Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault

by Adam-Troy Castro

  There was that phrase again. Would have been.

  But that wasn’t even the startling part. Fernie read the sentence three times to make sure she’d read it correctly, and then looked up at Gustav, feeling dazed. “She didn’t die after you were born. She died before.”

  “I told you,” Gustav said with a petulance she had never seen in him. “She wasn’t my mother. She would have been my mother. She died three months too soon to be my mother.”

  “B-but…how is that even possible? You’re standing right there, in front of me, and—”

  “My father was in the hospital for three days,” Gustav said without answering her question. “He returned to the Gloom house, hating the place for the first time in his life, because it was even bigger and emptier without her, and because there were reminders of her, and of the child who would now never be born, everywhere he looked. He was heartbroken and saw no reason to go on living in the house inside the house. He told his good friend Howard Philip October that he’d spend a couple of days gathering up his things, and hers, and then leave town forever.

  “From what I’ve been told, Howard Philip October just smiled sadly, put a hand on my father’s shoulder, and told him that he understood. He said, ‘Stay as long as you like.’”

  Anger burned in Gustav’s black eyes. “October said it like it was his house, not my father’s, and it was up to him to give permission. My father didn’t even notice. He barely had enough energy to think. The packing that should have taken a day stretched to three, and then to four…before everything changed.”

  Fernie didn’t want to ask Gustav the next question. “What happened?”

  “Somebody who witnessed her death told my father what had really happened to Penny. She told him that Penny had been in full control of the car and paying full attention to everything she was doing when the gas pedal suddenly pressed itself to the floor, the steering wheel ripped itself out of her hands, and the car headed for that ravine on its own. A truck passed by in the other lane, with its headlights on high, and lit up the inside of Penny’s car for a second, long enough for her to see that the car all around her was filled with shadows, fighting her for control of the car. Penny recognized one of them as October’s. She was still begging October’s shadow for the life of her baby when the car went over the edge.”

  Gustav fell silent and lowered his head, just as if he were remembering that day himself, even though he hadn’t been there and could only report what he’d been told.

  Fernie didn’t understand who could have told Gustav the story in that much detail, and was about to ask. But then a more terrible thought occurred to her. She realized that the future Gustav actually had been there, inside Penny, and that killing her had also been, by definition, an attempt to kill him.

  Her mouth was so dry that her voice broke even as she asked the next question. “What did your father do when he found out?”

  “What any husband in that situation would do,” Gustav said. “He went off to find and confront the man who had pretended to be his friend.”

  He took the album from her, closed it with an audible snap, and tossed it back onto the bed.

  He said, “I wish I could tell you what happened next. I don’t know what happened between October and my father. I don’t know how October wound up becoming a shadow eater. I only know that after that day, neither my father nor Howard Philip October was ever seen again.”

  Fernie now understood why the walls of the house inside the house reeked of sadness. She could picture Gustav’s father, lying in his crazy bed, thinking of everything he had lost and how empty his life would now be, with nothing to show for it but a family photo album that had accumulated all the happy pictures it ever would. She couldn’t even imagine what must have gone through his mind when the witness, whoever she was, reported October’s involvement…or how often Gustav himself must have visited this place, looked through those same pictures, and missed people he had never been given a chance to know.

  The air suddenly grew much, much colder, and a voice outside cried, “Girl! October has found you!”

  Gustav raced past her, down the hallway, and into the nursery. Fernie followed close behind and saw the same view he saw out the window: the terrible form of the shadow eater, standing in the center of the fake lawn, sniffing the air for signs of them.

  “Come out now, girl! You do not want to make me come after you!”

  Terrified, Fernie asked Gustav, “What are you going to do?”

  “What do you think I’m going to do? I’m going to march right up to October and ask him some tough questions.”

  Fernie could only protest: “But you can’t just walk up to him, not with the things he can do. You need a plan.”

  “Do you have one?” Gustav demanded.

  “No.”

  “Do you know where we can go about finding one?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know where Great-Aunt Mellifluous and the others are hiding so we can ask them if they have any ideas?”

  “No.”

  “Can you think of anybody else, anywhere, who can tell us anything about what this Nightmare Vault is and why October wants it?”

  She would have preferred giving any other answer in the world, but found herself forced to a frightened, unwilling, “No.”

  “Then,” Gustav said, with inescapable logic, “he’s the only one left. We’ll talk to him, all right. We just won’t talk to him here.”

  He walked past a still-sputtering Fernie, left the bedroom, and marched down the stairs.

  She whirled around and ran down the stairs after him, just in time to look over the side and see him heading down the central hallway for the kitchen at the rear of the house.

  The kitchen turned out to be the only room in the house that showed its long years of abandonment. There was still no dust, nor any mess, but the cabinets lining the walls had all had their doors removed and been emptied of any supplies they might have once housed. The sink was pristine, and the tiled floor showed indentations where heavy appliances might have stood. The only obvious cutlery, a set of cutting knives, sat in a slot holder in the middle of the central island. The only other item left over from its days as a working kitchen was a roll of aluminum foil.

