Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault

by Adam-Troy Castro

  “I don’t like rude girls,” October said as he took his first step toward her.

  Thinking her sister insane but also impossibly brave, Fernie took advantage of the distraction and sprinted to the front gate of the Gloom estate. It was closed, which she didn’t see as a problem, because it was also usually unlocked. She pushed and found to her horror that this was not one of those times; whoever decided whether it should be locked or unlocked had figured on this being one of the nights when it should be locked.

  It wasn’t that big a problem, all in all, because one of Fernie’s secrets—kept to herself because her father had a predictable list of terrible things that could happen to little girls who climbed things—was that she could climb trees and other things well enough to make squirrels jealous. She hopped up, grabbed the crossbar at the top of the gate, and in three short seconds pulled herself up.

  Perched atop the fence, she saw Pearlie still taunting October with insults. He’d opened his mouth all the way again to release another torrent of shadow tendrils.

  “Hey, you!” Fernie yelled, to return the favor and give Pearlie a chance to get away. “I know where the Nightmare Vault is—and I’m going to hide it where you’ll never ever be able to find it, even if you look for a million years!”

  October turned, the black hole of his mouth turning with him. Shadow tendrils exploded outward and began to grow in the air as he strode toward the gate.

  Pearlie’s fists went to her mouth at the moment the ice-cream man abandoned her to advance on her sister instead. A helpless apology flitted across her face just before she turned her back and began to run.

  Fernie jumped down, rolled as she hit the black lawn of the Gloom estate, then scrambled back to her feet and ran for the mansion’s pair of giant front doors. She found herself up against them, screaming for help and pounding on the wood with both fists, as behind her October reached the gate. He wrapped his pale, grubby hands against the iron bars.

  Fernie wasted five full seconds hanging everything on the desperate hope that the gate would succeed in keeping him out, before remembering how easily he’d succeeded in opening and closing a locked and bolted door.

  October pushed the gate open with no trouble at all.

  “Oh no,” Fernie said.

  As October strolled through the open gate, the black tendrils from his mouth cut through the air like cracks in the world. They moved a lot faster than he did. In seconds there were so many of them, slicing the air between himself and Fernie, reaching out toward her like blind snakes, that there was no point in abandoning the Gloom house; those groping shapes would find her, wherever she ran and wherever she hid, even if she learned how to fly and soared to Liechtenstein.

  She pounded on the door, screaming, “Gustav! I’m in trouble here!”

  “Yes,” October said. “You are.”

  The black tendrils were now fewer than three feet from Fernie, and she couldn’t have run in another direction even if she’d wanted to; they’d formed a cage around the two front steps to the Gloom house and blocked every other possible direction.

  “You should have cooperated,” October said as the tendrils closed in.

  Fernie pounded on the door. “Please, please, please! Somebody let me in! I’m a friend of this house!”

  The doors opened.

  Fernie, who’d been leaning against them with all her weight, fell flat on her belly. She landed on the long red carpet runner that extended down the long entrance hall to the grand parlor, dimly visible at the other end. The shadowy mist that should have covered the floor to ankle depth was missing. She saw nothing else between her and the rest of the house: no shadows, no Gustav, just the long hallway lined with tall vases and jet-black paintings.

  Somehow, she managed to get to her feet and run, yelling, “Gustav! Great-Aunt Mellifluous! Anybody! Help me!”

  As she ran, she reached out and toppled the giant vases, turning the hallway into an obstacle course that October would have to cross if he wanted to get to her. She heard the first and second and third ones all hit the floor with mighty crashes behind her as she ran, headed for the grand parlor and the escape it offered.

  It was when she got to the grand parlor that she knew just how much the shadows feared the monster chasing her.

  The first time she’d been here, the grand parlor had been a bustling, impossibly vast space, teeming with shadowy figures going about their shadowy business. There had been more of them than she could ever possibly count, gliding through the air, climbing and descending the multiple staircases, hanging out on the couches, and gathered in little knots of conversation everywhere the eye could see. Tonight, they were all gone. The grand parlor was just a room, abandoned by all the inhabitants, the scattered items of furniture as lonely against the great stretches of floor that surrounded them as empty life rafts on a vast, uncharted sea.

  As she knew from her last visit, there were too many possible directions to run. She didn’t have a clue where to go and where not to, which directions might offer help and which would only deliver her to worse danger. So she raced as far as the center of the forlorn and empty room and spun around, begging for some idea to occur to her. “Please, somebody! Gustav! The ice-cream man is here!”

  Somewhere above her head, Gustav said, “So?”

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE ONLY THING THAT COULD HAVE POSSIBLY MADE GUSTAV’S HOUSE ANY STUPIDER

  Peering down at her from the second-floor balcony, Gustav didn’t seem particularly frightened, or even worried, just surprised to see Fernie.

  He had changed into a different little black suit with a little black tie. Fernie could tell it was not the outfit he had worn earlier in the day, as that one had gotten some watermelon juice on the lapels, and this one looked like it had come straight from the dry cleaner. (This, of course, reopened the question of just who did Gustav’s laundry, but that was something Fernie didn’t have the time to worry about right now.)

