Gustav Gloom and the Cryptic Carousel #4 - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Adam-Troy Castro has said in interviews that he likes to jump genres and styles and has therefore refused to ever stay in place long enough to permit the unwanted existence of a creature that could be called a “typical” Adam-Troy Castro story. As a result, his short works range from the wild farce of his Vossoff and Nimmitz tales to the grim Nebula nominee “Of a Sweet Slow Dance in the Wake of Temporary Dogs.” His twenty prior books include a nonfiction analysis of the Harry Potter phenomenon, four Spider-Man adventures, and three novels about his interstellar murder investigator, Andrea Cort (including a winner of the Philip K. Dick Award, Emissaries from the Dead). Adam’s other award nominations include eight Nebulas, two Hugos, and three Stokers. Adam lives in Miami with his wife, Judi, and three insane cats named Uma Furman, Meow Farrow, and Harley Quinn.

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Chapter One: A Good-Bye Letter over a Bowl of Special Noogums

 
 
Seen from the air, the pleasant suburban neighborhood that included Sunnyside Terrace must have looked like a box of jelly beans onto which somebody had dropped a glob of black paint.
 
Most of the houses were painted colors like Kiwi Green and Sunflower Yellow and Citrus Orange, all so determinedly bright and cheerful that some people passing through the neighborhood on their way to more serious places had to put their sunglasses on to avoid getting headaches.
 
The one dark spot was the Gloom property, which sat under a perpetual storm cloud that always shielded it from the sunlight and never allowed in so much as a single beam of bright light. Between its massive black house, that house’s massive black windows, the one gnarled black tree, the black lawn covered in rolling gray mist, and the ominous iron fence that separated all that determined colorlessness from the carnival of color that surrounded it, the overwhelming impression everybody got was that the house itself didn’t like cheerfulness much at all.
 
This was not an impression that would have been broken by the sight of the ten-year-old girl who left through the front door one early morning in late summer, hugging herself with both arms as she made her way to the front gate.
 
Fernie What had bright red hair, freckles, and adventurous eyes that were bloodshot from a recent bout of crying. Her hair and jeans and T-shirt were covered in dust, of exactly the sort you would expect to settle if a number of ornate staircases had just collapsed in a heap in your immediate vicinity. She looked tired and she looked frightened, but she also looked deeply determined, in a way that suggested big trouble for anybody who got in her way.
 
As she left the Gloom property through the front gate and walked out from under the unmoving dark cloud that always hung low over it, blocking out the sun, she stood blinking at the bright day just outside the fence. It was so different from the nature of the light in and around the house she’d just left that the light might have come from a different world—which, in a very real sense, it did.
 
There were storm clouds rolling in on the horizon, which would likely arrive in just a few short minutes, but for now the sun was out, and the comfort she took in its warmth was limited by how easy it was to see that she cast no shadow at all.
 
Fernie hugged herself even tighter and crossed the street to her own family home, which was painted a color called Fluorescent Salmon that had hurt her brain ever since she had first seen it through the windows of the family car.
 
She walked in through the front door, closed it behind her, and was immediately greeted by the only family member present, a black-and-white cat named Harrington, who meowed at her in about a dozen different tones, as if looking for the one that would get his message across.
 
Fernie What picked him up and gave him the tightest hug of his little life. “Yes, baby, I know. You want some noogums.”
 
Noogums was the official family nickname for cat food. It took exactly the same amount of time to say as cat food and didn’t sound any more like a good name for cat food than cat food does. But Harrington knew exactly what it meant and jumped to the ground, meowing various cat sounds for “Don’t be stupid! Of course that’s what I want!”
 
Fernie went to the cabinet, where she was faced with a choice between the ordinary noogums that Harrington ate most of the time and the special noogums that he was given whenever the family wanted to include him in a festive occasion. She opened a can of the special noogums and plopped it into a bowl, which Harrington successfully ignored for about five seconds just to make sure he didn’t look grateful.
 
While he was nose-down in his bowl, Fernie left the room to wash off all the dust and change into clean clothes. She returned looking a lot more like she hadn’t been around any collapsing staircases recently, wearing fresh jeans and a bright blue T-shirt bearing a skull with a pink ribbon. She also carried a spiral notebook and her favorite writing pen, which ended with a small plastic cartoon boa-constrictor head. Then she walked over to the dinner table, where she took a seat and began to work.
 
It took her a long time, many cross-outs, and several interruptions for crying before she found the best possible approach. The problem may have been the pen. Fernie had learned once, when she was in trouble and needed a ride home, that it was very difficult to make a serious call if the phone you borrowed from a friend was pink and covered with glitter. Now she had to write what could very possibly turn out to be her last good-bye to her mother with a pen that ended with a small plastic cartoon boa-constrictor head. As upset as she was, it left her wondering if writers in olden times felt silly writing all those tales of suffering and woe with quill pens.
 
Fernie’s mother was a professional adventurer who was always off filming TV specials of herself doing things like out-skiing avalanches or hang gliding into volcanoes. She had been off for months now, on an expedition to some unconquered mountain or something, and had therefore missed everything that had happened to Fernie, her older sister, Pearlie, and their dad since the family moved in across the street from the Gloom estate. It wasn’t the kind of thing that could all be easily explained in a single letter, but now Fernie found herself having to, because there was a very real possibility that after she left the house today, she’d never be seen alive again.
 
So she thought about it, and thought about it some more, and crumpled up so much paper that Harrington started rolling around on his back in the middle of the pile, and eventually had what worked out to be as good a summary of the basic situation as she could possibly manage.
 
 
Dear Mommy:
 
I love you and I hope that you never have to read this.
 
I hope that I can throw this letter out before you get anywhere near it.
 
I’m only writing this letter because maybe I won’t.
 
Maybe you’ll walk in a week or a month from now, whenever you’re finished with your trip, and find the house empty and us gone.
 
You’ll need this note, then, to know what’s happened to us.
 
The big black house across the street is one of only a few shadow houses in the entire world. Shadows live there. By that I mean actual shadows. It turns out that the shadows that we walk around with, that do whatever we do, and that we don’t think of as alive are alive and have a whole separate world that they live in, including that house.
 
We discovered this when we moved in and I met the boy who lives there, whose name is Gustav Gloom. He’s my age and is now my best friend.
 
A couple of hours ago, Dad and Pearlie were in the house and fell into a bottomless black pit leading to the Dark Country, where all shadows come from. They’ll be stuck there forever, probably as the slaves of a really bad guy called Lord Obsidian, if me and Gustav don’t go down there to rescue them.
 
I don’t know how to explain Lord Obsidian except that he used to be a man called Howard Philip October who’s done a lot of bad things in his life, including imprisoning Gustav’s dad and killing the woman who would have been Gustav’s mom.
 
There’s a reason why I call Gustav’s mom...