Gustav Gloom and the People Taker (9781101620748) (2 page)

CHAPTER TWO

THE ARRIVAL OF FERNIE WHAT

Like always, Mr. What was careful to make sure his daughters weren't worried.

He said, “Don't worry, girls.”

Neither ten-year-old Fernie nor her twelve-year-old sister, Pearlie, who were riding in the backseat while their dad drove to the family's new home on Sunnyside Terrace, had said anything at all about being worried.

They rarely said anything of the sort.

But their dad had always been under the impression that they were frightened little things who spent their lives one moment away from panic and were only kept calm by his constant reassurances that everything was going to be all right.

He thought this even though they took after their mother, who had never been scared of anything and was currently climbing the Matterhorn or something. She was a professional adventurer. She made TV programs that featured her doing impossibly dangerous things like tracking abominable snowmen and parachuting off waterfalls.

“I know it looks like I made a wrong turn,” he said, regarding the perfectly calm and sunny neighborhood around them as if giant people-eating monsters crouched hidden behind every house, “but there's no reason for alarm. I should be able to turn around and get back on the map any second now.”

The What girls, who looked like versions of each other down to their freckled cheeks and fiery red hair, had spent so much of their lives listening to their father's warnings about scary things happening that they could have grown up in two different ways: as scared of everything as he was, or so tired of being told to be scared that they sought out scary things on general principle the way their mother did.

The second way was more fun. Right now, Fernie was reading a book about monsters who lived in an old, dark house and took unwary kids down into its basement to make them work in an evil robot factory, and Pearlie was playing a handheld video game about aliens who come to this planet to gobble up entire cities.

The final member of the family, Harrington, wasn't worried, either. He was a four-year-old black-and-white cat enjoying happy cat dreams in his cat carrier. Those dreams had to do with a tinier version of Mr. What making high-pitched squeaks as Harrington batted at him with a paw.

“Uh-oh,” Mr. What said. And then, quickly, “It's no real problem. I just missed the turnoff. I hope I don't run out of gas; we only have three quarters of a tank left.”

Mr. What was a professional worrier. Companies hired him to look around their offices and find all the horrible hidden dangers that could be prepared for by padding corners and putting up warning signs. If you've ever been in a building and seen a safety railing where no safety railing needs to be, just standing there in the middle of the floor all by itself as if it is the only thing that keeps anybody from tripping over their own feet, then you've probably seen a place where Mr. What has been.

Mr. What knew the hidden dangers behind every object in the entire world. It didn't matter what it was; he knew a tragic accident that involved one. In Mr. What's world, people were always poking their eyes out with mattress tags and drowning in pudding cups.

If people listened to everything he said, they would have spent their entire lives hiding in their beds with their blankets up over their heads.

Mr. What switched on the left-turn signal and explained, “Don't worry, girls. I'm just making a left turn.”

Pearlie jabbed her handheld video game, sending another ugly alien to its bloody doom. “That's a relief, Dad.”

“Don't hold that thing too close to your face,” he warned. “It gives off lots of radiation, and the last thing you want is a fried brain.”

Fernie said, “Gee, Dad, can we have that for dinner tonight?”

“Have what?” he asked, jumping a little as the car behind him beeped in protest at him for going twenty miles an hour under the speed limit.

“A fried brain. That sounds delicious.”

Pearlie said, “That sounds disgusting.”

Coming from her, that wasn't a complaint. It was a compliment.

Mr. What said, “That was very mean of you, Fernie. You'll give your sister nightmares by saying things like that.”

Pearlie hadn't suffered a nightmare since she was six.

“And Fernie, don't make a face at your sister,” Mr. What continued, somehow aware that Fernie had crossed her eyes, twisted her lips, and stuck her tongue out the side of her mouth. “You'll stick that way.”

Mr. What had written a book of documented stories about little girls who had made twisted faces only to then trip over an untied shoelace or something, causing their faces to stick that way for the rest of their lives, which must have made it difficult for them to ever have a social life, get a job, or be taken seriously.

