Shadowghast

by Thomas Taylor

  I’m surrounded.

  “I am disappointed in you,” Caliastra says. She brushes a scrappy lock of hair from my forehead but doesn’t smile. “I realize this is a difficult time for you, Herbie, and that I’ve turned your world upside down by coming here, but I do expect to be treated with respect. We are family, after all.”

  “But . . .” I say, still in mumble mode, “it’s my job to find lost things.”

  “I’m sorry to hear you are worried about your friends, Herbie,” Caliastra says with a hint of impatience. “Of course there’ll be an innocent explanation for these disappearances. Isn’t it around Halloweentime that the town shuts itself up for winter? Maybe Mrs. Hanniver and Jenny Fossick have gone away for a little holiday. And very well deserved, too, I’m sure.”

  “But . . .” I start to say, not knowing whether to launch into a protest or correct the names. Something moves behind the counter of my cubbyhole. It’s Violet, eavesdropping in on the conversation, unspotted by all but me. “But . . . they would have said something.”

  “The fact remains,” protests Mr. Mummery, “that the boy was snooping in matters that don’t concern him. Caliastra and I want something done about him.”

  “And I,” sneers Mr. Mollusc in triumph, “would like to be the one who does it.”

  Behind me, I sense Rictus and Tristo stand to attention. I think, when it comes to doing something about me, Mr. Mollusc will have plenty of competition.

  Caliastra holds up a commanding hand.

  “The boy is my responsibility now,” she declares to everyone there. Then she turns to me. “Herbie, I think it’s time you accepted that things have changed for you. We’ll talk again, but its late now and way past your bedtime. You look exhausted!”

  “Bedtime?” I’m confused by the concept. “Lady Kraken has never given me a bedtime.”

  Caliastra smothers my bafflement with a smile.

  “But you are no longer Lady Kraken’s concern,” she says. “I have an appointment with her now, as it happens, to finalize your future. And I intend to give her a little demonstration of my Shadowghast lantern while I’m there. In her wheelchair, Lady Kraken will struggle to reach the theater for the show tomorrow night, so I have brought my show to her. I wouldn’t want one of Eerie-on-Sea’s most prominent residents to miss out.”

  I glance fearfully at the lantern beneath its drape. I remember the things the doc said about the Shadowghast and the puppets it creates of all those whose shadows are snatched. Lady Kraken won’t stand a chance.

  “You mustn’t light the lantern again,” I say. “Please, Caliastra, it’s dangerous!”

  “Dangerous?” The magician blinks at me in surprise. “What do you mean?”

  “The Shadowghast!” I cry, seeing my chance. “When you let it out, it snatches people’s shadows, and . . . and then . . .”

  “Oh, Herbie.” Caliastra stops a laugh by covering her mouth with the owl on top of her cane. “Now I know you have been overdoing it. The Shadowghast isn’t real. It’s just a story.”

  There’s a ripple of laughter around the hotel lobby, and Rictus and Tristo mime a huge guffaw. Mr. Mollusc’s mustache is bristling with mirth, and even Amber Griss—the hotel receptionist—suppresses a giggle.

  “I thought you understood that stage magic is all about illusion, Herbie.” Caliastra looks more disappointed than ever as she steers me gently toward my cubbyhole. “I see that you have more to learn than I realized. Sleep now, dear boy. We’ll talk again tomorrow. And don’t forget, you promised me a tour of your Lost-and-Foundery before we leave. I want to see everything. Now, good night!”

  And she closes the counter behind me. I watch, helpless, as Caliastra leads her troupe to the hotel elevator—Tristo and Rictus carrying the Shadowghast lantern between them—to visit Lady Kraken.

  “Mr. Mollusc,” the magician calls as she enters the elevator, “please be so good as to ensure that my nephew does not leave the cellar again. He needs a good night’s rest.”

  “Very well, madam,” says the manager as the elevator door closes. Then he turns his sour grin in my direction. “Leave it with me.”

  “But, sir!” I cry. “We have to stop her. Lady Kraken is in danger.”

