Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault (17 page)

“It looks like the other side of the same door,” Fernie said.

Even Gustav was impressed. “I think in some way it may even
be
the same door. I think, in a way, the entire prison may be
in
the door. Either way…we really do need to run now.”

Fernie had spent more time running in this house than anywhere else, so this was hardly a surprise.

They ran.

They ran through corridors dim and dingy, through rooms grim and gruesome.

They ran around corners, up stairs, and through a freestanding wardrobe. They ran down a hallway with a crumbling gap in the middle, with nothing but wreckage and shadow-stuff below them, and though she would have liked to stop and judge the leap, Gustav said there was no time, so they jumped the gap and moved on.

At a wall covered with a painting of a very serious man with a mustache so ornate that it must have taken him half his day to comb it, they paused just long enough for Gustav to open the painting like a door and reveal a hidden doorway to the servants’ passage.

Fernie still couldn’t tell one part of that twisty maze from another, but Gustav could, seeing some pattern in the thin corridors that she could not. As they raced up and down stairs and along narrow passages in the space behind the walls of the Gloom house, she began to realize that wherever he was leading them, they were getting close.

Then they burst from the servants’ passage onto a green carpet and both fell to their knees, for the moment too exhausted from all their running to take as much as one more step.

For the first time since leaving the Hall of Shadow Criminals, Fernie knew exactly where they’d been going. She gasped in recognition. “The house…inside the house?”

It was indeed the room where Lemuel Gloom had built a cozy home for his family; the room where the glowing ball of sunlight still shone over the slanting roof of the smaller house where Hans and Penelope Gloom had wanted to live.

They both panted for almost a full minute before Gustav forced himself back upright. “I…don’t think…we have much time…before he gets here. We have to…hurry.”

“But…Gustav…are you sure it’s
here
? In your family’s
house
?”

“It…makes sense,” he managed as he dragged her to her feet. “Anything…that dangerous…Grandpa Lemuel would want to keep nearby…where he could keep an eye on it…and stop anybody bad, man or shadow, from trying to take it. It wouldn’t…have been…
safe
…anywhere else.”

“But, Gustav…how can you
know
…?”

Gustav didn’t answer, maybe because he didn’t have time to answer. Instead he left her behind and ran into the house inside the house, the rear door slamming. She stumbled after him and found him in the empty kitchen as he wrapped a sheet of aluminum foil around his glass globe.

“Gustav—”

“There’s no time…to explain,” he said. He had already gotten his breathing most of the way under control and sounded only a little ragged as he wrapped the globe, except for the one open end, in silvery sheets. “It took longer than…I expected to get here and…I think he’ll…be on us any second. I think he’ll be coming from the front yard. You need…to go out into the
front yard…under the sun, and watch for him. Shout if you see him coming. Slow him down if you can.”

The idea of having to stand still and wait as October approached was so against every instinct in Fernie’s body that she never would have agreed to do it for anybody other than Gustav. She nodded and headed for the front of the house.

“Wait,” he said.

She turned, expecting him to wish her good luck.

“Your globe,” he said.

She looked down at her right hand, which still held the globe he had handed her. She’d never put it down, not in all the adventures that followed. Without a word she placed it on the table beside him and began to leave again.

“Wait,” he said.

She looked at him.

“Thank you for calling me your best friend,” he said.

“Thanks for being my best friend,” she replied.

She turned and once again headed for the front of the house.

“Wait,” he said a third time.

She turned around and looked at him.

“Good luck,” he said.

“You too,” she said.

She bounded out onto the front lawn.

It felt strange to be directly under a sun again after so many hours of running around the dark corridors of Gustav’s house, and especially after their adventures in the shadow prison. She could only hope that it wasn’t the last sun she ever got to see, and that she would have another chance to be warmed by the more distant and yet somehow friendlier sun from the world outside.

The thought made her feel more alone than ever before. Though there was a sun blazing away just over her head, she felt a terrible cold that could not have been matched during the most frigid snowstorm in January.

