Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault (9 page)

“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.

THE PROPER USE OF THE WORD
SMELLY

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 strangeness 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: L
OCAL
W
OMAN
, 27, D
IES IN
W
RECK ON
D
EAD
M
AN’S
C
URVE
.

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.”

There was that phrase again.
Would have been
.

But that wasn’t even the startling part. Fernie read the sentence three times to make sure she’d read it correctly, and then looked up at Gustav, feeling dazed. “She didn’t die after you were born. She died
before
.”

“I told you,” Gustav said with a petulance she had never seen in him. “She wasn’t my mother. She
would have been
my mother. She died three months too soon to be my mother.”

“B-but…how is that even possible? You’re standing right there, in front of me, and—”

“My father was in the hospital for three days,” Gustav said without answering her question. “He returned to the Gloom house, hating the place for the first time in his life, because it was even bigger and emptier without her, and because there were reminders of her, and of the child who would now never be born, everywhere he looked. He was heartbroken and saw no reason to go on living in the house inside the house. He told his good friend Howard Philip October that he’d spend a couple of days gathering up his things, and hers, and then leave town forever.

“From what I’ve been told, Howard Philip October just smiled sadly, put a hand on my father’s shoulder, and told him that he understood. He said, ‘Stay as long as you like.’”

Anger burned in Gustav’s black eyes. “October said it like it was his house, not my father’s, and it was up to him to give permission. My father didn’t even notice. He barely had enough energy to think. The packing that should have taken a day stretched to three, and then to four…before everything changed.”

Fernie didn’t want to ask Gustav the next question. “What happened?”

“Somebody who witnessed her death told
my father what had really happened to Penny. She told him that Penny had been in full control of the car and paying full attention to everything she was doing when the gas pedal suddenly pressed itself to the floor, the steering wheel ripped itself out of her hands, and the car headed for that ravine on its own. A truck passed by in the other lane, with its headlights on high, and lit up the inside of Penny’s car for a second, long enough for her to see that the car all around her was filled with shadows, fighting her for control of the car. Penny recognized one of them as October’s. She was still begging October’s shadow for the life of her baby when the car went over the edge.”

Gustav fell silent and lowered his head, just as if he were remembering that day himself, even though he hadn’t been there and could only report what he’d been told.

Fernie didn’t understand who could have told Gustav the story in that much detail, and was about to ask. But then a more terrible thought occurred to her. She realized that the future Gustav actually
had
been there, inside Penny, and that killing her had also been, by definition, an attempt to kill him.

Her mouth was so dry that her voice broke even as she asked the next question. “What did your father do when he found out?”

“What any husband in that situation would do,” Gustav said. “He went off to find and confront the man who had pretended to be his friend.”

He took the album from her, closed it with an audible
snap
, and tossed it back onto the bed.

He said, “I wish I could tell you what happened next. I don’t know what happened between October and my father. I don’t know how October wound up becoming a shadow eater. I only know that after that day, neither my father nor Howard Philip October was ever seen again.”

Fernie now understood why the walls of the house inside the house reeked of sadness. She could picture Gustav’s father, lying in his crazy bed, thinking of everything he had lost and how empty his life would now be, with nothing to show for it but a family photo album that had accumulated all the happy pictures it ever would. She couldn’t even imagine what must have gone through his mind when the witness, whoever she was, reported October’s involvement…or
how often Gustav himself must have visited this place, looked through those same pictures, and missed people he had never been given a chance to know.

The air suddenly grew much, much colder, and a voice outside cried, “Girl! October has found you!”

Gustav raced past her, down the hallway, and into the nursery. Fernie followed close behind and saw the same view he saw out the window: the terrible form of the shadow eater, standing in the center of the fake lawn, sniffing the air for signs of them.

“Come out now, girl! You do not want to make me come after you!”

Terrified, Fernie asked Gustav, “What are you going to do?”

“What do you think I’m going to do? I’m going to march right up to October and ask him some tough questions.”

Fernie could only protest: “But you can’t just walk up to him, not with the things he can do. You need a plan.”

“Do you have one?” Gustav demanded.

“No.”

“Do you know where we can go about finding one?”

“No.”

“Do you know where Great-Aunt Mellifluous and the others are hiding so we can ask
them
if they have any ideas?”

“No.”

“Can you think of anybody else, anywhere, who can tell us anything about what this Nightmare Vault is and why October wants it?”

She would have preferred giving any other answer in the world, but found herself forced to a frightened, unwilling, “No.”

“Then,” Gustav said, with inescapable logic, “he’s the only one left. We’ll talk to him, all right. We just won’t talk to him
here
.”

He walked past a still-sputtering Fernie, left the bedroom, and marched down the stairs.

She whirled around and ran down the stairs after him, just in time to look over the side and see him heading down the central hallway for the kitchen at the rear of the house.