The sound the gong made as it landed flat against his face was far louder than the tones Gustav had managed to make with the beater, but then the gong landed on October much harder than the head of the beater had landed on it. Even so, October almost managed to drown out that resounding note with his own cry of pain and rage. The impact drove him down almost three full stories, and might have sent him plummeting all the way to the parlor floor, but the shadow tendrils managed to recover, grab hold of another balcony, and start pulling him back up. The gong flipped away and continued to fall, its work done. There was now a sizable dent in the center of the bell.
This all happened in about a second or so, in the time Fernie spent spinning her arms at the edge of the balcony, trying not to fall. Now she screamed as she tipped forward over the edge farther than any amount of frantic arm-waving could have possibly corrected.
October’s face, which had been misshapen before, now looked like one giant bruise. More black tendrils spilled from his mouth and reached up for her.
Then a small but strong hand grabbed the back of her shirt and with a single tug pulled her back from the edge.
Gustav looked paler than she’d ever seen him. “Don’t ever scare me like that.”
Fernie felt pretty pale herself. “I’ll try not to.”
The crunching sounds resumed. More black tendrils punched holes in the balcony floor. As the two friends ran together toward the entrance to the servants’ corridor, the tendrils grew so furious at their failure to catch the children that they began tearing the balcony to splinters. One giant section was ripped away just as Gustav and Fernie were about to run across it. There was no time to stop, so they leaped together, landing in a heap on the other side, which also started to collapse beneath them.
Far below them, the gong rang as it smashed into the floor of the grand parlor.
Gustav and Fernie scrambled to their feet and ran the rest of the way to the servants’ passage, tossing the narrow door open and barreling down the stairs, once again ahead of the tendrils pursuing them. Gustav no longer had a lit candle, so for long minutes they fled through nearly total darkness, Fernie unable to do anything but follow the dimly glimpsed figure up ahead.
From time to time he shouted a warning at her: “Left turn!” or “Stairs!” She hit a wall face-first, bounced off, almost headed the wrong way, and was guided back by another Gustav yell: “No, here!”
They didn’t stop running until Gustav pulled Fernie into a narrow space beneath a narrow flight of stairs. After that, they sat side by side, panting, both struggling to get their breathing under control so their gasps wouldn’t drown out any sounds of walls being torn down in October’s determination to catch them.
After a long time, their breath quieted.
Fernie glanced at the boy beside her and ached to see past the darkness. After all, this hadn’t been a good night for him. He’d been abandoned by his adoptive family. He had been reminded of his tragic past. He had confronted and fought his first battle with the evil man who’d killed the woman who would have been his mother. He’d learned the fate of his father. She couldn’t even imagine what he was thinking.
Then he heaved one of the most forlorn sighs she had ever heard and told her.
He said, “I’m really going to miss that gong.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE MOST FEARED CREATURE IN THE GLOOM HOUSE
They rested for a bit, then got up so Gustav could lead her through more of the servants’ passages, following a route that must have made some kind of sense to him, even though Fernie saw it as just a lot of running around heading nowhere in particular.
They had descended several flights of stairs and inched their way through what Fernie estimated to be several miles of corridor when she finally lost patience and exclaimed, “Do we have a plan yet?”
Gustav said, “No.”
“Do we have a plan for coming up with a plan?”
“No.”
“Do you even know where we’re going?”
“Sure I do.”
“Where?”
He pointed in the direction they happened to be walking. “This way.”
“Does this way lead anywhere that might be helpful, or is it just the way we happen to be going?”
He asked, “Does your dad ever get irritated with you on long trips?”
“No,” she retorted, “but we’ve never been on any when we were being chased by shadow eaters.”
A few minutes later they stopped at a spot that looked the same as every other, and Gustav pressed the palms of his hands against the wall. It swung open at his touch and revealed a solemn, empty chamber that Fernie had never seen before. It was the kind of long, narrow room that would have qualified as a hallway if the sides had been squeezed together a little bit. There was no furniture, but the walls were lined with framed portraits.
The men wore monocles, top hats, muttonchops, and the annoyed frowns of people who had just been interrupted while making important decisions. The women wore towering hairstyles that must have taken them all day to arrange and might have presented a problem with any nearby low-hanging ceiling fans. They all looked like famous people trying to hold the same fixed expressions on their faces for however long it took artists to paint them. The room was lit by candles burning in glass fixtures mounted on the wall between each painting.
“This is the Gallery of the Almost Famous,” Gustav said. “They’re all people who could have done important things but never got around to it.” He pointed at one fellow with a bald head and a mustache so broad that people standing directly behind him must have been able to see both tips sticking out the sides. “Like this one here: According to the plaque, his name was Colonel Montgomery J. Summerbottom, and he was going to mount an expedition to the South Pole, but decided not to go at the last minute because he’d just found out for the first time that it might be cold.”
“Gustav, how does this help us?”