Fernie and Pearlie had once spent a long afternoon testing the theory, each one taking turns crossing her eyes, sticking out her tongue, and stretching her mouth in weird ways while the other slapped her on the back at the most grotesque possible moments.

They'd both been disappointed when it hadn't worked.

Mr. What said, “Hey, we can see our new house from here!”

Both girls saw the big black house behind the big black gates and started shouting in excitement: Fernie, because she loved the idea of living in a haunted house, and Pearlie because she loved the idea of living in any house that was black and mysterious, whether it was haunted or not.

Mr. What naturally assumed that the girls were screaming in terror instead of enthusiasm. “Don't worry,” he said as he pulled into the driveway directly across the street. “It's not
that
one. It's this one, here.”

Now that the girls saw which house their father had really been talking about, they gaped in scandalized horror. “What
color
is that?”

“Fluorescent Salmon,” said Mr. What.

The little house did indeed look like the fish when it's put on a plate to eat, only more sparkly, which might be perfectly fine inside a fish, but not so good, as far as the girls were concerned, on a house.

Fluorescent Salmon, it turned out, was just the right color to give Fernie What a pounding headache. “I'd rather live in the scary house.”

Mr. What looked at the big black house as if seeing it for the first time. “That broken-down old place? I'm sure all the rooms are filled with spiderwebs, all the boards in the floors have pointy nails sticking out of them, and the staircases have plenty of broken steps that will collapse under your weight and leave you hanging for your life by your fingernails.”

Both girls cried, “Cool!”

Gustav Gloom stood behind the iron fence of the Gloom mansion, watching the new neighbors emerge from their car. His mouth was a thin black line, his eyes a pair of sad, white marbles. Standing behind the long black bars—and going unnoticed by the girls, for the moment—he looked a little like a prisoner begging to be let out.

He had grown quite a bit since the day five years earlier when Mr. Notes came to call. He was skinny, but not starved; pale as a sheet of blank paper, but not sickly; serious, but not grim. He still wore a plain black suit with a black tie, and his black hair still stood straight up like a lawn that hadn't been mowed recently.

He still looked like the unhappiest little boy in the world, only older.

The What family can be forgiven for not seeing him right away, in part because they were busy dealing with the business of moving into their new house, and in part because it was pretty hard to see Gustav in his black suit standing on his black lawn under the overcast sky over the Gloom residence.

It was just like the big black book Gustav still carried around wherever he went. Most people can't read black ink on black paper. Seeing Gustav could be just as difficult, even on a sunny day when the whites of his eyes stood out like Ping-Pong balls floating in a puddle of ink.

An odd black smoke billowed at his feet. It moved against the wind, and sometimes, when it got enough of itself bunched up around his ankles, his legs seemed to turn transparent and fade into nothingness just below the knees. It was a little like he was standing on the lawn and in an invisible hole at the same time.

There were other patches of blackness darting around the big black lawn, some of them large and some of them small—all of them hard to see against the ebony grass. But all of them seemed as interested as Gustav Gloom in the doings across the street.

One of those dark shapes left the black house and slid across the black grass, stopping only when it found Gustav watching the two What girls and their incredibly nervous father unload cardboard boxes from the trunk of their car.

To both Gustav and the shape that now rose from the ground, the girls were bright in ways that had nothing to do with how smart they were. They were bright in the way they captured the light of the sun and seemed to double it before giving it back to the world.

The shape watched, along with Gustav Gloom, as the littler of the two girls carried her box of books into the new house.

“Those are scary books,” the shape said. “I can tell from here. And from the way they all smell like her, that little girl must have read some of them half a dozen times. She likes spooky things, that one. A girl like that, who enjoys being scared, she's not going to be kept away from a house like this, no matter how stern the warning. I wager she'll be over here for a visit and making friends with you before that cat of hers takes its first stop at its litter pan.”

