Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault

by Adam-Troy Castro

  Fernie recognized this as the kind of answer that translated to “Because I said so,” one she’d never accepted as the response to any tough question, not even from her dad. “Okay,” she said. “And your mom and dad—”

  “My dad,” Gustav said with an odd emphasis, “and the woman who would have been my mom.”

  Fernie didn’t completely understand why Gustav was so insistent on the difference. “Okay. How did they know him?”

  Gustav sighed, stepped away from the window, and sat on the edge of the couch, his hands clasped between his knees. “My father grew up here, living with the shadows and every other strange thing my grandfather invited into the house, and though he was used to all of it, decided that he didn’t want to spend his life locked up inside a dusty old mansion chasing other worlds all the time. He wanted to live a normal life, living in the world beyond the gate.

  “So he left home, met and married the woman who would have been my mom, and for a few years traveled the world with her, never knowing when they returned for Grandpa Lemuel’s funeral that Grandpa had met October and considered him a dangerous man.”

  “How do you know all this,” Fernie wanted to know, “if it happened before you were born?”

  Gustav looked at his hands. “I was told. In this room.”

  “By who? Great-Aunt Mellifluous?”

  “No. Not her.”

  “Then who?”

  Gustav opened his mouth to answer and then fell back into an unhappy silence.

  Sometimes, a terrible secret can be even bigger than the hole it leaves in the story around it. The identity of the person who had told Gustav about his parents—or rather, his dad and what he called the woman who would have been his mom—seemed like one of those secrets.

  Fernie sat down beside him, saying, “It’s okay. Just tell me the parts you can talk about.”

  He nodded gratefully and moved on: “My father inherited the house, and Howard Philip October got in touch with him, saying, ‘Hey, as long as you’re not using the place, can I stay there for a while?’ And my dad and the woman who would have been my mom flew home, met with October, and decided that he seemed like a good man and that it wouldn’t do any harm.”

  “Of course,” Fernie noted, “it might not have been easy for them to tell, since he wouldn’t have been a shadow eater yet.”

  “No,” Gustav said, “he wasn’t a shadow eater yet, though he was already an ice-cream man, in a way, since his own family fortune comes from a company with a line of ice-cream trucks. I didn’t know until now that he was the shadow eater, but it kind of makes sense that as long as he had to become a monster, he would still take a form that was familiar to him.”

  He stared at his hands some more and said, “The point is that my dad and the woman who would have been my mom—”

  Fernie didn’t think she could stand to hear that terrible phrase spoken one more time. “Why don’t you just call her Penny? It’s faster.”

  Gustav thought about it for a moment. “All right. That works.” He took a deep breath. “My dad and Penny let Howard Philip October use the house for a couple of years, while they were out in the world doing other stuff. They visited from time to time, to see how he was getting on, and after a while came to think of him as a friend.”

  He took another deep breath.

  “And then, one day,” he said, “they found out that they were going to have me.”

  The way he said it, you’d think they’d received some terrible mortal news, like the diagnosis of a fatal disease. He stood up and circled the room twice, as if there was so much anger attached to that part of his story that pacing was the only way to get past it without exploding.

  Wanting to make him feel better, Fernie said, “That must have made them very happy, Gustav.”

  “I’m sure it did,” Gustav said, in the tone of a boy who believed that they would have been mistaken to feel that way. “Nobody’s ever bothered to tell me that part of the story, but I’m sure they took the news the way moms and dads are supposed to. I’m sure that if they decided to settle down anywhere else, it would have been as happy a thing as they wanted it to be, and I would now be a normal kid with a normal family like yours.”

  Fernie refrained from pointing out that a mom who traveled all over the world having adventures and a dad who knew all the ways people had been seriously injured by pencil erasers didn’t make hers fit anybody’s definition of a normal family. She guessed, “But instead they came back here to live.”

  “Yes,” he said, and then repeated the single word: “Here.”

  She looked around at the room, with all its pictures of the happy young couple, all the little souvenirs and knickknacks on the shelves. And suddenly, feeling stupid for having taken so long to figure it out, she understood the importance of this place to Gustav’s life. “Here,” she said. “In the house inside the house.”

  “Yes,” Gustav said forlornly.

  Fernie felt a chill. It was already noticeably colder in the house than it had been only a few minutes earlier, maybe a sign that the shadow eater was drawing close.

  “Why would they move here? I thought you said your dad wanted a normal life.”

  “He did,” Gustav said, “but from what I understand, the two of them weren’t planning to stay here forever, just for a few months while they looked for a normal place to live. It was his own childhood home; he didn’t think staying here for a little while would be a bad thing. Especially since he and Penny had this house, the house inside the house, to stay in while they waited.”

  She scratched her head. “That’s another thing. Why would there even be a house inside the house?”

  He sighed. “Because you’ve seen how endless the big house is. It goes on forever; it’s so big that you could never explore it all, not even if you had an army marching down every hallway and knocking on every door.”

