Gustav Gloom and the Inn of Shadows

by Adam-Troy Castro

  GROSSET & DUNLAP

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Text copyright © 2015 Adam-Troy Castro. Illustrations copyright © 2015 Kristen Margiotta. All rights reserved. Published by Grosset & Dunlap, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014. GROSSET & DUNLAP is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-698-41205-7

  Version_1

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  This one’s for Hillary Pearlman, because that designation makes this book a work of art for a work of art who wears a work of art and makes a work of art; how artful is that?

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Girl Who Looked a Lot Like Fernie What But Who Still Wasn’t Fernie What

  Despite what we’re so frequently shown in movies, not all of life’s worst news arrives on a dark and stormy night, with thunder and lightning for company.

  Some terrible news arrives on glorious sunny days, sometimes even in the well-lit kitchens of Fluorescent Salmon houses.

  For instance, outside the home of the What family, the light was bright and golden, the grass lush and green. The air rang with the joyful melodies of birdsong and the distant laughter of neighborhood children. All was right with the world.

  Inside the house, the famous world adventurer Nora What stood reading a very strange and frightening letter from her missing ten-year-old daughter, Fernie.

  Mrs. What had just returned from one of her frequent televised expeditions and was still dressed in a safari jacket, jodhpurs, and a pith helmet. She wore a necklace of lions’ teeth she’d been given by local tribesmen impressed by her skill at evading crocodiles in a swim across a river most sensible people avoided because it almost had more crocodiles than water. (The local tribesmen generally resisted engaging in such pointlessly risky activities themselves and considered Nora What insane and stupid for doing what they quite sensibly would not. But they’d learned from past exposures to self-proclaimed adventurers that the best way to get rid of a crazy person in a pith helmet was to praise her for her bravery and give her a ceremonial necklace of some kind and thus some reason to think she’d accomplished something of note.)

  On her return home, Mrs. What had expected to be met at the airport by her husband and her daughters, ten-year-old Fernie and twelve-year-old Pearlie. She’d made this arrangement with her husband just three weeks earlier. The trip to pick her up was going to be a surprise for the girls. But her family hadn’t been at the airport when she got off the plane. They hadn’t answered the phone, nor had they been at home when Mrs. What arrived in front of the new house in a taxi.

  Mrs. What supposed that they might have had car trouble, forgotten the date, or gone out on some unexpected errand, but the family cat, Harrington, was missing, too, and it was difficult for her to imagine an unexpected errand that could possibly require the participation of a cat.

  All of this had been extremely disturbing to Mrs. What, who despite her frequent and lengthy professional absences loved her family and liked being able to come home to them.

  Still, it had not been anywhere near as disturbing as the letter Mrs. What had just read, not once but five times.

  Mrs. What wasn’t sure that she was supposed to believe what she read.

  Fernie had written that the spooky house across the street was inhabited by shadows that walked and talked and had lives of their own.

  She went on to explain that it also contained the Pit, a gateway to a strange otherworldly realm called the Dark Country. The homeland of all shadows, it was at war with an evil conqueror named Lord Obsidian, which was admittedly exactly the kind of name Mrs. What supposed was appropriate for the kind of person who made war with dark countries.

  Mrs. What’s husband and her older daughter, Pearlie, had somehow fallen into the Pit and would never be seen again unless rescued. Fernie’s letter concluded with the news that she’d taken Harrington the cat and joined the house’s one somewhat human resident, a strange boy named Gustav Gloom, on an expedition with exactly that purpose in mind.

  Fernie had written all of this in just a couple of pages, rushing through a complicated story that probably would have required three full-length illustrated books to tell and still left a lot unexplained.

  Mrs. What wasn’t sure that further details would have rendered the story any more comprehensible, but they might have helped.

  When there’s a pile of questions fighting to be asked, the first one to escape is sometimes the best.

  Mrs. What wondered out loud, “Exactly how old is this letter, anyway?”

  A voice that sounded just like Fernie’s replied, “Fernie wrote it about eight days ago.”

  While it struck Mrs. What as distinctly odd that Fernie would refer to herself using her own name, the relief she felt that this nonsense about shadow houses and dark countries was all over and done with was overwhelming. She spun in her chair, a big broad smile on her face.

  Then she faltered.

  The room was inhabited by shadows. Not the kind of shadows that were normally present in the corners of rooms, but actual active presences who had been standing around behind Mrs. What, waiting for her to finish reading Fernie’s letter.

  One was a hulking figure in a tuxedo, another a lanky man wearing a striped suit and a flat straw hat, and a third looked enough like Fernie to make Mrs. What’s heart ache. She had Fernie’s eyes and Fernie’s nose and Fernie’s chin and pretty much everything else Fernie had except for the bright red hair—which wasn’t to say that this girl was bald, only that her hair looked more like what red hair looks like in black-and-white photographs.

