Gustav Gloom and the Inn of Shadows Read online

  Gustav surprised her by saying, “Yes, Fernie. It is.”

  “What?”

  “I’d much rather know exactly where I’m going and who I’m fighting than have to spend forever searching for one missing man in the middle of a place as large as the Dark Country.”

  “But they’ll—”

  Gustav was in far too much of a hurry to be kind about it. “Yes, they’ll probably be very mean to him. That’s just the way evil minions act. It’s never been the kind of profession that attracts nice people. I’m sorry, but that’s true.”

  The two girls drew close, unable to bear the prospect of what their poor father must have been enduring.

  “But,” Gustav said, “they’ll also want to make sure they deliver him to Lord Obsidian in prime condition, and that’s good news, too. For a little while, at least, he’s better off in their hands than he would be wandering around the Dark Country with no idea where he is. It just means that all we have to do is catch up.”

  “And defeat them,” Fernie said, for the moment not feeling much hope, “and rescue him, and manage to get away, and on top of all that arrange for our trip home.”

  “Aside from also finding and rescuing my own dad as long as we’re here, that’s pretty much the plan.” Gustav had made it sound no worse than a trip to the supermarket to get a fresh carton of milk. He turned to Pearlie. “It’s up to you whether you want to come along. After all, you’ve already escaped the Dark Country once. Entering it a second time, and hoping to escape with your life a second time, might be a little too much to ask of anyone.”

  Pearlie surveyed the emptiness of the land around them, taking in all the nothing surrounded by nothing on top of nothing with a nice extra added helping of nothing on top. “What do you expect me to do instead? Stay here forever?”

  “Well, not forever. We’ll be sure to come back to get you as soon as we’re done rescuing everybody. We probably won’t be able to get word back to you about how we’re doing, but at least you’d be safe, in the meantime.”

  Pearlie shuddered. “And worrying about you and Fernie every second.”

  “I didn’t promise it would be perfect, Pearlie. I just said it would be safe.”

  Poor Pearlie looked like what she was: a young girl being asked to make an impossible decision.

  Fernie knew how trapped Pearlie must feel and dearly wished there were some way to talk her older sister into staying behind. After all, it would leave her with one less person to worry about. But she also knew that Pearlie was just as trapped by her own duty as a big sister and could not watch Fernie march into the Dark Country without going along herself to help.

  There was only one decision Pearlie could make. The awfulness of it could be measured by just how long it took her to speak. “Gustav, if it’s a choice between being safe but having nothing else to do but worry for who knows how long or being in danger every moment but at least being with you guys doing something, I’d rather be with you guys doing something. If that’s okay with you.”

  “It’s okay with me. If it’s okay with you. You’ve been through a lot.”

  Pearlie glanced back in the direction of the terrible place she’d escaped, to which she was now expected to return. “I’ll go.”

  “Good,” said Gustav. “The more the merrier, I always say.”

  A terrible cloud passed over Pearlie’s freckled features. “I just came from the Dark Country, Gustav. Merry isn’t a word that you should expect to come up much.”

  “I don’t see why not,” said Gustav, as always insisting on optimism even as his mouth continued to form a thin, sad line. “Places are only as terrible as the people you find there, and wherever we go together, it’ll always still be us.”

  It wasn’t much to hold on to, not in this place, but Fernie had no other choice but to try. Beside her, Pearlie nodded as well. They both knew the worst was still coming, and they were both ready to face it.

  Gustav stood and turned his attention back to the long line of shadow refugees, which had spent the last several minutes continuing to trudge by without paying much attention to the three friends from the land of light. There were so many of them that for the most part they looked like a long gray trickle, flowing down the side of the mountain to become a full-size river. A few could be distinguished as the shapes of people, and these were heartbreaking, because they were people without hope, people who had already seen the worst that they ever should have been expected to see.

  He shouted, “Excuse me! Everybody! May I have your attention please? I want to talk to all of you about something very important.”

