Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault

by Adam-Troy Castro

  Fernie shuddered. “I’m glad you cleaned it up.”

  “So am I,” he said seriously. “It wasn’t the only skeleton I’ve found in this house, but the extra head on its shoulders was really creepy.”

  Fernie debated whether to devote any energy to exploring that, and decided not to. The Gloom house could be like that sometimes: so filled with strange sights and dark miracles and unanswerable questions that she had to let some things go unremarked in order to get on with whatever needed getting on with.

  After a few seconds of hugging herself, wondering how Pearlie and her father were doing, and hoping that they hadn’t mounted any efforts to rescue her, she glanced at Gustav again and saw him staring at her feet. “What?”

  He had just noticed. “Your shadow’s missing.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE HOUSE INSIDE THE HOUSE

  After all the fury and terror she’d been through, Fernie had almost forgotten. Now she felt a fresh wave of grief as she explained, “The ice-cream man ate her.”

  “Oh,” he said, following that up with a heartfelt, “Yes. He does that. I’m sorry.”

  “Does that mean she’s dead?”

  “No. Shadows aren’t really alive or dead the way people are; they’re just things that exist, and don’t bother with messy business like living or dying. I guess it’s more accurate to say that she’s been collected.”

  That didn’t sound much better than being eaten. “What does he do with them after he collects them?”

  “You saw those black snaky things that came out of his mouth? That’s them, or at least the stuff they’re made of. As long as even a part of them is inside him, they can’t remember who they are, so they do what he wants…which is mostly collect more for his master, Lord Obsidian. You do remember Lord Obsidian, right?”

  Fernie would always remember Lord Obsidian, even if she still hadn’t experienced the displeasure of meeting him. He was a power-mad tyrant currently fighting a war to take over the Dark Country, who planned to conquer the world of people as well.

  This was the first Fernie had heard about him snatching shadows. She’d known that he sent agents like the People Taker around the world to snatch human beings, but hadn’t known that he made it his business to collect shadows as well. It was the kind of realization that left her wondering whether anybody, shadow or person, joined Lord Obsidian willingly, or whether they all had to be stuffed in sacks and forced to join his growing army against their will. Maybe the only way a fellow that awful could make friends was to kidnap some.

  She glanced at Gustav’s feet and noticed for the first time that he wasn’t casting a shadow, either. “Where’s yours?”

  “With most of the others,” he said. “Hiding in some corner where they hope the shadow eater can never find them. Some went down to the Dark Country, others took the portals to the world’s other shadow houses, and others just found really, really good places to curl up and be quiet. It was a pretty rushed evacuation, so there must be a few in the more isolated parts of the house that didn’t get the word…but they aren’t any shadows you’d like to meet, I’ll tell you that.”

  “Didn’t they care that they were leaving you alone and defenseless?”

  He looked sad. “Some did. Great-Aunt Mellifluous said that she’d take me with her if she could, but she had a responsibility to the others and was going somewhere even I couldn’t follow. She had to be satisfied with telling me about the shadow eater and that I should stay away from him. My own shadow didn’t want to leave me, but went along to protect her. Most of the rest—it’s like I’ve told you: They may be the closest thing I have to a family, until I met yours, but most don’t really have all that much to do with me. They ignore me, pretty much, and it’s the same having them not here as it was having them here.”

  Fernie thought of the way she’d been forced to separate from Pearlie, not to mention her father, and felt a burning in the back of her eyes that she had to ignore in order to stay focused on the problem at hand. “And she didn’t leave you with any idea of how to fight the shadow eater if you had to?”

  “No.”

  “That’s not very helpful,” Fernie said.

  “I know. I wish there were more, but it’s not like there’s any chance of your knowing any more than I do.”

  Fernie looked around the room and swept her gaze over each of the ominous doors in turn, imagining horrid fates behind each. She thought of something Gustav might not know. “He said he was looking for something called a Nightmare Vault.”

  Gustav made a face. “Ewww.”

  “Do you know what that is?”

  “Sorry. That’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

  “It sounds like it could be a bank safe or something.”

  “I know, but this house is full of strange things, and we could spend years just searching the rooms without ever knowing how to recognize a Nightmare Vault if we saw one.”

  She racked her brain for anything else the shadow eater might have said after breaking into her home…and for long seconds there didn’t seem to be a single additional memory.

  Then she remembered something else. “He also said his name was October.”

  Gustav froze. He was always a pale boy, but the sound of the shadow eater’s name seemed to drain away what little color there was, as if the word itself were terrible enough to cut a hole in his heart. “October? Like the month October?”

  The sudden devastation in his eyes frightened Fernie more than anything she’d ever seen or experienced in this house. “Yes. Why? What’s wrong?”

  The strange boy Fernie had met and had adventures with, whom she had come to consider the single coolest friend she’d ever had, and who had never betrayed a single moment of anger or despair while she was around to see it, did something she never would have expected from him: He cried out and threw a punch at the wall. His fist landed between two of the ominously labeled doors, and from the sound must have hurt his hand far more than it could have hurt the masonry. He held his injured hand in the other one, but was far from calmed; if anything, he seemed even angrier.

