Fernie also had advice to offer. “Also, it’s okay to scream really loud. I ride roller coasters all the time, and I’ve found out it’s less scary if you scream and make screaming a fun thing to do.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said gravely. “Good luck, Fernie What.”
“Good luck, Hans Gloom.”
The front yard of the shadow version of the house inside the house—which was not just a fake lawn like the original, but a fake of the fake—seemed to contract to about half its prior size, as Penny’s shadow gathered up her substance for a leap at the exit. The awful sounds she had blocked out grew a little easier to hear, enough to chill Fernie when she considered just how bad they would sound when they were no longer blocked at all. Penny’s shadow drew close and brushed a transparent hand against Mr. Gloom’s shoulder and Fernie’s curly hair. The shadow woman knit her brow in concern and said, “I should be able to return in two minutes or less, but there’s no telling what’s waiting for me on the other side of the hatch. If I’m stopped, or if I can’t come back at all . . .”
Hans Gloom finished the sentence for her: “. . . you would have already done more than I ever could have asked of you.”
Penny’s shadow turned to Fernie next. “And you, Fernie? Are you ready?”
She gulped. “Why not?”
Penny’s shadow waited until Hans Gloom had once again covered Fernie’s ears with his hands, and Fernie had once again plugged his ears with her fingers. Then, on the count of three, she left. The shadow version of the house inside the house and the room that surrounded it went liquid and flowed toward the shadow woman like dirty water circling a drain, then started to spill upward as she slipped through the crack in the hatch.
Then it was gone, and she was gone, and all that remained was the Screaming Room.
Fernie had already experienced a few seconds of it once, but Penny’s shadow must have rescued her before it got too bad, because the difference between that experience and this one was like the difference between getting a few freckles from the sun and being burned lobster red. The sounds made by the shadows imprisoned in this room were the screams of things that had never known a single moment of hope or joy, things that knew that every moment they endured imprisonment was going to be worse than all the moments that had ever come before.
In no time at all, Fernie started screaming, too, and not because it put her in control of her fear, the way she was on roller coasters. She screamed because the sounds they made really were worse than anything she had ever known.
She felt her mind start to go, and vaguely remembered a bit of advice she’d been given about chanting the name of somebody who was depending on her. But though the faces came to her, the names did not. She remembered a kind and protective man who seemed to do nothing but worry about her but whose presence had always made her feel safe and loved. She remembered a brave and adventurous woman who had always told her that she could be anything she wanted to be. She remembered a girl very much like herself, only taller, who was smart and funny and an example of everything she wanted to become. But the names of her father and mother and sister receded from her, knocked right out of her head by the terrible sounds she could not cast out. The only name available to her was one that she might not have been able to remember on her own, but that the man before her kept shouting in a voice like thunder.
“GUSTAV! GUSTAV! GUSTAV!”
She found her voice. “GUSTAV! GUSTAV! GUSTAV!”
They each chanted the name separately, and then somehow found a rhythm and started chanting it together. “GUSTAV! GUSTAV! GUSTAV!”
His voice and her voice became one big voice, standing alone against everything that was destructive and terrible.
Then she was ripped from the small comfort of the chant into what felt like the worst nightmare of all time, in which she was chased through a dark place filled with jagged shapes and horrible faces by a monster who would not stop chasing her no matter how fast she ran. She didn’t know what the thing was, only that it was much larger than herself and intent on devouring her. She lashed out at it, heard it roar in response, and shrieked as its clawed hands reached for her:
“GUSTAV! GUSTAV! GUSTAV!”
A familiar voice cried: “Fernie! That’s enough!”
She had the sense that whoever it was had been trying to make herself heard over her own nonstop shouting of Gustav’s name.
She blinked the mental cobwebs away and realized that she was now lying flat on her back in some dim alcove, not far from the hatch. Two figures knelt beside her, one on each side. Hans Gloom, who looked even paler than he had before, knelt to her left, patting her hand, and Penny’s shadow knelt on her right, brushing her cheek with a touch like a soft summer breeze.
She wouldn’t exactly call the alcove quiet. She could still hear the creaks and echoes of the castle, as well as the cries of distant prisoners. But after the Screaming Room, the relative silence felt wonderful. She realized that she’d failed to notice it for several minutes now, as Hans Gloom and Penny’s shadow labored in vain to make her realize that the worst was over.
The shadow woman drew closer. “Fernie? Do you know where you are?”
“I’m . . . somewhere in Lord Obsidian’s castle, I guess. Deep in the Dark Country, but it looks like we’ve gotten out of the Screaming Room. Am I right?”
Penny’s shadow looked like she was about to cry. “Yes, honey. Yes. You’re right. That’s where we are, just down the hall from the Screaming Room. I’m so happy you came back to us. For a while there we both thought we’d lost you.”
Fernie winced in genuine pain. “Ow.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I bit my cheek. I have one of those lumps on it now, that I’ll have to keep on accidentally biting all day. I hate when that happens.”
