Gustav Gloom and the Inn of Shadows Read online

  Fernie’s shadow continued: “Hieronymus Spector is a villain who would lead you nowhere but ruin. And Fluffy, for all his good points, has never been the brightest bulb in the pack. He’s helpful when you want to break something, not so helpful when it comes to giving advice.”

  These names meant nothing to Mrs. What, but she gathered that none of the individuals mentioned would be able or willing to help. “Isn’t there anybody else?”

  “Anybody else would either ignore you or try to make matters worse for you. I’m sorry, but try as I might, I can’t think of even one other shadow we could turn to . . .”

  “Then you’re not thinking very hard,” a new voice said. “I know a shadow who can help.”

  It wasn’t actually a new voice, but a very familiar one.

  It was the voice of a healthy woman in her early forties, a voice that Mrs. What knew exactly as well as she knew her own.

  Mrs. What whirled again, realizing as she did that she was certainly doing a lot of that today. She found herself facing a shadow exactly her height, wearing the same kind of safari jacket and jodhpurs and pith helmet she wore; a shadow who presented herself as being slightly younger than she was, but still wore a face Mrs. What knew from seeing it in the mirror every morning.

  “I volunteer,” her shadow said.

  What happened next was not a typical thing for Mrs. Nora What.

  She was an intrepid and world-famous explorer and adventurer. She climbed mountains blindfolded, she swam with crocodiles, she kayaked off the edges of towering waterfalls, and she tickled sharks. She had done any number of things just because she’d been dared to do them, and had never once run away from a challenge in fear.

  But she had also already received several upsetting shocks in the last few minutes, shocks that completely disturbed her understanding of the way the world worked and had shaken her even more than she’d realized.

  The second her own shadow spoke to her, she did something she had never done before.

  Nora What, fearless explorer and adventurer, fainted.

  CHAPTER TWO

  More or Less “Meanwhile . . .”

  If Nowhere could be an actual place, it would look just like the wastelands that surrounded the Dark Country. They were just a flat, colorless emptiness, extending in all directions and not worth noting at all if not for the vast ring of mountains at its center, which enclosed the true home of all shadows. Every other direction was just a featureless straight line, without so much as a pebble or blade of grass. Had there been a gopher hole anywhere, it would have been the most spectacular sight for miles.

  A long line of dispirited shadows marched away from the Dark Country and into that featureless distance. There were thousands of them, maybe tens of thousands. A few had easily distinguishable faces, but the majority had never been the shadows of specific people and so were just vague shapes, blurry at the edges and hard to assign pasts and personalities. But even so, it was easy to see, just from the hopeless way they trudged and the hopeless way they wept, that they were just like refugees anywhere, in that they were shattered and heartbroken at having been forced to flee the now war-torn land they had known as home. They were beings with nowhere to go, who were forced to go there anyway.

  This was an odd place to imagine anybody ever staging a joyous reunion.

  But ten-year-old Fernie What, who had traveled across worlds and braved terrible dangers to reach this very spot, had just found her missing twelve-year-old sister, Pearlie, and for the last several minutes the two girls had not been able to stop hugging each other over and over again.

  Gustav Gloom, who was always dressed in an impeccable black suit with a red tie, had already been pulled into a couple of those hugs, still a novel experience for him since he’d been raised by shadows and hadn’t experienced the normal human allotment of embraces. (He still wasn’t very comfortable with them, but had come around to believing that they might not be entirely a bad thing.) He’d had enough of them for the moment, but knew the girls weren’t done with theirs, and so left them to their privacy while he returned to the parade of strangers. He addressed those passing by: “Excuse me? Anybody here willing to tell me what’s happening?”

  One of the nearest shadows, an ancient figure with a nose like a bedspring and a neck that had three separate bends in it before it reached his oddly shaped head, slowed down enough to mutter, “What does it look like, boy? We’re all running away.”

  “To what? What’s out there but more nothingness?”

