Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault (10 page)

The kitchen turned out to be the only room in the house that showed its long years of abandonment. There was still no dust, nor any mess, but the cabinets lining the walls had all had their doors removed and been emptied of any supplies they might have once housed. The
sink was pristine, and the tiled floor showed indentations where heavy appliances might have stood. The only obvious cutlery, a set of cutting knives, sat in a slot holder in the middle of the central island. The only other item left over from its days as a working kitchen was a roll of aluminum foil.

A doorway off to the right led to another chamber that might have been a laundry room, but from where Fernie stood looked as empty as everything else. It was as if the strange forces inside the Gloom house had reached inside the smaller house inside the house and claimed all the modern things as soon as Hans and Penny Gloom were gone.

Outside, October cried, “This is your last warning! Bring me to the Nightmare Vault!”

Gustav stood at the open screen door to the backyard, waiting for her. He whispered, “I’ll get you back outside first, if you want. There’s no reason we both have to talk to him.”

It was a tempting offer. Fernie couldn’t help worrying about Pearlie and their dad and even Harrington, and would have liked nothing more than to run back outside and give them all reassuring hugs. But she had been through so
much with Gustav that the thought of his trying to keep her away from the same dangers he had to face infuriated her. “The man walked into my house and ate my shadow. Don’t you think
I
might have a few things to say?”

Gustav seemed a little stunned and humbled by the reminder. “I’m sorry, Fernie. I almost forgot all about what he did to you. You’re right. That was pretty rude of him, too.”

“Not just pretty rude,” Fernie said. “
Cosmically
rude.”

Gustav seemed to appreciate that. “He is a big jerk, isn’t he?”

“And he’s smelly,” Fernie added.

Gustav cocked his head a little. “I know I never got all that close, but I didn’t notice the smelly part. Is he really?”

Fernie thought back to her first meeting with the man. “No. It’s just something else to say as long as we’re calling him names. He wasn’t smelly. We can erase the smelly.”

“That’s not necessary. I’m perfectly okay with calling him smelly. I was just checking.” Gustav held the door open for her and offered her a little bow. “After you.”

THE SUN IN THE SKY OVER THE HOUSE INSIDE THE HOUSE

The backyard of the house inside the house was another lawn made out of lush green carpet, surrounded by walls painted the same color as the sky. The light of the “sun” over the front yard was not as direct here, so the sky was painted darker and bore a number of pinprick lights, like the first stars becoming visible in the early light of a warm country evening. An empty hammock, which looked as comforting as all hammocks do, dangled between two upright poles, inviting Fernie or anybody else who passed by for a nice nap. Fernie almost wanted to, but she’d learned on the first trip inside the Gloom house that some places that looked inviting were just traps, promising terrible fates to anybody who heeded their calls.

The thought made her shiver, which wasn’t hard to do because the air was so unnaturally cold. That made her think of the “sun,” whose
glow she could still make out over the edge of the little house’s roof. What she could see really did look like a glowing ball of fire, one that from this angle seemed to be setting on the other side of the house. Some of the shadow eater’s tendrils rose toward it, like smoke. Others curled around the house inside the house, like blind snakes searching a burrow for mice to eat.

Despite the imminent danger, Fernie had to ask. “Gustav? Before we go, what is that thing?”

Gustav followed her gaze and said, “That? It’s our sun.”

“No, I mean really.”

“So do I,” Gustav said.

“Gustav—” she began.

“In a minute.” He turned his attention to the wall marking the end of the little house’s backyard, where a single lonely doorknob interrupted the expansive mural of faraway countryside. It was an odd place for a doorknob, in that there were no seams around it marking the presence of an actual door. But he turned it anyway, and when he did, the entire rear wall swung backward. There was no need to open it more than a crack. The narrow opening was as shrouded in darkness as the house inside
the house was bathed in sunlight, but Gustav stepped over this threshold without fear, and Fernie followed close behind.

Once they were past it, Gustav closed the door behind him and lit a candle he must have been carrying with him, creating a cozy circle of light that revealed the space around them to be a narrow hallway, leading into the darkness to both his left and right.

“Come on,” he said, breaking into a jog.

Fernie hustled along behind him. “Won’t he chase us?”

“From what Great-Aunt Mellifluous warned me, he’s not very talented at tracking anybody who keeps moving. He’s a terror when it comes to finding people who’ve settled down in a hiding place, because anyone staying in one place heats the air in a way he can sense from a distance, but he loses all track of anyone who keeps going. Don’t you already feel better?”

Now that Gustav mentioned it, the terrible chill around them seemed to be fading. “But we can’t keep going forever!”

“No. We can’t. But we can keep going long enough to choose the place where he catches up. Come on.”

The narrow passageway stretched out before them for what seemed like miles. After a few minutes, they slowed down a little, and Fernie prodded, “The sun?”

“Oh, that. It’s not actually the sun you’re used to looking at. Not the whole thing, anyway. It’s just a little piece of it, brought down to Earth and cooled just enough so that we can keep it around without burning up.”

One of the stranger things about visiting the Gloom house more than once is that you could hear something like that and believe it immediately. This was not the same thing as not having any problems with it. “What are you doing with a piece of the
sun
hanging over your head in your
house
?”

“All shadow houses contain a ball of concentrated sunlight. They need one around, because while shadows prefer darkness, they also can’t exist without light. This is ours. My grandfather built the house inside the house here, just under it, because he didn’t want to look out his front window and see a dark room all the time.”