Gustav gave the black shape a nod; as always, he offered no smile, but the
sense
of a smile, the easy affection that comes only after years of trust.

“Why not hope for the best, just this once?” the shape asked. “Why can't you believe me when I say that she'll be over here saying hello before the day is out?”

Gustav looked away from the view on the other side of the gate and gave one of his most serious looks to the black shape beside him: the shape of a man so tall and so skinny that his legs looked like sticks, with knees and elbows that bulged like marbles beneath the shape (but not color) of a pin-striped, powder-blue suit.

It was not Mr. Notes, who plays no further role in this story, and who we can safely assume continued to live in the home for nervous people and use up little boxes of black crayons for the rest of his days.

It had the outline of Mr. Notes and the manner of Mr. Notes and even the voice of Mr. Notes, except that it didn't sound like it was breathing through its nose like Mr. Notes did, and its words didn't come with that little extra added tone that Mr. Notes had used to give the impression that everything around him smelled bad.

It was the part of Mr. Notes that had stayed behind when Mr. Notes ran screaming from the Gloom house, a part that he would not have wanted to leave behind, but a part that had not liked Mr. Notes very much and had therefore abandoned him, anyway.

Its decision to remain behind was the main reason the real Mr. Notes now had to live in a padded room.

“Don't worry,” the shadow of Mr. Notes said. “You'll be friends soon enough.”

Gustav thought about the girls, who seemed to have been born to live in sunlight, and for just a second or two, he became exactly what he'd always seemed to be to all the neighbors on Sunnyside Terrace: the saddest little boy in the world.

“I have to warn her,” he said.

CHAPTER THREE

THE ODD TALE OF MRS. ADELE EVERWINER AND THE RUDE CASHIER

To Fernie What's infinite disappointment, the salmon-colored house contained no spiderwebs or boards with pointy nails sticking up. Nor was there any stairway with or without weak steps that might collapse without warning and leave the girls hanging for their lives over the basement.

In fact, there wasn't a basement of any size, or for that matter an attic, and as everybody knows, no house can be at all interesting unless it has either an attic or a basement for the storage of dusty and possibly dangerous things.

There wasn't even any furniture to climb on, not yet; just a bunch of empty rooms with nothing in them but the sunbeams streaming in through the windows.

It wasn't that Fernie
actually
wanted her new house to be secretly inhabited by monsters. She preferred her homes monster-free, thank you. But as far as she was concerned, a house that doesn't even have a dark place where monsters
could be
is also a house with no room for secretly pretending that there really are some. What was the fun of that?

Disappointed, Fernie picked a room at random and dropped off Harrington's cat carrier, setting up his food and litter box in a nearby corner.

Harrington took only one step outside his cage before retreating to the safety of imprisonment. This new place didn't smell like him. This was a major problem, since as far as he was concerned, the most important attribute any place could ever have was a nice Harrington smell.

Sounding just like her dad, Fernie said, “Don't worry. It's okay. You'll get used to it.”

Had she understood Cat, Fernie would have known that his answering meow didn't mean “I'm not so sure about that, Fernie” as she presumed, but the much more alarming “None of us is going to live long enough for me to get used to it!”

Instead, she petted him once, then went outside to see what was keeping her father, and found him and Pearlie in front of the house talking to a neighbor who had stopped by to give them a warning in Human Being.

Mrs. Adele Everwiner (for that was her name) looked like a human teardrop: wide and rounded at the bottom, narrower at the shoulders, and coming to a point on top. Her hair was as red as an apple and was the part that came to a point, even if the point was a little off center and leaned to the right, as if signaling to drivers behind her that she was about to make a sudden turn into their lane. She had bright- green eyes behind bright-green eye shadow and a nose so small that it looked like it had been placed on her face as an afterthought.

She held a rhinestone-studded leash leading to a little white dog that walked in constant circles without looking at anyone. It was one of the ugliest dogs Fernie had ever seen, as it was missing so many teeth that its tongue lolled out the side of its mouth like a treat it had picked up and forgotten to chew. Mostly it just followed its own shadow around as if expecting it to run away into the bushes as soon as it could.

