Gustav Gloom and the Inn of Shadows

by Adam-Troy Castro

  Up ahead, Gustav reached the summit and stood there, hands on hips, catching his breath as he surveyed the view. His black suit was very easy to see against the gray sky. “Now this is interesting,” he said.

  Fernie had learned to dread Gustav’s idea of interesting. “What?”

  “Lord Obsidian seems to have a pretty inflated opinion of himself.”

  Fernie wouldn’t have normally considered Lord Obsidian’s inflated opinion of himself remarkable enough to be worth mentioning. She couldn’t imagine anybody calling himself Lord anything if he hadn’t already decided that he was a pretty special guy. Just calling yourself Lord meant that you’d given up on shyness, insecurity, humility, and a reasonable sense of perspective.

  But whatever Gustav had seen seemed to impress him enough for him to make a special point of it, so she scrambled up the last few feet of slope and joined him on the ridge overlooking the Dark Country.

  As soon as she saw what he saw, she said, “Oh.”

  The “oh” had very little to do with Lord Obsidian, though.

  It had more to do with the Dark Country itself, which from this angle resembled nothing so much as a sea of rolling gray clouds so vast that she could not make out its other side. It was like standing on a cliff overlooking the ocean and trying to make out some beach thousands of miles away. Appreciating that another continent was out there somewhere and understanding that ships had been known to cross from here to there and back was not the same thing as feeling happy about the prospect of trying to cross that distance by swimming.

  The ring of mountains that completely surrounded the beclouded land stretched away to Fernie’s left and right. She got the impression that, somewhere far away through all that darkness, the other side of the Dark Country was marked by more mountains just like the one where she stood. But the line of mountains on either side of her extended as far away as she could see, and that line only seemed to curve a little bit before it disappeared into the horizon.

  Fernie’s voice sounded awfully tiny to her own ears. “It’s . . . big.”

  Gustav seemed wholly unconcerned. “Yup.”

  “Really big,” she said, as if he hadn’t gotten the point.

  “I know. It’s a big place. Big as the Earth. From what I hear, it has hills and plains and deserts and swamps and jungles and entire oceans, not to mention some cold places where nothing can live and some wild places with vicious hungry animals as big as houses.”

  She still had to believe he hadn’t gotten the point. “But you can’t find one lost man in a place as big as the Earth!”

  “No, normally you can’t . . . but then it would normally be just as hard to find one girl, and we weren’t here for even five minutes before we ran into Pearlie. That’s a crazy coincidence. But maybe luck’s on our side.”

  Behind them, Pearlie said, “I haven’t had a chance to tell you how I managed to join the refugees.”

  “I noticed,” Gustav admitted, “and I suspect it’s a good story. But that’s not what I’m trying to point out to the two of you now. Over there? Sticking up out of the clouds in that direction? Look closely.”

  He pointed, but for Fernie it was a little bit like standing on the top of the tallest building in a city and having a friend try to point out one little two-story house several neighborhoods away.

  “I don’t see what you’re pointing at,” Fernie confessed.

  Pearlie put her hands on the sides of Fernie’s face and adjusted the angle of her head. “Once you see it you won’t be able to stop seeing it. Look.”

  Fernie looked . . . and after a few seconds spotted something that made her heart thump in her chest: an ugly little face peering at her from out of churning clouds an unimaginable distance away.

  It was the long and narrow face of an intelligent, bookish man with a hawk nose, a high forehead, and a massive jaw: a face that only barely resembled one worn by a deadly monster called the shadow eater, who had once chased Fernie and Gustav around the Gloom house.

  The shadow eater’s face had been a loose-fitting, lumpy sack of flesh, shifting and bulging in odd places from all the shadows trapped and moving around inside him, the same way a pillowcase would shift and bulge if somebody decided to fill it with spiders and worms. But the Shadow Eater had worn the man’s face when it was just an empty sack of skin. The face emerging from the clouds was younger, more chiseled, and what that face looked like while it was still being worn by a human being.

  “Gustav! That’s Howard Philip October!”

  “No, it’s not,” said Gustav, who was nothing if not literal-minded. “That’s just the head of a giant statue of Howard Philip October.”

  It was indeed a giant carved figure of the strange and demented writer who had harassed Gustav’s grandfather Lemuel, arranged the death of the woman who would have been Gustav’s mother, taken Gustav’s father away, and ultimately become the conquering despot known as Lord Obsidian, at which point his villainy had ceased to be a hobby and become a full-time job.

  Fernie was impressed despite herself. “That thing’s got to be huge.”

  “Bigger than it has any right to be,” Gustav said, “since it’s got to be a few hundred miles away.”

  It wasn’t easy to judge distances over the clouds, because there were no closer objects Fernie could use for comparison. Fernie had based her own estimate of the head’s current distance on her own understanding of what was and wasn’t possible, which was always a risky thing to do when dealing with matters involving the world of shadows. Gustav’s own guess, which she knew at once to be more accurate than hers, made her head feel about to explode from ideas too large for her to easily imagine.

