Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault

by Adam-Troy Castro

  But this time, he surprised her by offering the explanation. “Look, it’s very simple. Remember that time from your last visit when we fell down the garbage chute into a big pile of shadow-stuff? Remember how far we fell and how soft the landing was?”

  Fernie remembered. It had been just like landing in a big pile of feathers.

  “Wasn’t that fun?” he asked.

  Now that she thought about it, it had been. “Yes.”

  “Well,” he said, “there’s no place in the house with a greater distance to fall, or with more shadows crowded together on the ground below me, than the balconies high above the grand parlor. I ring the gong because they can hear it and be warned that I’m about to jump. So far, they’ve always made a big soft pile out of themselves to cushion my landing.”

  It sounded exactly like the kind of fun thing Fernie would have wanted to try, even if it was also the kind of thing her dad would call an accident waiting to happen. But something bothered her. “Didn’t you also tell me that most of the shadows here don’t really care whether you live or die?”

  “Pretty much all of them,” he agreed. “There are only a few exceptions, like Great-Aunt Mellifluous, Mr. Notes’s shadow, and Fluffy the Dinosaur, who you haven’t met yet.”

  She ignored the reference to Fluffy the Dinosaur.

  “And yet you’re willing to jump from high balconies, for fun, just because there might be enough of them eager to catch you as long as they hear you ring the gong first?”

  Gustav blinked at her, as uncomprehending as he might have been if she’d said that there were giraffes in her underwear, or that there were swimming pools filled with yams on the moon. “It’s always worked so far.”

  Being Gustav’s friend sometimes meant wanting to slap him on the top of the head.

  Fernie might have done just that, but before she could, he saw that she was rested enough, and gestured for her to follow him again. “Come on,” he said. “It’s time.”

  They emerged from the maze of narrow servants’ passageways onto a chilly abandoned walkway, a skyscraping height over the grand parlor far below. It was far from the highest balcony, as the atrium extended upward as far as Fernie’s eyes could see, the nested balconies above them continuing to reach for the sky until they disappeared in a haze. But this was as high as she would have wanted to climb, given that none of the floors this high up seemed to have railings. It was also nastier in other ways, with spiderwebs making tents in the space between walls and floor, and a thin layer of dirt that crunched beneath her shoes every time she took a step.

  The gong stood about twenty steps from the entrance to the servants’ passageway, as out of place as a bunny on a motorcycle. It was even larger than Gustav had indicated, a head taller than him and about half again as wide as the span of his arms. Fernie was impressed that he’d been able to move it at all, let alone drag it down so many narrow hallways and up so many flights of stairs.

  It was an ornate gong, with serpentine golden dragons curled around the frame it hung from and two intertwined fish on the great golden disk itself. Diamonds and rubies and emeralds glittered wherever it might have occurred to its previous owners to put some. Fernie would not have been surprised to find out that it had once stood in the palace of an emperor. It was, after all, the kind of thing an emperor would have, probably so some slave could ring it every time the boss said something particularly decisive.

  Either way, she could tell that it was an ancient treasure, probably worth many times more than everything her family owned put together. Gustav had dragged it up out of the basement so he could play with it.

  The beater was a padded, weighted tool the size of a sledgehammer, hanging from two prongs on the side of the arch-shaped frame. The striking end looked heavy enough to shatter brick walls. Fernie thought that she would have had more than enough trouble carrying that up so many flights of stairs, without also worrying about the gong.

  Gustav stood at the edge of the balcony and looked down, leaning out a little just to be sure. He teetered as if about to fall, then rocked back on his heels. “He’s not down there. Either he’s gone back outside or he’s still exploring, somewhere.”