  “At least out there Lord Obsidian won’t be able to do what he wants with us.”

  “Which is what?” Gustav asked. “If you’re shadows and can’t be killed, what could he have done that would make you all frightened enough to run away?”

  The shadow refugee just shuddered and walked on.

  Gustav hustled to keep up. “Please, sir. I know I’m just a halfsie boy and your kind usually doesn’t like mine, but I’m not trying to be cruel. I have to go into the Dark Country to rescue my father, and I really need to know. Just what does Lord Obsidian do to shadows that makes him so terrible that so many would rather run away than face him?”

  The refugee stopped midstep and slowly turned to face Gustav. His features came into focus, revealing him to be the shadow of a very angry young man with burning red eyes that only escaped being terrifying because of the odd shape of the nose between them.

  He jabbed a long gnarled finger at Gustav’s nose and said, “You’re wrong about one key thing, halfsie boy. It only used to be true that shadows couldn’t die. That monster’s smart enough to have built weapons that can destroy us. Weapons of science and magic both that can erase us where we stand, and have already erased more of us than can possibly be numbered. Don’t you dare say we can’t be killed. Lord Obsidian—may his name be cursed ten thousand times—has already demonstrated that we can be.”

  Gustav was so stunned that he fell a step back. “I . . . didn’t know.”

  “And even that’s not the worst of it,” the refugee continued, each jab of his finger driving Gustav another step back. “If it were just death coming to take away home and everything we’ve ever had, even the cowards among us would stand and fight. We would fight even though he’s come up with more devilment than any peaceful shadow should ever have to face. We would fight even though he has secrets that can turn living men into shadows, others that can carry his foul minions from place to place in less time than it takes to think it, and others still like shadow eaters and worse that make opposing him a certain path to the end of us. But none of that’s the worst of it, boy. None of that’s the worst, at all; none of that’s the reason the ones you see have run away.”

  Gustav stopped his retreat midstep and let the latest finger jab against his chest dissolve into a puff of gray smoke. “Okay. So what is?”

  The angry shadow seemed to deflate all at once. “The one thing we’ve seen him do to his shadow enemies . . . that is far more frightening to us than mere death.”

  “What?” asked Gustav.

  The shadow walked away, and before Gustav could follow him, he had melded with the crowd and become impossible to find against all the other gray figures trudging off into the emptiness.

  There are times when even a boy who’s been raised in a house filled with monsters and dangerous rooms is capable of feeling a knot of fear at the pit of his belly, and this was one of them.

  He might have found another refugee to question to learn what “more frightening to us than mere death” meant, but then something else occurred to him and he ran back to the two What girls, who when he found them had just noticed his absence and were scanning the crowd to find him.

  The determined young Fernie and the somewhat traumatized Pearlie looked—accurately—like it had been a while since they’d last been on the same planet as a comb. Both girls were redheads and pale by nature, but Pearlie’
s time trapped in the Dark Country, away from the sun, had rendered her skin even paler, hiding a number of her compensatory freckles and making her almost as ghostly white as Gustav.

  Gustav demanded of her, “Pearlie! Where’s your shadow?”

  The older What sister looked down at the ground at Gustav’s feet. “Where’s yours?”

  “Mine’s accounted for,” Gustav said quickly. “I left him at home. We don’t know where Fernie’s shadow has gotten off to, but she seems to be back at my house, too. But, Pearlie, the last thing I remember your shadow doing, just after you fell into the Pit, was diving in to join you. Why isn’t she still with you? I need to know.”

  Pearlie took a deep breath and, very quietly, sank to the ground. For a moment it looked like all the strength had gone out of her legs. But no; she simply had a long story to tell, and it was too hard a story to remember without letting the ground support her. “She went with him when the minions got him.”

  “Tell us what happened.”

  She closed her eyes and said, “It was, I don’t know, a couple of days after we landed in the Dark Country. It was very unpleasant and very gray, and it was sometimes very hard to figure out what we were looking at. I don’t remember it as being very fun at all. It was just scary, and . . . well, scary, and—”

  “Got it,” Gustav snapped. “Scary. What next?”