  Fernie shouted. “Gustav!”

  He seemed to notice her again, and said what might have been the worst thing he could have said with that expression on his face. “Thank you. I know where we need to go now.”

  He threw open the nearest door and plunged through into darkness.

  Fernie was so concerned for Gustav that she didn’t worry about the horrible fates that waited behind some of the room’s doors. She just followed him through the opening into the next room, half expecting to immediately encounter the horrible fate that the warning signs on all the doors had promised.

  Instead, she found the last thing she ever would have expected.

  It was the opposite of everything she’d ever seen in her life, in that it was a room with a house in it.

  The floor was a lawn. It was not real grass, but a lush carpet of some kind, with fibers that were just long enough and just verdant enough to mimic grass. Little yellow fluff balls at the tips of longer strands stood up here and there, imitating wildflowers. The ceiling and the walls to her left and right were a shade of blue exactly the same as a bright summer sky, complete with painted puffs of cloud to complete the illusion. Near the baseboards the walls became a mural of sprawling farmland, with a herd of black-and-white cows, white picket fences, and even a faraway lazy river, snaking in and out of some gentle hills as if in no particular hurry to get there and not in any way concerned that somebody might criticize it for its lack of ambition.

  The sky even had a sun of sorts. It wasn’t a real sun—at least, Fernie hoped not—but it was a ball of blazing fire, hanging so low in the sky that most household stepladders would have been tall enough to allow a tall man to reach it. It gave off more daylight than heat, but even so, the air had the comforting warmth of a beautiful morning in July.

  The far wall was the front of a white clapboard house, with a screened-in porch and a pair
of side-by-side rocking chairs looking out at the view of the fake lawn. On the second floor, below the place where the two sloping sides of the roof peaked, a round window made up of four panes revealed a ceiling painted the same shade of blue as the fake sky outside, and a dangling mobile with toy biplanes and rocket ships.

  Fernie was just in time to see both the screen door leading to the porch and the wooden door leading to the house slam shut, one after the other.

  She said, “Gustav?”

  He didn’t answer.

  She approached the house with caution. It looked like any other inviting old country house, certainly more friendly in appearance than the larger house that contained it, but she had spent enough time traveling the dark passages and hidden rooms of Gustav’s strange home to know that many things that looked harmless might be very, very dangerous.

  When she reached the screen door, she opened it as if expecting it to bite her, and was only slightly encouraged when it didn’t. She stepped onto the porch, the wooden slats of the floor creaking beneath her feet. She stopped halfway to the front door because she wanted to make sure that she really had felt what she thought she’d felt: a cool breeze, blowing through the screen around the porch and filling the air with the welcome scent of fresh air and newly cut grass. It was so real to her nose that she could almost believe that the house inside the house was really standing outside, in some nice place in farm country.

  She walked through the inner door and into the front hall of a cozy family house. To her left was a dining room with a long polished table and enough seating for ten; to her right was a living room with couches, a fireplace, and a wall of books. In front of her was a long hallway leading to an open kitchen alongside a narrow staircase leading up.

  She called again: “Gustav?”

  Again, he didn’t answer.

  Fernie was not ready to climb that staircase yet, not without permission. She’d seen too many scary movies about girls who walk into abandoned houses and, like idiots, climb staircases leading to floors where some awful monsters lie in wait, eager to pounce on them.

  The only thing stupider than climbing those stairs, Fernie believed, would be to go poking around in the basement, where there would almost certainly be a slavering monster who ate people. Or, if not a monster, then at least spiders.

  She entered the living room, noting as she did that the windows all looked out upon what seemed to be green countryside, but which any close look revealed to be nothing more than a painted backdrop, the kind of thing she would have expected to find behind a window in a stage play.

  “Gustav!” she called again.

  There was still no answer.

  Unsure what she should be doing, she approached the bookcase, mostly because she had never spotted a bookcase inside somebody’s home without immediately taking a closer look to see what books the owners had been reading. She found a complete Shakespeare, a collected Charles Dickens, a book by someone named Shirley Jackson called The Haunting of Hill House, a few others she recognized, and on the top shelf a row of hardcover books with scarlet dust jackets. She picked up one of those and glanced at the title.

  It was called Beyond the Veil, by Dr. Lemuel Gloom, PhD.

  “Gustav!” she yelled. “Who’s Lemuel Gloom?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Fernie flipped the pages and turned to the back cover, which had a few words about the author beneath a big picture of his face. Lemuel Gloom, she read, is an award-winning physicist, infamous for his controversial theories about worlds beyond our own. He is most notorious for his beliefs in the secret nature of shadows. Born in Liechtenstein, Dr. Gloom now lives in America with his wife, Magda, and his young son, Hans.

  Lemuel Gloom had a shiny bald head and a red beard that flared to white points at both sides of his mouth. He looked like a silly man, though possibly a friendly one.

  Fernie flipped through the pages. The book was filled with strange charts and complicated equations. Fernie had always been a strong reader, but the one long sentence she started reading at the beginning of one chapter lost her after about seven words. It extended well past the bottom of the page and was still going strong at the end of the two-page spread after that.