  Fernie peered over the edge as well and saw the tiled floor of the grand parlor, a tiny checkerboard studded with toy furniture many stories below. From here, the two dozen stairways of different types that rose from that level to various levels higher up looked like thin lines, crisscrossing that distant space as if to strike out the whole place, marking the room like a mistake on a test paper. Another danger of Gustav’s reckless jumping hobby occurred to her: A leap meant not just hoping the shadows saw fit to cushion his landing, but also first aiming carefully enough to make sure that he didn’t smash himself against some set of stairs before the shadows even had a chance. The mental image this gave her was not pretty. She shuddered and took a hasty step away from the edge.

  Gustav lifted the gong beater off its hooks and cradled it in both arms before getting a firm grip on the handle and letting the striker hit the floor with an audible thunk. “Better stand back,” he said. “And get ready. If he answers, we might have to run in a hurry.”

  Fernie hesitated. After everything she’d seen, she wasn’t sure she was ready to face the shadow eater again. But then, she didn’t think she ever would be as ready as she would have liked to be. That, she reflected, was the major challenge of facing monsters. Sometimes you had to give up on being “ready,” and just get on with it. She took a deep breath and said, “Okay.”

  Gustav nodded. “On three.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A NICE LEISURELY CHAT WITH HOWARD PHILIP OCTOBER

  Fernie retreated against the wall to give Gustav enough room for his most powerful swing. Just as he strained to lift the beater over his shoulder, she obeyed a sudden impulse and stuck her fingers in her ears.

  It was not the loveliest swing in the history of the world. The slaves responsible for beating that gong, in whatever emperor’s palace it had come from, might have laughed at Gustav’s weakness, even if he was just a kid. But gravity took over on the downswing, and the beater hit the gong dead center, hard enough to leave Fernie happy to have protected her ears. The ring was not just loud but deafening, with a keening follow-up vibration that she could feel in her teeth.

  If anything, the bong seemed to get louder, not quieter, as the next seconds went on. The note echoed throughout the empty space of the atrium, hitting the walls and bouncing against other walls and making the single gong strike sound like a dozen, all almost as loud as the first. The sound must have been as impossible to ignore on the ground floor as it was all the way up on the balcony, and it only grew more insistent as Gustav drew back the beater and struck the gong a second time, and a third.

  “Hey!” Gustav yelled. The note was still reverberating. “Howard Philip October! Where are you? I’m caaaallling you! Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

  He leaned over the edge to look down.

  “Come on, Howard Philip October! Stop hiding! You want the Nightmare Vault, I’m the one to talk to! Show your face now and I won’t even say anything about it being so ugly! Come on, Howard Philip October! I’m talking to you!”

  His own voice echoed, too, until the atrium before them rang with multiple mocking repetitions of Howard Philip October, bouncing off the balconies like a thousand Ping-Pong balls looking for a place to land.

  After a moment, he seemed to see something. “There he is.” And he shouted again: “Up here, smelly! That’s right! I’m talking to you!”

  Fernie felt a chill as the air around them grew perceptibly colder. She ventured toward the edge to look down and see a great swirling mass of darkness, like a bowl of ebony spaghetti, writhing on the lower floors. A man-shaped white speck stood in the center of that darkness and seemed to be slowly rising toward the level where Gustav and Fernie stood.

  Her heart thumped. “How did you know he’d be able to fly?”

  “That’s not
so much flying as climbing,” Gustav said.

  “But how did you know?”

  “I didn’t. I figured. As long as that shadow-stuff inside him is able to reach out and grab things, it should be able to climb.”

  “How does that help?” Fernie wanted to know.

  “It gives us the few minutes it’ll take him to get here. We’ll be able to have a nice leisurely talk with him without worrying about his grabbing us right away.”

  Fernie steeled herself for another glance over the side. The swirling mass of blackness had now swallowed most of the lower crisscrossing stairways. The man-shaped thing at its center was now easier to make out as the same one who had chased Fernie and her sister from their home. At the rate he was climbing, he was going to be upon Fernie and Gustav in less than a minute.

  “Are we going to have time?” she worried.

  “I think we’ll make time,” Gustav said.

  She risked another look down. The leading tendrils were now only five stories or so below them. “Now?”

