Gustav Gloom and the Four Terrors Read online

  Pearlie asked a stupid question. “Does it hurt?”

  Fernie gave her an irritated look. “Yes.”

  The scratches would likely hurt a lot more when she found her way back to some disinfectant. Right now, she would have given her favorite zombie-head coin bank at home for some bandages just to keep them clean.

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  They followed Gustav farther down the spiral staircase, descending into deep darkness as the torches lining the walls grew even fewer and farther between. It was no longer possible to run in these conditions, especially with the steps and the walls growing more moist with every second, the little light there making the stone glisten with beads of cold light.

  Gustav said, “First off, your dad’s being led to the room I call the Hall of Almost Happiness. I promise you, it’s one of the house’s safest places.”

  Fernie was too concerned with other questions to ask for a description. “Who’s taking him there?”

  “My shadow. When everything started going bad in the Hall of Shadow Criminals, I asked him to lead your dad out the back way while I went out the front entrance and collected you. That tyrannosaur complicates things, and we might have to take some strange detours, but I don’t think we’ll have any problems.”

  “If you’re a shadow now,” Pearlie pointed out, “and your shadow’s out there somewhere helping our dad, then that makes you a shadow with a shadow.”

  “Yes. So?”

  “So that doesn’t make sense.”

  “Sure it does. Do you ever find yourself walking in a place where light’s coming from more than one source? Did you ever look down and see more than one shadow of yourself, one lighter than the other? That’s your shadow and your shadow’s shadow. My shadow’s been around a long time, and it isn’t about to disappear just because I’ve become a shadow myself. It just means that we’ll be more evenly matched when we have our thumb-wrestling contests.”

  Fernie slipped on a patch of moss and steadied herself with a palm against the wall. Her injured hand was immediately drenched. The water dripping down the walls had become a torrent, pouring down the stones in waves. More had collected on the steps and continued to pour downward, turning the stairs into a shallow cascade.

  “It’s getting deep,” she noted.

  “It’ll get much deeper,” Gustav assured her. “All part of the plan.”

  They passed another torch. This one could barely stay lit, the water was dripping on it so hard. It was now almost impossible to discern the shadow Gustav had become from all the darkness surrounding him, but that seemed a small matter next to finding safe places to step.

  Ahead of them, he said, “What next? Oh, yes: How I became a shadow. I don’t think I got to that part yet.”

  “I don’t think you’ve satisfied us with any of the other parts, either,” Pearlie muttered.

  He grunted. “I was always told that I might become a shadow someday, but never really thought that I would.”

  Pearlie asked him, “Why would you even think it could happen?”

  “One of the things my shadow mother taught me, before she disappeared, was that a half child, half shadow like me is a very rare thing that’s only existed a handful of other times in the entire history of the world. She said that in most cases, kids like me live as halfsies, part one thing and part the other, until some sudden fright pushes them off the fence one way or the other, and they become either all child or all shadow. I guess all the excitement in the Hall of Shadow Criminals must have been enough to do the trick. I’m a shadow for good now.”

  There was a difference between how calmly he said it and how much Fernie knew his heart must have been breaking. She said, “Didn’t you always tell me that you wanted to be like other kids, living on the other side of the fence?”

  Gustav seemed a little surprised at the question. “Did I say that? I don’t remember.”

  This, too, seemed wrong to Fernie, just another of the many things that had happened since the prison break that didn’t fit together. She was about to ask a skeptical question when she descended another step into darkness and found herself suddenly knee-deep in cold water.

  This surprised her so much that she stumbled off the riser and, yelling, belly flopped into the flood that had completely submerged the lower sections of stairs. She hadn’t expected to go swimming today and wouldn’t have done it in the dark, with her clothes on; certainly not at the bottom of a set of circular stairs. She went under the surface for a second, screamed a stream of bubbles, then thrashed her way to the surface in time to see her older sister’s head pop up just a couple of feet away.

  Gustav stood with his shoes on the surface of the water, peering down at them. “Are you okay?”

  Fernie sputtered. “No, we’re not okay! Why is there water at the bottom of your staircase?!?”

  “It’s not a staircase,” he said. “Well, it might have been once, before the walls sprouted all those leaks up above, but right now it’s really a well with steps. It started filling up long ago, and four of the five lowest levels are all underwater. Didn’t I mention that?”

  Pearlie, who’d managed to set her feet on one of the submerged steps and now stood in water up to her shoulders, coughed out water and said, “I thought you promised our dad you’d point out any possible dangers along the way.”

  “This isn’t really a danger,” Gustav said. “It’s a bit cold, but it’s still only water. Swimming down’s still the fastest route to where I sent your dad.”

  Fernie found a step to stand on and wiped the cold water from her eyes. “How can it possibly be the fastest route?”

  “Well, let me rephrase it. It’s the fastest route that’ll keep that crazy dinosaur from following us. You ever see one of those old movies where somebody on the run from people hunting him with dogs crosses a stream to throw the hunters off the scent? Once the two of you pass through water, that tyrannosaur will lose the trail.”

