Fernie began to see what the People Taker had in mind for her that could be worse than throwing her into the Pit. “You said before that you only had two left to go.”
“That’s right. Just two. Which would normally mean the Pit for you. But you made it personal by hurting me. And I’ve had the most wonderful idea.”
Fernie didn’t ask him about his wonderful idea. When the People Taker said wonderful, he meant everything that was not wonderful. It meant bad things happening, one after another, long after it would have been fair for them to stop.
“This was my wonderful idea: What if I just keep you out of the way until I fffffind two others to give my master instead? It’s a perfect sssssolution. He gets what he wants, and I get what I want. Everybody’s happy.”
“Except for me,” Fernie said.
“Yesssss. You’ll never be happy ever again. You’ll never be anything but afraid. But who’s counting you?”
The picture on the screen changed again and again while he worked, revealing one room of the Gloom house after another. She saw a massive gong on a balcony, a glowing ball of fire hovering near a room with walls painted blue like the sky, an odd standing wardrobe with drawers that kept popping open and shut as dark, unfamiliar shapes leaped in and out, and a chandelier with thousands of black candles, each lit with something other than fire, which cast inky darkness instead of light.
And then he got the picture he wanted.
The empty space the TV had instead of a screen now showed the towering double doors at the entrance to the Gloom house. The light was grim and overcast, and the ground covered with the lawn’s usual ankle-deep mist, but it was still clearly sometime after sunrise, and to Fernie’s light-starved eyes it looked as bright as a day at the beach in the heart of summer.
The thought that she might not see anything as bright again, and might instead be spending the rest of a very short life in the company of the People Taker, was bad enough. But then the picture changed again and got much, much worse. Instead of being a picture of the Gloom family’s front door, it became a picture of the What family’s Fluorescent Salmon house, just as silly looking as it had been the day before, but now also the safest place in the entire world.
The front door opened.
Fernie’s dad emerged, dressed in a blue suit with a red tie, followed by Pearlie in blue jeans and a black T-shirt with a picture of a giant dinosaur burning down a Japanese city. The T-shirt bore the words GODZILLA SURVIVOR.
“See?” the People Taker asked. “One, two. Exactly the number I need to give Lord Obsidian in order to get to keep you for myself.”
Forgetting the invisible rope around her neck, Fernie cried out and tried to attack him. But the invisible bond held her tight.
Fernie’s father and sister began to cross the street, the picture following them as they went, just like it would have if there had been a cameraman following them.
Grinning, the People Taker inquired, “Would you like to know what I said to him?”
He made a fist of his right hand and stuck out his thumb and pinky to turn the fist into a mock telephone. A dial tone emerged. He didn’t dial—though it was clear that he could—but he did speak in the same gentle, likable, entirely human tones she had heard before while she was stuck in the sack and he was making his call. But this time his words weren’t muffled at all. They were perfectly clear, and they were so far from being the sounds made by the People Taker that even though she could see him making them, she could also imagine the kind of man they should have come from: a chubby-cheeked, sweater-wearing neighbor with a cute little mustache and a swirl of thin hair on top of an otherwise shiny bald head.
“Hello? Is this Mr. What? . . . Mr. What, I’m Brad Gloom. I live across the street.” He listened. “Yes, the big old house. I’m sorry for waking you up so early in the morning, but, gee, I didn’t want you to worry. Fernie’s okay.” He listened some more. “No, I’m afraid you won’t find her safe in her bed. It seems that your cat got loose late last night and she snuck out to go looking for him.” Some more listening. “Well, you’re right. As a father myself, I agree, it wasn’t the safest or smartest thing in the world for her to do, but she’s a little girl, and she loves her little cat. I can’t blame her.” A grin. “That’s right, they’re both over here, safe and sound. In fact, I made pancakes. Why don’t you and your other daughter come over here to join us? We’d love to meet you.”
He mimed hanging up the phone and grinned at her. On the TV, Fernie’s father and sister passed the front gate of the Gloom estate and began to approach the front door.
Had desperation alone been enough to give Fernie the strength she needed, she would have ripped herself free of the invisible rope, smashed the chair into toothpicks, and hurled the People Taker against the nearest wall. “Don’t you dare hurt them, you big . . .” There was no appropriate word. “I’ll make you pay if you do.”
He grinned. “I won’t hurt them. They’re not mine to hurt. My master, Lord Obsidian, will get to decide what to do with them. But you, Fffffernie . . . you will be mine.”
On the screen, Fernie’s father and sister arrived at the towering double doors of the Gloom mansion, which opened up for them. They peered inside, blinking at the darkness they saw within. Mr. What turned to Pearlie and said something Fernie couldn’t hear, no doubt an expert opinion on the kinds of accidents that can befall unlucky people whose houses aren’t adequately lit. Fernie couldn’t hear Pearlie’s answer, either, but it was easy enough to read the single word on her lips: Whatever.
Then they both entered, and the doors shut behind them.
