Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault

by Adam-Troy Castro

  She whirled back around and saw Gustav standing in waist-deep shadow-stuff. Puffs of black mist, disturbed when he surfaced, slowly sank on all sides, like soap bubbles.

  From his expression, he had no idea whatsoever why Fernie would be crying.

  Mr. Notes’s shadow said, “Hieronymus is telling October where to find the Nightmare Vault.”

  Gustav didn’t seem disturbed by that at all. “Yes. He said he was going to.”

  Fernie cried, “We’ve got to stop him!”

  Gustav seemed curious. “Who’s him in that sentence? Are we supposed to stop Hieronymus from telling October where to find it, or October from rushing off to get it?”

  Fernie didn’t understand why he was so calm. “Both!”

  Gustav looked past her, to Hieronymus’s island, where the discussion between the ice-cream man and the traitor shadow seemed to have ended. October had sprouted his tendrils again and was allowing them to carry him back in the opposite direction.

  Gustav shook his head. “I’m sorry, but Hieronymus has already said everything he’s going to say, and October’s already on his way to get the Nightmare Vault. So we’re too late to stop either one of those things. Would you settle for getting there first and saving the world?”

  Fernie said, “What?”

  Gustav addressed Mr. Notes’s shadow. “I’m sorry, but if you follow us under the mists, you’ll probably just attract sharks, and I’d rather you didn’t. Is it okay if I ask you to just find your own way out?”

  Mr. Notes’s shadow seemed torn between loyalty to Gustav and relief at being spared any dangerous encounters with sharks. “Should I meet you in the grand parlor?”

  Fernie cried, “What?”

  “If we’re not there in an hour,” Gustav told Mr. Notes’s shadow, “it’s because we got killed.”

  Gustav’s shadow friend nodded. “That’s what I would have figured, anyway.”

  Fernie’s mouth opened and closed and opened and closed. “What? What? What!?”

  Gustav glanced at her, and though he didn’t smile with his lips, there was a hint of one in his eyes. “Well, come along, then.”

  He strode down the path until his head disappeared under the gray waves of shadow-stuff.

  Fernie had time for one last worry about being eaten by sharks before the urgency of the moment took over and she had to follow, running where she would have preferred not to go at all.

  She almost shrieked and turned back as the path dipped beneath her feet and the shadow-stuff rose over her head, but Mr. Notes’s shadow had told the truth: Despite the promise of sharks and the surface that behaved like waves on an ocean, the darker regions into which she had plunged were not very much like water after all. They were just gray mists, a shade darker and sootier than what she’d been passing through before. Walking through them didn’t feel any worse than being in the shadow of a wall that stood between herself and the sun. As long as there was still a stone path beneath her feet, walking in the stuff was not very uncomfortable at all.

  It was far spookier, though. There was nothing to see but the path itself, a dim straight line at her feet, as it headed downward into the murk…that, and the faraway black shapes of finned, toothy creatures who looked very much like sharks, swimming in the shadow-stuff the way the ones she had seen at the aquarium swam in water. There seemed to be an awful lot of them, and they weren’t nearly far away enough to suit her.

  Gustav was twenty steps ahead, not running but walking very fast, his arms pumping with determination.

  It only took her a second to catch up. “Why won’t you tell me what’s going on? Didn’t you hear me say What? all those times?”

  He kept walking. “Yes, I did. I thought it was odd, but I can cry out my last name, too. Gloom! Gloom! Gloom!”

  The realization that he was teasing her at such a serious moment made her furious. “Gustav—”

  He cut her off. “Do you still have the glass globe I gave you? I still have mine.”

  Fernie had been carrying it all along, though it had been long minutes since she’d bothered to think of it. “Yes. Can I ask you a question?”

  “You ask me questions all the time.”

  “Why aren’t we running?”

  “There’s no point. We’re not being chased at the moment. And we don’t want to slip and fall over the side, not here and not now; not considering what’s at stake, how far we’d fall, and the terrible part of the Dark Country where we’d land. Just keep moving. I saw an exit not far ahead.”

  She supposed it didn’t matter all that much whether they were walking or running, not when Gustav was walking faster than most people could run. So she did her best to keep up, shivering a little when she saw a host of darker shapes gliding by in the mists. “What about the sharks?”

  “Them? I never said they were dangerous to us. There are worse ones, farther down, but the ones swimming near the surface are only dangerous to shadows. That’s why I told Mr. Notes’s shadow not to come with us; they would have eaten him right up. Us, they won’t even bother—especially since neither one of us has a shadow right now and don’t even smell good to them.”

  Now that Fernie looked, the dark shapes swarming about in the mists did seem to be keeping their distance. “But what about—”

  “Sorry,” Gustav said. “It’s my turn. I get to ask you one.”

  “Come on! You haven’t explained anything yet!”

  “Sorry,” he said. “It’s still my turn. I wanted to ask you about what you told Hieronymus. About my being your best friend.”

  She couldn’t believe he wanted to talk about that now. “Come on, Gustav. You know we’re friends.”

  “Oh, I knew we were friends, but I didn’t know we were best friends. Is that true?”