  Not all of the refugee shadows stopped to pay attention to Gustav. Many just lowered or shook their heads and kept on trudging into the distant emptiness. But a few slowed and turned toward him, showing less interest in what he had to say than resignation that here was yet another interruption arriving just in time to make the day even less pleasant.

  The audience wasn’t nearly large enough, but he shouted again. “You all know who I am—I’m Gustav Gloom, grandson of Lemuel and son of Hans. My family’s opposed the man who became Lord Obsidian since long before I was born.”

  A thin, reedy voice emerged from the crowd. “Didn’t stop him while you had the chance, though, did you?”

  Gustav was a trifle slowed by this reasonable point, but after a moment he rallied and recovered. “No, we didn’t. And maybe we should have before he became so powerful. But that doesn’t mean I’m willing to quit, either. I’m perfectly willing to face him if I have to. You know what that says?”

  “That you’re stupid?” the same voice suggested.

  There was a rumble of nasty laughter. The crowd seemed to grow darker and denser, as if Gustav’s success at offending them gave them back some of the substance they may have given up by running away from a fight.

  This didn’t discourage Gustav. “My friends and I are headed into the Dark Country to rescue our fathers. I don’t expect all of you to join us; I know that you have just spent a whole lot of effort running away from there. But if any of you feel any shame over having to give up your homes and run, then maybe one or two of you will stand with us as we do what needs to be done.”

  There was more angry muttering from shadows who did not much appreciate being mocked by this halfsie outsider.

  “Leave us out of it!” cried one.

  “We’ve been through enough!” complained another.

  “You should be grateful enough that we let that Pearlie girl escape with us!” yelled a third.

  They all started shouting at once, until the three friends could no longer make out any individual voices, but instead experienced the sound they made as a kind of raging thunder, driven by all their shared pain and loss.

  This was almost more than Fernie What could bear. They weren’t hateful. They had lost almost everything they had to the war with Lord Obsidian and were all so wrapped up in their own hurt that they could offer nothing but anger at the suggestion that they go back and risk losing more. But they weren’t hateful. It was the kind of anger that sounded more like pleas for mercy from beings who had already sacrificed more than they could afford to give.

  Gustav stood there quietly, a pale little boy in a little black suit, momentarily driven to silence by all the rage around him.

  Then the shouting died down a little and, as inevitably happens, somebody in the angry mob said one thing too much.

  It was the high, reedy voice again. “We’d have to be crazy to go back there!”

  Gustav suddenly stood straighter, emboldened by the opportunity he’d just been handed. “Of course you would.”

  The response to that was a sudden pause that would have been a mass intake of breath had the crowd been composed of creatures who needed to breathe.

  Gustav shouted, “I agree! You’d have to be insane to go back where a war’s going on, e
ven if that war has cost you everything. I agree! You’d have to have lost all your common sense just to go back where it’s dangerous, even if you can make a difference there. I agree! You’d have to be brainless morons to go anywhere but where you’re headed, even if there’s nothing out there worth heading for.”

  Fernie reached for his arm. “Gustav—”

  But he pulled away and finished saying what he had to say. “I know that what Lord Obsidian promises you is death, and worse than death! So, yes, you’re all better off going however far you have to go to get away from the danger. Yes! You’re all better off sitting down in some terrible empty place and waiting for things to get better. And, yes! Even if things don’t ever get any better and you wind up staying out there forever, you’re all better off always having the satisfaction of being able to look back on this one moment and remember that when your world was in trouble and you needed to decide what to do, you did the only sensible thing!”

  The mob of shadows had fallen completely silent now. Many had stopped trudging along and stood still, arms at their sides, gaping at Gustav as if he were some species of strange animal.

  Gustav lowered his voice to just above a whisper, but there was no doubt that thousands of shadows heard it. “As for me, when I look back at this moment, I’m going to remember that when I was given the chance to do something crazy, I took it.”

