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

protest until they’d left the banquet behind and were well along one of the branching corridors, a downward-slanting hallway so steep that running in that direction amounted to little more than controlled falling. By the time Fernie got mad and yanked her arm away from Gustav’s grip, the slope had grown even steeper, and the marble floor even more slippery. The only safe thing to do was to treat it like a slide. She fell on her backside next to where Gustav had fallen on his backside and joined him in plunging down the hall while the doors on both sides raced by too quickly to be seen.
    They slid for so very long that Fernie had to think that they were now far, far underground, if not at the center of the Earth then at least far deeper than any basement had any right to be, unless there were top secret government weapons or a villain’s secret laboratory in it.
    Fernie shouted, “Is this your idea of a shortcut?”
    Gustav yelled back, “What’s wrong with it?”
    The hallway started leveling out, but Fernie and Gustav were moving too fast to stop. Fernie looked ahead and saw the hallway seeming to end at what looked like a big picture window two stories above the street. The new Fluorescent Salmon house of the What family could be clearly seen in the bright glow of the streetlights, even if the black lines of the Gloom mansion’s iron fence made it look like it had been cut into narrow slices.
    As much as she wanted to get home, Fernie did not particularly relish the idea of a shortcut that required her to crash through a plate-glass window. So she yelled,
“Gustav!”
    And he yelled,
“Whaaaaaaaat?”
which might have been him calling her name or might have been the more common kind of
what
.
    For a heartbeat, the picture window loomed so close that Fernie braced herself for the sound of shattering glass.
    Then the view of the street seemed to lift out of sight like a curtain raised at the last moment. The long slide of a hallway had ended in a sudden drop just short of that picture window, leaving the two kids to fall head over heels into darkness.
    Fernie had just enough time to wonder if this was the Pit he’d mentioned before she landed in something spongy and bounced up and down a little before coming to a stop. She almost mistook the surface beneath her for a trampoline or a pile of pillows or something like that, until she stirred some of it by moving her hand around and saw that it was a great big mound of shadow-stuff, about four times her own height and just solid enough to provide a soft landing.
    When she glanced back up at the place she and Gustav had fallen from, she found that she could make out the end of the hallway they’d just slid down, which looked like a square pipe hanging in midair that curved upward until it disappeared in distant murk. A couple of puffs of darkness billowed from the open end and began to tumble downward toward her.
    Fernie suddenly understood something she wished she hadn’t. “That was a garbage chute.”
    â€œWell, yes,” Gustav replied as if it should have been obvious. “Everybody has to clear their places when they’re finished eating.”
    â€œBut it was the size of a hallway, and it had doors along the walls. Why would there be doors you couldn’t even get to without sliding down the garbage chute?”
    â€œNot everybody in the family’s lucky enough to get the best bedroom.” He grabbed her by the wrist again and said, “Come on, we need to hurry. If we run through the Gallery of Awkward Statues and the Too Much Sitting Room, we’ll make it back to the parlor, and—”
    Suddenly irritated at him for not giving her any time to think, Fernie yanked her arm away from his and fought her way out of the big mound of shadow garbage on her own. Though for her it was only like struggling through slightly thicker air, she couldn’t stop herself from wondering if