports from the engine. To her ears, everything he said sounded like advisories that the freeblematzers were all gunked up with guacamole, or something.

  She didn’t feel better until the carousel shuddered, and from her perspective, the walls of the trench the carousel had carved seemed to shoot upward like the rapidly growing flowers shown in fast-motion in nature documentaries. By the time the carousel was back to its proper size, the walls of the trench were towering cliffs, and the trench itself was so wide that those cliffs were only distant gray lines on two sides.

  The carousel had, she realized, just dug what the residents
of the Dark Country would someday consider its Grand Canyon.

  She grabbed one of the vacated poles and used it to pull herself to her feet. “Grandpa Lemuel!” she called. “How much longer?”

  “Just a couple of minutes!” he said from down below, and rapid-fired another gibberish explanation about veeblefretzers and soufflés.

  Concerned that this would be too long to make a difference, she stumbled forward and peered back along the track of the fresh canyon, willing her eyes to do the impossible and penetrate all the Dark Country’s murk to whatever was happening on the statue’s head.

  Not far away, a patch of slightly blacker darkness scrambled down the cliffs and hit the base of the trench, screaming in rage as it charged.

  It took her a second to recognize it, but when she did, her heart froze up as if grasped by an icy fist.

  Oh no. Of all the stupid places to crash . . . !

  “Grandpa Lemuel!” she shouted. “The Beast has found us!”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Fernie Versus the Beast, and Gustav Versus Lord Obsidian

  There was only one thing Fernie What could do, with Grandpa Lemuel’s shadow still buried in the machinery doing what repairs he could: take the battle to the air.

  She leaped onto the winged horse’s back. “Up! Up, up! We have to lead it away!”

  “I hear you,” said the winged horse. “I was afraid we’d get through this whole battle without me ever getting to do anything.”

  The horse sprung from his assigned pole on the empty carousel into the air, swooping low over the dark landscape to charge the approaching Beast head-on. Just before its path crossed the monster’s, it veered upward, coming so close to being seized by the Beast’s terrible, shifting hands that Fernie felt the wind of the monster’s fists grasping shut.