  He allowed the terrible weight of his words to hang in the air like a shroud. And then he turned on his heel and strode away from them.

  As he passed between Fernie and Pearlie, he muttered, “Don’t look back. We’ll lose anybody following us if we show any doubt.”

  Not looking back was one of the most difficult things Fernie had ever done. It reminded her of an old story in one of her books, the tale of a grieving man named Orpheus who had been granted permission to bring his beloved wife, Eurydice, back from the land of the dead. The only catch, Orpheus was told, was that she’d walk behind him and that he must never look back to make sure she was following; if he did, the land of the dead would own her forever. The poor man resisted temptation until he was well within sight of home . . . at which point he allowed himself a brief glance and saw his wife fade away, forever lost to him.

  As a little girl of eight reading that famous tale for the first time, Fernie had felt nothing but scorn for Orpheus. What an idiot, she’d thought. He’d been told the rules and had only needed to follow them in order to have his wife back. Instead, he’d been as impatient as a kid at a birthday party, so eager to open his presents that he breaks the rules about waiting until after everybody was served cake, rips open the gifts prematurely, and is punished by having all of his lovely toys taken away for good. Young Fernie had told herself that if she was ever in a situation like that, she’d be much better at resisting temptation than that stupid old Orpheus had been.

  But she’d been a foolish, overconfident little brat of eight then. As a wise ten-year-old who’d fought monsters and bad men and now found herself in a different situation where she had to avoid looking back, she felt a lot sorrier for Orpheus than she once had. This keeping-her-eyes-on-the-road-ahead stuff really wasn’t very easy at all.

  Eventually, though, she was able to draw up alongside Gustav and mutter, “You know, I’ve noticed that for a boy who never really knew any other people until he met us, you’re awfully well practiced at giving speeches.”

  “I read a lot,” Gustav said.

  “I know. So do I. And?”

  “So, if you read a lot of adventure stories in particular, you run into lots and lots of long-winded heroes making great glorious speeches to rally the troops or frighten off the bad guys. Those are always some of my favorite parts. From time to time I practice reading those speeches out loud, just to hear if the words sound anywhere near as impressive coming out of my own mouth. For instance,” he said, apparently remembering one he particularly enjoyed, “did you ever hear of the English king Henry Vee?”

  Fernie had never heard of any king named Henry Vee. “Sorry, no.”

  Gustav could only shake his head in awed admiration. “Too bad. That guy really knew how to talk.”

  Pearlie caught up to Gustav’s other shoulder. “What about what you told them? That even trying to save our dads is crazy?”

  “I meant that,” said Gustav. “It’s nuts. It’s buggy. It’s absolutely insane. We’re outnumbered a billion to one, and we’re heading into a country we don’t know, without even a map or a plan. Even if we do find your father, let alone mine, we have no way of getting home unless we find some way to signal Lemuel’s shadow aboard the Carousel.”

  Pearlie blinked. “Who’s Lemuel and what’s the Carousel and how would he go about rescuing us with it?”

  “Sorry, Pearlie. That’s all stuff you missed. I guess we have to catch you up just like you had to catch us up. But the whole point of everything I’ve been saying is something my grandpa wrote about in one of his books—that it’s always the sensible people who tell you what can’t be done and the crazy people, overall, who see that it has to be done and therefore do it anyway.”

  Pearlie seemed a little dizzied by this conversation. “I guess the real difference is, we don’t want to blindly jump off any cliffs or anything.”

  “Oh, I did that a few days ago,” Gustav said seriously, “and it turned out to be one of those crazy ideas that worked out just fine.”

  Fernie happened to be looking at Pearlie when Gustav said this and saw a familiar look on her older sister’s face. It was the same look she had often felt on her own face when Gustav dropped something inexplicable into a conversation. Being a little sister, a job that requires scoring as many points as possible, she took a little evil pleasure in rubbing it in. “Yes, Gustav. Jumping off that cliff really was the best way for us to get away from the giant spider.”