According to Mrs. Everwiner, the dog's name was Snooks.

“It's actually my fourth dog named Snooks,” she explained, in a voice like air escaping from a balloon and wishing it hadn't. “I had one named Snooks and then one named Snooks 2 and then one named Snooks 3. Like I said, this one's my fourth. Can either of you little girls guess his full name?”

“Snooks 4?” Fernie guessed.

“No, Snooks 5. I decided to skip Snooks 4 because Snooks 3 was such a good dog that I didn't want this sweet baby here to start his life at such a disadvantage.”

“That was a good idea,” Fernie said. “Having too much to live up to can ruin a dog's life.”

Pearlie suggested, “You can always have Snooks 4 later on. Once the pressure's off.”

“Not a bad idea. As it is,” Mrs. Everwiner said, looking down at her dog with an odd mixture of affection and disdain, “he's a strange little dog, frightened of almost everything. I think it's because of
that house
.”

She looked around as if frightened of being overheard, then leaned in so close that Fernie could see the little hairs on the tip of her chin. “Look at that place! I wouldn't want you girls to take this the
wrong way
, but you know how some places don't really belong in the world? How they have secrets that should stay hidden?”

Even though she was reading a book about a haunted house and had a good idea what Mrs. Everwiner was trying to say, Fernie thought it wiser to feign ignorance. “Ummm. No, not really.”

“Well,” Mrs. Everwiner said, now leaning so close to Fernie that if she were leaning any closer she might have been behind her. “That house over there, it's a bad place. You can tell because the sun never shines on it, and because the birds never fly over it. Just look at it! How can a place that looks like that not be a
bad place
?”

Fernie looked at the house and saw a sad and strange little boy in the front yard, watching her through the iron fence. The idea of that boy having to stand there in his front yard watching Mrs. Everwiner tell people that his house was evil struck her as so unfair that she almost said something rude. “What's so evil about it?”

“By the time you found out,” Mrs. Everwiner said, “it would be . . .
too late
.”

This was the kind of thing that people say only in scary movies and only at night and only when they expect thunder to crash right outside the window like an exclamation point. But this was a warm, sunny day, the only cloud was the one that shaded the big dark house, and no thunder obliged.

“We keep asking the city to tear it down,” Mrs. Everwiner continued. “Unfortunately, they keep saying they have no
cause
. How can they have no cause? Just look at the place!”

The Whats looked at the place.

Their lack of an immediate response made Mrs. Everwiner change the subject. “By the way, I saw you bring a pet carrier into the house. I hope that was another little dog. Snooks here can always use a friend for playdates.”

This, at least, was something that could be answered. “I'm sorry,” Mr. What said. “Harrington's a cat.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Everwiner said. There were several seconds of uncomfortable silence. Apparently she didn't like cats much and ran out of words as soon as one was mentioned. “You don't let it run around loose, do you? You don't really want him to get into a fight with Snooks.”

Fernie regarded Snooks (who had just jumped away from his own shadow as if it had turned around and tried to bite him) and found it hard to believe that any fight between Snooks and Harrington would ever happen. “No,” she said. “I don't want him to get into a fight with Snooks.”

“That's good,” Mrs. Everwiner said, “because Snooks is a very high-strung dog and would be so upset if that ever happened that he probably wouldn't eat or poop right for weeks.”

“Well,” Mr. What said politely, “we wouldn't want Snooks to have any trouble pooping.”

“Yes,” Fernie said. “We were worried about that when we drove in.”

Mr. What began to tell Mrs. Everwiner about all the special precautions he was going to take to make sure Harrington didn't get out of the house and bother Snooks, and he was so busy detailing the procedures that he missed seeing what Fernie saw.