Hans Gloom flashed a smile, which was by far one of the brightest things Fernie had ever seen in the Dark Country. There was a fresh set of parallel scratches on his left cheek, running almost all the way from his ear to the corner of his lips. “Me too, honey. How are you doing, aside from that?”
“I’ve also got a sore throat from yelling. Wait. We were yelling a lot. Shouldn’t we be worried about the guards coming to investigate?”
“We would,” Penny’s shadow said, “if you’d been doing any of that yelling anywhere but just outside the Screaming Room, or down this corridor where all the most despised prisoners are kept. I’m afraid that screaming and yelling is an expected part of the local atmosphere down here. It wouldn’t worry anybody unless those sounds suddenly stopped.”
Now that Penny’s shadow mentioned it, Fernie could hear distant muffled cries coming from every direction; her own yelling, loud as it was, wouldn’t have added much.
She shuddered at the thought of a place so terrible that it was more disturbing for screams to stop than for them to start. “What about all the shadows still chained in the Screaming Room? Shouldn’t we try to rescue them, too?”
“They’re so mad, they would fight us if we tried. Freeing them, and curing them of their insanity, is something that’s going to have to wait for another time. Meanwhile, you need to concentrate on getting back your strength so we can move on and not waste this escape on gestures that would just leave the two of you trapped again.”
Fernie hated to leave any creature, even a mad shadow, behind in the Screaming Room, but had to admit to herself that Penny’s shadow was right.
A few seconds later she noticed something else that could be important, something that had been next to invisible inside the illusion Penny’s shadow made. She asked Hans, “Where’s your shadow, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” said Hans Gloom. “Where’s yours?”
“In the world of light, somewhere. She was missing for a while even before I left to come here. Where did you last see yours?”
“Just before Lord Obs
idian’s forces captured me. I saw that I was about to be taken, and told my shadow to flee and save himself. He said that he would continue the fight as best he could, but that’s the last I heard. I don’t know what’s happened to him.”
“I hope he’s okay,” said Fernie.
“So do I,” said Hans Gloom. “But I guess that’s one of the many things I’ll have to wait to find out.”
Fernie glanced at Penny’s shadow, noting for the first time just how much the shadow of Gustav’s mother bore on her face the features echoed on Gustav’s. Even so, the sight of a shadow, any shadow, brought back some of the horror Fernie had experienced in the Screaming Room. “How long were we in there without your protection?”
Penny’s shadow said, “A little less than two minutes, dear girl.”
“It . . . felt like a lot more than that.”
“I was back almost immediately. But by the time I returned to the room and opened the hatch for you, you were so out of your mind with terror that you didn’t recognize Hans anymore. The poor man had to chase you into the worst part of the room’s madness just to rescue you.”
Fernie turned back to Hans Gloom and considered the kind of courage it would take any man to run headlong into madness just to save a little girl he barely knew. She supposed it would have required even more bravery, even more disregard of his own safety, than running into a burning building to save somebody, because a hero who failed to make his way back out of a burning building could only give up his life, but somebody who failed to make his way out of the Screaming Room would be stuck in there forever.
She gave a second hard look at the scratches on Hans Gloom’s cheek, and winced. “Don’t tell me I gave you those.”
“Don’t worry,” said Hans Gloom, with a wink. “It wasn’t something I ever planned to tell you.”
Some occasions require a teary hug before anybody involved can move on to anything else. This was one of them. It wasn’t the first teary hug Fernie had given or received in the Dark Country, or even the first hug she had given Hans Gloom. But like all teary hugs, it made things a little bit better for as long as it lasted. Fernie had to remind herself that this was exactly the kind of thing Lord Obsidian didn’t seem to want in the world, any world, anymore, and the thought was so sad that for a moment she hugged Hans Gloom even more tightly before letting go to wipe her eyes dry.
“Okay,” she said, as he helped her to her feet. “On to the next thing.”
“I agree,” he said, giving a few light brushes to her shoulders to clean off some of the dust. “Have any ideas?”
Fernie said, “Don’t you want to help Gustav?”
“I’m desperate to help Gustav, Fernie. I’m desperate just to meet him for the first time. But I also know the difference between doing something that’ll get us captured right away and doing something useful. The problem is, I’m out of practice when it comes to whatever one’s supposed to do in enemy castles where evil minions hold a thousand-to-one advantage. Right now, I don’t even have the beginnings of a plan. Do you?”
Fernie felt a grin spread across her face as she remembered Gustav’s odd explanations of the difference between an idea and a plan.
She said, “Yes.”
It happened to be a brilliant plan, too: starting with the release of the screaming shadows as a distraction, moving on past freeing Pearlie and, with any luck, Dad, and finally leading an entire army of the chained and oppressed to a final confrontation with Lord Obsidian.
It was a perfectly brilliant plan in that it was also the way she wanted things to work out, and how they really would have worked out had life been more like books.
But unfortunately, it wasn’t going to be that simple.
Because even as she took a deep breath and started to launch into it, a squad of Lord Obsidian’s minions drifted around the nearest bend of the corridor.
