Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault (2 page)

Grinning, Fernie got up and went to the cooler for a soda. It was a few steps from the site of the picnic table, and the gray-black mist swirled over the cuffs of her jeans as she knelt and checked out the flavors. They had grape (which she considered a fine fruit but a disgusting flavor of soda), orange (Pearlie’s personal favorite, though Fernie considered it vile), and her father’s favorite, Safety Cola (which had all the carbonation removed to make sure none got up somebody’s nose and distracted him at a critical moment). Finally, she found a can of her own favorite, the cherry-flavored Bloodred Hungry Zombie Blood Fizz.

She only realized just how long she’d been kneeling in place, soda in hand, a sudden darkness shrouding her sun-freckled face, when Great-Aunt Mellifluous came up behind her and asked, “Are you all right, dear?”

“I’m just thinking.”

Great-Aunt Mellifluous clucked in sympathy. “This
is
a strange front yard for someone raised in sunlight, isn’t it?”

Fernie glanced back at the table to see if Gustav or her family could hear her; but no, he was back to his fried chicken and intent on some
long and involved story Pearlie was telling. “I don’t mind. It’s just that—”

“What, dear?”

Fernie bit her lip and leaned in close. “Would it be okay if I spoke to you in private for a couple of minutes?”

“Of course, Fernie. You should never be afraid to talk to me. You’re like family. Where would you like to go?”

“Maybe under the tree,” Fernie said.

Closely followed by Great-Aunt Mellifluous, Fernie sat down on the little wooden swing that hung from the thumb of the Gloom yard’s only tree. She gave the dust at her feet a few halfhearted kicks while gathering her thoughts.

After a second or two, she managed: “I keep thinking about everything Gustav’s missing. There’s so much to the world outside the fence. I mean, my mom’s in Kenya swimming with crocodiles for one of her TV specials; she gets to go to interesting places and see interesting things
all the time
. My dad gets to go into the city for work, even if he only walks near tall buildings when he’s sure that they have no open windows filing cabinets might fall from. But Gustav never gets to go anywhere. Everything
else has to be brought to him, and that’s
not fair
.”

“Life isn’t always fair, dear. At least it gives Gustav friends like you and Pearlie, who can do for him what he can’t.”

Fernie turned the swing in place two or three times, twisting the cords that bound it and her to the overhead thumb. “But that’s the part I can’t stop thinking about, Auntie. I mean, why can’t he? I know that something bad must have happened to his flesh-and-blood family, if you had to adopt him. But how does that end with Gustav trapped here forever? When does that start making sense?”

For just a moment, deep sadness seemed to make Great-Aunt Mellifluous less transparent and more solid than the shadow she really was. “I’m sorry, Fernie. I know this is all still new and confusing to you, but you really aren’t asking the right kinds of questions.”

“Okay. So what are the right kinds of questions?”

“The real mystery,” Great-Aunt Mellifluous said, “is not what happened to prevent Gustav from ever being able to survive outside the estate grounds, but what gives him life in the first place.”

Fernie did not see this as helpful. She turned away and found herself watching an ice-cream truck with black windows as it passed down the street that separated Gustav’s house from her own. It was the first time she’d seen this particular truck, with a big model of a strawberry cone affixed to its front grille. She had the same thought that always flitted across her mind whenever an ice-cream truck went by, namely that it would be nice to run out and have a sprinkle sandwich, but then she remembered that she was already at a picnic.

So she turned back to Great-Aunt Mellifluous, intent on suggesting a return to the table, but saw at once that something was terribly wrong.

It was impossible to say that the shadow woman had gone pale, because she was the same shade of see-through gray she always was, but she did look stricken, in the manner of a lady who has just seen the fin of a great white shark slicing the surface of her backyard pool. “Oh, dear.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to forgive me,” Great-Aunt Mellifluous said, her usually
strong voice now weak and quivery, “but we’ll have to postpone this conversation for a while, as I have to rush inside and take care of a few things. Is that all right?”