Then something landed on her head with a plop.

She yelled and fought a heroic battle with her attacker that would have had the greatest warriors of all time nodding with appreciation and carefully taking notes, until she managed to get out from under it and saw that it was just a
dusty old sheet, covered with a pattern of roses.

“Sorry!” cried Gustav, who had tossed it out the nursery window. “I didn’t mean for it to land on you! Spread it out on the lawn!”

Fernie had no idea why Gustav would want her to do such a thing, with the air around her already growing cold from October’s approach, but assumed that he had his reasons. She spread the king-sized sheet across the fake lawn, and just because it was something to do took extra care to make sure that all the wrinkles were smoothed out.

Then she stood up and faced the door she had followed Gustav through just before her first visit with the green carpet pretending to be a lawn. On this side of the wall, it was just the outline of a door, painted with the same mural of bright blue skies and faraway rolling hills as the rest of the wall around it. She could almost close her eyes and imagine that the fake horizon was real. But no, it was only a painting. That peaceful horizon was just a made-up thing, less real than the danger that was coming for them.

When she heard distant crunching, the sound October’s tendrils of darkness had made as they punched holes through the balcony over
the grand parlor, it took every ounce of courage she had to resist running for her life.

Her teeth chattered before she clamped her jaw shut.

Then a hole appeared in the wall before her. A black tendril poked through, seemed to look around a bit, and then retreated, as if to report to its master what it had seen. Another half dozen tendrils crashed through the wall, ripping apart the fake hills and fake clouds and fake beautiful summer day as if offended that anybody would ever decorate their home with such things. October hadn’t caused such damage the last time he’d entered this room, but he seemed to be in a greater hurry this time now that he knew his prize was so near. The frustration he must have felt after his last encounter with Gustav and Fernie must have also lent fury to his dark mission.

The door blew off its frame.

A formless, swirling mass spilled out into the room where Fernie stood, curling around the doorway and slithering across the fake grass like an army of black snakes. October followed close behind, floating a foot off the floor as the shadow tendrils carried him along, like a
package they’d been asked to deliver.

Gustav had asked Fernie to let him know when October showed up, so she felt absolutely no shame about screaming at the very sight. But she might have screamed anyway. This was the first time she had seen October up close since helping Gustav drop the big gong on his head, so it was also the first time she could see the effects of the impact. His head looked like a flat clay sculpture that somebody had stepped on; his features had flattened, turning his nose into an outline against the planes of his cheeks. His skin was black-and-blue, and his eyes hung askew, no longer lined up perfectly like eyes should be, but one mashed farther down his face by several inches. One of those eyes was open, the other puffy and closed.

His mouth, though…that was unchanged. That was still open, and still spilling out thickets of grasping black tendrils.

The man-shaped creature at the center of all that darkness stopped only a few steps into the room to peer at Fernie with dull curiosity as the shadowy tendrils he controlled spread out to fill every corner of the lawn. They encircled Fernie, weaving together until she was
completely imprisoned in a cage of them.

Behind her, some of the snaky black shapes spilling through the open screen door of the house inside the house groped for whatever they expected to find within; others curled up to the open second-story window, invading the nursery. In seconds all she could see of the house was the sloping roof. She heard ransacking sounds as the search began.

The shadow eater didn’t come any closer to her. He stared at her, tilting his flattened head first one way, then the other. “The girl who ran,” he said in his dull, empty voice. “The girl who lied. The girl who helped to drop the big bell on my head. I told you that you would be punished if you didn’t help me. Now we are back in the same room where we were hours ago, and all your running has come to nothing.”

“I’m not sorry,” Fernie said, her voice quavering only a little as she said it. She had been afraid, but she was past that now, ready for anything that might happen.

“You won’t stop October from getting the Nightmare Vault.”

“No. I won’t. But you want to know something?”

The tendrils around her drew closer. “No.”

