Gustav Gloom and the Four Terrors by Adam-Troy Castro

Author:Adam-Troy Castro [Castro, Adam-Troy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780698159303
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Published: 2013-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE SHADOW WHO RUINED MOVIE NIGHT

About ten minutes later, the two friends emerged from the servant passages into a vast and elegant gallery with walls of carved dark wood, ornate oriental carpets so beautiful that they dazzled despite the usual ankle-deep layer of gray mist obscuring them, tempting easy chairs arranged in circles around coffee tables, and what looked like hundreds of paintings, ranging in size from some smaller than Fernie’s thumb to others large enough to decorate the sides of barns.

It wasn’t the first art gallery Fernie had found in Gustav’s home, but the last one had been all portraits, and this one presented a variety of images, from bloody battlefields to grinning elderly ladies.

There was also a painting of a horrid old skeletal castle of black stone, rising from a black swamp to stand tall and foreboding against a starless black sky. There was even black lightning, crashing against the black night. All around the castle, dark inhuman armies, numbering thousands, stood in formation, knee-deep in the muck, some not wearing shoes or not much caring that any shoes they wore would be peeled off by the mud the second they tried to take a step.

With all the black set against other shades of black in a place composed of so many shades of darkness, there seemed no possible way that anything in the picture should have been visible at all—but it was somehow all perfectly clear, a place that had never known light but which was too stubborn to let its ebony majesty go unseen.

There were some human beings in sight: men, women, and children, all skinny, all dressed in rags, all identifiable at first glance as slaves. They had the miserable look of people who have been frightened for so long that they no longer know how to be anything else. Some of them were being dragged along the ground like shadows, by shadows who walked upright like men.

Gustav saw Fernie stop to stare at the terrible image, and put a hand on her shoulder. “That’s Lord Obsidian’s palace.”

Fernie shivered. “That’s what it looks like in the Dark Country?”

“Yes,” Gustav said. “But that’s not a painting of the Dark Country. This is the Gallery of Possible Futures, where all the paintings are images of things that might someday come to be. That’s one possible future for your world, if Lord Obsidian ever gets his way. It’s not a palace that stands now. It’s a palace he wants to build.”

Fernie could hardly bear the thought. “But why would he want it, Gustav? He used to be a person, back when he was called Howard Philip October. What could possibly go wrong with somebody, even an evil somebody, that would cause him to want to make the world look like that?”

Gustav shrugged. “Maybe his mom and dad didn’t hug him enough. Maybe he didn’t get what he wanted for his birthday one year. Maybe he never learned how to keep his clothes from clashing and wanted to simplify things by getting rid of every color except black.

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