“Of course,” Fernie said.

Great-Aunt Mellifluous glanced back at the picnic table. “You may finish your picnic with Gustav, but afterward you need to go straight home, and stay there the rest of the day and night. And promise me something, dear?”

“Sure. What?”

“Stay
away
from that ice-cream man.
Run
away from him if you have to. He’s not what he looks like. He’s something very, very bad.”

As soon as she said this, Great-Aunt Mellifluous dissolved like a puff of smoke and joined the swirling cloud at her feet. But she wasn’t the only thing that vanished. All over the Gloom yard, the mist started pulling back, a great gray tide that retreated from its comfortable coverage of every nook and cranny of the estate and hurried toward the mansion’s opening front doors. It seemed intent on escape, driven by fear of whatever terrible thing Great-Aunt Mellifluous had seen.

As the last of the mist retreated inside the
house, the black grass of the lawn was left uncovered, a field of stubbly black needles that somehow looked exactly like the upright hair on Gustav’s head.

Fernie’s own shadow, which like all shadows all over the world had a mind of its own, stayed with her, but only just; the instant the shadow mist had disappeared, the shadow Fernie lay revealed at her feet, and took a few tentative steps toward the house before darting back and remaining, as if in defiance, at the feet of the girl who gave it form.

The ice-cream truck disappeared around the next corner, still jingling its bells and attracting absolutely no interest from anybody in the neighborhood. Fernie had the feeling that it would be back.

Over at the picnic table, Fernie’s dad peered down at his feet, which were suddenly not shrouded by fog. “Hey, look! The weather’s improving!”

Gustav looked down at his feet, too. “It’s not weather. It’s the shadows. They’ve all gone indoors for some reason. They must be having a family meeting of some kind.”

“Does that happen a lot?” Pearlie asked.

“Enough.” Gustav shrugged. “They get involved in a lot of political arguments, and sometimes call in reinforcements when one side is losing.”

Fernie didn’t see any reason to ruin his picnic, since he’d had so few during his strange life, so she returned to the table and pretended to be calm while the family finished the chicken and had watermelon slices for dessert.

But even as Pearlie taught Gustav to spit watermelon seeds, Fernie couldn’t help but wonder: What about an ice-cream man could possibly be scary enough to frighten shadows?

And why was she so terribly afraid that she’d soon be finding out?

THE VERY IMPORTANT NEIGHBORHOOD MEETING ABOUT FINALLY DOING SOMETHING ABOUT YOU-KNOW-WHAT

Later that day, after the What family had returned home, Fernie retired to the living room and curled up with her black-and-white cat, Harrington, and an exciting new book about a pair of mummy-hunting archaeologists named Oozle and Boozle. But she was unable to concentrate on the story and drifted away around the time when the two explorers found themselves trapped in a crypt by millions of hungry beetles. She found herself staring out the window at the Gloom house. As always, it was big and black and ominous and clearly hiding any number of secrets.

The ice-cream truck drove by, jingling its happy tune—maybe the twentieth time she’d seen it pass or heard that tune in the last few hours. Each time the truck went by, she’d felt a deeper chill.

She said, “I don’t know what that truck’s selling, Harrington, but I don’t want any.”

Harrington, who had gone wide-eyed at the first sound of bells, hissed at the truck as it went by, itself an ominous sign, since cats have a special sensitivity to shadows and tend to feel bothered when they’re up to no good. His plaintive meow when the truck passed out of sight again was Cat for “Why don’t you do something about that scary thing?”

“There, there,” Fernie said as she petted him. This was Little Girl for “I don’t know what to do, but petting you makes me feel better.”

Harrington purred.
Me too.

The doorbell rang.

Fernie fit her feet into her new pair of slippers (the ones that looked like some bloodred mutated alien blob that had glommed itself around her feet and was now working its way up her ankles) and went to see who it was.

She and Harrington got to the door just behind Pearlie, who opened it.

