Gustav Gloom and the Cryptic Carousel Read online

It could only be the voice of the giant spider-thing, whatever it really was. It sounded both very, very whispery and very, very ruined, the way the voices of certain beautiful young women become after they’ve become mean old ones. To Fernie it sounded a little like Mrs. Everwiner’s voice, except that even Mrs. Everwiner could have lived ten thousand years and not come within a mile of sounding as cruel, and as tired, and as regal, and as stained by hatred as this thing did when it spoke its first words.

  Those words were enough to prove that Gustav had been right when he’d said, back at the carousel, that things could be worse. Of course they could be. They’d gotten worse just now.

  The words were, “Silverspinner can smell him.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  In Between a Rock and a Cruel Place

  The voice rumbled on: “Silverspinner can smell the one who hurt her.”

  Gustav couldn’t shrug properly, clinging to the cliff the way he was, but he shook his head a little, just enough to show Fernie that he was as confused by this development as she was.

  “Silverspinner remembers his smell. It stank of blood and dust. It was a smell that did not belong anywhere near Silverspinner’s web, and it made Silverspinner unhappy, oh, so very unhappy. Silverspinner tried to squash him, yes, she did. Silverspinner tried to eat him. Yes, she did. Silverspinner ate all her enemies back then. Silverspinner grew strong and feared. Oh, so very feared. But this one had the needle of fire and he hurt her first. He freed Silverspinner’s toys and brought Silverspinner to this terrible lonely place where there’s no one to worship her and nothing to eat but the nasty reptile birds.”

  Gustav glanced at the high-flying shapes so far above them. So, yes, he seemed to have been right about that much. Silverspinner, if that was indeed the spider-thing’s name, preyed on whatever they were and they didn’t come down more than they absolutely had to.

  Fernie wasn’t comforted to learn that Silverspinner didn’t seem to like the taste of the bird-creatures very much. A creature that didn’t enjoy what it had been eating would have absolutely no problem with moving on to another item on the buffet.

  “We’ve come this far,” Gustav whispered. “We can rest on the next ledge.”

  Fernie also wasn’t exactly thrilled that her day had deteriorated to the point where, finding herself trapped on a cliff that was also the home of a giant spider, the best of all her possible choices was climbing closer to it. But that did seem to be the kind of day she was having, so she got on with it.

  The rumbling, half-insane rant continued: “Silverspinner knows he has come back, but why? Has he come to hurt her some more? Silverspinner would not like that. Oh, no, don’t believe that for a second. Silverspinner would not like that at all.”

  Gustav had pulled a little ahead of her and scrambled onto a ledge wide enough for him to turn around and offer Fernie his hand. Half on her own power, half on his, she joined him on the ledge and pressed her back hard against the cliff side. A narrow vertical crevice split the wall between them, so deep and so dark that it was not possible to see what lay within. It was certainly a place to go if a hiding place became necessary, but did not seem inviting enough to investigate out of idle curiosity.

  “Silverspinner would not want him to hear her. Silverspinner’s sometimes so lonely that she forgets and talks to herself, but Silverspinner doesn’t think she’s talking to herself now. Maybe she is. Silverspinner must stop. Silverspinner must be quiet or he’ll know she’s lying in wait. This is Silverspinner being quiet now. Oh, so very quiet.”

  The silence that followed gave Fernie a chance to catch her breath and regard the world where she found herself. From this height, the Cryptic Carousel looked like a child’s toy, abandoned on a pink fleece hammock. The webbing was already very far down, farther than Fernie ever would have wanted to fall even with the softest surface in this world stretched out ready to catch her. The other three pillars of rock that provided the webbing with its other anchor points looked impossibly tall, and impossibly imposing, even before they vanished in the churning red storm clouds far below or the additional layer of churning red clouds high above.

  Though Fernie searched the view from horizon to horizon, she could see no other mountains or other rocky pillars poking through the clouds far below. These four pillars, and the web stretched taut between them, seemed to be it.