“You know what?” the People Taker said. “I think I’m going to have fffffun with them. I think I’m going to actually let them go on thinking I’m going to make them pancakes. It’ll make the moment when I throw them into the Pit that much more enjoyable. Why don’t you watch and see how fffffunny it is.”
Fernie screamed in rage and frustration, while the chuckling People Taker left to take her family.
Pancakes would surely not be involved.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE PEOPLE TAKER MUST BE BRAD
The neighbors had always thought Gustav was the saddest little boy in the world. They thought this because he looked lonely behind the fence, and because he never seemed to smile, never seemed to show that he even knew how to smile.
But he had never truly known despair until he saw the People Taker stuff Fernie in his sack, pull the drawstring tight, and strut out the front door of the Too Much Sitting Room.
He hadn’t known despair until he heard Fernie crying his name, ordering him not to even dare think that any of this was his fault.
Gustav wasn’t sad that he was now stuck to this chair, part of this chair, forever.
He wasn’t sad that anybody who entered this room from now until the end of time would always find him, still sitting where he was now.
He wasn’t even sad that there was no escape from this predicament, not from now until the very end of the world.
There would be plenty of time to be sad about those things; enough time to forget that he ever was a boy who could get up, walk around, have adventures, and sometimes even go out into the yard and talk to other people.
But right now he couldn’t be sad about any of that. He could be sad only about a girl he’d just met for the first time the previous day, who had crossed the street, talked to him, invited him back across the street to meet her family, punched him in the shoulder, called his house stupid, hugged him, and called him a friend, and who had been so kind and brave that she’d taken time to worry about him being sad even as she was being stuffed in a sack and carried away to be thrown in the Pit for Lord Obsidian.
He hadn’t really had time to tell her much about himself: not what had happened to his real parents, not how he’d come to live with shadows, n
ot what would happen to him if he ever took one step outside his front yard. He would never be able to show her the fun parts of his house like the carousel or the arcade or even his favorite place, the Planetarium of the Neverworlds.
Nor would he ever have a chance to learn about the world she came from, about what her father was like and what her mother was like and what her sister was like and even what her stupid cat was like. He had wanted to ask her what it had been like to go to school and to walk around under the sun and have people around her who she could touch and talk to and hug as much as she wanted. Most of all, he wished he could ask her what it was like to live a life so special that even when she was being stuffed in a sack by the People Taker, she still had enough room in her heart to worry about how sad this would leave a boy she’d known for less than a day.
That all made Gustav sadder than he’d ever been, sadder than he’d ever known he could be. It made him so sad, in fact, that something happened to him that had not happened to him in years.
He began to cry.
The room blurred. His eyes burned. His tears welled over and streamed down his cheeks in waves. His nose stuffed up and began to run. He shook his head and wiped his face dry with the back of his jacket sleeve and . . .
. . . and . . .
“Wait a minute,” Gustav said.
He studied his right arm, which he’d just used to wipe his face. Doing that had required him to lift it off the armrest. The armrest that his arm was now supposed to be part of.
He put his arm back down on the armrest and then immediately picked it up again. He had no trouble moving it. Nor did he have any trouble moving his left arm. Nor, he discovered, did he have any trouble standing up.
“That’s interesting,” Gustav said.
He looked down at the chair he had just left. It looked exactly like all the other chairs in the room. It was, he knew, exactly like all the other chairs . . . and it should have trapped him in its eternal grip. Except that it hadn’t.
“I can stand,” he told the room. “I can walk.”
Two dozen people trapped in just as many chairs all shouted at him in just as many languages, all of them calling him their version of the name an English speaker called him. “Showoff!”
Gustav supposed that bragging about his personal miracle in the presence of all those people who were still trapped in their chairs had been a rude thing to do. “Sorry. I’m just surprised. This isn’t supposed to happen.”
“So it’s not supposed to happen,” one of the trapped figures growled. “We all know it’s not supposed to happen, and we all know that it happened, anyway. I’m sure you can find out why later on. Right now, why don’t you go do something useful with yourself other than stand there bragging? Like, gee, I don’t know . . . saving that poor girl?”
For a man who’d been stuck in an easy chair for the last few centuries, the fellow really did have a way of getting to the heart of a problem.
“Thank you,” Gustav said.
“Don’t waste time thanking me,” the trapped man snapped. “Just go!”
Gustav went.
He raced out the door and into the stairwell, taking the steps three at a time and hitting the first landing so fast that he turned himself around by grabbing the railing and swinging himself around like the end of a whip. He took the next set of steps four at a time, wishing that he were like one of his many shadow siblings who, when in a hurry, did not so much run as glide.
He ran thinking of Fernie and how she might be plunging helplessly into the Pit even now.
He threw open the door at the top of the stairs thinking of how he wouldn’t let that be true, how the People Taker might have taken his own sweet time carrying her there, and how there were any number of things that could have delayed them.