“The painting? Not at all. But we can use this.” He unscrewed the glass globe between the painting of Colonel Summerbottom and the painting next to it of a very proper woman who looked like she wanted to sneeze.
He handed the globe to Fernie.
She stared at the globe, which was sooty and warm from the fire it had contained. “What am I supposed to do with this?”
“I think we’ll need it,” Gustav said.
“So you were lying. You do have a plan.”
“I never lie,” Gustav said. “I don’t have a plan, or even a plan for coming up with a plan. What I do have is an idea.”
“What’s the difference?”
“An idea comes first, and is what you have when you know something that might work, but still need to figure out how to go about it. A plan is what you have when you know what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it. I have the idea, but no plan yet.”
Fernie thought that over and decided that in Gustav-land, it made a certain amount of sense. “All right,” she said. “So you may not have any plan for coming up with a plan, but does your idea give you any ideas about how to come up with a plan?”
“Of course,” Gustav said. “I’m going to go ask an old acquaintance of mine for advice.”
“I thought you said that there was nobody to ask but October.”
“That wasn’t quite true. I do know someone else who should still be around, but he’s not exactly a friend and not easy to have a useful conversation with.”
Fernie was left wondering what kind of old acquaintance could possibly be so unpleasant that Gustav would have found him harder to talk to than the shadow eater.
Gustav went to the light fixture on the other side of Summerbottom’s portrait, unscrewed its globe as well, and took that one for himself. “I am pretty sure about one thing: That wasn’t the real Howard Philip October.”
“But you said—”
He started for the set of double doors at the far side of the room, forcing Fernie to hurry in order to catch up
with him. “I never said it was him. I showed you a picture of October and asked you if it was the same man you saw. You said it was. That’s not the same thing as my saying it was, and now that I’ve met him and talked to him I don’t think it was.”
She rushed along beside him, not getting it at all. “Why not?”
“He didn’t sound like Howard Philip October.”
“How would you know, if he disappeared before you were born?”
“I told you, he wrote books. I’ve read them all just in case he ever tried to come back, and even listened to some recordings my grandfather had of his voice. He was the kind of person who doesn’t really know what he’s talking about but thinks he can fool you into thinking he does by using long windy sentences and words that sound important but that he doesn’t really understand.”
“Like what?”
“Well, like for instance, squamous.”
“You’re just making that up.”
“No. It means ‘covered in little scales.’ In his books, he kept using it to describe people he had met. If you listened to him, he couldn’t travel fifteen feet in any direction without finding people who looked squamous. Why, I read one of his books where he took a trip to some spooky little village somewhere and, if you believe him, every single person he met there was squamous.”
“If the village really was that spooky, maybe they were.”
“Maybe. Or maybe he was just counting on nobody who read his books owning a dictionary. The point is that the real Howard Philip October used a lot of fancy words, even if he didn’t always use them the right way. That thing we just met could barely come up with a the.”
“Maybe becoming whatever he is now hurt his mind.”
“Could be,” Gustav said. “But I think the real October is still alive somewhere, and that this one is just a bad copy, one that looks like October and has some of his memories, but still isn’t really him.”
“Is he October’s shadow?”
“No. He’s filled with shadows, but his skin, the part that gets all lumpy because of the shadows moving around inside him, is human. It might even be grown from October’s own skin, since it looks so much like him, but I don’t think there’s anything else inside that thing but the shadows he’s eaten.”
“How does that help?” she wanted to know.
“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “But it might be something we need to keep in mind.”
They reached the set of double doors at the end of the Gallery of the Almost Famous. Gustav propped his glass globe under one arm in order to handle the doorknob with the other, hesitated, and told Fernie, “I should warn you. When we open the door, we might have to run very fast.”
“Gee,” Fernie said. “That would be a nice change.”
“I’m serious. We’re about to head into a part of the house where the shadows aren’t very civilized. Most of them aren’t evil so much as mean and unpleasant. They’re not fit for polite company, and are so disliked by most of the others that they band together here, where nobody talks to them or has anything to do with them.”
“Is it a jail?” she asked.
“No. There’s a jail here, and it happens to be where we’re going…but everything around it is like…a bad neighborhood. It’s possible they were never warned about the shadow eater, and might not have hidden wherever the rest went. They’ll give us trouble if we try to pass.”
“Then why do we have to go this way?”
“Because,” Gustav said, “it’s the only way I know of to get to the jail. The person I want to talk to is a prisoner there. Getting to him might be dangerous, and talking to him will be more dangerous still, but we have no other choice, not with October still loose and searching for us.”
“Okay,” Fernie said. “I’m ready.”
Gustav took a deep breath, steeled himself, and pushed open the door.
Fernie was used to seeing dim and dingy places in the Gloom house, but the new corridor on the other side was dimmer and dingier than most: the kind of place not inhabited by mere shadows, but by shadows that couldn’t be bothered to keep up appearances. The walls were dirty, as if somebody with mud on his hands had recently passed through and attempted to paint. The air smelled gray with soot, and the carpet runner emitted little puffs of dust with every step Gustav and Fernie took.