This was all worse than no explanation at all, because it failed to account for just who
had gone out and collected a little piece of the sun, and how Gustav himself could walk around underneath it when she’d seen him start to vaporize like a movie vampire the second he was exposed to the direct rays of the real sun in the real sky.

You could collect a lot of question marks when having a simple conversation in the Gloom house. It was safer, sometimes, to go with the first answers that were given, and say what Fernie said now: “Okay.”

They reached the end of the narrow passage they traveled, made a left turn, and kept going.

A few minutes later, they reached an intersection and turned right.

Fearing that Gustav had led her into another situation like the endless train of closets, Fernie finally exploded, “But where does this lead?”

“Everywhere,” he said.

“Gustav!”

“No, I’m serious. You can get anywhere in the house from these passages.”

“What is that? More shadow tricks?”

“No. They’re actually a real-world thing, left over from the days when the Gloom house was still a normal house, if you really can use
that word to describe a big mansion with a small army of maids and butlers on staff. Back then, servants weren’t supposed to be seen unless they were needed, so they traveled from one part of the house to another through hallways that ran behind all the other rooms, and did all their cleaning and so on while out of sight. The trick was to avoid being seen. I’ve been taught that in some houses like this, a maid could actually get fired if the boss happened to walk in and catch her dusting.”

Fernie said, “Couldn’t she also get fired if he walked in and found her
not
dusting?”

“I suppose,” he supposed. “The trick for the servants was always to pretend that they weren’t there and that the mess was always picked up and the dust always wiped away and the windows always cleared of smudges all by themselves, without a couple dozen busy people running around hidden hallways and popping into rooms doing all the work.” He thought about it for a moment, and said, “I guess that made it a shadow house of a different kind, then.”

Fernie and Gustav turned left at a four-way intersection and hurried down a passage so narrow that they had to rush along single file,
Gustav’s candle illuminating no more than the few steps ahead and the few steps back.

A little while later, they arrived at another four-way intersection, and Gustav turned right, into a corridor even narrower than the one before it; so narrow, in fact, that Fernie could have named a number of people, Mrs. Everwiner, for example, who would have been too fat to pass.

Another left turn and the passage narrowed yet again, giving Fernie the impression of walls closing in, eager to crush her. They reached a thin set of stairs, climbed it, made their way down another long and narrow hallway, and reached another stairwell, which they climbed as well.

Five flights of stairs later, Fernie found herself getting winded. “How high are we climbing?”

Gustav said, “High enough to stay out of his reach long enough to ask what needs to be asked. The grand parlor goes up high enough that he might find answering our questions easier than chasing us.”

“Doesn’t that all depend on his being on the ground floor of the parlor?”

“It does,” Gustav allowed, “but that’s more or less the first place I would go, if I were him and needed to catch our scent again. If not, I think we can still attract his attention.”

Gustav and Fernie climbed more flights, and further conversation lagged as they forced themselves as far as they could go. On the way, Fernie couldn’t help but notice how quiet the house seemed. On her previous visit, the place had been anything but silent; even in the most isolated places, there had always been distant whispers, cries, breathing, the sounds a living house makes when people, or at least creatures, move around inside. But now all the shadows were in hiding, and the walls around them seemed as quiet as a tomb. Her own ragged breath reflected the exhaustion of a girl who might have been able to run up ten flights of stairs without breathing hard, but was being pushed to her limits by the time she had climbed twenty.

If this had been less important, she might have asked Gustav for a break.

She lost count of how far they had climbed, though it was certainly much higher than the house seen from the outside should have been able to accommodate.

Then he sat down at the top of one flight that looked the same as any other flight and wiped a thin sheen of sweat from his forehead. He was tired, but not nearly as out of breath as Fernie was. “Okay,” he said. “This is the floor with the gong. We should rest up a bit before we strike it, because we might have to run away in a hurry if things go wrong.”

Fernie sat down gratefully. “Gong?”

“Yes,” Gustav said. “It’s a giant round bell, about this big.” He extended his arms as far as they would go.

“I know…what a…gong is. But what’s one…doing all the way up here?” she panted.

“I brought it up from the basement,” Gustav explained.

“You…carried…a gong…up all these stairs?”

“I don’t want to pretend I’m stronger than I am,” he said. “It took me four days. I had help, and even then I had to drag it a little bit farther every day.”

“Why…would you…spend four days…lugging a big heavy…gong…through all those…narrow hallways…and up more than twenty…flights of stairs?”

“So I could ring it,” he said as if that were the most obvious question in the world.

She was mad at herself for falling into the same trap that she’d promised herself she wouldn’t fall into again of asking questions.

But this time, he surprised her by offering the explanation. “Look, it’s very simple. Remember that time from your last visit when we fell down the garbage chute into a big pile of shadow-stuff? Remember how far we fell and how soft the landing was?”

Fernie remembered. It had been just like landing in a big pile of feathers.

“Wasn’t that fun?” he asked.

Now that she thought about it, it had been. “Yes.”

“Well,” he said, “there’s no place in the house with a greater distance to fall, or with more shadows crowded together on the ground below me, than the balconies high above the grand parlor. I ring the gong because they can hear it and be warned that I’m about to jump. So far, they’ve always made a big soft pile out of themselves to cushion my landing.”

It sounded exactly like the kind of fun thing Fernie would have wanted to try, even if it
was also the kind of thing her dad would call an accident waiting to happen. But something bothered her. “Didn’t you also tell me that most of the shadows here don’t really care whether you live or die?”