Gustav Gloom and the People Taker (9781101620748) (9 page)

She almost allowed herself to hope that she and Gustav were winning.

And then the People Taker, faced with the need to do something with the boy in his hand so he could take care of the girl at his feet, did something terrible that Fernie hadn't considered at all.

He threw Gustav away.

Fernie happened to see Gustav's face as he sailed backward, reaching out with both arms. His eyes, meeting hers, were filled with apologies, saying more than any number of words ever would have been able to.

He landed in the seat of one of the empty high-backed chairs.

His arms and legs fell into place a fraction of a second later, his hands landing palms-down on the armrests.

He did not get up.

He didn't even turn his head, which had hit the seat back and must have become part of it at once. But a terrible, despairing expression appeared on his face. He cried out, “Fernie!”

Fernie screamed, “Gustav!”

This was a mistake, as screaming meant releasing her jaw's grip on the People Taker's ankle, and while biting his ankle now seemed like a tremendously lame way to fight him, it was also the only idea she'd had. Before she knew it, cold, dead fingers grabbed the collar of her pajamas and yanked her to her feet.

“That,” the People Taker whispered, “was an unfffffortunate accident. I didn't mean that to happen at all.”

“Liar!” Fernie screamed. “You—”

His other hand clamped tight around her jaw, holding it shut. His thumb and forefinger tightened on her nostrils, cutting off her air and leaving her unable to breathe.

“I'm ssssserious,” the People Taker said, almost apologetically. “I wanted to
take
both of you. You were the last two I needed to make my quota. Now your fffffriend's stuck in that chair ffffforever and I can't
take
him at all. It's a terrible inconvenience to me. Maybe you have a suggestion . . .”

He released Fernie's jaw. She gasped, swallowed a deep breath of air, and thrashed, feeling a little piece of herself die inside as her most powerful kick merely brushed against his ribs with a soft and embarrassing thump.
“Let me go!”

The People Taker cocked his head to one side. “An interesting idea. Not one I would have sssssuggested, but an interesting idea nevertheless. Arguably, I
could
let you go, apologize, lead you out the fffffront door, let you go back home, and never bother you again. Jussssst out of the goodness of my heart or fffffor the sheer novelty of doing something diffffferent for a change. Maybe ifffff I did, my night would not be so awfully . . . predictable.”

What followed was five seconds of the eeriest silence Fernie had ever known as the People Taker pretended to weigh the pros and cons of her idea.

Then he decided. “Naaaaahhhhh.”

He took a satiny black bag out of a coat pocket and
took
her.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

IT'S NOT TIME FOR PANCAKES

The People Taker turned out to be the kind of fellow who sang a happy tune as he went about his business.

With Fernie crammed inside his sack, he amused himself with a melody that might have been quite charming to anybody whose idea of music was the squeal car brakes emit when the wheels are skidding on ice.

Fernie did what she could to drown him out. She yelled for help and called him terrible names and told him that he was in big, big trouble and wept in fear. Then she decided that being angry was better than being terrified and went back to calling him names again.

None of this was at all useful, at least not as long as she was stuck inside this sack, smelling everybody else who'd ever been stuck in there before her. From what her nose told her, it must have been an awful lot of people, some of whom should have used deodorant.

After several minutes, he said, “Ahhhhh. We're
here
.”

She heard him dialing a phone. This was hard to digest, not just because Gustav had said that there were no phones inside this house but also because it was impossible to imagine the People Taker having anybody to call. Who on earth could have wanted to answer a phone call from him?

She couldn't make out the conversation, but she could tell that it didn't sound at all like him. He didn't use his customary reptilian tones but spoke with a warm and friendly voice, concluding with a warm chuckle as he said good-bye.

The material around her loosened as he undid the drawstring. A pale light barely better than darkness streamed in just before he reached in and pulled Fernie out by the collar.

Holding her at arm's length, he whispered, “Loooook.”

The large circular chamber around them had four equally spaced doorways, dingy gray walls, air so dusty that it burned her lungs, torches trying and failing to dispel the darkness with flickering light, and, at the center of it all, a floor that would have been like any other floor were it not interrupted by a black pit.

The Pit was circular and had a lower edge just over the side leading to another step down and then the deepest darkness Fernie had ever seen. It was impossible to see very far into what lay below as the gray mist that Fernie had come to recognize as concentrated shadow-stuff churned like a storm-tossed sea less than a foot down. But it was impossible to look at it and not know that it was bottomless.