They walked quickly, but even so the shadows started to gather around them, circling around to get good looks from all sides. They were not the kind of shadows Fernie had met and come to know, either the good ones like Great-Aunt Mellifluous or the bad ones like the Beast; these were taller, scrawnier, more distorted, almost as if somebody had grabbed them on both ends and stretched them out of shape.
One said, “Boy.”
Another said, “I thought we told you to stay out of this part of the house, boy.”
Another said, “A halfsie boy could get lost in a place like this and never find his way out.”
One of the threatening shadows plucked at Fernie’s shirt. It was a nasty pinch that didn’t feel anything like the hand of any other shadow whose touch Fernie had known; it felt colder, stickier, as if it had been dipped in gravy and then dried.
“Look, everybody, the girl doesn’t have a shadow!”
“Neither does the boy,” another shadow pointed out.
“Yes, but we know what the boy is. We’ve seen him without his shadow before, and know that it always comes back to him. What’s the girl’s excuse?”
“Maybe she fired it,” one theorized.
“Flesh-and-blood people can’t fire their shadows,” another protested.
“They can if the economy’s bad enough,” one pointed out.
“We ought to teach her a lesson,” another declared.
The shadows looming around Fernie, scandalized by the presence of a flesh-and-blood girl who didn’t have a shadow of her own, drew even closer, their cold fingers tugging at her hair to confirm that she was real.
“Walk faster,” Gustav murmured.
Fernie did just that, but the shadows continued to gather around her, examining her from head to toe and appearing to block the way ahead.
One piped up with considerable excitement. “Don’t hurt her! She’s a genuine rarity! We should take her to the zoo, put her in a cage, and charge other shadows to see her!”
The others around him chorused their approval of this excellent idea. “We’ll teach her how to do tricks! We’ll put on four shows a day!”
More shadows drew close. There seemed to be hundreds of them, all hungry, all cruel, and all frayed at the edges, like ripped cloth. They plucked at Fernie’s hair and her clothes, as if greedy for her warmth. Passing through them was like walking through an unseen spiderweb in a dark, cramped place.
Fernie whispered to Gustav, “Do they actually have a zoo where they keep people?”
Gustav whispered back, “They tried to start one with me once. They gave me a tire on a swing, so it wasn’t so bad, especially since I got away after a week.”
“Wonderful,” she muttered.
“I told you we might have to run.”
Running seemed pointless now; the corridor in front of them was growing as crowded with disreputable shadows as the corridor behind them. Some were solid enough to have faces, and they were always the stupid, cruel, self-satisfied faces that Fernie associated with schoolyard bullies, taunting weaker kids into begging them to stop. There were so many up ahead that they filled the corridor like fog and made seeing past them impossible. There was no way to know where to run.
The Fernie who had first walked through Gustav Gloom’s front door three weeks earlier might have been terrified into running for her life, but this Fernie whirled in place, pointed a pale finger at the nearest shadow’s face, and cried, “Would any of you idiots like to know why I don’t have a shadow?”
They gasped, startled by her question.
One, speaking in a very soft voice, said, “Yes.”
She said, “Because I’m a shadow
eater and I ate mine!”
The disreputable shadows surrounding her all reared back as one at this statement, and for a horrible second or two all seemed about to start laughing at her. But no one shadow seemed prepared to call her a liar until one very slight and meek one ventured, “But a little girl can’t be a shadow eater.”
“She’s bluffing,” one of his braver friends declared, though he didn’t seem quite sure.
“If I’m bluffing,” Fernie said coldly, “then why don’t you go check out the Gallery of Awkward Statues, or the Too Much Sitting Room, or the banquet hall, or any of those other places where you used to be able to find all the nice civilized shadows who behaved themselves? Ask yourself why they’re all gone.”
The uncivilized shadows all gaped at her uneasily, unsure whether to laugh in disbelief or run in terror.
One said, “I haven’t heard anything from the rest of the house tonight.”
Another protested, “I heard a gong.”
An especially irritated one said, “The gong doesn’t count. The boy’s always beating that gong. Keeping me up all hours of the day and night, when I need my beauty sleep. It’s not decent. But that’s all I’ve heard.”
Then one of them, speaking in the quavery voice of someone just realizing that he should be afraid, said, “Guys? I ran down to the banquet hall an hour or two ago, hoping for some scraps…and she’s telling the truth. There was nobody there. Why would there be nobody there?”
“Because,” Fernie said in the most fearsome voice she could manage, “I ate them all. And I’m getting hungry again now.”
The uncivilized shadows decided that fleeing in terror was the better of the two available options, and did just that with a haste that stirred up some of the dust on the floor and sent it trailing after them as if it, too, wanted to flee the unexpectedly frightening little girl.
Surprised that it had worked but gratified to have done something right, she turned back to Gustav, who was giving her the oddest look she’d ever seen him give.
Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault Page 9