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

cat,” Great-Aunt Mellifluous continued, “maybe even the best cat you’ve ever known, but he could be the greatest cat who ever lived and you’d still be far more important to your family than he is. Trust me, dear, you don’t want to be wandering around this place while the People Taker is loose.”
    â€œGustav already rescued me from him once tonight,” Fernie admitted.
    A shadow man in some kind of red military uniform who was eating an entire shadow roast pig on the other side of the table, and getting the shadow gravy all over its long white shadow mustache, put down the entire roast hog it held in its hands and snapped, “Then you should know that he’s dark and cruel and dangerous and has no problem with
taking
a little girl down to the Dark Country and handing her over to Lord Obsidian to live forever as his cannon fodder.”
    Fernie had to agree that this wasn’t something she was at all likely to enjoy. She was about to ask the most pressing of all the questions she’d been carrying around—who this Lord Obsidian was—when she noticed something that took her breath away, in its own way as amazing as anything else she’d seen so far.
    Two high-backed wooden chairs had appeared on either side of Great-Aunt Mellifluous. The table itself had stretched to make room for them, teeming plates of shadow foods popping up at the new place settings. A pair of very recognizable shadows, one a young boy and one a young girl, had leaped out of nowhere to claim those seats and were even now devouring their meal with great abandon.
    The shadow boy, who looked just like Gustav, was having food Fernie didn’t recognize at all.
    The shadow girl seemed to be having pizza. Its shadow legs didn’t end where they touched the floor, but instead stretched farther, a pair of straight gray lines reaching past the back of the chair and several feet across the carpet to where they became a pair of shadow feet in shadow Frankenstein’s monster–head slippers, touching the real Frankenstein’s monster–head slippers on the real Fernie’s feet.
    Fernie would have jumped away when she realized just whose shadow this was, but it turned out that she couldn’t move her legs.

CHAPTER NINE
    FERNIE SAYS, “YOUR HOUSE IS REALLY STUPID.”
    Up to this point, Fernie hadn’t paid much attention to her own shadow or Gustav’s. Somehow, with all the other shadows running around, she hadn’t seen the point. She didn’t know whether they had been following along all this time or taking breaks to run their own private errands.
    Happily munching away at her shadow pizza, Fernie’s shadow looked just like Fernie herself would have looked eating pizza, except that both the pizza and the girl were gray and smoky things that could be seen through. In fact, it looked familiar for reasons other than its resemblance to Fernie. For the first time, Fernie realized that it was the very same girl, or shadow girl, who had defended her from the Beast in the house’s library.
    Great-Aunt Mellifluous followed Fernie’s stare to her shadow self, who was at that moment accidentally letting some hot shadow tomato sauce spill onto her shadow pajamas. “Oh, dear,” Great-Aunt Mellifluous said. “That’s going to leave a spot.”
    Gustav, whose own shadow was still munching away at a meal that didn’t look like anything Fernie had ever seen, told Fernie, “Look at it eat. You must have been hungry.”
    Fernie had been, and now that she stopped to think about it for a second, she remembered that it was pizza she’d been craving. “But the shadow’s eating! I’m not!”
    â€œYour shadow’s eating
for
you,” Gustav explained, “because you can’t eat shadow food with a real mouth.”
    Fernie couldn’t taste the pizza the shadow version of herself was eating, but she did feel her stomach