Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault (11 page)

“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.”

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.