  Pearlie seemed taken aback at his impatience. “Well, after a while we found a . . . cave, I guess you’d call it. The only reason I’m not sure that’s what it was is that the walls had these weird spiky things on them, and it always sounded like somebody was trapped farther down, mumbling to himself about a defective jet pack. We never did find out what that had to do with anything.

  “After a while, Dad told me to stay inside and wait for him while he went out looking for something we could use to start a fire. I didn’t see why, because we weren’t cold. We weren’t really warm or cold. But Dad said it was very important to start a fire. He insisted that starting a fire was the thing to do in a situation like this. He said it was the first instruction in all the safety manuals.”

  Fernie shook her head. “It’s the first thing to do when you’re lost in the woods, not when lost in the Dark Country.”

  “I kept telling him that, Fernie. But you know Dad. He insisted that certain principles were universal. ‘When you’re lost,’ he said, ‘you’re always best off doing what the official guidelines say.’ I pointed out that looking for wood was going to be a hard thing to do since we hadn’t seen any trees yet, but he said that there were always trees, and as far as he was concerned that settled it.”

  She seemed about to start crying, but bit it back, and told the next bit in a voice very cold, very angry, and very controlled.

  “I was watching from a distance when they came down from the sky on what looked like ropes. There were a couple dozen of them . . . all very big and bulky and stupid, the shadows of the kind of people who aren’t happy unless they’re pushing other people around. They carried shadow weapons that looked like swords. Dad kept running from one to the other, looking for a gap so he could break free. One snatched Dad’s shadow away from his body and stuffed it in a little box, hooting, ‘You won’t need this helpful fella where you’re going!’ Another cried, ‘Ooooh, now. Look at the warmbody, thinks he can boss around the likes of us. He’ll be a grand one for our lord’s mines.’

  “Another one laughed nastily and said, ‘You might even be lucky and not go into the mines at all. If you’re deserving, our lord also knows how to turn one of your kind into one of ours. It’s painful, and he’ll only do it if he thinks you’ll be useful, but when he’s done, you’ll fit in with the rest of us. Just look at me! I used to be a man meself. Just not a very good man.’”

  Pearlie’s hands curled into fists. “Dad cursed them. He called them names and tried to tackle them and told them they would pay. He never gave them a single reason to think he was afraid, and they thought it was funny until he also said, ‘Gustav and Fernie will stop you.’”

  Gustav said, “I bet that made them stop laughing.”

  “It did, Gustav. I didn’t understand why, but it did.”

  “I have a reputation,” he explained. “And Fernie’s getting one.”

  “I found that out later, while traveling with this bunch.” Pearlie waved at the mob of refugees filing back behind them. “They aren’t the friendliest folks in the whole world—it’s like you said, Gustav; most shadows don’t seem to care whether humans live or die—but a couple of them were chatty enough to ask me my name, and when I told them, word traveled quickly up and down the line. You’re famous down here for being the grandson of Lemuel and the son of Hans, and also for being the boy to defeat the shadow eater. Even Fernie’s famous for being your sidekick.”

  This latest revelation made Fernie yelp. “Excuse me!?!”

  Gustav’s stern expression softened with confusion. “What?”

  “I’m not Robin the Boy Wonder! I’m not Chewbacca or Ron Weasley or Doctor John H. Watson, MD! I’m not a sidekick!”

  “But I didn’t call you a sidekick,” Gustav protested. “That’s just what the shadows called you.”

  “Well, we’re going to have to set the record straight as soon as we’re done fixing everything else! Getting a reputation as a sidekick is just plain unacceptable!”

  “I know,” Gustav said. “That’s why I call you a friend.”

  Fernie’s mouth slammed shut with a click and she looked away, a little ashamed of herself.

