Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault (12 page)

October had started to rise again and was now less than ten feet below the balcony where they stood. He was so close that it was possible to
see into the darkness inside the mouth, see the storm clouds that churned inside him, as fresh tendrils spilled from his lips. Fernie noticed what she hadn’t before: a couple of the leading tendrils curling over the edge of the balcony, not making much of a show out of their advance, but definitely approaching Gustav like sly dogs trying to pretend they weren’t really interested in that piece of turkey carelessly left on the kitchen counter.

She said, “Gustav…”

He gestured her silent with a wave of his hand and addressed October again. “One last question. What happened between you and my father after he found out what you had done?”

The tendrils gripping the edge of the balcony where Gustav and Fernie stood suddenly retreated, as if burned by the surface of a hot stove.

October’s mouth formed an expression that was neither smile nor grimace, snarl nor leer, but something that might have been all of them, possible only on a mouth that could stretch farther than any human mouth ever had. It was like a shark’s grin, with no joy or friendliness or humor behind it: just an open
mouth, unconnected to anything that he might have been thinking or feeling.

He said, “Your father went after October. He hunted October through the house for thirteen days and thirteen nights. He fought monsters to get to October. He went without rest to get to October. He never let up. He chased October through all the terrible rooms of this house, all the way to the pit leading to the Dark Country.”

“And then?” Gustav demanded.

“They fell in together, clutching each other as only deadly enemies can, still fighting all the way down.”

Fernie heard a sudden loud
crunch
at her feet. She looked down and saw something that terrified her: a dark, shadowy tendril, exploring the floor around the hole it had punched through the underside of the balcony. It almost found her left shoe before she stepped away, but even as she did there was another
crunch
and yet another dark tendril broke through, whipping through the hole it had made like a black snake.

More crunches followed, dozens of them in every direction, each of them followed by another tendril of the shadows at October’s command. In seconds there was a forest of
them, grasping the air for the girl they knew to be standing somewhere on the floor they had broken through.

October bellowed:
“Now give me the Nightmare Vault!”

Fernie kicked at one of the tendrils, and it reared back, as if both enraged to have been attacked and delighted to have found her. It grabbed for her, faster than she’d seen any of them move before.

Without thinking, she leaped over its lunge and landed on her feet right behind Gustav, who was also surrounded by them but didn’t seem to care enough about that to take his grim eyes off the distorted, grinning face of Howard Philip October.

Gustav didn’t raise his voice. “Before I’m done, you’re going to wish you had stayed where my father sent you.”

Then he put his back against the gong’s massive frame and pushed.

It was too heavy to fall immediately, but Fernie saw what he was doing and lent her own shoulder to the effort. At first it seemed like the gong wasn’t going to move at all, and Fernie groaned from the strain as the black tendrils
emerging from the floor groped for her, but then the gong started to tip toward the edge.

The two kids braced their shoes against the floor and their backs against the frame and strained with all their might, until the slight tilt became a greater one and the gong started to fall.

Fernie had put so much of her weight into it that she took an unwilling step or two after it went and started to go over the edge herself. For one terrible moment, she saw nothing below her but yawning open space, the tumbling gong, and the terrible form of the man who had been Howard Philip October.

She spun her arms and managed to stay upright long enough to see October’s face at the moment when he saw that he would not be able to avoid the gong. It was the same expression anybody would have when looking up and seeing a heavy falling object. Inhuman as October was, he did not seem to look forward to the impact.

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.”

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.”