Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault (13 page)

“Like what?”

“Well, like for instance,
squamous
.”

“You’re just making that up.”

“No. It means ‘covered in little scales.’ In his books, he kept using it to describe people he had met. If you listened to him, he couldn’t travel fifteen feet in any direction without finding people who looked squamous. Why, I read one of his books where he took a trip to some spooky little village somewhere and, if you believe him, every single person he met there was squamous.”

“If the village really was that spooky, maybe they were.”

“Maybe. Or maybe he was just counting on nobody who read his books owning a dictionary. The point is that the real Howard Philip October used a lot of fancy words, even if he didn’t always use them the right way. That thing we just met could barely come up with a
the
.”

“Maybe becoming whatever he is now hurt his mind.”

“Could be,” Gustav said. “But I think the real October is still alive somewhere, and that this one is just a bad copy, one that looks like October and has some of his memories, but still isn’t really him.”

“Is he October’s shadow?”

“No. He’s filled with shadows, but his skin, the part that gets all lumpy because of the shadows moving around inside him, is human. It might even be grown from October’s own skin, since it looks so much like him, but I don’t think there’s anything else inside that thing but the shadows he’s eaten.”

“How does that help?” she wanted to know.

“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “But it might be something we need to keep in mind.”

They reached the set of double doors at the end of the Gallery of the Almost Famous. Gustav propped his glass globe under one arm in order to handle the doorknob with the other, hesitated, and told Fernie, “I should warn you. When we open the door, we might have to run very fast.”

“Gee,” Fernie said. “That would be a nice change.”

“I’m serious. We’re about to head into a part of the house where the shadows aren’t
very civilized. Most of them aren’t evil so much as mean and unpleasant. They’re not fit for polite company, and are so disliked by most of the others that they band together here, where nobody talks to them or has anything to do with them.”

“Is it a jail?” she asked.

“No. There’s a jail here, and it happens to be where we’re going…but everything around it is like…a bad neighborhood. It’s possible they were never warned about the shadow eater, and might not have hidden wherever the rest went. They’ll give us trouble if we try to pass.”

“Then why do we have to go this way?”

“Because,” Gustav said, “it’s the only way I know of to get to the jail. The person I want to talk to is a prisoner there. Getting to him might be dangerous, and talking to him will be more dangerous still, but we have no other choice, not with October still loose and searching for us.”

“Okay,” Fernie said. “I’m ready.”

Gustav took a deep breath, steeled himself, and pushed open the door.

Fernie was used to seeing dim and dingy places in the Gloom house, but the new corridor
on the other side was dimmer and dingier than most: the kind of place not inhabited by mere shadows, but by shadows that couldn’t be bothered to keep up appearances. The walls were dirty, as if somebody with mud on his hands had recently passed through and attempted to paint. The air smelled gray with soot, and the carpet runner emitted little puffs of dust with every step Gustav and Fernie took.

They walked quickly, but even so the shadows started to gather around them, circling around to get good looks from all sides. They were not the kind of shadows Fernie had met and come to know, either the good ones like Great-Aunt Mellifluous or the bad ones like the Beast; these were taller, scrawnier, more distorted, almost as if somebody had grabbed them on both ends and stretched them out of shape.

One said, “Boy.”

Another said, “I thought we told you to stay out of this part of the house, boy.”

Another said, “A halfsie boy could get lost in a place like this and never find his way out.”

One of the threatening shadows plucked at Fernie’s shirt. It was a nasty pinch that didn’t feel anything like the hand of any other shadow
whose touch Fernie had known; it felt colder, stickier, as if it had been dipped in gravy and then dried.

“Look, everybody, the girl doesn’t have a shadow!”

“Neither does the boy,” another shadow pointed out.

“Yes, but we know what the boy is. We’ve seen him without his shadow before, and know that it always comes back to him. What’s the girl’s excuse?”

“Maybe she fired it,” one theorized.

“Flesh-and-blood people can’t fire their shadows,” another protested.

“They can if the economy’s bad enough,” one pointed out.

“We ought to teach her a lesson,” another declared.

The shadows looming around Fernie, scandalized by the presence of a flesh-and-blood girl who didn’t have a shadow of her own, drew even closer, their cold fingers tugging at her hair to confirm that she was real.

“Walk faster,” Gustav murmured.

Fernie did just that, but the shadows continued to gather around her, examining her
from head to toe and appearing to block the way ahead.

One piped up with considerable excitement. “Don’t hurt her! She’s a genuine rarity! We should take her to the zoo, put her in a cage, and charge other shadows to see her!”

The others around him chorused their approval of this excellent idea. “We’ll teach her how to do tricks! We’ll put on four shows a day!”

More shadows drew close. There seemed to be hundreds of them, all hungry, all cruel, and all frayed at the edges, like ripped cloth. They plucked at Fernie’s hair and her clothes, as if greedy for her warmth. Passing through them was like walking through an unseen spiderweb in a dark, cramped place.

Fernie whispered to Gustav, “Do they actually have a zoo where they keep people?”

Gustav whispered back, “They tried to start one with me once. They gave me a tire on a swing, so it wasn’t so bad, especially since I got away after a week.”

“Wonderful,” she muttered.

“I told you we might have to run.”

Running seemed pointless now; the corridor in front of them was growing as crowded with
disreputable shadows as the corridor behind them. Some were solid enough to have faces, and they were always the stupid, cruel, self-satisfied faces that Fernie associated with schoolyard bullies, taunting weaker kids into begging them to stop. There were so many up ahead that they filled the corridor like fog and made seeing past them impossible. There was no way to know where to run.