  Pearlie returned to her story in a hurry to avoid getting sidetracked by any further arguments over proper billing. “Anyway, as soon as Dad mentioned the two of you, the shadows got very excited. One said, ‘Oi, now. Do you know who we have, laddies? This must be the father of those What brats! Our lord’s taken a special interest in your lot! Why, it wasn’t all that long ago that he sent his People Taker and a small army of shadows up to the world of light just to capture you! Am I right?’

  “Dad did that thing he does with his chin when he’s really mad. ‘Yes, sir, you’re right. And do you know what happened to the People Taker when he tried?’

  “The minion gave him a long snotty look. ‘Well, you’re here, aren’t you?’

  “Dad said, ‘That’s right, I am. But that has nothing to do with anything the People Taker did. It only happened because I’m a clumsy man. Ask anybody. I’m always breaking glasses, tripping over things, and tumbling into bottomless pits. I’ve caught my hand in more doors than you’ll find in some entire neighborhoods. It’s why I became a safety expert in the first place. I have to be.

  “‘But my little girls,’ he said, ‘and their friend Gustav? They’ve beaten the People Taker twice and the shadow eater once. What does that tell you about starting fights with my family?’”

  Pearlie bit her lip. “He included me to fool them, to keep them from realizing that I was only a few feet away, hiding and helpless.

  “They looked around, frightened, not knowing what to do. For a moment it looked like they might let him go. But then they moved toward him, cackling.

  “That’s when my own shadow whispered to me.

  “She hasn’t spoken to me as much as your shadows have spoken to you, but she spoke to me then. She said, ‘I’m going to him,’ and left me behind as she slipped away. The next thing I knew she was out in the middle of them, flying at their faces and making them scatter. But it was too little too late. One grabbed her by the arm and stuffed her down into his sack, muttering something about stupid little girl shadows who don’t mind their own business.”

  Pearlie trembled. “I half expected them to come after me next, but they didn’t even look. It was like . . . they thought I wasn’t even worth the trouble of looking for.”

  Gustav put his hand on hers. “They didn’t think anything like that. They would have taken you if they’d known you were t
here. But the Dark Country’s the land all shadows come from, the land where they walk around by themselves all the time. As long as your shadow kept quiet about you, no minion catching her would have had any reason to suspect that the girl whose shape she wore was also within their reach.” He thought about that for a minute. “Are you sure that’s what she said, though? ‘I’m going to him’? Not, ‘I’m going to rescue him’ or ‘I’ll be right back’? But ‘I’m going to him’?”

  “That’s what she said,” Pearlie insisted. “‘I’m going to him.’ And then she tried to chase them off.”

  Gustav nodded to himself, and for just a moment didn’t seem to be looking at Fernie or Pearlie or even the dreary landscape around them, but at some conveyor built inside his own head, where things that didn’t make sense got fed into a machine and came out reshaped as things that did.

  Finally he said, “She meant to be captured and taken with him to Lord Obsidian.”

  Pearlie said, “Yes.”

  Gustav still didn’t know what the shadows considered more frightening than death, but comforted himself now with the knowledge that, at the bare minimum, Pearlie’s shadow had not suffered it the last time she’d been seen.

  He said, “Good.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Merry” Is Not a Word That Comes Up Much

  Fernie What had faced unmentionable dangers alongside her best friend, Gustav Gloom. She’d traveled to other worlds with him. She trusted him with her life and the lives of her family. But every once in a while he said something so clueless or infuriating that she just had to yell at him. Now she stiffened with anger at the cold cruelty Gustav had just unexpectedly shown. She joined her sister in crying, “Good!?!?”

  Gustav seemed to realize that he’d given offense, and he hastened to explain. “Come on. I don’t mean it’s good that she was captured. It’s good that she went willingly. It means we’ll have an ally waiting once we catch up.”

  Fernie didn’t see how that necessarily followed. “It also means that we have to go up against Lord Obsidian’s slave catchers and not be caught ourselves. That’s much better.”