  Fernie could just about sympathize with Silverspinner’s complaint. This was a lonely place, and Fernie would not have wanted to be trapped here, either. The thought reminded her that she and Gustav very well might be trapped if they didn’t reach the dial Gustav had seen. This made her heart clench and her stomach feel like she’d swallowed a sharp, jagged stone.

  Beside her, Gustav whispered, “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Fernie whispered back. “Why did we stop?”

  His next words were low but urgent. “The crevice, Fernie. You can seek shelter in there.”

  “Not if I’m climbing with you.”

  “You’re a very good climber, Fernie . . . even better than I expected you to be, and that was very, very good to start with. But you’re still not as good a climber as I am.”

  “That’s stupid!” she hissed.

  “No, it’s not. I was raised by shadows. I can do things you can’t do, and I can do them faster than you ever could. I can go grab the dial and be back faster if I don’t have to worry about you. And besides . . .” He hesitated and glanced away, making it absolutely 100 percent clear that he would rather she didn’t ask him Besides what?

  Fernie was not in the mood to care. “Besides what?”

  His next whisper was so low that it made most whispers seem like shouting. “Besides, if we’re together, and that thing comes after us, then we’ll probably both get eaten in the same gulp. There’ll be nobody left to rescue your father and sister. If I go ahead and get eaten all by myself, then she might be satisfied for a while, and that’ll give you a chance for another go.”

  There are things that it’s merely annoying for another person to be right about, and other things that it’s absolutely awful for them to be right about. Gustav’s words belonged to that second category.

  Fernie formed fists. “You better not get eaten, Gustav! If you do, I’ll . . . I’ll . . . never talk to you again!”

  “You can’t be entirely sure of that,” he said seriously. “Even if I was eaten, you could get eaten right after me and we could find ourselves in the same spider stomach, with enough time for a conversation.”

  “What kind of conversation do you think we could have in a stomach?!?”

  “Oh, you know. ‘Hey, Fernie, we’re in a stomach. This isn’t good.’ ‘You’re right, Gustav. This isn’t good. I don’t like being in a stomach.’ That kind of thing. I don’t think it would last much longer than that.”

  He didn’t smile. This wasn’t the kind of situation that allowed him one of his rare smiles, some of which were so slight that even somebody who knew him as well as Fernie did couldn’t have discerned it. But he did seem to be joking. (At least she hoped he was joking. Gustav had grown up in the Gloom house, living with the kind of things that happened in the Gloom house. His idea of what made sense and what did not were not like anybody else’s.) It was, she privately admitted to herself, one of the things she most liked about him.

  “I should only be a few minutes,” he said. “If I’m not back by the time you count to about, I don’t know, two hundred and seventy-three, you should assume I’m not coming back and try for the dial yourself. It’s about fifty feet farther up and a little off to the right. You’ll know it because it’s the only thing in sight that looks like a dial.”

  Fernie was still working on the strange choice of number to count to. “Okay. But you still better not get killed.”

  He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze and began to climb.

  Gustav had been right to remind her that he c
ould do things she could not, things only possible for a halfsie boy raised by shadows. His skill now proved so amazing that it revealed he’d been holding back to let her think she was doing well. Fernie craned her neck to follow the sight of him as he scrambled over the next overhang and then reappeared farther up than she ever would have thought possible, inching along on a ledge that amounted to little more than a rough place to plant the tips of his shoes.

  He moved so quickly across the rock face that it was hard to keep him in view by just following his progress, and easier to just look ahead to where he was going to be and give him time to catch up. This Fernie did . . . and that’s how she came to spot Silverspinner coming around the bend before he did.

  Even glimpsed from a distance, Silverspinner looked far more frightening than even a girl who loved monster movies ever could have imagined. She was a little like the giant spider Gustav and Fernie had imagined, in that she had a giant segmented abdomen and long, spiky legs that ended in points. But at precisely the point where a spider would have had its head, the waist of something that vaguely resembled a hideous, scrawny old woman began. The woman part of her body was large enough to qualify as giant all by itself, down to stick-arms as long as telephone poles and clawlike hands as far around as manhole covers. They did as much to pull her along the rock wall as her spider-legs did, each finger stabbing the rock with sickle-shaped claws.