  A sentence like that contained either a lot of information or a lot of wind, and she didn’t have the time right now for either. She returned the book, turned her back on the bookcase, and went to look at the framed photos on the wall.

  They all depicted the same young couple, a pretty blond woman with bright hazel eyes and a man with a hawk nose and a smile that suggested he saw something funny he wouldn’t mention out of politeness. There were photos of them wearing safari gear with thick jungle all around them, grinning at the camera while skydiving, standing on the tops of snowcapped mountains, and kayaking through white-water rapids.

  It did not escape Fernie that these were all things her own adventurer of a mother did on a regular basis, and that she would someday like to do herself. She couldn’t help thinking, just from the photos, that her mother would have liked the couple quite a bit…and discovered, thinking about it, that knowing them only from the photos, she liked them quite a bit as well.

  The woman smiled in all of the photos except for one, where she was bent over some tropical fern looking at the single biggest spider Fernie had ever seen. Not counting the legs, it was almost as big as Fernie’s closed fist. Fernie wouldn’t have smiled at that spider, either, but she also wouldn’t have leaned in close to it long enough to have her picture taken. The woman in the picture seemed to be frowning out of intense interest rather than the disgust any reasonable person would have shown upon finding a spider as big as a kitten. But that was not even the interesting part to Fernie; the interesting part was that, when there was no smile lighting up her face, she happened to look almost exactly like Gustav.

  “Her name was Penelope,” Gustav said.

  Fernie jumped. She hadn’t heard Gustav walking up behind her.

  “She called herself Penny for short,” he continued. “His name was Hans. He couldn’t come up with a nickname shorter than that.”

  Gustav was always so serious about everything that the neighbors who spotted him in his estate’s yard believed him to be the saddest little boy in the world. Fernie had learned that he wasn’t as sad as he looked; he just didn’t smile much. But sometimes he was sad, and he looked very sad indeed right now, the kind of sad that came from losing something very important, or from never having had it at all.

  He carried a framed photo. “She would have been my mom.”

  She remembered the bio on the back of Lemuel Gloom’s book. “And Hans would have been your dad?”

  “Hans was my dad,” Gustav said. “Penny was never my mom. Somebody else had to be. But she would have been.”

  “I’m sorry, Gustav. I don’t understand. Even if you’re saying she died, she was either your mom or she wasn’t.”

  “She did die,” Gustav said. “But she never got to be my mom.”

  “But what does that mean?”

  “It means she never had a chance.”

  He was so bereft, and so angry, that Fernie found herself a little afraid of him. “What happened?”

  He handed her the picture in his hands. “He happened.”

  The three people in the photo stood in front of the Gloom house, looking like any other best friends happy to have their picture taken together. Two of them were the man and woman adventurers in all the other pictures. The woman looked heavier than she did in any of the other photos; she wore a T-shirt bearing the word BABY with an arrow pointing at her tummy. Her smile was golden. The man’s was a little more crooked, but he still looked as happy as any man could be.

  The other man with them was an older, paler figure with bright blue eyes, a high forehead, and a smile that suggested that he wasn’t very good at smiling but was just doing it because it was expected of him.

  He was not nearly as lumpy as the ice-cream man she knew, and his head was high an
d thin instead of round and misshapen, but Fernie recognized him, anyway.

  It was October.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE WORDS OCTOBER HEARD

  “Is this the man you saw?” Gustav demanded.

  Fernie, who was still a little frightened by the pain in the eyes of this strange boy she’d come to care about, needed a few seconds to find her voice. “It could be. The man in the picture has a normal head, and he doesn’t look like he could open his mouth as much as October can…but yes, I think this is a picture of the person October used to be.”

  Gustav walked away, his shoulders shaking, and for long seconds stared out the window, as if seeing something beyond the fake horizon.

  She took a step toward him.

  Before she could even get close, he flung the photo out the nearest window. There was no glass in the window, so the only thing that shattered was the glass in the picture frame when it hit the fake blue sky outside.

  He didn’t turn around. “Before I was seven years old,” he said, “I thought they were just on a long trip somewhere and would be back someday. Then I was old enough to hear the truth, and see that picture for the first time. He’s the one who killed my parents. He’s the one who made sure I became what I am. He’s the one who made sure I could never go past the fence and know the world you know. It was all him.”

  Fernie drew close. “He doesn’t look like he was a shadow eater then.”

  “No, not then. He was just a man. His full name was Howard Philip October. He wrote the same kind of books my grandfather Lemuel wrote, about ancient civilizations and evil spirits and elder gods and gateways to other worlds…the difference being that my grandfather actually made contact with the world of shadows, while Howard Philip October mostly just made up crazy stuff and claimed that he found it in lost ancient texts.”

  Fernie struggled to keep up. “Where was he supposed to get lost ancient texts?”

  “From what I’ve been able to put together, he just said ‘lost ancient libraries.’ And if you asked him where he found the ancient libraries, he’d say ‘the lost cities of lost ancient civilizations.’ If you asked him where he found those lost cities and lost civilizations, he claimed to have found ‘ancient lost continents at the center of the Earth,’ but not many people went that far; you only have to ask that kind of question a couple of times to know the type of answer you’re always going to get.”