Gustav Gloom and the Four Terrors Read online

  AND THE FOUR TERRORS

  by Adam-Troy Castro

  illustrated by Kristen Margiotta

  GROSSET & DUNLAP

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Text copyright © 2013 Adam-Troy Castro. Illustrations copyright © 2013

  Kristen Margiotta. All rights reserved. Published by Grosset & Dunlap, a division of

  Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  GROSSET & DUNLAP is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Manufactured in China.

  Book design by Christina Quintero. Typeset in MrsEaves, Neutraface, and

  Strangelove Text.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012025517

  ISBN: 978-0-698-15930-3

  This one’s for Morgan and Megan

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE: THE WOMAN WHO PUT SWEATERS ON DUCKS

  CHAPTER TWO: THE LEAST HELPFUL BUTLER IN THE WORLD

  CHAPTER THREE: MR. WHAT HAS EMERGENCY PROCEDURES FOR BEING ATTACKED BY LOBSTERS

  CHAPTER FOUR: OF COURSE, SOMETHING GOES TERRIBLY WRONG

  CHAPTER FIVE: THE ONE THING SMART PEOPLE DO WHEN THEY’RE BEING CHASED BY MONSTERS

  CHAPTER SIX: GUSTAV IS A SHADOW OF HIS FORMER SELF

  CHAPTER SEVEN: DOWNSTAIRS, UNDERWATER, AND AFTERWARD

  CHAPTER EIGHT: THE USEFULNESS OF DOOR KNOCKERS

  CHAPTER NINE: AN UNFRIENDLY CHAT WITH NEBUCHADNEZZAR

  CHAPTER TEN: GUSTAV SAYS “OW”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE SHADOW WHO RUINED MOVIE NIGHT

  CHAPTER TWELVE: GUSTAV GOES SURFING

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE MOST INAPPROPRIATE NICKNAME EVER

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: THE MOST FRIGHTENING THING GUSTAV COULD POSSIBLY DO

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: “NERTS”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: *EXCEPT

  EPILOGUE: WHAT MAKES WINNING POSSIBLE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE WOMAN WHO PUT SWEATERS ON DUCKS

  For the fourth time in two days, Mrs. Zoe Soggybottom yelled, “No! Stop! Wait!”

  The front door of the Fluorescent Salmon house on Sunnyside Terrace burst open, and the young couple she’d been giving the grand tour lurched into the afternoon sun.

  Panic had turned the man and woman different colors. The man was as red as a beet, and the woman as pale as the underbelly of a frog. Fear had contorted both of their mouths into shapes like coin slots.

  They stumbled down the driveway to the compact car with the bumper sticker assuring everybody unimpressed with their vehicle that their other car was a far more expensive one.

  As they ran, a small mob of angry gray shapes clung to their shoulders and shouted in their ears. Two of those shapes were the shadows of little girls; another was the shadow of a house cat, inflated to giant size and roaring with the ferocity of India’s grumpiest tiger.

  Some of the dark shapes shouted things like “Get out!” and “Go away!” and “Go live in some other Fluorescent Salmon house!”

  The man and woman dove into their compact car and pulled out in a hurry, knocking over both the mailbox and the lawn sign reading HOME FOR SALE: OPEN HOUSE. The car squealed as it veered across the narrow street. Its rear bumper hopped the sidewalk on the other side and smashed into a black iron fence that surrounded the yard of an ominous, sprawling old mansion.

  The rolling mist that covered the yard sprouted its own small army of dark shapes, protesting this attack on their domain. “Whoa!” shouted one. “Hey!” said another. “Watch where you’re going!” cried a third.

  The woman screamed the same five words over and over, without any pause for breath between them. It sounded like “GETUSOUT OFHEREGETUSOUTOFHEREGETUSOUT OFHERE.” This wasn’t the kind of thing likely to improve her husband’s driving. He accelerated too fast and turned too sloppily. The car hopped the curb on its driver’s-side wheels and rode half on and half off the grass, knocking down mailboxes and drawing a deep rut in the lawns as it went.

  Somewhere along the way the man realized that he needed to avoid a car parked against the curb. He corrected in the wrong direction, leaving a pair of tire tracks on the lawn belonging to one Mrs. Adele Everwiner. After clipping the rear bumper of her car, his car hopped back off the curb and onto the street, still picking up speed as it vanished around the curve.

  The shadows responsible for chasing the young couple from the Fluorescent Salmon house slid back across the driveway and toward the front door, congratulating one another on their fine performance.

  The one shaped like the smaller of the two girls met up with a real flesh-and-blood girl now appearing at the front door: freckle-faced, curly-haired, ten-year-old Fernie.

  “That,” she declared, “was the best one yet.”

  As she reclaimed her own shadow, Fernie’s twelve-year-old sister Pearlie worried. “It may have been a bit much this time. Look at all the damage. Dad’s going to throw a fit.”