Snooks had scrambled away from his shadow as if it had tried to bite him a second time. In fact, Fernie realized with a start, it
had
tried to bite him. The shadow was running around the actual dog in circles, sniffing his rear end and nipping at his tail. Snooks was so disturbed by all the shadow's attentions that he whined and walked in circles and looked up at Mrs. Everwiner, begging her with his big brown eyes to notice how badly he was being bullied. But Mrs. Everwiner was too busy to notice, as she was too involved with telling Mr. What more about her dog's nervous conditions, which, in addition to being scared of the house across the street, also included being angry at the toilet bowl and in love with the umbrella stand.

Fernie wanted to say, “Yes, that's all very interesting, but if you'll just look down you'll see something even weirder: your dog's shadow picking a fight with him.” But all that came out was a little amazed squeak. Unable to come up with any way to get her family's attention other than just opening her eyes as wide as possible, Fernie could only watch as the shadow dog grew tired of baiting the real dog and ran across the street.

Then she saw the second impossible thing she'd seen in about as many seconds: Snooks's runaway shadow leaped between the iron bars in the fence and into the sad little boy's arms, licking his face with doggy affection.

Fernie whirled toward her father, hoping against hope that he'd seen it, too. But, no; Mr. What was too busy listening to Mrs. Everwiner, who had changed the subject and was now going on at great length about a local supermarket with a cashier that had been rude to her and why this meant Mr. What should never shop there.

Even Pearlie paid close attention to this, not because it was the most fascinating subject in the world but because she was fascinated that anybody would ever think it was.

Feeling a little like her body was a car and she'd just been handed the steering wheel without knowing how to drive, Fernie murmured “Excuse me” and slipped away somewhere during Mrs. Everwiner's breathless story about giving that rude cashier a piece of her mind.

Nobody noticed her crossing the street, not even when Mrs. Everwiner had gone on to the part of the story about demanding to see the rude cashier's manager and that manager getting the same piece of her mind, only louder.

Nobody stopped Fernie from approaching the place in the iron fence closest to the sad-looking little boy, who stood holding a black book in one hand and the smoky, gray shadow of the little dog in the other.

Behind her, Mrs. Everwiner had gone on to explain how the manager's apology had failed to satisfy her, and how she'd demanded a personal phone call from the company headquarters in St. Louis. But ahead of her, the sad little boy stood ankle-deep in gray mist.

To Fernie, it was a lot like being in a dream, but she had always been polite, even in dreams, so she found herself saying, “Hello. I'm Fernie What. Like in the question.”

“What question?”

“Like in any question that starts with
what
. My first name is Fernie and my last name is What. When I say ‘My name is Fernie What,' many people say ‘Fernie what?' again, like a question, so I kind of have to beat them to it by saying, ‘Like in the question.'”

The sad little boy nodded. “I can see how that would happen. But I got it the first time. I'm Gustav Gloom.”

“That's a strange name.”

“So's Fernie What.”

He had a good point, of course, but all of this was dancing around the real reason she had come across the street, the thing she now found she was having a little trouble coming out and actually saying. “You're playing with Snooks's shadow.”

“Yes,” Gustav Gloom said as Snooks's shadow licked him on the cheek. “It's much nicer than the actual dog.”

Fernie resisted a strange need to stamp her foot. “But that can't be.”

“Sure it can,” Gustav Gloom said. “The real dog bites.” When he put the shadow dog down, it ran around him three times, panting in canine joy, before slipping back through the fence and galloping across the street to the flesh-and-blood Snooks, who did not seem all that happy that it had returned.

Mrs. Everwiner had just gotten to the part of the story about the angry letter she'd written to the newspaper, whose editors were so horrified that a woman of her station would ever have an unsatisfactory experience in a supermarket that they put her letter on the front page beneath a giant headline of the kind most newspapers reserve for warnings about erupting volcanoes. It was even bigger, Mrs. Everwiner proudly assured them, than the headline over the latest story about all those mysterious disappearances that had plagued the town over the past few months: Seven people so far, some plucked from their beds, had all disappeared without a trace.