  “I want to look him in the face,” Gustav said.

  Fernie gave the rising figure another look. The space where his face should have been was the big black O of his open mouth, larger than any face would have been.

  Gustav glanced down and guessed what she was thinking. “Good point. That is disgusting.” He yelled again: “All right, Howard Philip October! That’s close enough! Come any closer and you’ll never get your Nightmare Vault!”

  To Fernie’s surprise, the figure in the yellowing white uniform stopped rising, only four stories below them. His mouth closed most of the way, his lumpy features drawing back over the yawning black emptiness of his mouth like an ill-fitting hood. His unhappy eyes searched for the source of the threat, found Gustav, and regarded him without any obvious understanding or recognition. But his body turned and shifted closer to their side of the atrium so he could stare up at Fernie and the boy with her.

  He was as slow at forming sentences as he had been inside Fernie’s home, and when he spoke, through a mouth still sprouting dozens of long black tendrils, it was unclear whether he was answering Gustav or speaking to himself and not caring whether Gustav heard. He was close enough now to speak in a conversational tone of voice. “You’re the girl who ran,” he noted in his lifeless voice. “The one I’ll have to punish for making me give chase. The boy, I don’t know. Who are you, boy?”

  While staying the same size and remaining the same boy, Gustav seemed to swell, and darken, and become something far more terrible than the boy Fernie knew, who had never tasted fried chicken and was capable of wondering whether pizza was some kind of bird.

  “Who am I?” he roared, in tones so fearsome Fernie wondered why he’d ever bothered to use a gong. “You come into my house, scare my friends, chase away my family, and dare to ask who I am? You could not possibly be so stupid! My name’s Gustav Gloom. Grandson of Lemuel Gloom, son of Hans, almost the son of Penelope, protector of this house and of my friends. If you’re looking for anything inside these walls, you need to negotiate with ME.”

  Fernie was sincerely impressed. “Wow.”

  Even October seemed a little intimidated. He retreated a few feet, as if considering that information. Then he looked up again, his lumpy cheeks bulging and twisting from the shapes churning beneath them. “Very well, boy. I will deal with you. Where’s the Nightmare Vault?”

  “Not so fast, smelly,” said Gustav, speaking in a conversational tone of voice now that the proper respect had been offered. “I’ve spent my whole life in this place, have explored it more than you could in a thousand years, and still don’t even know what you’re talking about. I’m not going to help you look without trading some questions for answers, starting with just what this Nightmare Vault looks like.”

  October took several seconds to think on this, his uniformed body bobbing in the air just below the spot where Gustav stood. When he spoke, his voice sounded like a cry at the bottom of a deep well. “Is this a trick?”

  “I can’t tell you where to find something if I don’t know what it looks like.”

  “It will be in a wooden cabinet. Ten feet tall, four feet wide, three feet deep, standing on four clawed legs. There are two big doors in front, opening in the middle. There are two handles in the center, held shut with heavy chains.”

  Gustav shrugged his shoulders so gently that only Fernie could see it. He hadn’t ever seen any furniture in the house that fit October’s quick description.

  “Maybe I know what you’re talking about and maybe I don’t. Maybe I need some persuading that it’s something you should be allowed to have. What’s in it?”

  “Nightmares,” October said.

  “You’re pretty nightmarish already. Just look at you. You’re so powerful that people and shadows both run away from you. What power will the Nightmare Vault give you that you don’t already have?”

  October’s forehead swelled, then shrank, as if reflecting the fury of the thoughts within. “The cabinet is not for the October who stands before you. It is for his master.”

  “But if you don’t know where it is, how do you know it exists?”

  “When October was still human, he read Lemuel Gloom’s book. There’s a chapter on the Nightmare Vault. October offered Lemuel Gloom millions for it. Lemuel Gloom said no man should have it. He said that October would never have it.”

  This struck Fernie as a pretty sound business decision on Lemuel Gloom’s part.