  Gustav went on. “The head alone must be the size of a small mountain range, and since I can also make out a neck and a pair of shoulders beneath it, there must be a whole standing body there, just tall enough for only the head to emerge above the clouds.”

  Fernie’s head felt as fluttery as a jar filled with playful butterflies. “That’s not just huge. That’s . . . you know . . .”

  Fernie had a decent vocabulary for a girl her age, but couldn’t come up with a word more expressive than huge.

  Pearlie placed a protective hand on her shoulder. “Huge works.”

  “Why would anybody need a statue of himself that huge?”

  “I wouldn’t,” said Gustav. “I don’t need any statues of myself, big or small. I know what I look like.”

  Fernie stared at the giant October head and tried to figure out some way to avoid being frightened of a power great enough to even consider building such a thing. For long seconds nothing occurred to her.

  Forgetting her father’s plight for a moment, she came very close to chickening out. Maybe this adventure was more than they could handle. Maybe they shouldn’t go on at all. Maybe it would be smarter to back down and make their way home to Sunnyside Terrace.

  And then she realized something that allowed her to look at the faraway face and derive some genuine hope from it. “Gustav? It’s . . . awfully sad, isn’t it?”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Gustav replied.

  A truly big man wouldn’t have needed a giant statue of himself. The statue in the clouds would have been needed by somebody who felt tiny all the time . . . by a person who blustered and bullied and ran around trying to conquer things but, deep inside, knew he wasn’t all that much.

  This didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous. If anything, it might have made him more dangerous. There’s nothing more dangerous, in any world, than a tiny person willing to hurt other people in order to prove that he’s bigger than he really is. But Fernie was unable to look at the giant head without knowing that, on some level, she’d never take Lord Obsidian seriously ever again.

  Pearlie seemed to feel the same way, because she chose that moment to laugh out loud. It was a welcome sound, but also a profound
ly unexpected one, given how quiet she’d been since the Dark Country came into view. She hugged her stomach as if to hold herself together while hilarity made her sink to her knees.

  For one ghastly moment, Fernie thought Pearlie was not laughing, but sobbing. “Are you okay?”

  Pearlie indicated with a hand wave that she was fine. Even then it took her several seconds to catch her breath enough to say, “Wow. I needed that.”

  “What?” asked Fernie.

  “That’s a really, really, really big statue.”

  “So?”

  “So I found myself wondering who has to clean it up if the Dark Country has any really, really, really big pigeons.”

  One stunned moment of silence later, Fernie started laughing, too.

  Every once in a while, life provides a laugh that won’t go away, because it keeps being rekindled every time you look at the face of the person laughing with you. Sometimes even the one person in the group who doesn’t laugh at all (in this case, Gustav) strikes you as equally hilarious because he’s so serious about whatever you’re laughing at. The two girls needed several minutes to stop, and they had just managed to get themselves back under control, their bellies hurting, when Gustav unwittingly said the one thing designed to start them up again.

  He said, “I don’t get it.”

  Well, of course he didn’t get it. He’d never been to a public park. He’d seen statues, but all of his were indoors. His front yard had ravens who said “caw,” but it was possible that he’d never actually seen a pigeon or had any idea what they did to statues. This was all pretty sad, really, maybe even as sad in its own way as Lord Obsidian’s wan attempt to compensate for a poor self-image. But there was something about Gustav’s total incomprehension at the sight of two close sisters reduced to breathless giggles that somehow made the hilarity funny all over again. It became funnier still when both Fernie and Pearlie kept meeting those serious eyes and couldn’t gather up enough breath to explain the joke.

  This went on for so long that Gustav finally said, “If he could see the two of you right now, he’d probably be surrendering already.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Return of Somebody Remarkably Unpleasant

  Unfortunately, that was the last laugh any of them had for a while.

  They discussed what to do next, and Gustav said it made little sense to use the reverse route the shadow refugees had used. After all, that would just lead straight to the horrors the refugees had been fleeing, horrors Gustav could see from this height and which he described as the advance of a shadow army that was better off avoided.

  This made sense to the girls, but without hunger, thirst, the need for sleep, or the rising and setting of the sun, it was impossible to tell for sure how many hours or days they spent wandering the mountaintops without Gustav declaring any particular spot a suitable way down. The result was a deadly dull, exhausting, and dangerous slog. Unlike the number of hikes Mrs. What had taken the girls on across other mountain trails, this journey wasn’t even kind enough to reward their efforts with a beautiful view. Here, the only views available were a bunch of gray clouds on one side and an endless dull emptiness on the other.

  There was nothing to do but talk or remain silent, and neither was very satisfying.

  At one point, Pearlie muttered a sarcastic, “I’m almost sorry I didn’t bring a camera.”

  Fernie looked out upon the nothing, surrounded by nothing, on top of nothing, capped by nothing, and said, “I agree! You could have made a postcard of it!”

  “It would have been a very mean postcard,” Pearlie said seriously. “I mean, what do you write on postcards, anyway? Wish you were here, right? Considering where we are, that would be a really stinky thing to say to someone. You would only send it to someone you didn’t like.”