  Pearlie shivered. “Anybody ever tell you that your house is stupid?”

  “I think it’s been said once or twice. Come on, it’s only a short swim.”

  The sense that something here didn’t add up was now a constant buzz in Fernie’s head that she couldn’t put out no matter how hard she tried. It was like the feeling she got when she was lying in bed early in the morning, deep in that state exactly halfway between being awake and being asleep, and couldn’t quite understand what the buzzing sound from her alarm clock meant. She knew that it seemed urgent but was not able to figure out why.

  Next to her, Pearlie said, “You’ll show us the way, right?”

  “Of course,” Gustav said. “The only thing is, it’s best if we go one at a time. You follow me first, and I’ll come back right away for Fernie.” He sank into the water without making a ripple, not stopping until he was only half a shadowy boy’s head, just above the surface. It didn’t affect his voice at all as he said, “Ready?”

  “In a minute,” Pearlie said. She took three deep breaths, each heavier and hungrier than the last, and then dove in, just a second before Fernie—still trying to figure out the reason for that inner alarm—would have shouted NO!

  The water splashed against the stones, churning hard as Pearlie disappeared; and then it started to smooth out, becoming just a black mirror, as hard to see through as spilled ink.

  Fernie was alone.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  DOWNSTAIRS, UNDERWATER, AND AFTERWARD

  For the last several minutes, she hadn’t liked Gustav one bit.

  That was what Fernie had realized too late, that had made her want to shout No.

  That was odd. Normally she liked Gustav a lot. She’d liked him from the very first words he’d spoken to her from the other side of his iron fence. She’d liked him even as he’d proven aggravating in a thousand different ways and irritating in a thousand more. She’d liked him even as she’d shared adventures with him in a house that was so much a part of him that it was alm
ost impossible to imagine him living anywhere else.

  Sometimes people meet friends who are just so perfect as friends that they instantly fit together like two puzzle pieces that were always meant to come together. She had come to think of Gustav as one of those friends. She felt safe around him, even when the two of them were doing insanely dangerous things.

  But since before entering the circular stairway, Fernie hadn’t felt safe around Gustav at all.

  The Gustav she knew would have given her more answers without being pushed. He would have warned her about the water at the bottom of the stairs before she fell in. He would have been sadder about becoming all shadow when he wanted to be all boy. He would have been more apologetic about the emergency whistle not working, and about getting her whole family into danger when he’d so earnestly promised not to.

  He had changed since becoming all shadow, and not in any way she liked.

  Fernie looked at the black water on all sides and couldn’t escape the sudden certainty that if she stayed here and waited for Gustav to return, her father and sister were lost.

  So she took three deep breaths and dove in herself.

  The water had the terrible slimy feel that some lake water has, which was one key reason, aside from her father’s worries about submerged tree trunks, that she preferred to do her swimming in pools and oceans instead of ugly, icky, nasty lakes. There was no way to see where she was going, but the stairs did curve downward around that center wall, and she could keep heading down by pulling herself along the stones. The water was so cold that it gave her the same kind of headache that always made her hold her head in her hands after she ate ice cream too fast. She almost wished that she could turn into a shadow herself, just so she could make the swim less unpleasant, but then realized it wasn’t the kind of thing a girl should wish for, and just concentrated on pulling herself down along the stairs.

  When she’d descended twenty steps, the water pressure started to hurt the top of her head. By the time she’d pulled herself only a few feet farther, she wanted to take a breath so badly, it was like somebody had set a fire inside her ribs.

  She knew that if she swam down much farther, there would not be any point in turning back, because there was already barely enough air in her to fuel her return to the surface. But her family was in front of her, and there was nothing but darkness and a cold, dark wait behind her, so she pulled herself farther down, hoping to see some sign of light around the next bend.

  Instead, something that felt like a strand of spiderweb brushed across her face.

  Bubbles exploded from her mouth as she clutched at her face to sweep the nasty thing away. One touch and she felt a chill deeper than the temperature of the water. Her hands closed around it, snatching it from the current that had left it tumbling through the water.

  It was the necklace with the useless emergency whistle. The last time she’d seen it had been around Pearlie’s neck.

  She screamed, releasing the last of her air in a stream of bubbles. She spun and kicked hard, no longer sure that she was headed in the right direction and no longer sure that it mattered.

  She found herself up against the jagged stone ceiling, banging on it as if her strength alone could possibly be enough to make it break and let her pass.

  She closed her eyes, sure that this was what drowning felt like.

  It was, actually, but drowning usually doesn’t end with opening your eyes a little while later and finding yourself not just alive and unhurt but completely dry.

  “I told you to wait for me,” Gustav Gloom complained.

  He sat beside her on the curling stone steps of what seemed to be the very same flooded staircase she’d just been drowning in, except that these steps were dry, well lit by enough torches to do the job, and completely unencumbered by either running water or patches of moss.

