Gustav Gloom and the People Taker (9781101620748) (4 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

“THE PEOPLE TAKER IS LOOSE”

Fernie What stood at the iron fence and shone her flashlight into the darkness. It didn't help much.

She waved the beam around. “Come on, Harrington! Want some noogums?”

Noogums
, the family term for the smelly, brown canned glop that constituted most of Harrington's diet, was one of the human phrases he definitely understood, along with
good cat
,
bedtime
, and—thanks to Fernie's dad—
emergency safety procedures
.

Normally, a cry of
noogums
brought Harrington running. But the only cat answer from within the shifting darkness of the Gloom property was a distant wail followed by an angry hiss.

“Harrington! You come back here right
now
!”

As anybody who owns a cat could have predicted, that didn't work even a little bit.

Fernie swung the flashlight beam across the Gloom yard, finding nothing between the fence and the house but the smoky blackness that Gustav seemed to have instead of a lawn. It was only when the light passed the Gloom family's front door that she spotted a familiar shape cowering on the front steps just before the two giant front doors. It was Harrington, whose eyes glowed green the way cats' eyes do when light hits them just right. The second he saw that he was being looked at, he let out the most pitiful of all possible meows, which was very pitiful indeed.

Though he sat in the center of the spotlight, he cast no shadow.

Fernie called to him again, shouting, “Noogums!” in a way that promised the biggest bowl of noogums any cat had ever seen.

Harrington looked interested, but cats prefer claims like that to be verified.

“Stupid cat,” Fernie muttered.

This was not a very nice thing to say, but it happened to be true.

Fernie's arm had started to hurt where the shadow Harrington had clawed her, so she wasn't exactly eager to face that strange beast again. But the only other choices were to go back home with her cat still in danger or to stay at the fence promising him noogums all night long, so she inched along the row of iron bars until she reached the gate, which was unlocked and swung inward with a push. The little tendrils of fog curled at the edges of the Gloom property, melting almost at once wherever they spread past the fence line.

“This is your last chance, stupid cat! You can come out by yourself and have some noogums, or you can wait there for me to get you and be in
big
trouble!”

Harrington licked his paw and considered his options. Any fear he might have had of the giant shadow cat, wherever it was, seemed to have evaporated out of his little head.

Fernie stepped over the property line onto the Gloom estate. To her it felt like brushing aside a soft silk curtain and walking into a room where the air was cooler and the light was dimmer and the floor was the source of a draft.

Between the gate and the steps to those big doors where Harrington sat licking his paw, she heard a number of soft voices murmuring things she couldn't understand. Somebody said, “Ooh, pretty.” Somebody else said, “Another one for the People Taker.” A third voice said, “Poor girl,” in a voice as sad as the one Fernie's aunt Sybil fell into whenever she watched sad movies where the family dog dies at the end.

Fernie didn't want to think much about who those voices belonged to and what they were saying, but they didn't bother her even half as much as the sudden squeal of rusty hinges.

Those big front doors were opening.

“Oh no!” Fernie cried as she started to run.

She knew that Harrington, like all cats, loved open doors.

Cats love open doors even if they have no idea what's on the other side.

In fact, cats love open doors
especially
when they don't know what's on the other side.

She didn't have time to realize that this was also a pretty good description of the mistake she was making by passing through the front gate of the Gloom estate without telling anybody where she was going . . . and by racing up those three front steps after her cat.

By the time she reached the front stoop, Harrington's question mark of an upright tail was wagging a little good-bye wave as he nosed his way into the darkness.

“No!” Fernie yelled. “Harrington, stop!”

She grabbed for him, but by then she was past the front door herself, watching the tip of his tail turn the corner at the end of the long front hall.

The end of the hall was too far away to make sense even for a house this big, and the blackness too thick even for a house this dark.

When Fernie shone her flashlight down the hall, the beam had no trouble casting light on the framed paintings lining the walls or the dusty chandeliers hanging from the ceiling or the long, narrow dingy red carpet marking the path she'd have to walk if she decided to go any farther. But it wouldn't light up that blackness at the end of the hall.

Fernie almost turned back. As much as she hated to give up on Harrington, she had read a number of books and been to a number of movies about haunted houses and knew that the people reading those books or watching those movies always yell at the girl who walks deeper into the haunted house for being so stupid.

Fernie had to admit that this was pretty much the same situation, and if her life ever became a book or a movie, she wouldn't want anybody reading it to call her stupid for continuing to chase her cat into darkness. So she glanced over her shoulder just long enough to make sure that the way out was still clear and saw that it wasn't.

The doorway was full of dark shapes coming in after her.