He burst out into the grand parlor, which was as always teeming with uncounted thousands of dark shapes drifting to and fro on their various mysterious errands. He ran around the grand staircase and toward the opposite wall, heading toward one particular passage out of many, as it was the fastest way to get to the Pit, and hating how far away it was.
His only hope was to get to the Pit as quickly as he could, get to Fernie if she hadn’t been thrown in yet, and somehow keep the People Taker busy enough for Fernie to run away. He knew that if he could not defeat the People Taker, the most he might be able to give Fernie was a one-minute head start. Gustav wasn’t about to give up even if that minute was the best he could do, but it really would have been nice to work out something more permanent.
He ran toward the corridor that would take him to the secret passage that would take him to the trapdoor that was the fastest possible way to the room where his new friend Fernie had probably already been thrown into the Pit. Then, all of a sudden, he heard a rich, worried voice way on the other side of the parlor, calling, “Hello!?!? Mr. Gloom?”
Gustav recognized the voice. He had heard it once before, when the man who owned it had been standing across the street listening to Mrs. Everwiner’s story about the rude cashier.
A girl said, “This house has ghosts! Why couldn’t we live here?”
Her voice sounded so much like Fernie’s, only older, that Gustav’s heart suffered a pang at the thought that he might not have his new friend Fernie any longer.
Already knowing what he was about to see and how much it would complicate his problems, Gustav turned toward the source of the voices. Fernie’s father and older sister stood at the entrance to the grand parlor, gaping at the sights they had found inside the Gloom household.
The man seemed one step away from panic. The girl seemed incapable of considering that there might be reason for any.
Neither one spotted Gustav right away because he was on the opposite side of the parlor and there were too many overlapping shadows wandering about between them. They didn’t notice when Gustav, doing what he knew Fernie would have wanted him to do, turned his back on his only chance to rescue her and started running toward them instead in order to warn them away before they wandered into more trouble.
But as Gustav started to run toward them, the People Taker emerged from one of the side hallways to stride across the room with a big friendly and utterly lying grin on his face.
For some reason Gustav didn’t know, the People Taker had disguised himself. He no longer wore the short cape or the crooked top hat. He had changed into a white T-shirt and a pair of shorts as well as a chef’s hat and a white apron bearing the words PANCAKE CHEF. To Gustav, who knew him, the apron just made him a menacing killer who happened to be wearing a chef’s hat and an apron that said PANCAKE CHEF. But the getup already seemed enough to reassure Mr. What, who strolled toward him extending a friendly hand. “Hi! You must be Brad!”
Gustav could already tell that he wouldn’t reach the Whats before the People Taker did.
But maybe he could still warn them. Maybe he could still impart the danger in words they would believe and get them to run away before it was too late. He threw out his hand and opened his mouth to yell, “No, get away! That’s not Brad; that’s not anything that could possibly be thought of as a Brad.”
But before he could speak, the air before him got impossibly colder and darker, and he knew that he was already far too late.
An inky blackness swept across the floor like an evil wind, taking on the form of a silent whirlwind that rose from the tiles in his path to swallow up all the space between Gustav and the strangers he would have given his life to save. A mouth wide enough to swallow four of him whole and still have room for fries gaped wide, revealing that the familiar monster was even darker on the inside than it was on the outside.
There was no chance of going around it.
There was no chance of getting past it.
And there was no chance of outrunning it.
The Beast had caught up with him.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
FERNIE WATCHES THE WORST TELEVISION SHOW EVER
Depending on the way Fernie What looked at it, the People Taker had been either a really considerate maniac or a very cruel one. He’d left the television set on for her and allowed her to watch her father and sister as they ventured, impressed and apprehensive but determined to be good neighbors, down the long entrance hallway of the Gloom mansion.
Like most characters on television doing something that was about to get them killed, they didn’t hear anybody watching them tell them that they were about to be killed.
Like anybody who had ever watched a scary movie, Fernie asked the universe at the top of her lungs, “How could anybody be stupid enough to walk into this house and walk down that hall and not know it’s bad news?”
The universe was far too polite to point out that she’d done the same thing in search of a lost cat just a few hours earlier.
On the screen, her father and sister arrived and stood at the entrance to the main parlor, their eyes wide as they took in all the hundreds, or thousands, of dark shapes milling about in the room before them.
Mr. What’s mouth fell open, but his eyes looked busy. Behind them, Fernie knew, sat a brain counting all the unpadded edges, all the sharp places that could be brushed against, all the shadows where loose nails could be hiding. The grand staircase would of course be the worst thing he saw, as staircases were just teeming with possible accidents. To him, the hundreds of ghostly shapes wandering to and fro before his eyes might not have been even nearly as disturbing as all the possible places where a careless person could trip.
Pearlie didn’t seem to have made up her mind what to think of the house or all of the strange shapes moving around inside, but from the light beginning to dawn in her eyes, she was about to declare how much she loved it.
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