  “You heard your aunt,” Mr. Mollusc snaps, crossing the lobby to loom over me in my cubbyhole. “It’s bedtime for little boys. You, Lemon, are confined to the Lost-and-Foundery until further notice. You’re grounded.”

  “What?”

  “Sweet dreams,” Mr. Mollusc croons sarcastically, blowing me a kiss, “dear boy!”

  Then he slides the metal grill down over my cubbyhole with a vicious CLACK! and locks it.

  I’m trapped.

  Not exactly trapped,” says Violet a moment later, when I join her down in my cellar. “We can still get out through the window, remember?”

  “But what’s the point?” I slump down on my beanbag and lift my Lost-and-Founder’s cap. Clermit, who’s been there all along, falls out and I catch him. He extends his scissor claw, gives a small snip of encouragement—or is he wishing me good night, too?—and then retreats back inside his shell.

  “We need to warn Lady Kraken,” Violet says. “If Caliastra makes the Shadowghast snatch her shadow, too, it will be a disaster for you. And the whole town. Come on, Herbie! Let’s get out of here.”

  But before we can reach the window, there’s a rumbling, scraping sound from outside. Darkness falls as a heavy metal object is rolled in front of the cellar window, blocking the streetlight.

  “What’s happening?” says Violet, turning to me in surprise.

  “The hotel garbage cans, I expect,” I reply. “Old Mollusc breath has been threatening to block my cellar window for ages. He meant it when he said I’m grounded.”

  “But we’ve got to get out!” cries Violet, running to the window and flinging it open. She pushes at the metal bin there, but it won’t budge. “Herbie, help me!”

  I join her, but even heaving together we can’t shift the stinking garbage can.

  “Did you know how much waste a hotel kitchen creates?” I ask, slumping down on the floor. “Because you do now. We really are well and truly boxed in this time.”

  “Well, of course we are, Herbie!” Violet waves her arms in fury. “I’ve been telling you all along we can’t trust Caliastra, and now, without breaking a sweat, she has us imprisoned down here, while she can go around unleashing the Shadowghast at anyone she pleases. Soon she’ll control everyone!”

  “Unless she doesn’t realize what she’s doing!” I say, jumping up. “You saw how she reacted when I told her that the Shadowghast was dangerous.”

  “Yes, Herbie, she laughed at you!” Violet raises her voice. “Then everyone laughed at you.”

  “OK, but for a moment—just a moment—she seemed genuinely surprised,” I reply. “Maybe she really is just here to perform a magic trick and doesn’t understand that she’s feeding a monster.”

  “Herbie, how can you not see it?” Violet cries. “How can she have gotten her claws into you so deep that you can’t see the truth. Caliastra is the monster!”

  And I want to shout “No!” to that. I want to find the words to explain to Violet—to show her—just how it feels to be smiled at by someone who isn’t merely a famous magician or a hotel guest, but someone who has spent years looking for me. Someone who knew me as a baby.

  Someone who makes me feel what it must be like to have a mother.

  You can’t explain, says the voice of Caliastra in my imagination. Violet will never understand. I said she would be jealous of you.

  “And anyway,” Violet continues, speaking into the awkward silence that I’ve created by thinking all this, “what was that about you promising her a tour of your Lost-and-Foundery?”

  “She just wants to see where I’ve been all these years.” I shrug. “That’s all.”

  “Really?” Violet looks disgusted with me. “You think a celebrity magician—with an actual magic lantern—wants to visit a c
luttered cellar full of lost property and dusty old whatsits just because she thinks you’re her nephew?”

  “She might,” I say, gazing around the overfilled shelves, the boxes and chests and baskets of lost things that I call home.

  “Herbie!” Violet grabs my uniform front and rattles me so hard my cap slips over my face. “She’s tricking you. She’s tricked everyone. Oh, why can’t you see that if she puts on the Ghastly Night show tomorrow she will capture the shadows of everyone in Eerie-on-Sea? The whole town is in danger!”

  “NO!” I shout, louder than I’ve ever shouted in my Lost-and-Foundery before. Violet stops, and blinks at me in surprise, so I shout it again. “NO! You are wrong, Violet Parma!” I yell. “I mean, yes, the town is in danger, but it’s not Caliastra who’s doing it. She’s not the Puppet Master. She can’t be. She’s come to Eerie-on-Sea to find me!”