  “Why would you believe it wasn’t?”

  “It’s just surprising,” he said, “because it makes sense for you to be my best friend. I’m stuck behind the estate gates and haven’t met a lot of people. Any friend I made, even a bad one, would still be my best friend, just because there’s nothing else she could be. But you…you’re out in the world. You’ve been to school. You must have known a hundred kids in your life. Am I really your best friend?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” she said irritably. It had only been two weeks since she’d introduced him to her sister as “by far the coolest friend I’ve ever had,” which as far as she was concerned meant the same thing. “Of course you are.”

  He fell into silence as they hurried down the slanting stone path, which wound through shadowy murk among the shadowy sharks beyond the shadow prison in the most shadowy place of his shadowy house.

  He remained silent even as a small mote of light appeared up ahead and grew larger as they approached, revealing itself as a portal to a brighter place.

  The path through the Gloom house’s darkest places led straight back to hope, after all.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A FINE SUMMER DAY IN OCTOBER

  Gustav and Fernie passed through the portal and found a little set of curving stone stairs, which led upward through a murk already far lighter than anything they’d been passing through for some time. When they ran up those stairs and emerged into what would be considered dry land if they’d been traveling through water, a circular vault door at the top slid aside to reveal a dingy hallway identical to the one that had led to the shadow prison in the first place, except reversed.

  Even the warning on the door was reversed:

  “It looks like the other side of the same door,” Fernie said.

  Even Gustav was impressed. “I think in some way it may even be the same door. I think, in a way, the entire prison may be in the door. Either way…we really do need to run now.”

  Fernie had spent more time running in this house than anywhere else, so this was hardly a surprise.

  They ran.

  They ran through corridors dim and dingy, through rooms grim and gruesome.

  They ran around corners, up stai
rs, and through a freestanding wardrobe. They ran down a hallway with a crumbling gap in the middle, with nothing but wreckage and shadow-stuff below them, and though she would have liked to stop and judge the leap, Gustav said there was no time, so they jumped the gap and moved on.

  At a wall covered with a painting of a very serious man with a mustache so ornate that it must have taken him half his day to comb it, they paused just long enough for Gustav to open the painting like a door and reveal a hidden doorway to the servants’ passage.

  Fernie still couldn’t tell one part of that twisty maze from another, but Gustav could, seeing some pattern in the thin corridors that she could not. As they raced up and down stairs and along narrow passages in the space behind the walls of the Gloom house, she began to realize that wherever he was leading them, they were getting close.

  Then they burst from the servants’ passage onto a green carpet and both fell to their knees, for the moment too exhausted from all their running to take as much as one more step.

  For the first time since leaving the Hall of Shadow Criminals, Fernie knew exactly where they’d been going. She gasped in recognition. “The house…inside the house?”

  It was indeed the room where Lemuel Gloom had built a cozy home for his family; the room where the glowing ball of sunlight still shone over the slanting roof of the smaller house where Hans and Penelope Gloom had wanted to live.

  They both panted for almost a full minute before Gustav forced himself back upright. “I…don’t think…we have much time…before he gets here. We have to…hurry.”

  “But…Gustav…are you sure it’s here? In your family’s house?”

  “It…makes sense,” he managed as he dragged her to her feet. “Anything…that dangerous…Grandpa Lemuel would want to keep nearby…where he could keep an eye on it…and stop anybody bad, man or shadow, from trying to take it. It wouldn’t…have been…safe…anywhere else.”

  “But, Gustav…how can you know…?”

  Gustav didn’t answer, maybe because he didn’t have time to answer. Instead he left her behind and ran into the house inside the house, the rear door slamming. She stumbled after him and found him in the empty kitchen as he wrapped a sheet of aluminum foil around his glass globe.

  “Gustav—”

  “There’s no time…to explain,” he said. He had already gotten his breathing most of the way under control and sounded only a little ragged as he wrapped the globe, except for the one open end, in silvery sheets. “It took longer than…I expected to get here and…I think he’ll…be on us any second. I think he’ll be coming from the front yard. You need…to go out into the front yard…under the sun, and watch for him. Shout if you see him coming. Slow him down if you can.”

  The idea of having to stand still and wait as October approached was so against every instinct in Fernie’s body that she never would have agreed to do it for anybody other than Gustav. She nodded and headed for the front of the house.

  “Wait,” he said.

  She turned, expecting him to wish her good luck.

  “Your globe,” he said.

  She looked down at her right hand, which still held the globe he had handed her. She’d never put it down, not in all the adventures that followed. Without a word she placed it on the table beside him and began to leave again.

  “Wait,” he said.

  She looked at him.

  “Thank you for calling me your best friend,” he said.

  “Thanks for being my best friend,” she replied.

  She turned and once again headed for the front of the house.

  “Wait,” he said a third time.

  She turned around and looked at him.

  “Good luck,” he said.

  “You too,” she said.

  She bounded out onto the front lawn.

  It felt strange to be directly under a sun again after so many hours of running around the dark corridors of Gustav’s house, and especially after their adventures in the shadow prison. She could only hope that it wasn’t the last sun she ever got to see, and that she would have another chance to be warmed by the more distant and yet somehow friendlier sun from the world outside.