  Pearlie blinked some more. “Okay. I think I need to hear about the giant spider.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Lord Obsidian Seems to Have an Inflated Opinion of Himself

  Up ahead, the gray slope rose toward a gray sky, with only the slightest difference in shade rendering it possible to tell the difference between one and the other. Wisps of shadow-stuff, yet another shade of gray, overflowed the gaps between those peaks and came apart high above, becoming part of the featureless cloud cover. It was such a bleak sight, all but eliminating any hope of anything good on the other side of those mountains, that Fernie shuddered even as she set her jaw and concentrated on telling Pearlie the story of the past few days, which included that giant spider.

  She finally got to the point where she and Gustav instructed Lemuel Gloom’s shadow to keep the Cryptic Carousel in flight over the Dark Country and await the signal that it was time to come down and save them.

  With a quick glance at Gustav, who was scouting up ahead, Pearlie repeated, “A signal? What kind of signal?”

  “Gustav didn’t say.”

  “He didn’t?”

  “No.”

  “Isn’t the whole point of a signal that it’s something you arrange in advance so the person you’re trying to signal knows what to watch out for?”

  “Usually,” said Fernie. “But Gustav wasn’t really sure what we’d run into in the Dark Country or what kind of signal he’d be able to send. So he just told Lemuel’s shadow to watch for something big.”

  Pearlie chewed on this for several seconds, as if it were a piece of stringy meat she couldn’t swallow. “I don’t know, Fernie. I don’t think signals work that way. I mean, suppose Dad drops me off at the mall and I promise to let him know when I want to be picked back up. I can promise to send him a text . . . or I can say I’ll send whatever random signal I can come up with at the spur of the moment, in which case he’s at home waiting for a call and I’m making a fool of myself standing in the food court for an hour, waving a napkin like a flag.”

  Fernie had to think about t
hat. “Dad would probably still come.”

  “Yes, but that’s because he’s Dad. He probably followed me in and spent the whole day waiting for me in the food court.”

  “True. The second you started waving the napkin, he’d be right there.”

  “The point,” Pearlie said doggedly, “is that Gustav’s made no plans for what the signal’s going to be. He doesn’t know for sure that he can send a signal Lemuel’s shadow can see from the air. He just assumes he can. I’m not sure that’s smart.”

  “It’s smart,” said Fernie, even if Pearlie had managed to plant a little seed of doubt in her mind.

  Then the slope grew steep, and the girls needed to save their breath.

  To the left, a massive parade of refugees continued to flow on the well-worn path down the mountain. They had nothing to say as the halfsie boy and the two human girls walked alongside them. Most just looked at their feet—or at the clouds of flowing, shadowy mist that obscured the places where their feet would have been. Fernie’s heart broke for them. It was downright infuriating to remember how much was being taken from so many, just to fuel the dreams of the madman who had begun life as a crackpot writer named Howard Philip October.

  The oddest thing about the mountain itself was that there was no grit to it. There should have been. Every other big rock or pile of rocks she’d ever seen had spent years and years being exposed to wind and rain and had places where the stone had worn down to dirt or where it was covered with a layer of dust loose enough to come off in her hands. Some of the big ones were so crumbly, it was dangerous to get close to them because of falling stones. This wasn’t just true of rock piles or cliffs, but also of brick walls. She’d never seen a brick wall, even a brand-new one, that wasn’t already eager to give up a few little brick pebbles. This was the nature of rock. It crumbled.

  This mountain was nothing like that. It was as solid and smooth as polished marble, completely free of dust or grit, even though the ledges and outcroppings and even little crevices all looked the same way they would have if they’d formed their shapes by being hammered by wind or rain. It just didn’t feel real, the way one of the imperfect, stony, dusty mountains back home would have. It felt less like a mountain and more like something a giant sculptor had made of some unbreakable material and put in place at the beginning of time, confident that it would last until time’s end.