Read Gustav Gloom and the People Taker (9781101620748) for Free Online Page B

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.
    â€œLittle girl . . .”
    â€œThe 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.
    â€œCat,” 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.
    â€œNo,” 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