  “I don’t even have Mrs. Everwiner’s address,” Fernie concluded.

  This was the least fun of Fernie’s adventures with Gustav so far, because even while they’d been running from the Beast or fighting the People Taker or hiding from the shadow eater or being scared by Hieronymus Spector or being chased by the Four Terrors or trying not to get eaten by Silverspinner, they had never been bored. There had always been something happening, something that gave her something to think about. Now, it was only with a tremendous act of will that Fernie managed to resist asking the mostly silent Gustav if they were ‘there yet,’ wherever ‘there’ happened to be.

  Eventually, though, Gustav stopped, gazed down into the Dark Country upon a patch of rolling gray clouds that to Fernie’s eyes looked just like any other patch of rolling gray clouds they’d looked down upon before, and uttered a deeply satisfied, “All right, then. Here we go.”

  Fernie saw nothing about the view from this mountaintop that struck her as in any way different from the views of every other mountaintop they had passed. Even the angle of the giant Howard Philip October head didn’t seem to have changed all that much. The likely distance they would have had to walk around the mountains before being able to see that distant monument in profile, let alone from the back, was greater than she could even begin to imagine. And yet she could see from the set of Gustav’s jaw that he really did seem to be satisfied. “Why? What do you see?” she asked him.

  “Nothing,” said Gustav.

  She protested, “But that’s all we’ve been seeing all along!”

  “That may be all you’ve been seeing, but it’s not all I’ve been seeing.”

  “What have you been seeing?”

  “Oh, well . . . Back when we first reached the top, I saw a whole bunch of shadow cities crumbling to dust as Lord Obsidian’s armies swept through them. Not long after that, I saw a dense forest of spiny plants that would have cut us to ribbons if we’d tried to walk among them. Then I saw a place where the ground was all covered with terrible grasping hands that probably would have seized us if we’d tried to pass. After that, there was a gooey marsh, and we might have been able to trudge through that, but it would have been very difficult and very messy, and I didn’t like the look of the flies.”

  “You can see flies from all the way up here?”

  “Not normal flies, no. But I saw these.”

  “What was so visible about these flies?”

  “I think you assumed I meant small flies.”

  “And these—”

  “You could have put seats on the back of the smaller ones and used them as school buses.”

  She shuddered. “Okay. Good place to skip.”

  “After that, there was nothing much in particular, a village or two, but none of them looked friendly enough to be worth going to, especially with all those billboards saying things like No Trespassers and Go Away and Warning: Anybody We Don’t Like Will Be Fed to the Gnarfle.”

  Pearlie beat her sister to the obvious question. “What’s a gnarfle?”

  “I don’t have even the slightest idea,” Gustav confessed, “but I think the important message to take away from that sign is that we don’t want to be fed to it.”

  This struck both sisters as sensible.

  Fernie rubbed her nose. “And now you say you’re seeing nothing?”

  “Pretty much. Just one of those places that are considered too distant and out-of-the-way and unpleasant for anybody to bother living in. I don’t see any armies fighting over it, any traffic crossing it, or any obstacles that we won’t be able to pass. Just . . . like, I said, nothing. Or almost nothing. And nothing’s good in the Dark Country.”

  A dark voice behind them exclaimed, “Ha! Nothing’s good in the Dark Country.”

  All this time, Fernie had obeyed the don’t-look-back advice as she’d become so focused on the road ahead that she’d forgotten all about it. Now, as she and the others turned, she saw a small group of shadows gathered so close to one another that their gray substance overlapped and seemed to flow from one figure to the n
ext.

  The gravelly voice of the shadow who’d spoken up struck her as strangely familiar, but right now she found herself more concerned with the odd way he’d repeated Gustav’s words. He’d made a point of emphasizing the word nothing differently than Gustav had.

  Fernie asked him, “What’s your point?”

  The shadow chuckled nastily. “It all depends on what word you emphasize. When the stupid boy said that nothing’s good in the Dark Country, he meant it in the sense that the empty places here are better than those filled with dangers. When I replied that nothing’s good in the Dark Country, I meant to say that you won’t find any places that fit such a stupid, limited description of good. The Dark Country isn’t safe for flesh-and-blood people. It’s one of the few things I like about the wretched place.”

  Pearlie said something surprising then. “Yes. You kept saying that.”

  Fernie stared at her sister. “You know this guy?”

  “Yes, she does,” the gravelly voiced shadow said. “And yet here she is, proving what an idiot she is by marching back in, no matter how hard it was for me to get her out to begin with. It makes saving her in the first place even more of a waste of time than I thought.”

  He stepped forward, radiating the open resentment of an unpleasant neighbor upset that some kids down the street might be having fun he couldn’t ruin. He took the form of an old man in a dirty undershirt and baggy shorts, with unpleasant eyes half-hidden behind scraggly eyebrows.

  Fernie finally remembered where she’d heard that unpleasant voice just as his face grew distinct enough to be recognized. “Cousin Cyrus!”