  The thought made her feel more alone than ever before. Though there was a sun blazing away just over her head, she felt a terrible cold that could not have been matched during the most frigid snowstorm in January.

  Then something landed on her head with a plop.

  She yelled and fought a heroic battle with her attacker that would have had the greatest warriors of all time nodding with appreciation and carefully taking notes, until she managed to get out from under it and saw that it was just a dusty old sheet, covered with a pattern of roses.

  “Sorry!” cried Gustav, who had tossed it out the nursery window. “I didn’t mean for it to land on you! Spread it out on the lawn!”

  Fernie had no idea why Gustav would want her to do such a thing, with the air around her already growing cold from October’s approach, but assumed that he had his reasons. She spread the king-sized sheet across the fake lawn, and just because it was something to do took extra care to make sure that all the wrinkles were smoothed out.

  Then she stood up and faced the door she had followed Gustav through just before her first visit with the green carpet pretending to be a lawn. On this side of the wall, it was just the outline of a door, painted with the same mural of bright blue skies and faraway rolling hills as the rest of the wall around it. She could almost close her eyes and imagine that the fake horizon was real. But no, it was only a painting. That peaceful horizon was just a made-up thing, less real than the danger that was coming for them.

  When she heard distant crunching, the sound October’s tendrils of darkness had made as they punched holes through the balcony over the grand parlor, it took every ounce of courage she had to resist running for her life.

  Her teeth chattered before she clamped her jaw shut.

  Then a hole appeared in the wall before her. A black tendril poked through, seemed to look around a bit, and then retreated, as if to report to its master what it had seen. Another half dozen tendrils crashed through the wall, ripping apart the fake hills and fake clouds and fake beautiful summer day as if offended that anybody would ever decorate their home with such things. October hadn’t caused such damage the last time he’d entered this room, but he seemed to be in a greater hurry this time now that he knew his prize was so near. The frustration he must have felt after his last encounter with Gustav and Fernie must have also lent fury to his dark mission.

  The door blew off its frame.

  A formless, swirling mass spilled out into the room where Fernie stood, curling around the doorway and slithering across the fake grass like an army of black snakes. October followed close behind, floating a foot off the floor as the shadow tendrils carried him along, like a package they’d been asked to deliver.

  Gustav had asked Fernie to let him know when October showed up, so she felt absolutely no shame about screaming at the very sight. But she might have screamed anyway. This was the first time she had seen October up close since helping Gustav drop the big gong on his head, so it was also the first time she could see the effects of the impact. His head looked like a flat clay sculpture that somebody had stepped on; his features had flattened, turning his nose into an outline against the planes of his cheeks. His skin was black-and-blue, and his eyes hung askew, no longer lined up perfectly like eyes should be, but one mashed farther down his face by several inches. One of those eyes was open, the other puffy and closed.

  His mouth, though…that was unchanged. That was still open, and still spilling out thickets of grasping black tendrils.

  The man-shaped creature at the center of all that darkness stopped only a few steps into the room to peer at Fernie with dull curiosity as the shadowy tendrils he controlled spread out to fill every corner of the lawn. They encircled Fernie, weaving together until she was completely imprisoned in a cage of them.

  Behind her, some of t
he snaky black shapes spilling through the open screen door of the house inside the house groped for whatever they expected to find within; others curled up to the open second-story window, invading the nursery. In seconds all she could see of the house was the sloping roof. She heard ransacking sounds as the search began.

  The shadow eater didn’t come any closer to her. He stared at her, tilting his flattened head first one way, then the other. “The girl who ran,” he said in his dull, empty voice. “The girl who lied. The girl who helped to drop the big bell on my head. I told you that you would be punished if you didn’t help me. Now we are back in the same room where we were hours ago, and all your running has come to nothing.”

  “I’m not sorry,” Fernie said, her voice quavering only a little as she said it. She had been afraid, but she was past that now, ready for anything that might happen.

  “You won’t stop October from getting the Nightmare Vault.”

  “No. I won’t. But you want to know something?”

  The tendrils around her drew closer. “No.”

  “I’ll tell you anyway,” she said, speaking quickly because she only had seconds left. “I agree with something my friend Gustav said about you. I don’t think you are Howard Philip October. I think you’re just an empty, stupid thing that the real Howard Philip October made to fetch what he wants.”

  October was silent for several seconds, absorbing that…and then he said, “Being right won’t save you.”

  Shadow tendrils whipped around Fernie’s ankles, lifting her shrieking form off the ground and into the air.

  The room’s sun veered so close that she shut her eyes tight, afraid of being burned up; but though she was swung so close to that ball of fire that she could have reached out and touched it if she’d tried, she felt no heat at all except in her eyes, which though closed were momentarily dazzled by its brightness.

  It was certainly better than what she saw when the grip of the tendrils swung her away from the sun and she opened her eyes to see the shadow eater’s head, rolling back as his mouth opened wider and wider. There was nothing in there but empty space and more churning black shapes, some of them looking like the shadows of people.