Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault (8 page)

It was October.

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.”

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.