  “Oh, Herbie.” Violet looks at me pityingly. “That’s only what she wants you to think.”

  “You’re just jealous,” I shout, pushing Violet away, “because no one has come to find you!”

  Violet looks aghast, as if she has been slapped.

  “It’s true!” I yell. “Caliastra warned me this would happen. You can’t stand that it’s me who found my family first, so you’re . . . you’re seeing evil plots everywhere.”

  Violet grabs me again, but rougher this time, as if she can shake me into having different ideas.

  “Caliastra is evil!” she cries. “She’s made you think these horrible things about me!”

  I grab Violet’s coat front and shake her back.

  “The Shadowghast is evil,” I cry. “Caliastra is in danger, too. We’ve got to save her!”

  And then we’re falling, shaking each other off our feet, crashing into a box of lost walking sticks, and sprawling over the floor, each trying to get the other one to shut up.

  It’s the first time Violet and I have had a fight. And even while it’s going on, I know how stupid it is and how ridiculous we must look. No amount of kicking or shoving is going to change what the other one is thinking. And yet, here we are anyway, rolling around like a pair of ferrets in a pillowcase.

  “Numpty-headed ninny brain!” Violet cries, trying to get me in a headlock, and kind of succeeding.

  “Shouty McShout Face!” I gasp, trying to pull Violet’s coat over her head but getting mostly tangled in her hair.

  “Dumb muppet!”

  “Yelly belly!”

  I’m just so glad there’s no one around to see this!

  But then comes a bone-jarring, monstrous SCREECH from somewhere deep in the Lost-and-Foundery that makes us pause in our struggle.

  “What’s that?” I say.

  “Fomeone’f in here!” Violet replies, muffled because of the coat.

  We hear the screech again—an ear-twanging, blood-chilling noise from inside the cellar.

  “Someone,” I squeak, from beneath the crook of Violet’s arm, “or something!”

  But what could it be?” Violet gasps as we untangle ourselves and stand up hastily. “And how did it get in here?”

  The screech comes again, louder than before.

  “It’s coming from over there . . .”

  The cellar of the Lost-and-Foundery is L-shaped. Most of the action takes place where we are now, in the main part, with the cozy fire and comfy chairs and the biscuits. But the strange sound is coming from around the corner—from the dark and dustier space where I hang the coats and keep the bigger things. Violet has a bed over there—made of blankets and cushions—for when she stays over.

  Then the screech comes again, and our fight is quite forgotten.

  “What is that?” Violet demands.

  “Terrifying!” I squeak. “That’s what!”

  Violet picks up an umbrella—an antique one with a particularly sharp brass point—and then the lid of a wicker hamper, which she holds like a shield. In a moment, she’s ready for battle. I look around, but all I can see to arm myself with are the hefty walking sticks we spilled on the floor or a nearby tennis racket with broken strings. It’s obvious which I should pick.

  “Ready?” says Violet.

  “No,” I reply, clutching the tennis racket in both hands.

  And, so armed, we advance around the corner into the gloom.

  The coats and blankets Violet sleeps on are heaped where they usually are, against a hot-water pipe. A paperback book is spread open on the floor nearby, surrounded by candy wrappers and a pair of dirty socks.

  Violet glances at me sheepishly.

  “Sorry,” she says.

  “I don’t mind,” I say with a shrug. “I just wish you’d use a bookmark like a normal person . . .”

  “No, I mean the fight. I . . . I shouldn’t be surprised you’re so stubborn about Caliastra, Herbie. She hasn’t made things easy for you.”

  I blink.

  An apology?

  From Violet?

  But then I notice the word stubborn.

  “Yes, well, I’m sorry, too,” I say, in my iciest voice. “Sorry you can’t be happy for me to have found my own family at last.”

  “Happy for you?” Violet turns on me, raising her umbrella sword and basket shield. “Happy that you can’t see the truth, even when it’s right under your squashy little button nose?”

