Gustav Gloom and the People Taker (9781101620748) by Kristen (ILT) Adam-Troy; Margiotta Castro Page A

Why haven’t you called the police?”
    â€œWe don’t have a phone.”
    â€œWhy didn’t you just warn people? Or ask somebody in the neighborhood for help?”
    Gustav stopped between one step and the next, wearing an expression that could not have been any worse if he’d been hit in the face by a board. “It’s not that easy. People on the other side of the fence—especially grown-ups—don’t always want to talk to me.”
    â€œI talked to you.”
    â€œThere aren’t many like you.”
    â€œOkay, so if it was just you,” Fernie asked, “why haven’t you snuck up behind him and pushed him over a balcony or something?”
    â€œIt’s not that easy,” Gustav said. “He has the Beast helping him. I haven’t even been able to get close.”
    â€œSounds like a lame excuse to me when there are innocent people being
taken
.”
    Gustav remained silent.
    â€œAnd another thing,” she asked. “What does this Lord Obsidian, whoever he is, do with the people this People Taker . . .
takes
?”
    Gustav hesitated, then he heaved a sigh of tremendous sadness that struck Fernie as the very first sound he’d made that matched the gray, unsmiling expression on his face.
    â€œYou don’t want to know.”
    Fernie almost protested, but realized that it happened to be true, at least for the moment. Her head was already so crowded with thoughts of People Takers and Beasts and houses bigger on the inside than they were on the outside that she was not yet ready to absorb any more terrifying information.
    Then Gustav said, “Come on. I’ll take you someplace a little safer.”
    She was so grateful to him for saying something that made some kind of sense that she put all her other questions away in a box for later. “Okay.”
    He squeezed past her, did something unseen to the panel, and opened it back up again.
    Fernie feared that the library would be on the other side and that the People Taker and his pet would still be there, waiting to do whatever awful things he had meant by
taking
her.
    But this time the opening led to a flight of stone stairs, shiny with water dripping down from a low ceiling, which curved up a narrow passage lit by torches. The torches didn’t seem to be having much trouble staying lit even though the water coming down from above was so heavy that it was just a couple of clouds and a flash of lightning away from becoming a thunderstorm. Loud smashing, banging, crashing, and roaring noises, together a lot like how Fernie imagined a prehistoric jungle would sound, echoed from up above.
    Gustav began climbing the stairs. “It shouldn’t be too bad up this way. He’s only a
People
Taker, so he never bothers the dinosaurs.”
    Fernie had been about to follow him, but now she stopped in midstep. “Dinosaurs.”
    Four steps above her, Gustav said, “Well, yes. We’re headed for their bedroom.”
    â€œYour house has a bedroom for
dinosaurs
?”
    â€œOf course it does. Where else would they sleep?”
    Fernie rubbed the spot at the bridge of her nose that her father sometimes rubbed. She had noticed that this habit of his seemed to help him understand things a little better, but it didn’t help her one bit. Apparently, she didn’t have any brains in her nose.
    She wasn’t doing herself much good here at the bottom of what looked like dungeon stairs, so she put one foot in front of the other and pretty soon she was following Gustav, at least in the sense of walking behind him, if not in the sense of understanding any of this.
    Gustav chatted away. “They’re not really dinosaurs, anyway. They’re dinosaur shadows.”
    He had disappeared around the next bend of the stairs before he seemed to notice that she’d stopped climbing again. His pale little head popped around the curve of the wall to peer at her.