“Well, now,” said Gnulbotz, as the minions behind him unsheathed their swords. “This is convenient. We were just coming to fetch you . . .”
CHAPTER TEN
Reunion
Over at the Dungeon of Those Who Await, a familiar and beloved voice said, “Pearlie?”
She still didn’t trust what she was hearing until Not-Roger gently stepped forward and turned her around, forcing her to face the man who stood before her with a disbelieving expression that mirrored her own.
He had been through a rough time since they’d been apart, that was certain. Scraped knees showed through rips in his trousers, and the left lens of his eyeglasses had popped out of its frame at some point, which looked particularly odd since the existing right lens worked like a magnifying glass, and the absence of the left one made him look like he had eyes of two completely different sizes. He also wore only one shoe, and his own shadow, clinging close to him like a protective babysitter, looked as frayed at the edges as an old sleeve. But aside from all that he was the man she knew. “Pearlie.”
She whispered, “Daddy.”
Both What girls usually called their father “Dad” these days; they hadn’t used the more childlike “Daddy” since kindergarten. But Pearlie was perfectly happy to feel like a much littler girl right now, as she and her father staggered toward each other and did what came naturally.
They were only vaguely aware of Caliban and Anemone and Not-Roger and his shadow, all arriving together just about then, applauding.
The next few minutes went pretty much the way they had to.
First, father and daughter hugged, and they were splendid hugs indeed, salted with tears and many cries of “Are you all right?” that were inevitably answered by “I’m fine, fine, what about you?”
This was a moment of perfect happiness.
Alas, the time then came for each of them to have a few seconds being less than perfectly happy, which Mr. What took care of by saying how sorry he was that Pearlie had gotten caught, and Pearlie took care of by telling her father how sorry she was that it had taken her so long to find him.
This was followed by the time it took for each of them to spend a few minutes describing just what they’d been up to since they’d been separated, which in Mr. What’s case wasn’t all that long as he’d been trapped in a dungeon with Pearlie’s shadow and nothing useful to do but keep hoping for the best, and in Pearlie’s case required an explanation of the word gnarfle.
Hearing the explanation of the monstrous gnarfle, Mr. What said, “That doesn’t sound like it was much fun to deal with at all.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” said Pearlie.
“I miss the poor beast,” said Not-Roger. “One of the best pets I ever had.”
Then came the part of the conversation where Pearlie had to introduce the patiently waiting Not-Roger to her father, and Not-Roger had to explain that, yes, Not-Roger was really the closest thing to a name he still seemed to have.
They all heard a horrible distant scream, just around then, and realized that something significant had happened, probably involving Gustav . . . but there was nothing that could be done about that right away, so they arrived at the next part of the conversation, the one that wasn’t about the father and daughter catching up.
First the human beings and their shadow allies found a part of the dungeon that could accommodate them all in privacy. It was an alcove under a stairway that didn’t head up or down or sideways but simply twisted, as if it had had a terrible argument with itself and lost. All around them, lost shadows and the occasional trapped human being traveled the aimless steps that headed from no place special to nowhere in particular, moaning about the heartbreak of knowing that there was no way out.
Anemone explained that Scrofulous had condemned her and Caliban and Not-Roger’s shadow to the Dungeon of Those Who Await only a few minutes after condemning Pearlie and Not-Roger there. “Of course,” she said, “I knew you and Not-Roger were somewhere around here, so we’ve been looking for
you. We followed the commotion we heard. We spotted your dad from a distance and were hurrying to catch up with him, just before he found you.”
“That was convenient,” opined Not-Roger.
Anemone patted him on the wrist. “Not all that convenient, dear. It still leaves us in the dungeon of one of the most evil beings who ever existed.”
“It does save us a little bother,” said Not-Roger. “But isn’t that the way it always works? Whenever two groups of people are trying to find each other in a crowded place, it’s always best if one stays put. That way they’re not both looking and unknowingly chasing each other in circles, looking in all the places that they can’t possibly know the other bunch has just left. The group helping Pearlie and the group helping Pearlie’s dad could have looked for each other forever, that way.”
“What’s most convenient,” Pearlie said, “is that Anemone here managed to recognize my father without ever meeting him before.”
“I have met him before,” Anemone said.
“Really?” Mr. What said. “I don’t remember you.”
“You wouldn’t,” Pearlie said. “At least, you wouldn’t remember her wearing this face or calling herself by this name. But just before we all got ourselves captured, I heard Fernie figuring out who she really is—a shadow we all know well, who’s only disguising herself as this stranger Anemone.”
Mr. What went through the process of elimination in his head, and exclaimed, “You don’t mean Great-Aunt Melli—”
“You’re right,” Anemone said quickly, her lovely features blurring to provide them all with a quick glimpse of the sweet old-woman shadow who had watched over Gustav in his mother’s absence. “But don’t say it out loud. I’m one of the leaders of the anti-Obsidian resistance. If his minions ever found out who I truly was, they would lock me, and you, in a much more terrible place than this.”
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