  A doorway off to the right led to another chamber that might have been a laundry room, but from where Fernie stood looked as empty as everything else. It was as if the strange forces inside the Gloom house had reached inside the smaller house inside the house and claimed all the modern things as soon as Hans and Penny Gloom were gone.

  Outside, October cried, “This is your last warning! Bring me to the Nightmare Vault!”

  Gustav stood at the open screen door to the backyard, waiting for her. He whispered, “I’ll get you back outside first, if you want. There’s no reason we both have to talk to him.”

  It was a tempting offer. Fernie couldn’t help worrying about Pearlie and their dad and even Harrington, and would have liked nothing more than to run back outside and give them all reassuring hugs. But she had been through so much with Gustav that the thought of his trying to keep her away from the same dangers he had to face infuriated her. “The man walked into my house and ate my shadow. Don’t you think I might have a few things to say?”

  Gustav seemed a little stunned and humbled by the reminder. “I’m sorry, Fernie. I almost forgot all about what he did to you. You’re right. That was pretty rude of him, too.”

  “Not just pretty rude,” Fernie said. “Cosmically rude.”

  Gustav seemed to appreciate that. “He is a big jerk, isn’t he?”

  “And he’s smelly,” Fernie added.

  Gustav cocked his head a little. “I know I never got all that close, but I didn’t notice the smelly part. Is he really?”

  Fernie thought back to her first meeting with the man. “No. It’s just something else to say as long as we’re calling him names. He wasn’t smelly. We can erase the smelly.”

  “That’s not neces
sary. I’m perfectly okay with calling him smelly. I was just checking.” Gustav held the door open for her and offered her a little bow. “After you.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE SUN IN THE SKY OVER THE HOUSE INSIDE THE HOUSE

  The backyard of the house inside the house was another lawn made out of lush green carpet, surrounded by walls painted the same color as the sky. The light of the “sun” over the front yard was not as direct here, so the sky was painted darker and bore a number of pinprick lights, like the first stars becoming visible in the early light of a warm country evening. An empty hammock, which looked as comforting as all hammocks do, dangled between two upright poles, inviting Fernie or anybody else who passed by for a nice nap. Fernie almost wanted to, but she’d learned on the first trip inside the Gloom house that some places that looked inviting were just traps, promising terrible fates to anybody who heeded their calls.

  The thought made her shiver, which wasn’t hard to do because the air was so unnaturally cold. That made her think of the “sun,” whose glow she could still make out over the edge of the little house’s roof. What she could see really did look like a glowing ball of fire, one that from this angle seemed to be setting on the other side of the house. Some of the shadow eater’s tendrils rose toward it, like smoke. Others curled around the house inside the house, like blind snakes searching a burrow for mice to eat.

  Despite the imminent danger, Fernie had to ask. “Gustav? Before we go, what is that thing?”

  Gustav followed her gaze and said, “That? It’s our sun.”

  “No, I mean really.”

  “So do I,” Gustav said.

  “Gustav—” she began.

  “In a minute.” He turned his attention to the wall marking the end of the little house’s backyard, where a single lonely doorknob interrupted the expansive mural of faraway countryside. It was an odd place for a doorknob, in that there were no seams around it marking the presence of an actual door. But he turned it anyway, and when he did, the entire rear wall swung backward. There was no need to open it more than a crack. The narrow opening was as shrouded in darkness as the house inside the house was bathed in sunlight, but Gustav stepped over this threshold without fear, and Fernie followed close behind.

  Once they were past it, Gustav closed the door behind him and lit a candle he must have been carrying with him, creating a cozy circle of light that revealed the space around them to be a narrow hallway, leading into the darkness to both his left and right.

  “Come on,” he said, breaking into a jog.

  Fernie hustled along behind him. “Won’t he chase us?”

  “From what Great-Aunt Mellifluous warned me, he’s not very talented at tracking anybody who keeps moving. He’s a terror when it comes to finding people who’ve settled down in a hiding place, because anyone staying in one place heats the air in a way he can sense from a distance, but he loses all track of anyone who keeps going. Don’t you already feel better?”

  Now that Gustav mentioned it, the terrible chill around them seemed to be fading. “But we can’t keep going forever!”

  “No. We can’t. But we can keep going long enough to choose the place where he catches up. Come on.”

  The narrow passageway stretched out before them for what seemed like miles. After a few minutes, they slowed down a little, and Fernie prodded, “The sun?”

  “Oh, that. It’s not actually the sun you’re used to looking at. Not the whole thing, anyway. It’s just a little piece of it, brought down to Earth and cooled just enough so that we can keep it around without burning up.”

  One of the stranger things about visiting the Gloom house more than once is that you could hear something like that and believe it immediately. This was not the same thing as not having any problems with it. “What are you doing with a piece of the sun hanging over your head in your house?”