  The old woman part of Silverspinner wore a garment that resembled a shawl, but it was nothing as cozy as wool. It seemed to be made of the same material as her webbing, but there were lumpy places that might have been cocooned prey and enough barbed protrusions to suggest that her hidden back probably didn’t look all that much like an old woman’s after all.

  Her head, big enough to dwarf Gustav’s entire body, seemed to peer at him with intense interest, but between that windswept shawl of webbing and the just-as-windswept long yellowing hair, Fernie found it almost impossible to tell exactly how human Silverspinner’s face looked. From what little she was able to see when the winds briefly blew those curtains aside, it wasn’t much.

  Silverspinner resumed talking to herself. “Oooh. He looks tinier than she remembers, but he was tiny before and he hurt her more than anybody ever has. She has to be careful. Oh, so very careful. He sees her, too. It won’t stop her from getting her revenge, but he can bite. Oh, yes, he can.”

  Gustav had started to back away. Fernie could hear that he was talking, either threatening Silverspinner or assuring her that he meant no harm, but he was too far away for his voice to carry the full distance.

  Whatever he said, though, had no effect. As he backed up, Silverspinner advanced, revealing with her next words how little she believed him.

  “He lies. Yes, he does. Silverspinner’s eyes are old and weak, but she knows scent as well as she did in her days after emerging from her egg; and she knows the reek of that blood. She has spent her life in exile remembering the reek of that blood. Only one creature has blood that smells like that, only the monster who took away everything from her. Why would Silverspinner’s enemy lie when he must know that Silverspinner can tell it’s him? Is it because he’s become old and weak? Is it because he’s so weak now that he knows Silverspinner can eat him?”

  Again, Fernie couldn’t hear exactly what Gustav said in reply, but she caught enough of a sentence—a sudden claim to be exactly who Silverspinner thought he was—to know that he was out of ideas and reduced to bluffing.

  Fernie had seen Gustav face down enough bad people to know that he was very, very good at bluffing, but could also tell that this time, it wasn’t going to work.

  But Fernie was pretty good at bluffing herself.

  She yelled, “HEY! SILVERSPINNER! STAY AWAY FROM HIM OR I’LL SQUISH YOU LIKE A BUG!”

  Silverspinner’s head turned, swiveling to peer down at the ledge where Fernie stood.

  At the first full sight of the monster’s face, Fernie’s knees went weak.

  Silverspinner did indeed look a little like an old woman, in that she had gaunt cheeks and thin red lips stretched tight over a mouth full of yellow teeth. But instead of human eyes, she had a row of what looked like bulging red marbles, running from one side of her forehead to the other. There were at least ten of those, and even if they had not been enough to eliminate any further resemblance to humanity, the sides of her lips anchored a pair of nasty-looking mandibles, snapping open and shut like the claws of an angry lobster.

  “There’s another one,” Silverspinner announced. “Maybe it will be easier to eat her first.”

  And with that, she leaped.

  Silverspinner moved with the speed of something fired from a cannon, adding her own lightning reflexes to any velocity she might have achieved just by falling. It took no time at all, less than a heartbeat, for her to grow from something that was already monstrous at a distance to something that could hardly be imagined when she was closer than anybody would ever want her to be. Fernie was almost paralyzed by the sight of her face, which grew uglier and more wrinkled and filled with more madness and cruelty than any face had ever been meant to hold. It was the meanest old-lady face Fernie had ever seen, so much worse than the face of the runner-up, Mrs. Adele Everwiner, that Fernie found herself almost missing the lady whose one major joy in life seemed to be giving people a piece of her mind.

  As recently as a month before, before her first visit to the Gloom house, Fernie might have remained frozen and been swept off the ledge in Silverspinner’s mandibles.