  Fernie found his look of only slightly confused calm infuriating. “Didn’t you hear what I said? I’m being chased by the ice-cream man!”

  “Oh,” Gustav said. “You didn’t say that he was chasing you, only that he was here. Chasing you is something quite different.”

  Sometimes talking to Gustav made her want to stomp her foot. “Are you going to pick on me or are you going to help?”

  “Help,” Gustav decided. “Meet me at the top of the purple staircase, over there.”

  The grand parlor had a dozen staircases, including some that bypassed the second floor entirely and went straight to some of the upper levels. There were rickety wooden staircases and tightly wound spiral staircases, a few with missing steps, and one, leading to some high place obscured by haze, that only provided its users with one step out of every five, and therefore promised a painful plunge to the ground level for anybody who couldn’t simply leap the yawning gap between boards. The purple staircase was one of the more regal, as it had ornately carved banisters, a plush runner, and a base that widened at the ground floor, as if to offer open arms to anybody who ever wanted to climb it. Fernie went for that one, her heart pounding as she took the steps three at a leap. Just as she reached the top she looked back and was driven to despair by the sight of October, entering the parlor with his mouth still yawning wide and a thicket of shadow tendrils invading the air before him.

  Gustav met Fernie at the top of the stairs and was almost bowled over by the force of her grateful hug. As always, he showed only a limited understanding of what to do when being hugged, and demonstrated particular confusion over whether he should hug back. Looking over her shoulder at the new arrival, he said, “That doesn’t look like an ice-cream man. That looks more like a shadow eater.”

  “He drives an ice-cream truck.”

  “Now I understand why you’re so frightened by him; being chased by a regular old ice-cream man would be just plain silly.”

  Fernie couldn’t help feeling that her friend was missing the big picture.
“Would it really be too much trouble to hold off discussing what’s silly and what’s not until we get away?”

  “Oh, not at all,” said Gustav. “This way.”

  They rushed down the length of the second-floor balcony, the grand parlor to their right and a series of numbered doors to their left. Fernie couldn’t help noticing that the doors ranged in design from polished mahogany masterpieces to featureless metal slabs, and that the room numbers weren’t even close to being in sensible order, with one white door labeled ROOM 237, immediately followed by one dowdy green door labeled ROOM 101 and one bright red door labeled ROOM 3X2(9YZ)4A.

  There was no time to worry about any of this, because the great empty parlor down below was filling up with the horrid black tendrils from October’s mouth. Some were already more than halfway to the second floor, and would probably reach Fernie and Gustav in seconds.

  The tips of those tendrils had just begun to poke through the empty spaces between the bars on the second-floor railing when Gustav skidded to a stop before a door reading ROOM 1 and wrapped his little fist around the jeweled doorknob. “In here!” he cried.

  Fernie didn’t have to wait for him to tell her twice. But she had been to Gustav’s house before and knew that its many doors hid many sights as strange as the Gallery of Awkward Statues, as terrible as the Too Much Sitting Room, and as frightening as the basement level with a bottomless pit descending all the way to the Dark Country. So even as she followed him into a room so dark that she couldn’t tell what it contained at all, a little part of her steeled herself for whatever strange sight might be waiting in there.

  It turned out to be just a closet with another door on the other side.

  Gustav opened that one and led Fernie into another closet that led to another that led to another that led to another.

  Fernie could tell that they were putting some distance between themselves and October, because the unearthly cold he brought with him seemed to be going away. But after the ninth or tenth door, she still found herself getting exasperated. “I’m waiting for an explanation.”

  “For what?” Gustav asked as he led her into yet another small dark room with yet another identical door on the far wall.

  “Why, out of all the other possible doors you could have picked, you picked the one that led to this.”

  One more closet and door later, Gustav said, “Why? What’s wrong with this?”

  “What’s right with this?”

  “Oh,” Gustav explained as he led her into the latest closet in line, “this is a very useful place when you’re being chased by a monster. It’s always good to have a door between you and monsters. Two doors are better, three doors are better still, and five hundred doors are best of all. There were nights in the old days, when I was trying to stay ahead of the People Taker, when I put four or five thousand doors between myself and him, and didn’t stop adding doors until I could hear him yelling, far behind me, that he was giving up for the night. He always got tired of it before I did.”

  “Unfortunately,” Fernie pointed out, “you were so good at running away from him that you didn’t get around to doing anything about him for months.”

  “That’s true,” Gustav had to admit.

  Gustav led Fernie through another fifteen or sixteen doors.

  “How long does this go on?” she demanded.

  Gustav opened the next door in line. “Forever, I think. I always had to quit when I got hungry, but I’ve been told that if you packed enough provisions, you could keep going indefinitely.”

  As they walked through the next door after that, Fernie could imagine nothing so pointless. “What if you could pack provisions for a month? Or a year?”

  “You do know what the word forever means, right?”

  Another fifteen or sixteen doors later, Fernie decided that she had to be a little more aggressive about forcing Gustav to come up with a more helpful plan. “Isn’t there some other safe place we could hide long enough to talk over what we’re going to do?”