  October droned on. “Later on, October moved into the Gloom house. He found many powerful things. He made many shadow allies. He still could not find the Nightmare Vault. He was afraid when Hans and Penny Gloom moved back in. He could not afford to be stopped before he found what he wanted. But he made a mistake. He thought Hans would also be in the car. But only Penny was in the car. Only Penny died when the car went over the edge.”

  Gustav’s profile, which looked serious at the best of times, now looked downright grim, and his pale skin had turned a light pink that might have been as close as it could ever get to being scarlet with fury.

  October had started to rise again and was now less than ten feet below the balcony where they stood. He was so close that it was possible to see into the darkness inside the mouth, see the storm clouds that churned inside him, as fresh tendrils spilled from his lips. Fernie noticed what she hadn’t before: a couple of the leading tendrils curling over the edge of the balcony, not making much of a show out of their advance, but definitely approaching Gustav like sly dogs trying to pretend they weren’t really interested in that piece of turkey carelessly left on the kitchen counter.

  She said, “Gustav…”

  He gestured her silent with a wave of his hand and addressed October again. “One last question. What happened between you and my father after he found out what you had done?”

  The tendrils gripping the edge of the balcony where Gustav and Fernie stood suddenly retreated, as if burned by the surface of a hot stove.

  October’s mouth formed an expression that was neither smile nor grimace, snarl nor leer, but something that might have been all of them, possible only on a mouth that could stretch farther than any human mouth ever had. It was like a shark’s grin, with no joy or friendliness or humor behind it: just an open mouth, unconnected to anything that he might have been thinking or feeling.

  He said, “Your father went after October. He hunted October through the house for thirteen days and thirteen nights. He fought monsters to get to October. He went without rest to get to October. He never let up. He chased October through all the terrible rooms of this house, all the way to the pit leading to the Dark Country.”

  “And then?” Gustav demanded.

  “They fell in together, clutching each other as only deadly enemies can, still fighting all the way down.”

  Fernie heard a sudden loud crunch at her feet. She looked down and saw something that terrified her: a dark, shadowy tendril, exploring the floor around the hole it had punched throu
gh the underside of the balcony. It almost found her left shoe before she stepped away, but even as she did there was another crunch and yet another dark tendril broke through, whipping through the hole it had made like a black snake.

  More crunches followed, dozens of them in every direction, each of them followed by another tendril of the shadows at October’s command. In seconds there was a forest of them, grasping the air for the girl they knew to be standing somewhere on the floor they had broken through.

  October bellowed: “Now give me the Nightmare Vault!”

  Fernie kicked at one of the tendrils, and it reared back, as if both enraged to have been attacked and delighted to have found her. It grabbed for her, faster than she’d seen any of them move before.

  Without thinking, she leaped over its lunge and landed on her feet right behind Gustav, who was also surrounded by them but didn’t seem to care enough about that to take his grim eyes off the distorted, grinning face of Howard Philip October.

  Gustav didn’t raise his voice. “Before I’m done, you’re going to wish you had stayed where my father sent you.”

  Then he put his back against the gong’s massive frame and pushed.

  It was too heavy to fall immediately, but Fernie saw what he was doing and lent her own shoulder to the effort. At first it seemed like the gong wasn’t going to move at all, and Fernie groaned from the strain as the black tendrils emerging from the floor groped for her, but then the gong started to tip toward the edge.

  The two kids braced their shoes against the floor and their backs against the frame and strained with all their might, until the slight tilt became a greater one and the gong started to fall.

  Fernie had put so much of her weight into it that she took an unwilling step or two after it went and started to go over the edge herself. For one terrible moment, she saw nothing below her but yawning open space, the tumbling gong, and the terrible form of the man who had been Howard Philip October.

  She spun her arms and managed to stay upright long enough to see October’s face at the moment when he saw that he would not be able to avoid the gong. It was the same expression anybody would have when looking up and seeing a heavy falling object. Inhuman as October was, he did not seem to look forward to the impact.