“Hello,” said Mrs. Adele Everwiner.

The What girls had been raised to show respect toward their elders, and for the most part obeyed that simple commandment, as it
was generally easier to be nice than not-nice. But they’d both long since reached the age where it became obvious to them that some adults seemed determined to make that difficult.

Unfortunately, Mrs. Everwiner belonged to that category.

She was the kind of person who seemed to spend her life waiting for the precise moment when a visit from her was least wanted.

If you ever want to predict when a person like her is about to show up, then simply wait until you’re comforting yourself with a thought like,
Well, at least Mrs. Everwiner isn’t here,
and you can be assured of a knock on the door.

Both What girls managed a polite “Hello, Mrs. Everwiner” that sounded only a little bit less convincing than when they had looked at dinner and said, “Oh, great, spinach.”

Their visitor looked like a human teardrop: wide and rounded at the bottom, narrower at her shoulders, and coming to a point on top. Her hair was as red as an apple and was the part that came to a point, even if the point was a little off center and leaned to the right, as if signaling to invisible people behind her that she was about to make a sudden turn. She had
bright green eyes behind bright green eye shadow and a nose so small that it looked like it had been placed on her face as an afterthought.

Just below her shoulders she had affixed an adhesive sticker with the friendly words H
ELLO
! MY NAME IS. Beneath that the sticker bore an empty space in which she’d handwritten
Mrs. Adele Everwiner, Founder and Vice President, Neighborhood Beautification Society
.

Reading it, Pearlie said, “Is
all of that
your name?”

Mrs. Everwiner glanced down at the sticker. “No, dear. I keep telling you, my
name
is only Mrs. Adele Everwiner. The rest is just my official title.”

“Like lord or lady,” Pearlie suggested.

“Or countess,” Fernie added.

Mrs. Everwiner was such an important person in her own mind that she never saw when she was being messed with. “Except this is a democracy, dears. The Neighborhood Beautification Society doesn’t go in for actual inherited titles.”

“Oh, well,” Fernie said. “As long as it’s
official
.”

“Thank you, dear. Hello, Mr. What.”

Fernie’s father had arrived at the front door. “Hello, Adele. What can I do for you this fine evening?”

“I just wanted to pick you up for the meeting,” Mrs. Everwiner said, with a worried sideways glance at the girls. She leaned forward and whispered, “You know, the one about finally doing something about you-know-what?”

“Oh, yes,” Mr. What said in a regular tone of voice, making absolutely no attempt at all to keep the matter the secret Mrs. Everwiner seemed to want it to be. “The very important neighborhood meeting about Finally Doing Something about You-Know-What. I’m sorry, Adele, I know that I promised to come, but the truth is that I forgot all about it.”

“What’s you-know-what?” Fernie asked.

Mr. What glanced at his daughter. “Adele here is launching another of her regular campaigns to get the city to condemn and tear down the Gloom place.”

Mrs. Everwiner preened. “Somebody has to, dear. It’s an
eyesore
. It doesn’t fit the character of the neighborhood.” This was her way of saying that, unlike the other houses on Sunnyside Terrace, it wasn’t painted some headache-inducing color like Fluorescent Salmon or Radioactive Lime Green.

Mr. What said, “But it was here before the
rest of the neighborhood was built. Isn’t the real problem that
they
don’t fit in with
it
? Couldn’t we solve the problem by just painting all the other houses black?”

“Sounds good to me,” Pearlie declared. “I’ll get the paint roller.”

She actually turned around and started hurrying toward the closet, but Mrs. Everwiner called her back.

“That won’t be necessary, thank goodness.”

Pearlie stopped. “Why not?”

“We’ve found an old law in the city charter that empowers the authorities to demolish ugly buildings like that horrid Gloom place. The city can intervene whenever a majority of the residents within a two-block radius sign statements testifying to the aesthetic damage being done to the overall character of the surrounding neighborhood.”