There were too many to count: things shaped like people and things shaped like dogs and things shaped like big black birds and things shaped like giant clutching hands and things that looked like about six or seven of all those other things mashed together so they didn't look like people or dogs or birds or hands but what happens when you melt them all together into a big wriggling mess.

The Harrington shadow was just one of them, and though it wasn't as big as a tiger anymore, it was still a cat Fernie could see through. It leaped past all the other shadows to dart through the gap between Fernie's legs and down the hall after the real cat.

The dark shapes approaching her all spoke in soft, whispery voices.

“Little girl,” one said.

“You're trespassing,” another said.

“You shouldn't be out tonight,” a third said.

“The People Taker is loose,” a fourth warned.

They reached for her, their long, gray see-through hands giving off a smoky mist wherever they passed through the bright light of Fernie's flashlight beam.

Fernie did something she had never done before in her life, something that she had often promised herself she would never ever do if attacked by monsters. She screamed like a girl.

She turned around and ran farther into the house, her Frankenstein's monster–head slippers pounding the red carpet as she fled down the long hallway. She ran past framed paintings that didn't seem to be anything but big black squares, past walls that seemed to shift and dance as she ran by, past decorative vases twice her size and dark shapes that poked their gray heads out of them as if disturbed from their slumber. Other dark shapes raced along the walls and ceiling, their long arms reaching out for her as she ran, and their voices whispering things like “Get out,” and “You should not be here,” and “Stay away from the Pit.”

Scared as she was, Fernie didn't like that “Stay away from the Pit” business, especially since she still couldn't see past the darkness at the end of the hall. It crossed her mind that maybe she should stop, but somehow that idea didn't get to her legs, which were quite happy running.

She ran past the end of the hall into a grand parlor of some kind, many stories taller than the house had looked from across the street. There were at least a dozen ornate staircases, each leading to balconies on upper floors, each crowded with more shadowy figures peering over the railing and pointing at Fernie. She could not see a ceiling, just an endless field of darkness as vast as the sky. But the walls were alive with shadows, including more giant cats and a few giant dogs and a big swarm of something that could only be bats.

The floor was a polished tile of some kind, and when she tried to evade a crowd of looming shapes directly in her path, she went into an uncontrolled slide. Fernie tried to brake before she slid right into them but was moving too fast. Passing through them was like passing through a cold breeze. She grabbed the armrest of a couch to stop herself, fell to her knees, and screeched as others lunged for her again.

“Little girl . . .”

“The People Taker will get you, little girl . . .”

She got up and fled without any particular direction in mind, fleeing down one of a number of hallways branching out from this main room.

More shadows, a mob of them, loomed ahead. Another hallway opened up to her left. She ducked down that one and then another opened to her right, and she was so panicked that she took that one, too, even though she knew by then that these were too many confusing turns and that she was getting herself lost.

Making it all worse somehow was the distant sound of Harrington's meow, somehow just ahead of her and a million miles away at the same time.

The small problem was that she would never find him, not in all of this.

The bigger problem was that she was beginning to doubt that she would ever find her way back to the front door, either.

She started to slow down, at least enough for the doors on both sides of the current hall to stop going by in such a blur. She saw that they didn't match one another. There were bright white doors and dark wooden doors and doors with curved tops and doors too small for mice to get through. There were even a few doorways without actual doors in them, just black openings as hard to see past as the blackness at the end of the entrance hall had been.

By the time she slowed to a stop at a place where two long corridors crossed, she seemed to have traveled miles. Harrington's meow sounded so close that she might have been able to reach out and touch him. But he was nowhere to be seen.

“Cat,” she said to him, not knowing if he could hear her but hoping he could, “you and I are going to have a real long talk.”

Wherever he was, he meowed, which meant either “I know, I know, this is all my fault,” or “It wasn't my idea to move into this neighborhood.”

She spun a little because she was dizzy, and she fell down, feeling even more stupid than she'd felt a second before, because after that spin she was no longer quite sure which of the four long hallways around her she'd just come running from. There seemed to be thousands of doors stretching in every direction as far as her eyes could see, but there didn't seem to be any of those dark moving shapes around right now.

She was lost, and she didn't have the slightest idea what to do next. This was not nearly as simple and fun as a mere rickety staircase with loose boards and protruding nails.

She was alarmed to feel her eyes burn in the special way that announces the arrival of tears.

“No,” she told herself. “Absolutely not. That will not be helpful at all. You can cry like a baby for an hour, and when you're done, you will still be in the same stupid place with the same stupid problems. Find the stupid cat, then find the stupid way out, and then bawl all you want. But crying now is stupid.”

She dabbed at her eyes and turned around in a complete circle, taking another careful look at the four dark corridors stretching away from her. No direction seemed any better than any other. But then she thought of something that made her feel a whole lot better.