The People Taker licked his lips. “That's the Pit.”

“Duh,” Fernie managed.

“Yesssss,” the People Taker agreed, “I'm sssssure you could already tell. It's a pit, and even if it is one of only ten pathways to the Dark Country in the entire world, there's ssssstill only a limited number of things it really could look like.”

“Then why bother to tell me what it is?”

“Because I want you to understand. I'm
not
going to throw you in.”

“You're not?”

“No, Fffffernie, I have something better in mind for you. But before you find out what, I'm going to tell you the terrible fate you'll be ssssspared, so you'll know how terrible the one awaiting you would have to be in order to be even worse. You sssssee, Fffffernie, while shadows may have no problem using the Pit to travel back and forth from the Dark Country, people have a rougher time of it. Fffffor people, it's just a long fall. A very long fall. It lasts longer than you could ever imagine. Hours. Days. Sssssometimes weeks or months or years. It can last so long that you'll wonder if you'll die of old age before hitting the bottom. Then, when you land . . . you're ssssstuck in a strange and dangerous place, not at all fffffriendly to human beings. You might wander there for a long time as I did when I fell . . . cold and helplesssss . . . with nobody to talk to and nobody to help you before Lord Obsidian finds you and makes you his ssssslave.”

“It's still got to be better than being here with you!”

The People Taker's chuckle was like the rattle of a poisonous snake. “Oh, yesssss, dear Fffffernie. It is. You're a smart girl. That's
exactly
the point I was making.”

All of Fernie's grim determination to deny this evil man the satisfaction of seeing her beg for mercy nearly turned to water. She
almost
cried,
almost
wailed,
almost
told him that she'd do anything if he just let her go. She resisted, and that
almost
made her about as brave as any girl in her position could possibly be, but it didn't feel like bravery to her.

“Now,” he said, “on to where you're going instead.”

The People Taker tucked her under his arm and lugged her through a narrow opening. He proceeded along a winding hallway, up a long, curving flight of stairs, and through a number of stranger passages until he reached a smaller room empty except for an ancient high-backed wooden chair and a rickety table bearing an old-fashioned box-shaped thirteen-inch television. The TV had a V-shaped wire antenna and an empty hole where the picture tube should have been.

“I've never been much of a TV watcher,” the People Taker remarked. “There's too much sssssinging, too much laughter, and I've never liked anything that sounds like people being”—his lip curled as he spoke the next word like a curse—“joyful. But this particular TV was a gift from my master. And it's
ssssspecial
. Wait till you see what it does.”

He put her down. She couldn't see what he did to keep her in the chair, but when he let go and stepped away to address his attentions to the TV, she couldn't stand up or throw herself to the floor or do anything else to try to get away. It felt like having a rope around her neck, even though there were no ropes to speak of.

He played with the rabbit-ear antenna, making images appear where the screen should have been. Most of what came up were black-and-white images of places in the house, not just rooms she and Gustav had visited but places she hadn't, one of them an odd gallery of paintings that included the wedding portrait of a man who, from the resemblance, could have been Gustav's father, and a beautiful red-haired woman who must have been his mother. But that vanished, replaced by static, and the next image in line was an aerial view of the Beast limping away from the wreckage of the fallen Awkward Liberty.

As he worked the antenna, looking for the precise image he wanted, the People Taker chatted away. “After I fell into the Pit and landed where you would have landed, I ssssspent more time wandering lost in the Dark Country than I like to think about. It's not a nice place, Fffffernie, not even for someone like me. There are things you can't sssssee that are far worse than the things you can.”

“It sounds like the kind of place you deserve,” Fernie said.

“That's what I thought,” the People Taker agreed. “I began to wonder if I was being punished for all the bad things I'd done, all the people I'd
taken
. And I began to promise myself that if I ever got out, I'd be a better man.” He paused. “That was, of course, a very sssssilly promise to make. I don't want to be a better man.”

Fernie wasn't surprised. Not that it wouldn't have been nice for the People Taker to be a better man, but she had the distinct impression that he wouldn't have had the slightest clue how.

“So,” he continued, “Lord Obsidian fffffound me and made me a special deal that he's never offfffered anybody else. He sssssaid that in exchange for my shadow, which he keeps beside him, he'd send me back to the world of people. For every nine people I
took
and threw into the Pit for him, I could keep one, just one, for my own personal amusement. You may have heard about all the ssssstrange disappearances in your town? I have been working toward my reward.”

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 G
ODZILLA
S
URVIVOR
.

“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.”