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

clips.
    By the time Fernie began to pay attention to where they were again, they had been following the paw prints for about ten minutes. Dark shapes, vaguely resembling people but stretched out to many times their natural length, had begun to emerge from the various doors lining the corridor and floated alongside them, chattering away in strange languages Fernie didn’t know and some that she wasn’t even certain could be called languages at all. A very small number of the shapes spoke in sentences Fernie understood, saying things like “Hi, Gustav,” and “Oh, good, you found her” and “
Tsk, tsk
, what’s a girl like her doing out this time of night?” and, again, “The People Taker is loose.”
    Then one particular shape circled Gustav twice, seemed to hug him, and surprised Fernie by fluttering back her way to embrace her as well. “Fernie!” it cried. “I’m so glad that Gustav found you! I heard you’d come for a visit and was so afraid that the People Taker would get you first!”
    Its hug felt like a cool wind just before a summer rain. Fernie asked it, “Have we met?”
    â€œNot really. Well, sort of. In a way. It’s open to interpretation.”
    That was helpful. “Who are you?”
    â€œI’m the shadow of a man named Mr. Notes. He visited here once. I’m afraid he wasn’t a very nice man, and I was pretty much already fed up with his behavior when we came here a few years ago, so I didn’t go with him when he left.”
    Fernie wasn’t sure she liked this information at all. “So the real Mr. Notes doesn’t have a shadow anymore?”
    â€œWell,” the shadow Mr. Notes said, “it’s not like he made following him around all the time a barrel of laughs.”
    Fernie was still struggling with the concept. “So he doesn’t cast a shadow at all now?”
    â€œNo, of course not.”
    â€œWhat happens to him when he’s out in the sun?”
    Gustav Gloom and the runaway shadow of Mr. Notes both answered that one at the same time. “He gets hot.”
    Even as Fernie wrestled with this, the corridor grew more crowded from the many dark shapes joining the mob. Soon the air was so thick with them that they began to merge together, forming a great gray cloud that no longer looked like it was made up of people, but instead like a thunderhead that had not yet decided to drop its first drop of rain. The shadow of Mr. Notes was whisked away in the crowd, and the others seemed to realize how jammed together they were, because their many different voices started to say things like “Oops” and “Pardon me” and “Hey, stop shoving” and “Excuse me, madam, you have your elbow in my eye.” Forcing her way through it began to feel less like walking around inside a house and more like being waist-deep in warm water and trying to get to the other side of the swimming pool.
    Then all of a sudden the tilted corridor opened out into a vast dining room, less like a proper room than a wider corridor extending left and right as far as the eye could see. An endless oak banquet table, just as long, sat in the center of the room, its ends invisible in the distance. The shadow shapes of crystal chandeliers hung from the arched ceiling every twenty feet or so, not so much casting light as making places where it was less dark.
    A rich feast that seemed to include roast turkey and glazed ham and bowls of spaghetti and cupcakes and hamburgers—all also made of shadow-stuff, unfortunately for Fernie’s growling stomach—sat piled on the table, also for an infinite distance in either direction. The hundreds of shadow shapes emerging from the various doors and open hallways on both sides of the room wasted no time claiming the empty seats and attacking the meal with great abandon. Most of them had terrible table manners.
    Many of the assembled shadows