When you're lost in a big, confusing place, it helps to have more than one good thing to look for.

Finding Harrington would be a good thing.

Finding the way back out afterward would be even better.

But in the meantime, she'd have a lot of help finding
both
if she could just find that boy, Gustav Gloom.

CHAPTER SIX

THE BEAST IN THE LIBRARY

Fernie started trying the doors and calling Gustav's name along with Harrington's. She didn't find the boy or the cat, but she did find more confusing things.

One door opened up into a room that seemed to be filled with dark shapes that resembled giant rabbits. Another had straight-backed wooden chairs that were running around in circles while making race car noises.

Then she turned a crystal doorknob and found a room so strange that for a few seconds she forgot all the others.

It was the largest library she had ever seen, occupying a circular room with walls that towered all the way from the carpeted floor at the entrance to what looked like miles above her. She craned her neck to follow the shelves as they reached toward the sky and got a headache when she spotted the place far above where all those endless shelves came together at a single dot.

A long ramp of a walkway started at the door and spiraled up along the wall, circling and circling until it also hurt her eyes to see how far up it went. Thin black candles burned along the wooden railing, one every few steps for as far as her eyes could see. Fernie couldn't imagine an army of people with a world of matches ever having the time to light them all, let alone clean up all the wax drippings. They were the only lights around, but there were so many of them—millions, she supposed. They came together high above her head in a flickering light like a sun.

The books all had black leather covers without any visible titles. She ran her pointer finger along a couple of them and, despite not having the time to read any books right now, couldn't resist pulling one off the shelf, just to see what kind of book it was.

It turned out to be the biggest and heaviest book she'd ever held. She struggled with it, placing it flat on the stone floor so she could turn the first page and then the second and then the third.

The pages were all, like so much in that house, as black as night.

She took a closer look at one of the pages and saw from the dim impression of glossy black lettering against glossy black paper that the book wasn't blank, but had words in it the same black color as the paper that could be seen only if you squinted and strained and held the pages at just the right angle, revealing the places where the shiny ink caught just enough of the light to be seen.

Doing everything she could to read just one of those words, a
the
, was so much trouble that she couldn't imagine why anybody would read further to find out “the” what.

She was still straining to return the volume to the shelf where she'd found it when the nearest candles seemed to flicker with a sudden draft and a cold voice high above her explained, “It's an idea.”

“What?”

“The book,” the voice explained. “It's an idea. Do you know how many great ideas are never born?”

She looked up and thought she could see a man coming down the ramp, maybe a hundred feet above her. “I don't know. A lot?”

The man continued to descend, leaning over the balcony and peering down at her as he went. Fernie couldn't see his face because he had long, stringy hair that hung over his cheeks like a pair of curtains, shading his face from the light of all those flickering candles. His top hat was tall and narrow and bent in the middle.

“More than fffffive?” he said, rolling the
f
.

“I suppose a lot more than five,” Fernie guessed.

“More than a hunnnnndred?” he whispered, drawing out the word.

As he descended the long spiral walkway, slowly making his way down to her, Fernie had to keep turning in circles to keep him in sight. “I guess there must be zillions.”

“Even more than zzzzzillions,” he said, running his black-gloved hand along the railing as he made his way toward her. “A zzzzzillion zzzzzillion zzzzzillion.” He made the words sound like the buzzing of wasps.

He was not a shadow. He was a man, though a man who dressed all in black and seemed as much at home in this near darkness as any shadow possibly could. Fernie didn't need to wait until this man reached her to already know that he had nothing good in mind. But there was something about his voice, something about the calm way he spoke and the unhurried way he moved, that kept her rooted in place, unable to make it to the door and run away.

He said, “You have fffffound a library of all the ideas that never came to be; all the great books never written, all the dangerousssss visions never imagined, all the great inventions that poor men could have built and made themselves rich. Why, that very book you just looked at has what would have been the greatest poem ever written, until some sssssilly man knocked on the poet's door, interrupted his day, took up his time, and put all those great lines right out of his brilliant head and back into the world of shadowsssss. Can you imagine that, Fffffernie? Can you even guesssss what elssssse is hidden here?”

The man in black wasn't the only thing making its way down from high above. Something else clung to the shelves, so high above her that she couldn't make out its exact shape. But it seemed to change its form every time it swung down to the next set of shelves. It reminded her of something. A feeling she knew well, had seen many times, and didn't like.

As she watched, it jumped from one curve of the walkway, many floors up, across the open space to another curve several levels below, clinging to the railing for a second before yet another leap across open space.

It had more arms and legs than Fernie wanted to think about.