  “Button nose?” I shout, waving the tennis racket at her. “Squashy?”

  CRASH!

  A sound so loud that it makes us jump reverberates around the room.

  “It came from there!” Violet says. “From inside!”

  And she points her umbrella-sword at a large mahogany wardrobe standing against the far wall. This wardrobe, carved with a seaweed and octopus motif that I’ve never liked to look at, looms dark and mysterious.

  “Oh, no,” I say, starting to back away. “Are . . . are you sure?”

  As if to answer this, there comes another crashing sound, like pieces of wood falling, and the wardrobe shakes.

  “Herbie?” Violet narrows her eyes at me. “What do you use that wardrobe for?”

  “Narnia business,” I reply, hoping a joke will lighten the mood.

  It doesn’t.

  The wardrobe starts to tremble again.

  Violet raises her wicker shield and umbrella and steps toward it. I clutch the tennis racket and somehow manage to step forward, too. But then we hear something new from inside the wardrobe—something so astonishingly eerie that it makes everything else we’ve heard so far seem like nothing at all. From within the antique cabinet, a muffled, slightly desperate voice speaks to us.

  “Having nine lives is good,” says the voice, “but only if you haven’t used up eight of them already!”

  We stare at each other. We’d know that voice anywhere.

  “Erwin!” Violet cries, flinging her sword and shield to one side and scrabbling with the large iron key in the lock. She flings the wardrobe door open.

  Inside there are several moth-eaten fur coats moldering on a rail. Obviously, I don’t approve of making coats out of fur, but they were lost, these coats, so I still have to look after them—at least until a hundred years are up. Then I’ll give the poor things a decent burial, I guess. But it’s not the fur coats we’re gawping at in amazement. It’s the fuzzy head who stares down at us with frantic ice-blue eyes from a gap in the wooden paneling at the back of the wardrobe.

  “Erwin!” cries Violet again, pushing the antique furs aside and climbing into the wardrobe. “Erwin, get down.”

  “I don’t think he can,” I reply. “He’s stuck.”

  “Quick, Herbie,” Violet replies. “Help me move these bits of wood.”

  And so we climb up into the wardrobe, and pull away the broken panels that form the back of the wardrobe, exposing the wall behind.

  Except we don’t expose the wall at all, do we? We expose, instead, something I knew was there all this time but had almost—almost—forgotten.

  “A door!” says Violet in amazement as we pull the last strips of
wood away and reveal the pitted surface of an iron door that wouldn’t look out of place in an antique submarine. “Herbie, there’s a door in the back of your Lost-and-Foundery!”

  “Is there?” I reply, swinging the tennis racket at my side and trying to avoid my friend’s gaze. “Fancy that!”

  “You knew this was here,” Violet declares, suddenly realizing the truth. “Herbie!”

  But all I can do is offer up a lopsided grin.

  “Anyway, looks like I wasn’t the only one,” I add, nodding at Erwin, whose head and front paws are dangling through a hole.

  And what is that hole? Well, the iron door has a circular opening near the top, once covered by a metal grill, held in place by screws. Those screws have clearly rusted away, and my guess is the grill was forced out of the opening by sheer feline determination, causing the shrieking sounds we heard and that bang. The feline in question twitches his whiskers in annoyance and—finally—finishes coming through.

  Cats are amazing. It’s said that wherever a cat’s head can go, its body can go, too, and Erwin seems determined to prove this. Before our eyes, the bookshop cat squirms and worms and wriggles and toothpastes himself through the hole in the door, till he plops down to land beside the broken metal grill on the wooden floor of the wardrobe. Then he quivers all over, ejecting rust particles from his bristling coat and flicking his ears in disgust at the indignity of it all.

  Violet scoops him up.

  “Clever cat!” she cries.

  And she strokes his head furiously until his grumpiness melts away. His eyes narrow to closing, and the Lost-and-Foundery fills with purr.

  And me? Well, I’m left staring fearfully through the hole in the door at the subterranean dark beyond. A steady gale of cold air rushes out at me, making me squint.

  “A Netherways door!” Violet says in a wondering voice. “It must be. Herbie, how long have you known?”