  It would have been all too tempting for Mrs. What to still believe that this actually was Fernie in some way . . . but Mrs. What was an attentive and loving mother in between her frequent expeditions, and she could tell from the way the little girl carried herself that she was not Fernie at all, but a different person who just happened to look like her.

  Mrs. What could only say so. “You’re not Fernie.”

  “I didn’t say I was,” the little girl shadow replied.

  “But you talk like her. You have her voice.”

  “I’m her shadow. How else would you expect me to sound?”

  Mrs. Wha
t, who had seen her share of astonishing sights, had not seen anything quite this astonishing for as far back as she could remember. “I didn’t expect you to have a voice at all.”

  The shadow girl sniffed. “All shadows have voices. But we just don’t speak that much around people from the world of light.”

  Mrs. What didn’t know what to say. “Ummm. I’m sorry?”

  The hulking figure rolled his eyes. “That’s exactly the kind of answer that makes flesh-and-blood people so often not worth my valuable time.”

  “You’ll have to forgive Hives,” said the shadow of the man in the striped suit and straw hat. “He’s the Gloom house’s terrible butler. It’s his job to always be rude to the people who need his help.”

  “He seems to be awfully good at it,” Mrs. What noted.

  “I’m a professional,” sniffed Hives.

  “As for me,” said the man in the straw hat, “I’m the shadow of a fellow named Mr. Notes, who last I checked wasn’t a very nice man at all, but I don’t follow him around anymore and I’m trying to be a much more pleasant person. I hope we’ll be good friends.”

  One of the many pressing questions piling up in Mrs. What’s head, so deep by now that it was a wonder she had room to think at all, squirmed out from underneath. She addressed it to the shadow girl. “If you’re Fernie’s shadow, aren’t you supposed to be with her?”

  “I’m a free being. I can be wherever I want to be.”

  “But you’re usually with her, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” Fernie’s shadow said, “I am, but that’s a matter of choice, and it’s because I like her.” With a faint note of disapproval, she added, “Personally, I think you should spend more time with her yourself.”

  “Why aren’t you with her now?”

  “Well, I do tend to stick very close to Fernie, but then a little while back, when she was being chased by a shadow dinosaur, I got stomped on and jammed up between his toes.”

  Suddenly, swimming with crocodiles seemed very mundane to Mrs. What. “Does that kind of thing happen often?”

  “Where Fluffy the tyrannosaur is concerned? Unfortunately, yes. They’re not toes you want to get yourself stuck between. They smell like rotten bananas dipped in rancid mayonnaise and stored in a sweaty gym sock. I don’t know why they call that big lummox ‘Fluffy’ when he should be called ‘Stinky’ instead.”

  Mrs. What felt the room spinning. “Losing a little control of your story, aren’t you?”

  “I suppose. Anyway, it normally takes a shadow no time at all to recover from being crushed flat or to get out from under heavy objects like dinosaur toes, but I wasn’t the only shadow Fluffy stomped in that crowded hallway, and his feet were sticky, so we all got mixed together in a kind of jam. When we fell off, it was all in one big lump, like hard candies melted together in a bowl. A very bad shadow named Ursula recovered a couple of seconds before the rest of us did and had the time to lock me away in what I suppose you would call a closet, where I remained imprisoned until Gustav’s shadow, who was looking for me by that point, heard my cries and let me out.”

  Mr. Notes’s shadow took over the story. “Yes. You see, Mrs. What, Fernie’s friend Gustav had sent his shadow to find Fernie’s shadow, but by the time he succeeded in that mission, Fernie had already left with Gustav to rescue your husband and older daughter from the Dark Country.”

  The strangeness of this encounter had overwhelmed Mrs. What so much that until this last sentence she’d almost managed to forget that they were talking about the fate of her family. “The letter says . . . they fell into a pit of some kind?”

  Hives sniffed. “Your husband’s clumsy.”

  This was the first part of the story Mrs. What couldn’t even begin to argue with. “And . . . Gustav and Fernie have gone there to rescue them?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Fernie’s shadow. “Word around the house has it that they must have taken the Cryptic Carousel.”

  Mrs. What didn’t know what a Cryptic Carousel was, but it struck her as the kind of detail that instantly grants believability to unbelievable stories. Without wanting to, she suddenly found herself certain that everything Fernie had written about in her letter, all that nonsense about a house filled with shadows and a pit down to the country all shadows came from and so on, was absolutely true. The awfulness of this revelation welled up in her like a storm, leaving her frantic in the manner that only a terrified mother can be frantic. She leaped to her feet and made the chair fall over behind her and clatter on the kitchen floor like angry applause. “Oh . . . my family!”