  Fernie had gotten that impression. “So?”

  “Well, it’s worse now that it’s a shadow house, but it was pretty big even when it was only an ordinary house. It wasn’t nearly as big on the inside as it is now, but even before Grandpa Lemuel made his deal with the shadows, even before the inside filled up with shadow-stuff and became so much larger than any ordinary house could ever be, the Gloom house was a great big sprawling mansion and the kind of place that would have been much too big for one husband and one wife, since it was originally built when the family was much larger and had enough room to house cousins, second cousins, third and fourth cousins, entire branches of the family nobody ever bothered to speak to, and I-don’t-know aunts.”

  “What’s an I-don’t-know aunt?”

  “Everybody has an I-don’t-know aunt,” Gustav said. “They’re related to you in some way, but if you’re ever asked to explain how, you have to say ‘I don’t know.’”

  Fernie had to admit to herself that, yes, she did have several I-don’t-know aunts, most of whom she saw just often enough to make it embarrassing to keep forgetting exactly who they were. “All right. So it was a big house. And…”

  Gustav said, “It was too much house for Grandpa Lemuel, when most of the family had moved out and he was a young man married to my grandmother and raising my dad. It didn’t feel cozy enough to him. So he built this house inside the house for his family, and they spent most of their time here. When he gave the rest of the big house to the shadows, he still kept this room with the smaller house for himself, so he could take a break from the shadows and everything they were whenever he wanted.”

  Fernie supposed that made sense, in the same way that anything crazy makes sense when you’re living with the craziness. She said, “Okay. So when your dad and your mom—”

  “The woman who would have been my mom,” Gustav said, reminding her that he wouldn’t give ground on this particular point.

  “When your dad and Penny came back here to have you, they weren’t interested in getting the rest of the house back, or interfering with whatever October was doing; they just
wanted to stay in this small part of it for a while.”

  Gustav nodded. “They were friendly about it. They invited him to come over from whatever part of the house he was spending time in, to eat dinner with them every night. They practically made him a member of the family.

  “But they’d been away for a couple of years by that point, and didn’t know that he’d come to consider the Gloom house his own and resented their being back. From what I was told, he was also deathly afraid that they’d get around to asking him what he’d been doing all this time…and he was secretly working on a project so evil that if they ever did find out, they’d throw him out of the big house forever and never let him back in.

  “Before long, it wasn’t just a matter of pretending to be their friend. It was a matter of pretending that he didn’t hate and fear them enough to want them dead.

  “But even then, they might have survived knowing him. Even then, it might have been all right if they’d just moved out when the house being built across town was finished.”

  He sighed, and looked more miserable than Fernie had ever seen him. She realized that, despite the habitual serious expression that made so many people consider him the saddest little boy in the world, his usual intense interest in everything amounted to a kind of enthusiasm. It was an awful thing to miss when he was telling a story that gave him less reason for enthusiasm with every sentence.

  He said, “Then one day Penny surprised my father with a decision. She said that she’d been thinking about it and that it wasn’t so important to live in a normal house after all. She said that normal was overrated, and that people who open their hearts to different experiences get to enjoy life more than people who just want to be the same as everybody else. She said that as long as their child got to go outside and enjoy the sunshine and spend time with other children and grow up to be whatever he wanted to be in life, she would be proud to raise him in the house inside the house; and that she was sure he’d be all right, because my father had grown up there, too, and he was the best man she’d ever known.

  “I’ve been told that he kissed her and told her that if this was what she wanted, then it was what she would have.”

  He took a final deep breath and spoke the next words all in a rush.

  “Unfortunately, they had this conversation in the kitchen, on one of those nights when their good friend October was over for dinner. They thought he was on the living room couch. They didn’t know that he’d gotten up and headed toward the kitchen to refill his glass of wine…or that he’d stopped right outside the door and heard everything they’d just said to each other. Neither one knew that he was their enemy, and that this was the very worst thing they could have said in his hearing.

  “One week later, the woman who would have been my mother was dead.”

  He looked down at the floor and stared at it for a long time.

  Fernie had no idea what to say, and like most people who have no idea what to say, said the right thing. “They must have loved each other very much.”

  Gustav looked up, his eyes red, even though he hadn’t shed any tears. “Yes,” he said. “That’s what I’ve been told.”

  He almost said more, but then came to a decision and stood. “I don’t think we have much time left,” he said. “He’ll find us soon. But there’s still something else you have to see.”

  He headed for the hallway.

  Fernie saw him turn at the stairway, glance at her, and start heading up.

  She hesitated. She didn’t know why, but she had the impression that whatever he wanted to show her up there was the worst part yet. She found herself afraid, for him and for herself, of whatever it might be. She also found herself wanting to turn her back and run, find her way out of the house, and never find out what it was.

  One thing made that impossible. Gustav was her friend.

  She got up and followed him to the second floor of the house inside the house.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE PROPER USE OF THE WORDSMELLY

  There were no horrible monsters at the top of the stairs, but there was something much worse, something so obvious that Fernie sensed it almost as soon as she reached the second floor.