  He was still a shadow, of course; Fernie could see through him, where the flames of one of the wall torches were dancing. They shone brightest through his eyes, making them look red.

  Pearlie was nowhere to be seen.

  Fernie asked, “How . . . ?”

  He pointed upward. “Look.”

  She did, and saw one of the most remarkable sights she’d ever encountered in the Gloom house. The air immediately above her head was a smooth black surface, moving to and fro in smooth, lazy ripples. The stairs ascended into it and disappeared.

  She raised a trembling hand to this strange liquid ceiling and found that her fingers went right through, just as they would have if she’d poked them into the surface of a pond. She recognized the feeling of cold water against her skin and pulled her hand back into the bubble of dry air where she and Gustav sat. Her fingers were dry again.

  The water didn’t seem willing to descend any farther into the stairwell than where she sat, not even by allowing the hand that had invaded it to remain wet.

  She stuck her arm back into the water and swished it all about, making bubbles rise, then pulled it back to where she was, and again found that her skin remained dry, not retaining even a single drop.

  She looked at Gustav.

  He said, “I told you that four of the five lowest levels were flooded. The lowest level, where we are, is the dry one. It has to be in order for anybody to use the door at the bottom of the stairs.”

  She came within a hair’s breadth of telling him, for perhaps the millionth time, that his house was stupid. She only stopped herself because something in his impatient expression warned her that it would not be the greatest of ideas. Instead, she said, “I was drowning . . .”

  “That’s right. That’s because you didn’t follow my directions and wait for me.”

  Gustav said this far more coldly than he’d ever spoken to her before. She was struck again by the sense that something must have been terribly wrong for a boy who had been so patient with her for so long to suddenly show such flashes of anger.

  She said, “Did you rescue me?”

  “No. I didn’t come back in time to rescue you. But I didn’t have to. As soon as you passed out, you started to sink, and once that happened, you just tumbled down the stairs until you popped back into open air again. You were lucky that you didn’t come to a complete stop with your head still in water. I could have found you lying here with everything under your neck in dry air and everything above it nice and drowned in water.”

  She shuddered. “I don’t even feel like I’ve been coughing.”

  “In case you haven’t figured it out,” he said, in a way that called her a stupid girl without actually using those words, “that’s the way it works here. You didn’t bring any of the water with you, not even the part you’d already swallowed or inhaled.”

  She sat up straight, felt the very top of her head brush water, and let it stay there, because she found its cooling touch helped her stay calm while talking to this new, different, and not very nice Gustav. “What about Pearlie?”

  “What about her?”

  “Is she okay?”

  He seemed to take this as a personal affront. “Why wouldn’t she be okay?”

  “Gustav! Please! I know that you’re mad at me, but tell me that my sister is okay!”

  He blinked several times, as if showing concern for a sister was the kind of thing that never would have occurred to him. “Yes, she’s okay.”

  “Where is she? Is she with my dad?”

  He needed a couple of seconds to work that out. “No. Your dad’s still a little bit farther ahead. Pearlie’s just been through a lot and needed to sit down a bit, so I left her in a safe room, just up ahead, and told her to stay there while I came back for you. We should hurry, or she’ll get worried.”

  Fernie nodded, pretending that this made sense to her, but inside was even more certain something had gone horribly wrong and that Gustav was lying. Pearlie was, after all, the girl who had stayed by her side even when the tyrannosaur was coming and staying meant probably giving up the chance to save herself. Agreeing to sit around on her butt somewhere w
hile Gustav went back for Fernie was just not the kind of thing Pearlie would have done, or the kind of thing anybody who knew Pearlie for even five minutes would have thought she could have done.

  But why was Gustav lying?

  Why was Fernie suddenly so sure that telling him she knew he was lying would be a very bad idea?

  She couldn’t keep the quaver out of her voice. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  He turned his back on her and for just a moment glanced away, down the remaining curve of the steps.

  He was still looking away when she pulled herself down a couple of steps so she could stand up without poking her head into the water. Something shifted under her left leg, and groping to see what it was, she discovered it to be the chain of the necklace with the useless emergency whistle.

  She’d been lying on it, and therefore, without meaning to, hiding it with her body.

  As useless as it had proven to be, it suddenly seemed like a bad idea to let Gustav know she had it.

  So she scooped both the whistle and the chain up in her right hand, wrapping it up in a tight fist just before Gustav turned around to see how she was doing.

  He scowled. “Haven’t you gotten up yet?”

  She rose, wobbling unsteadily on her feet. “I did just come close to drowning, you know.”

  “That wasn’t my fault,” he muttered.

  She stood, swayed a little bit as if dizzy, and turned away from him, as if needing to test her balance. In fact, her balance was just fine. She’d recovered from her ordeal in the water, was neither unsteady nor dizzy, and wobbled only because she wanted to. She just needed to hide what her right hand was doing as she slipped the emergency whistle and its chain into the pocket of her jeans.