  Fernie’s shadow bit her shadow lip. “I know it’s upsetting. I’m still not entirely sure that telling you was better than not telling you, but I figured that Fernie would want you informed, so we’ve kept an eye on your house, hoping to scoot on over here and give you the heads-up if you came home.”

  “What . . . what should I do?”

  “That’s a very good question,” said Fernie’s shadow.

  “You think so?” asked Hives. “It strikes me as a wholly average question.”

  “It’s relevant and to the point,” Mr. Notes’s shadow argued.

  “Oh, I recognize that,” Hives allowed. “I wouldn’t call it a bad question, either. But it’s not as brilliantly incisive as you’re painting it. I wouldn’t give this woman credit for asking a ‘very good’ question yet.”

  Mrs. What had suffered more than enough of this. “I wasn’t asking your opinion of the question. I was asking you to answer the question! What do I have to do to get my family back?”

  The shadow of Mrs. What’s younger daughter surprised her by crossing the distance between them and placing one gray hand on the back of hers. The comforting touch felt cool, like a piece of silk, but aside from the temperature it was so much like Fernie’s touch that Mrs. What felt her heart break a little at the thought that this could be all she had left.

  “This is the problem,” Fernie’s shadow said. “I’m really not all that sure that there’s much we can do.”

  “You mean it’s hopeless?”

  “No. Nothing’s ever hopeless. But there isn’t much you can do, is my point. There’s no purpose in informing the police of your world that your family’s gone missing, because they’ll never believe your story about where your family’s gone and would only waste time looking in all the places in your world where we already know your family isn’t. You can’t go down to the Dark Country yourself looking for them, because the only way for you to get there now that the Carousel’s gone is to jump into the Pit yourself, and that’ll more than likely only deliver you to Lord Obsidian and make you yet another person Gustav and Fernie will need to rescue . . . and trust me, they already have plenty of those.”

  All of this made a crazy kind of sense, even if it also made no sense whatsoever. Mrs. What, who was normally brilliant at dealing with emergencies and had once survived a week buried alive by an avalanche using nothing but a teapot, a hand mirror, and a fountain pen, now found herself paralyzed with fear. “But I can’t just sit here and do nothing! My children—”

  “—are not helpless,” Mr. Notes’s shadow finished. “Yes, they’re in more trouble than any person of flesh should ever have to face, but if you knew the kind of dangers they’ve already braved, and the kind of monsters they’ve already defeated, you’d be more proud of your girls than you’ve ever been before.”

  Mrs. What was proud of her girls already, but still didn’t find this very comforting.

  The shadow girl paused now, to give her next words a weight that even a distraught mother had to feel. “And then you also have to consider Gustav.”

  “I’m sure he’s a very brave little boy, but—”

  Fernie’s shadow took offense at that. “He’s more than just brave, more than just the best friend Fernie has ever had or ever will have. He’s half shadow himself, almost as fast and cu
nning and hard to kill as a shadow—a good thing, as he’s spent all his life in a wondrous place facing down more dangers than even you could possibly imagine. If you knew the things he’s already done and the things he is prepared to do in defense of your family, then you’d know that your girls and husband are in the hands of the best possible companion. If anybody can get them home alive, it’s him.”

  The certainty in the shadow girl’s voice was like nothing Mrs. What had ever heard. It was the kind of faith she would have liked to have in a friend—the kind so great that it banished all doubt.

  Maybe that made her feel a little better . . . but a little was not nearly enough. She was a woman who faced dangers on her own rather than allowing others to face them for her, and it was difficult for her to endure being told, by a shadow no less, that there was nothing she could do.

  Struggling to remind herself that this strange thing really did seem to be happening and was not just some terrible dream brought on by airline food, she protested, “But I can’t just stay here and pretend nothing’s happened. I’ll go crazy. I have to be able to do something.”

  The shadow girl’s features softened, showing compassion that was so much like the way Fernie would have, it was all Mrs. What could do just to avoid breaking into tears. “I’m sorry. I really can’t think of anything useful.”

  “Maybe there’s someone else I can talk to?”

  “There are plenty of other shadows you can talk to, but not many who’d answer you, or agree to get involved, or give you the kind of help you want. Great-Aunt Mellifluous is down in the Dark Country herself, helping to lead the battle against Lord Obsidian. Gustav’s shadow already dived into the Pit himself to try to catch up with them. Hives, here, has duties in the house that he needs to get back to. Mr. Notes’s shadow . . .” She hesitated and apologized to him. “I’m sorry, he’s a good friend, but just isn’t the most useful person to have around in a crisis.”

  “I’m not,” Mr. Notes’s shadow apologized. “I panic too easily.”