  “We won’t be able to stay there long,” Gustav warned. “Those shadow tendrils have our scent by now and will be able to track us down if we spend too much time in one place.”

  “We’ll wear ourselves down to nothing if we don’t find somewhere we can figure out what to do.”

  Gustav surprised her by not arguing about it. “Okay.”

  He turned the next doorknob to the left instead of the right and they emerged into a well-lit, circular room with a high ceiling and walls bearing an array of lit torches. About twenty additional doors ringed the outer wall, each bearing the hand-painted words DO NOT ENTER ON PAIN OF DEATH! HORRIBLE, AGONIZING FATE AWAITS ALL WHO VENTURE HERE! YOU WILL SCREAM FOREVER KNOWING YOU DISREGARDED THIS WARNING AND MET A FATE WORSE THAN DEATH! THIS MEANS YOU!

  Fernie had seen so many terrifying sights on her previous visit to the Gloom house that the prospect of any room horrifying enough to require such an earnest warning gave her chills. “Where are we?”

  “The Choice of Horrible Fates Room,” Gustav said. “Do you like it?”

  She discovered that she couldn’t tell the difference between the door they’d just come through and any of the others. “Right. This is much better than closets.”

  “You didn’t say you wanted better,” Gustav said. “You said you wanted a place where we could hide until we figured out what we were going to do.”

  She rubbed her forehead. “And once we do figure out what we’re going to do, aren’t we going to have to leave by one of those doors?”

  “Sure,” Gustav said.

  “But those signs…”

  “You like them? I painted them myself, when I was little.”

  Fernie looked closer at the hand-painted warnings, all of which persisted in looking ominous despite Gustav’s reassurances. It may have been that the letters were all bloodred, and that they all dripped like blood, but maybe that was just the sloppy painting of a little kid. “So the rooms behind these signs are not dangerous?”

  “Not all of them. One or two go to terrible places, but the rest are all safe. We’re perfectly fine as long as we go through one of the safe ones.”

  Fernie was beginning to sense a big but coming up. “And you’re about to tell me that you don’t remember which doors are safe and which ones are dangerous.”

  Gustav looked a little embarrassed. “Right.”

  “Why didn’t you just paint warnings on the dangerous ones?”

  “That would have been a good idea,” he admitted, “but I was bored that day and couldn’t stop after only two.”

  Fernie folded her arms across her chest and gave Gustav the hardest look she could muster, which so unnerved him that he had to look down at his shoes.

  “Gustav?” she said.

  “What?”

  “Remember that time I told you your house was stupid?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it is stupid, and you just told me that you once did the only thing that could have possibly made it any stupider.”

  “I know.” He sighed. “Every time I’m here, I could kick myself.”

  Fernie turned in circles and tried to figure out, just by looking, which doors promised safety and which hid fates worse than death. “So how are we supposed to pick a door and not get ourselves killed?”

  “We don’t,” Gustav explained. “At least, not until we need to.”

  “Don’t we need to now?”

  “No. We just want to. It’s kind of complicated, but the way it was explained to me, the Choice of Horrible Fates Room always lets you decide whether you want to be impatient and leave just because you want to, in which case you might pick a door that leads to something awful, or leave when you need to, in which case you’ll almost certainly pick one that leads to the place you should go.”

  “So if we go before we have to,” Fernie summarized, “we’ll probably pick the door with the giant man-eating rat behind it, and if we wait until one of us really needs a bathroom, we’ll probab
ly pick the door that leads to one.”

  “See?” Gustav said encouragingly. “It’s not so difficult, after all.”

  Sometimes talking to Gustav made Fernie wish for a handy cream pie to throw in his face. “Except that it wouldn’t have to be even this difficult if your house didn’t have so many rooms that led to horrible fates!”

  Gustav was thunderstruck. “You mean your house doesn’t?”

  It wasn’t Fernie’s first reminder that Gustav hadn’t ever experienced the world outside the Gloom estate, but it was one of the most maddening. “Of course it doesn’t! Gustav, my house only has about ten doors in it, if you include the closets, and they always lead to the same places no matter how long you wait before opening them, and none of them lead to horrible fates no matter what you do!”

  “Really?” Gustav asked. “Not even your front door?”

  She started to say Of course not, but then shut her mouth. Of course, he was right. All over the world, everybody’s front door sometimes led to normal days and sometimes led to horrible fates, and there was never any way to tell whether it was going to lead to one or the other without walking through it and hoping for the best.

  Maybe Gustav’s house really didn’t make any less sense than the rest of the world. Maybe it just made a different kind of sense: a mad, constantly changing sense that could actually be understood by somebody like Gustav who had spent enough time there.

  So she calmed down a little. “So how long do we have to wait until we know we need to leave?”

  “I don’t know,” Gustav said. “It could be a few minutes. It could be a few days. It could be forever. There was a skeleton on the floor the first time one of the shadows brought me here; I guess it belonged to somebody who missed his chance and never worked up the nerve to try any of the doors.”