  Fernie stuck out her lower lip. “It’s not our fault that the people looking for houses nowadays are all a bunch of cowardly wusses.”

  Harrington, the family’s beloved black-and-white cat, appeared at their feet, feasting his golden-green eyes on the epic destruction before him. He sniffed the nose of his own shadow, which had shrunk back down to a manageable cat size but was not yet ready to calm down and behave. His plaintive meow might have been Cat for “Nice work. I would have helped out, but I saw that you had the situation fully under control.”

  The shadow Harrington meowed back. Sure you did.

  Zoe Soggybottom reached the front door behind them, her hazel eyes as round as dinner plates. Zoe was a tall, fussy woman with a weak chin and a beak of a nose that, between them, made her face look like it had been designed to come to a point. She wore the official red pantsuit of Lucky Lemon Realtors, complete with a bright yellow lapel pin promising WE SELL THE HOUSES NO ONE ELSE CAN!

  She looked pale. “Why is everybody doing that?”

  “Doing what?” Fernie asked, even though she knew the answer very well.

  “Running away.”

  “I don’t think it’s anything you said,” Fernie replied.

  “They di
dn’t like the sunroom,” Pearlie suggested.

  “Or maybe it’s a problem with the backyard,” Fernie ventured. “It’s not even close to being big enough for a pool.”

  Mrs. Soggybottom looked faint. “I’m not sure that explains all the screaming and panicking and fleeing for their lives.”

  “Well,” Fernie said, “maybe that’s because the ad in the paper is attracting too many nervous people. Maybe instead of calling the house a ‘sunny little family home in a high-end neighborhood,’ you should call it a ‘perfect home for thrill-seekers eager to challenge the unknown.’ You know. Get some braver types to look at the place.”

  Mrs. Soggybottom flashed the girls an uncomprehending smile before drifting back inside to flutter around the kitchen counter like a blind moth.

  The two What girls glanced at each other, each a little ashamed about how they were treating the poor woman. They liked Mrs. Soggybottom, really. She had a warm smile, a fine sense of humor, and (as she’d explained at length, between tours of their house) a deep commitment to her personal charity, a volunteer group that knit waterproof sweaters for ducks. Her pet cause didn’t make any more sense to the girls than it likely did to the ducks, but it demonstrated that the lady had her heart in the right place.

  Unfortunately, she was also trying to sell the house for their father, and neither the What girls nor the various shadows of the household could permit that to happen.

  The girls retreated to Pearlie’s bedroom, which was decorated on one side with pictures of giant monsters busily making buildings collapse, and on the other with posters of a popular boy singer who had the same effect on girls.

  Pearlie murmured, “I’m not sure how long we can keep this up.”

  “We’re not doing anything,” Fernie declared. “We can’t help it if our shadows are misbehaving.”

  “They’re only misbehaving because we asked them to.”

  “And we only asked them to because we have to. It’s only until we come up with a better idea.”

  “But what if there is no better idea?” Pearlie worried aloud. “Scaring people away isn’t going to solve the problem forever. Sooner or later Dad’s going to move us away just because he wants to, whether he sells the house or not.”

  This was true. Mr. What was a world-renowned safety expert, famous for cataloging over a thousand terrible things that could happen when spatulas were hung on insufficiently secured hooks. He made a living out of taking positions like declaring the need for warning sirens on grocery carts. He had not taken well to learning that the house across the street contained a gateway to a place called the Dark Country, where all shadows come from, or having his beloved daughters exposed to mortal danger two times in less than a month.

  What the What girls needed was a way to change his mind. But they had no idea how.

  They were still considering this when another dark shape slid into the room and settled against the nearest wall. “Hello, girls.”

  From prior meetings, Fernie recognized the shape as a shadow that had once belonged to a not very nice man named Mr. Notes, until deciding several years earlier to live apart from him. “Hello, Mr. Notes. Sorry about what happened to your fence.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Fernie. We’ll fix it. But Gustav sent me over because there is something important he needs to discuss. Can you get away long enough to meet him?”

  “Sure,” Fernie said. “Tell him we’re coming.”

  Mr. Notes’s shadow flitted away to deliver the message.

  Mr. What had forbidden the girls from ever braving the dangers of the Gloom estate again, or even spending any time in its front yard, but had out of kindness said that they were still allowed to meet their good friend Gustav at his fence. The alternative was not to see him again at all, because Gustav started to give off smoke the second he left the confines of the Gloom estate. Friends had to go to him; he couldn’t ever go to them.

  On their way out, the two girls found Mrs. Soggybottom slumped on the sofa, looking defeated. As her frightened eyes searched the room’s four corners for mysterious moving shapes, she seemed less like somebody who was supposed to be there than somebody who had landed there after falling from a height.

  Fernie wondered if they’d gone too far. “Ummm, Mrs. Soggybottom? We’re going to go see our friend across the street, but we’ll be right back.”