“I’ll tell you anyway,” she said, speaking quickly because she only had seconds left. “I agree with something my friend Gustav said about you. I don’t think you
are
Howard Philip October. I think you’re just an empty, stupid
thing
that the real Howard Philip October made to fetch what he wants.”

October was silent for several seconds, absorbing that…and then he said, “Being right won’t save you.”

Shadow tendrils whipped around Fernie’s ankles, lifting her shrieking form off the ground and into the air.

The room’s sun veered so close that she shut her eyes tight, afraid of being burned up; but though she was swung so close to that ball of fire that she could have reached out and touched it if she’d tried, she felt no heat at all except in her eyes, which though closed were momentarily dazzled by its brightness.

It was certainly better than what she saw when the grip of the tendrils swung her away from the sun and she opened her eyes to see the shadow eater’s head, rolling back as his mouth opened wider and wider. There was nothing in
there but empty space and more churning black shapes, some of them looking like the shadows of people.

She closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to watch as October swallowed her whole.

But that’s when Gustav yelled,
“Oh no, you don’t!”

Fernie had been so terrified that she’d forgotten all about Gustav, but when she opened her eyes again she spotted him swinging from shadow tendril to shadow tendril like a monkey swinging among vines in the jungle. He didn’t seem afraid at all: just angry, and determined, and so much in control of the situation that, for a heartbeat, he seemed as fearsome as the shadow eater himself.

When he passed between her and the room’s sun, like an eclipse in the shape of a boy, she saw two brilliant points of light, burning at the center of his chest. They were the glass globes he had insisted on collecting earlier, each now wrapped in aluminum foil and clanking together in a sling he had made of another wadded-up bedsheet from the house. The open ends of both glass globes glowed from the fires burning inside them—fire made of the pure burning daylight he had just scooped from the surface of the room’s sun.

For the first time, Fernie began to understand the nature of Gustav’s plan, something she never could have imagined herself, because she never would have dared dream that it was possible.

Forgotten in the shadow eater’s grip, the way her father sometimes forgot he was carrying his car keys because he was too busy concentrating on bigger problems, Fernie could only watch as every tendril that had invaded the house inside the house suddenly pulled back out to dart in Gustav’s direction at once. It was like watching a thousand spears, thrown by a thousand warriors, all angrily converging on the same boy.

It looked hopeless for Gustav, but then he appeared, somehow leaping past that storm of darkness without ever being touched by it, running across a bucking bridge of groping darkness toward the shadow eater’s gaping mouth. Gustav had one of the glass globes in his hand and was winding up to throw it. But then the tendrils thrashed, and he dropped the globe; it fell past the thicket of swirling darkness to the fake grass and shattered, releasing a blinding burst of light that dissipated some of the invading darkness but didn’t come even close to stopping the shadow eater.

But that was why Gustav had packed two globes. He needed a spare.

Even as a thousand grasping tendrils reached for him again, he grabbed the remaining globe and dove straight into the shadow eater’s open mouth.

Fernie shrieked. It was that terrible. It looked exactly like the boy she’d called her best friend was being eaten.

But her shriek was not nearly as loud as the shadow eater’s. He threw back his head and bellowed, shafts of light pouring from a gaping mouth that until now had only emitted darkness. An army of dark shapes, driven from his belly by that light, flew out, all of them adding to the chorus of screams; all of the ones the fake October had eaten, that had been in his power before, now had to follow their nature and flee something that always drove shadows before it. There were more of them than Fernie ever could have imagined: not just hundreds of them but thousands, many of them crying “Free! Free!” as they escaped into the open air.

The tendrils holding Fernie by the ankles released her. She fell toward the ground, shutting her eyes again as she braced for the impact. But
it never came. Other shadows, freed by Gustav’s brave act, caught her and gently lowered her to the fake lawn. One said, “I’m sorry we can’t stay to help, but we still have to get as far away from that monster as we can,” and joined the many others fleeing through the holes the shadow eater had ripped in the walls.