  “All shadow houses contain a ball of concentrated sunlight. They need one around, because while shadows prefer darkness, they also can’t exist without light. This is ours. My grandfather built the house inside the house here, just under it, because he didn’t want to look out his front window and see a dark room all the time.”

  This was all worse than no explanation at all, because it failed to account for just who had gone out and collected a little piece of the sun, and how Gustav himself could walk around underneath it when she’d seen him start to vaporize like a movie vampire the second he was exposed to the direct rays of the real sun in the real sky.

  You could collect a lot of question marks when having a simple conversation in the Gloom house. It was safer, sometimes, to go with the first answers that were given, and say what Fernie said now: “Okay.”

  They reached the end of the narrow passage they traveled, made a left turn, and kept going.

  A few minutes later, they reached an intersection and turned right.

  Fearing that Gustav had led her into another situation like the endless train of closets, Fernie finally exploded, “But where does this lead?”

  “Everywhere,” he said.

  “Gustav!”

  “No, I’m serious. You can get anywhere in the house from these passages.”

  “What is that? More shadow tricks?”

  “No. They’re actually a real-world thing, left over from the days when the Gloom house was still a normal house, if you really can use that word to describe a big mansion with a small army of maids and butlers on staff. Back then, servants weren’t supposed to be seen unless they were needed, so they traveled from one part of the house to another through hallways that ran behind all the other rooms, and did all their cleaning and so on while out of sight. The trick was to avoid being seen. I’ve been taught that in some houses like this, a maid could actually get fired if the boss happened to walk in and catch her dusting.”

  Fernie said, “Couldn’t she also get fired if he walked in and found her not dusting?”

  “I suppose,” he supposed. “The trick for the servants was always to pretend that they weren’t there and that the mess was always picked up and the dust always wiped away and the windows always cleared of smudges all by themselves, without a couple dozen busy people running around hidden hallways and popping into rooms doing all the work.” He thought about it for a moment, and said, “I guess that made it a shadow house of a different kind, then.”

  Fernie and Gustav turned left at a four-way intersection and hurried down a passage so narrow that they had to rush along single file, Gustav’s candle illuminating no more than the few steps ahead and the few steps back.

  A little while later, they arrived at another four-way intersection, and Gustav turned right, into a corridor even narrower than the one before it; so narrow, in fact, that Fernie could have named a number of people, Mrs. Everwiner, for example, who would have been too fat to pass.

  Another left turn and the passage narrowed yet again, giving Fernie the impression of walls closing in, eager to crush her. They reached a thin set of stairs, climbed it, made their way down another long and narrow hallway, and reached another stairwell, which they climbed as well.

  Five flights of stairs later, Fernie found herself getting winded. “How high are we climbing?”

  Gustav said, “High enough to stay out of his reach long enough to ask what needs to be asked. The grand parlor goes up high enough that he might find answering our questions easier than chasing us.”

  “Doesn’t that all depend on his being on the ground floor of the parlor?”

  “It does,” Gustav allowed, “but that’s more or less the first place I would go, if I were him and needed to catch our scent again. If not, I think we can still attract his attention.”

  Gustav and Fernie climbed more flights, and further conversation lagged as they forced themselves as far as they could go. On the way, Fernie couldn’t help but notice how quiet the house seemed. On her previous visit, the place had been anything but silent; even in the most isolated places, there had always been distant whispers, cries,
breathing, the sounds a living house makes when people, or at least creatures, move around inside. But now all the shadows were in hiding, and the walls around them seemed as quiet as a tomb. Her own ragged breath reflected the exhaustion of a girl who might have been able to run up ten flights of stairs without breathing hard, but was being pushed to her limits by the time she had climbed twenty.

  If this had been less important, she might have asked Gustav for a break.

  She lost count of how far they had climbed, though it was certainly much higher than the house seen from the outside should have been able to accommodate.

  Then he sat down at the top of one flight that looked the same as any other flight and wiped a thin sheen of sweat from his forehead. He was tired, but not nearly as out of breath as Fernie was. “Okay,” he said. “This is the floor with the gong. We should rest up a bit before we strike it, because we might have to run away in a hurry if things go wrong.”

  Fernie sat down gratefully. “Gong?”

  “Yes,” Gustav said. “It’s a giant round bell, about this big.” He extended his arms as far as they would go.

  “I know…what a…gong is. But what’s one…doing all the way up here?” she panted.

  “I brought it up from the basement,” Gustav explained.

  “You…carried…a gong…up all these stairs?”

  “I don’t want to pretend I’m stronger than I am,” he said. “It took me four days. I had help, and even then I had to drag it a little bit farther every day.”

  “Why…would you…spend four days…lugging a big heavy…gong…through all those…narrow hallways…and up more than twenty…flights of stairs?”

  “So I could ring it,” he said as if that were the most obvious question in the world.

  She was mad at herself for falling into the same trap that she’d promised herself she wouldn’t fall into again of asking questions.