  “Sure,” Mrs. Soggybottom said, a little foggily. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  Wondering what that could possibly mean, the two girls crossed Sunnyside Terrace and found their friend Gustav standing behind the iron fence, gripping the bars in his pale white hands. The ankle-deep mist that always billowed around his property obscured his shiny black shoes, but they matched his little black suit with the little red tie, each as dark as his sun-deprived skin was pale. He wasn’t alone, because Mr. Notes’s shadow stood with him. But when the shadow saw that the girls were coming, he sank back down into the mist, disappearing from view.

  The dark circles under Gustav’s eyes were more pronounced than usual today, suggesting either a lack of sleep or worries unusual even for a boy who had spent his entire life dealing with the many strange challenges of life inside the Gloom house. “Hello, Fernie, Pearlie. I see the sale’s not going well.”

  “It’s never going to go well,” Fernie declared. “We’re not leaving you.”

  “I appreciate that,” said Gustav, who really did seem to. “I hope you don’t get into too much trouble with your dad because of it. If my dad were around, I wouldn’t want to be in any trouble with him.”

  Fernie felt guilty. “It would have been okay. You can’t be a kid without getting into trouble with your parents every once in a while.”

  “It’s part of the point of being a kid,” Pearlie emphasized.

  “If you have parents,” said Gustav, which made Fernie feel even worse. “I wouldn’t know.”

  Gustav’s human mother had been killed by a bad man named Howard Philip October, and his mother’s shadow, who’d raised him in her stead, had disappeared without explanation years later. He still had a living father, but poor Hans Gloom had been trapped in the Dark Country since before Gustav was born, a prisoner of Howard Philip October, the villain now known as Lord Obsidian.

  Now Gustav said, “That’s why I’ve decided that it’s time I rescue my dad.”

  This announcement stunned the girls.

  Fernie asked him, “Won’t you have to go to the Dark Country to do that?”

  “The problem with having to rescue people,” Gustav pointed out, “is that you pretty much always have to go wherever they are.”

  “Yes.” Pearlie sighed. “It would be much more convenient if people could rescue people without ever leaving our houses.”

  Gustav looked confused. “Really? I’ve rescued you once and Fernie twice without ever leaving my house, and I wouldn’t call it convenient at all.”

  This also happened to be true.

  “Anyway,” he said, getting back on track, “I need some help preparing for the trip. It’s something that only Fernie can do, and that can only be done inside my house.”

  Fernie hesitated. After everything they’d been through with Gustav, it would be horrible to refuse him, but she couldn’t see any good way to say yes without disobeying her dad. “I’m not sure I could get away with that, Gustav.”

  But Gustav seemed to have thought of this already. “Don’t worry. I like your dad a lot. I don’t think there’s any reason to go behind his back. Why don’t you let me talk to him when he gets home? I think I have a plan that even he’ll agree to.”

  Pearlie was dubious. “It’ll have to be a really, really good plan, Gustav.”

  “That’s okay,” Gustav said complacently. “I’m good at coming up with really, really good plans.”

  This was something Fernie knew to be true, even if a plan capable of satisfying her father would have to be more than just really, really good; it would have to be brilliant. “All right,” she
said. “It’s up to you, then. We’ll tell him as soon as he gets home.”

  Of course, almost as soon as she said this, Mr. What’s car inched around the corner, the head of a honking line of other cars that wanted to pass him but couldn’t because he was driving in the middle of the road at a speed slower than a walk.

  As the cars drew close enough for the girls to hear some of the nasty names the other drivers were shouting out their car windows, Mr. What’s eyes widened at the tire tracks gouged in the previously immaculate green lawns.

  “This is so not going to be good,” fretted Pearlie.

  Mr. What turned into his driveway, beside the car belonging to Mrs. Zoe Soggybottom. The cars he’d trapped seized the chance to escape and zoomed past the house all in a rush, their drivers shouting a few more choice insults out their windows. Mr. What didn’t seem to hear them, but instead could only stare at the trail of destruction.

  Mr. What was a gentle man, with a soft face dominated by a pair of black eyeglasses too big for his head. Yelling at his daughters did not come easily to him. Mostly, when they did something wrong, he calmly explained why it had been wrong and was so reasonable about it that they didn’t have the heart to argue.

  But whenever they misbehaved so badly that even he had to yell, he seemed to grow an extra pair of lungs for additional volume. “PEARLIEEEEE! FERNIEEEEEE! I WANT TO TALK TO YOU NOW!”

  Behind the fence, Gustav grew paler. “Of course, it’s also perfectly okay if we wait for the right time.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE LEAST HELPFUL BUTLER IN THE WORLD

  Mr. What told the girls that he was leaving with Mrs. Soggybottom to straighten things out with her boss, and that he had better find them in their rooms when he got back.

  This would have been a quick errand for anybody who drove at a normal rate of speed. But by the time Mr. What’s car came back around the same bend leading another parade of honking drivers, the setting sun had disappeared behind the rooftops and the first stars had begun to discuss the possibility of showing themselves for the evening.