Either way, it looked like there was a race over whether the man in black or the monster with the familiar shape was going to get to her first.

“Fffffernie?” asked the man in black, making the first letter of her name sound just like all the air going out of a dying balloon. “I sssssaid, can you guesssss what
else
is hidden in this library?”

He was now only five or six turns of the walkway above her, close enough for her to see that his black suit included the hint of a cape, ending halfway down his back. His pointed, white teeth were like headlights in the blackness that, for the moment, hid the rest of his face.

Fernie found her voice. “How do you know my name?”

“I know a lot of things, Fffffernie. I was watching and listening from a window when you moved in across the street. I found that nice and convenient, because you're exactly the kind of person I like to
take
. But you haven't answered my question. Do you know what elssssse is hidden here?”

“Why don't you just tell me?”

“All the life-saving ideas. All the brilliant strokes of geniusssss that could have saved any number of poor people who found themselves in terrible danger. All the ways they could have gotten off sssssinking ships. All the ways they could have gotten out of burning houses. All the ways they could have essssscaped the bad men like me who were going to
take
them. There are many books here that could help you get away, Fffffernie. Many.” The man in black chuckled. “Would you like to know where on the shhhhhelves you'd find them?”

The shapeless monster jumped again, falling past many levels of walkway before wrapping its claws around the railing on the loop of walkway just over the man's head. As she watched, it turned its head, located Fernie, and tensed up, less than a second from jumping down the rest of the way.

Too late, Fernie's legs unfroze. She spun in place and darted for the library door, knowing even as she reached for the crystal doorknob that she was not nearly fast enough, that the monster had already leaped and would land between her and the door.

He landed right in front of her with a powerful
thud
, a wall of fur and muscle and too many arms and legs to count, all between her and the hallway where all she'd had to worry about was being lost.

It should have been close enough to see now, but Fernie's eyes refused to make sense of any one part of it, from the mouth that seemed to be as big as the rest of it put together, to the eyes that looked like eyes only until she looked at them, and then looked like other mouths. Its two biggest arms, that were so much bigger than Fernie herself, still looked ridiculously small compared to the rest of it. None of it made sense.

Fernie couldn't have described it with a thousand words or painted a decent picture of it with a warehouse of watercolors, the help of the best artist in the world, and a white wall the size of a barn. But as the thing reached for her, taking its time, she suddenly knew where she had seen it before.

At night sometimes, when she'd been so tired or lazy that she forgot to throw her dirty clothes in the hamper and instead just tossed them onto the back of her desk chair . . . sometimes she woke up and the light coming in through the crack of the door shone on the combination of clothes and chair and made a shapeless but terrible monster.

Without thinking, she did what she'd always done to make it go away.

She shone her flashlight at it.

The result was almost as terrible as letting the thing get her. The circle of light at the end of the beam lit up a part of its face that looked like a bath mat somebody had tossed into a mud puddle. There were more eyes and shapes that looked like angry black worms. But the touch of the flashlight beam made the monster cry out and fall back, smoke rising from fresh burns on its skin. It slammed against the door, still between Fernie and escape as it reached for her with arms like tree trunks. Fernie ducked and felt an awful hot wind pass through the air right over her head.

“Very nice,” said the man in black. “That's one fffffine idea that won't gather dust on these shelves. But it's only a
sssssmall
idea, one that won't save you for more than a few ssssseconds. I'll still get to
take
you.”

There was something about the way he kept saying
take
that made the word the most terrible thing Fernie had ever heard.

Using both hands to hold her flashlight before her, Fernie could think of nothing to do but keep it pointed at the monster's face.

Then it charged her again.

Fernie was sure she was dead, but it blundered right past her and slammed into the shelves with a mighty crash. Books flew everywhere. The impossible monster reached one impossible arm around its impossible back to swipe at its impossible shoulders.

It was only when it staggered back into the center of the floor and toward her again that Fernie was able to tear her gaze away from the awful mess it had instead of a proper face long enough to pay attention to the form riding those shoulders: the strangely familiar dark outline of a young girl, punching it again and again with fists Fernie could see through.

The beast swiped at this girl shape but couldn't seem to reach her no matter how hard it tried.

High above her, the man in black said, “Oh, well. I can always come down there and
take
you myself.”

Then somebody grabbed Fernie by her left wrist and yanked, hard. She found herself being pulled toward the shelves with all their unreadable books, caught a glimpse of a pale hand pulling her along, and found herself kneeling in a narrow, cramped little closet just as a panel slid down and locked everything in the library out.

One tremendous crash later, the panel cracked, but held.

Fernie shone her flashlight at the face of the boy who had pulled her into the closet.

“Hello,” said Gustav Gloom.