  But Fernie had spent much of this past month running from People Takers, Beasts, shadow eaters, and shape-changing Terrors. She’d gotten used to moving quickly.

  She scrambled into the crevice in the rock, cramming herself into the narrow space just as Silverspinner’s bulk slammed into the cliffside.

  It was so narrow a space that Fernie had to release most of her breath to be skinny enough to fit. Even so, she had to force herself past the tight bend a few feet in, in order to stand packed into a cramped space just barely large enough for her. The crevice didn’t end beyond that point, but it did narrow to a crack, through which a cold and vaguely sulfurous breeze blew, promising deeper shelter for creatures small enough to fit there. She took a deep breath of that air, almost gagging from the terrible smell, before managing to turn around in her tiny hiding place and peer back the way she had come.

  That’s how she found out that Silverspinner hadn’t given up on catching her just yet . . .

  CHAPTER TEN

  An Extremely Unpromising Plan for Fernie’s High-School Years

  The tip of one of Silverspinner’s long segmented spider-legs stabbed into the rock at the point where the crevice curved toward Fernie’s current hiding place. The leg was about twice as thick around as a human arm and covered with sticky white fuzz. The claw at its tip scraped the rock, dislodging a few pebbles, before withdrawing and striking again, hard enough that the sound of the impact echoed like a thunderclap.

  Then Silverspinner seemed to sense that Fernie was off to one side, in a little alcove she couldn’t bend enough to reach.

  The leg and the claw at the end of it slammed against the rock another five or six times, in a tantrum over being denied access to the little piece of meat who had retreated inside the mountain.

  “Little thing thinks she can hide from Silverspinner. Little thing is wrong. Silverspinner only needs to eat once every ten years, and Silverspinner had one of those nasty old reptile-birds just a week ago. The little thing will get hungry long before Silverspinner does.”

  “I don’t think so!” Fernie cried. “My shadow’s far away from here, eating and drinking for me! I can stay here forever and never get hungry or thirsty!”

  “Oooh. Silverspinner finds that interesting. But Silverspinner also knows what it’s like to wait in a terrible and unpleasant place forever . . . and Silverspinner thinks that the little thing will grow tired of hiding
in that little crack for weeks and months and years, without even hunger for company. Silverspinner thinks that the little thing will surrender herself without further argument once she realizes that being eaten is better.”

  As much as Fernie hated to admit it, the giant old-woman-spider-monster had a point. Ten years was, after all, the sum total of all the time she’d spent alive so far. That included all her birthdays, all her time spent watching scary movies, all her times doing anything that could possibly be considered fun, and all her time spent standing in boring lines. Even if her shadow would keep her from ever getting hungry, no matter how much time she spent squeezed into this cramped and uncomfortable crevice, it still wasn’t how she’d pictured spending her high-school years.

  But she wasn’t willing to volunteer as spider-food just yet. “So what will we do, the two of us, while we’re waiting for you to get hungry and me to get bored? Talk?”

  “Little thing asks Silverspinner if she would like to talk. Silverspinner once liked to talk. Silverspinner made long speeches about her greatness and forced her toys to listen. Oh, yes, they listened. They listened or they got eaten. Yes, they did.”

  “Make up your mind!” Fernie snapped. “Were they toys or food?”

  “They were both toys and food. They were little things just like you, little thing. Oh, yes, they were. They lived in villages around the base of Silverspinner’s mountain, and they lived for as long as Silverspinner let them live, and they did whatever Silverspinner wanted, including listening to Silverspinner talk, because they knew that if they didn’t, Silverspinner would get angry. Silverspinner made them sing songs about how lucky they were to be her toys and food. Silverspinner made them pretend to be happy whenever she came down from her mountain to take one of them away. Ooooh, life was good for Silverspinner in those days.” There was a pause. “Silverspinner likes having a little thing to talk to again. Maybe Silverspinner won’t eat this one. Maybe she’ll just keep this one trapped in this hole, web her in, and talk to her forever and ever.”