  It took her a second to recognize it as sadness.

  The air on the second floor of the house inside the house tasted entirely different from the air downstairs. It felt, or tasted, or at the very least smelled, like a place where somebody who had once hoped for a happy future had lost everything and had been reduced to sitting by himself, thinking about what might have been.

  A short hallway alongside the stairs led to three rooms, one in the front of the house and one in the back, with an open bathroom door midway between them. She couldn’t see where Gustav had gone, so she checked the room in the front first. It turned out to be a baby’s room, with a sweet little crib, a changing table, and walls painted the same gentle shade of blue as the fake sky outside. The same mobile with rocket ships and biplanes that she had seen through the window when approaching the house from the front yard hung over the crib, spinning slowly.

  Nothing in it looked real to her. It looked a little like a cartoon, all outlines and bright colors, and she had trouble figuring out why until she realized that there wasn’t a single shadow in it, not even where shadows should have been cast by the fake sunlight coming through the window.

  Fernie had never realized before how much shadows help solid objects look real. She found that interesting until she remembered that she didn’t have a shadow anymore, and then found it very frightening. Was the same true of her now? With her shadow gone, would people always look at her and think she wasn’t quite real?

  Something else bothered her as she glanced out the window. Despite that bright sunlight, the yard looked darker somehow. A pale mist, not shadow-stuff but the fog that forms on a cold morning, rolled across the fake grass. A thin layer of frost had formed on the fake flowers.

  Gustav was right. It could not be long before October found this place.

  Somewhere in the back of the house, Gustav said, “I’m over here.”

  Fernie left the baby’s room, passed the bathroom, and went to the room in the back, which turned out to be the master bedroom.

  Gustav stood just inside the door, his arms at his sides. “This was their room.”

  Fernie entered. Most of the furnishings were exactly what she would have expected to find in such a place, including the king-sized bed, a beautiful antique chest of drawers, end tables, lamps, a painted portrait of Hans and Penny Gloom at their wedding, and even a smaller bookcase lined with dog-eared paperbacks. There was no closet, but there was a freestanding wardrobe for hanging clothes, its doors open and all its contents removed. The door to the master bath led to exactly what it was supposed to. Everything looked bright and clean, just as if the family living here had moved out only yesterday. The view outside the windows was the same rolling countryside and the same blue sky she had seen through all the other windows.

  But it was a strange place in other ways. From what she could tell, the mattress looked normal enough, but it was almost ten feet off the floor and rested on a wooden platform so massive that a ladder was built into its side to help whomever may have wanted to sleep there. Maybe it was a special kind of bunk bed, designed to reflect the fact that nobody ever wants to sleep on the bottom mattress—but there wasn’t even space for a bottom mattress, just the platform itself. The end tables were on stilts to bring them to bedside level; one was covered with the remains of white candles, melted to nubs. Fernie saw the edge of a big book poking over the side.

  She gave Gustav the kind of look she always gave him just before telling him that his house was stupid. “Why did their bed have to be so high up?”

  He gave her the same kind of look. “They lived in a little house inside a bigger house, and that’s what you find strange?”

  She wilted. “It’s just…it seems like the kind of strangeness that doesn’t have a point.”

  “Lots of s
trangeness doesn’t have a point,” Gustav pointed out. “That’s why it’s called strangeness.”

  Fernie had to admit to herself that this made as much sense as anything else she’d encountered in the Gloom house.

  He said, “Stay here,” climbed the ladder up to the bed, grabbed the book, and brought it back down to her. “This was their photo album. Most of it is pictures from their life together, but my father lived long enough to add a clipping from the morning after she died.”

  He put the book in her hands and turned to a page that he must have known well, because he found it without looking. The item he wanted to show her wasn’t pasted to the page like all the happy photos preceding it, just folded up and tucked in the book, like something that had been forgotten there. It was a yellowing newspaper story, with a picture of Penny Gloom’s smiling face under the headline: LOCAL WOMAN, 27, DIES IN WRECK ON DEAD MAN’S CURVE.

  Fernie’s heart broke a little. “Oh, Gustav—”

  “You already know that she died,” he said with impatience. “Read the story.”

  Fernie skimmed it. Penny had been driving the family car late at night, after a quick trip to the grocery store, when it suddenly sped up and went off a curve into a ravine. The police believed that she’d accidentally pressed the accelerator when she’d really wanted to press the brake. It was the kind of thing that could have happened to any innocent driver who wasn’t paying enough attention to what she was doing.

  The story also reported that Penny’s husband, Hans, after having been notified at home of her death, collapsed in shock and had been taken to a local hospital for observation. Howard Philip October, a “family friend” who had been staying with the couple, gave a statement instead, telling the newspaper, “Penny was an extraordinarily good person with a kind heart and a gentle soul. The worst part of this tragedy is that she would have been a terrific mother.”