The Fernie who had first walked through Gustav Gloom’s front door three weeks earlier might have been terrified into running for her life, but this Fernie whirled in place, pointed a pale finger at the nearest shadow’s face, and cried, “Would any of you idiots like to know
why
I don’t have a shadow?”

They gasped, startled by her question.

One, speaking in a very soft voice, said, “Yes.”

She said, “Because I’m a shadow eater and I
ate
mine!”

The disreputable shadows surrounding her all reared back as one at this statement, and for a horrible second or two all seemed about to start laughing at her. But no one shadow seemed prepared to call her a liar until one very slight
and meek one ventured, “But a little girl can’t be a shadow eater.”

“She’s bluffing,” one of his braver friends declared, though he didn’t seem quite sure.

“If I’m bluffing,” Fernie said coldly, “then why don’t you go check out the Gallery of Awkward Statues, or the Too Much Sitting Room, or the banquet hall, or any of those other places where you used to be able to find all the nice civilized shadows who behaved themselves? Ask yourself why they’re all gone.”

The uncivilized shadows all gaped at her uneasily, unsure whether to laugh in disbelief or run in terror.

One said, “I haven’t heard anything from the rest of the house tonight.”

Another protested, “I heard a gong.”

An especially irritated one said, “The gong doesn’t count. The boy’s always beating that gong. Keeping me up all hours of the day and night, when I need my beauty sleep. It’s not decent. But that’s all I’ve heard.”

Then one of them, speaking in the quavery voice of someone just realizing that he should be afraid, said, “Guys? I ran down to the banquet hall an hour or two ago, hoping for some
scraps…and she’s telling the truth. There was
nobody
there. Why would there be nobody there?”

“Because,” Fernie said in the most fearsome voice she could manage, “I ate them all.
And I’m getting hungry again now.
”

The uncivilized shadows decided that fleeing in terror was the better of the two available options, and did just that with a haste that stirred up some of the dust on the floor and sent it trailing after them as if it, too, wanted to flee the unexpectedly frightening little girl.

Surprised that it had worked but gratified to have done something right, she turned back to Gustav, who was giving her the oddest look she’d ever seen him give.

“What?” she asked.

He answered her very softly. “Nothing. That was a very good idea you had. Except…”

He was so quiet for so long that she felt the need to prod him. “Except what?”

“You know that they’ll go straight to the places you mentioned. And you know that when they do, none of the respectable shadows will be around. This lot will just find empty room after empty room, where all the other shadows
used to be. And they’ll think you told them the truth. If they manage to avoid October, they’ll tell their friends, and so on.”

Fernie asked, “And your point?”

He looked away just a fraction of a second too slowly for Fernie to miss the slight twitch at the corners of his lips. He said, “What’s the most feared creature in the Gloom house.”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“What,” he said.

“Why are you asking me?”

“I wasn’t asking you anything, Fernie. I was telling you something. As far as that bunch is concerned,
What
is the most feared creature in the Gloom house.
What
. That’s your name. Do you get what I’m saying?”

It took her a second to see what Gustav was getting at. Then she did, and turned red. “Oh.”

They walked on in silence through a corridor now blessedly cleared of disreputable shadows, both knowing that it would not be long before the next of the night’s many dangers popped up to say hello.

FERNIE RECEIVES AN OFFER

For the next few minutes, as they headed deeper into the parts of the house where no respectable shadow would ever go, they weren’t bothered. Any shadows they spotted were just terrified, furtive faces peering at them from around corners or through the windowpanes of some of the corridor doors.

The path ahead grew grimmer and dirtier, the air so cold that Fernie could only wonder if somebody had left a window open somewhere. There was so much dust that Fernie had to bite her lip to avoid sneezing.

Then the hairs on the back of Fernie’s neck stood straight up, and she sensed something that had been putting her ill at ease for several minutes.

One member of the mob had doubled back to follow them and had now almost caught up
with them; even as Fernie whirled to see whom, she cringed, expecting his inevitable cry to his friends, that they should come back, because all the stuff about the little girl being able to eat shadows had been a lie.

Instead, she saw the vague outline of a friendly, skinny figure with bony elbows and knees, and ears that poked out like handles. “Hello, Fernie. Hello, Gustav.”

She relaxed. “Hello, Mr. Notes.”

Mr. Notes’s shadow was one of the few, other than Great-Aunt Mellifluous and Fernie’s own shadow, whom Fernie had spoken to. All she really knew about him was that he’d once been the shadow of a mean man also named Mr. Notes, until he decided that following Mr. Notes around was no fun at all.

“I was wondering when you’d catch up with us,” Gustav said.

“It took me a while,” Mr. Notes’s shadow allowed as he fell into a friendly stroll alongside them. “But I had to flee almost all the way to the other end of the house before I could get away from that mob and start making my way back.”

Fernie didn’t understand. “You were with them?”

“I was the one who told the others that he’d been to the banquet hall looking for scraps. After that wonderfully clever lie you told, it was just the right thing to say to push them the rest of the way into panic.”

“Oh.” Fernie felt deflated. After how satisfying it had been to scare the disreputable shadows away all by herself, it was disappointing to now find out that she’d had a friend in the mob giving them an extra added nudge.

Gustav spotted her stricken expression. “I’m sorry, Fernie. I thought you knew that it was him. I recognized him right away.”

“Well,” she said defensively, “I only met him the one time, and even then only for a minute or two. And besides, what was he doing over here with all the disreputable shadows? Why isn’t he in hiding with the rest of your family?”