Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault (5 page)

Then the outline of a man in a dingy white
uniform appeared, walking around the side of the house. The white uniform didn’t seem very bright; it was just the suggestion of light, and the only reason October could be seen at all. The darkness, already impenetrable, seemed darker still where his head should have been.

“He’s coming,” Pearlie said.

A GAME OF HIDE-AND-SHRIEK

October closed his mouth, though his face remained as lumpy and uneven as ever. He stopped in the center of the What lawn, throwing his head back so he could sniff the air. In the glow of the streetlights, the patches of darkness dancing around his head looked like a swarm of bees angry at being dipped in ink.

Pearlie whispered, “What are we going to do?”

Fernie understood that Pearlie wasn’t really asking her. She was a big sister, and big sisters are always in charge, even when the little sister has spent a little more time dealing with scary monsters and knows more about what’s involved. But only one decision made sense. “I have to go to the Gloom house and find Gustav.”

“What could
Gustav
do?”

“I don’t know,” Fernie said with deep
irritation. “If I knew, I’d do it myself and save him the trouble.”

Pearlie had to nod at the sense this made. “All right. So we’ll find Gustav, and—”

As much as Fernie didn’t want to be separated from her sister at a time like this, she could only shake her head. “No. You can’t. Somebody has to stay behind and make sure that Dad doesn’t try to come home while that guy’s around. You have to go to Mrs. Everwiner’s, yank him out of that stupid meeting, get him to a car, and have him drive away with you as fast as you can.”

“What? Why?”

“Because he’s covered with shadow-smell, too, and if he sticks around, October will go after him next.”

October had followed the scent into the street and was now standing under the streetlight, sniffing the air again.

Brave as she was, Pearlie was unable to resist a little whimper. “But I’m older. I’m supposed to protect you. Why can’t
I
get Gustav while
you
run away and warn Dad?”

This was the last argument Fernie wanted right now, but there was no way to get past it without first taking the time to have it. “Because
I’ve spent more time inside Gustav’s house than you have. Because I know some of the dangerous places inside and might have a better chance of staying out of trouble. Because I probably have more shadow-smell on me than you do, and that means the ice-cream man’s probably going to go after me, instead of you, if we split up. Because I can lead him away from you and Dad, and maybe toward something that can stop him.”

Pearlie was being offered the easy way out, but she still shook her head, resisting the idea just a little bit more. “Dad’s not going to go anywhere with you at Gustav’s!”

“He has to,” Fernie insisted. “And you have to say whatever it takes to make him. Tell him Gustav and his friends will help me. Tell him everything will be fixed by the time the two of you come back in the morning and that I’ll tell him all about it over a nice waffle breakfast.”

“You don’t know that.”

“If it’s not all right by morning, it’s never going to be.”

Out in the street, the lumbering ice-cream man began to stride toward them.

The air grew colder the closer he came.

Pearlie only had enough time for one more
objection. “You’ll be leading a man who eats shadows into a house filled with shadows.”

“If he wants something in Gustav’s house,” Fernie said, “he’ll be headed there sooner or later, anyway. At least now I’ll be warning them.”

Pearlie hesitated for one heartbeat more before throwing her arms around Fernie and squeezing her as tightly as she ever had. They’d always gotten along and had never suffered a shortage of sisterly hugs, but this particular hug was the kind sisters only give when they think it might be the last one ever.

Then Pearlie stepped out into the street and waved her hands over her head. “Yoo-hoo, you big smelly stupid-head! Anybody ever tell you that you have a
big mouth
?”

October turned to face Pearlie, his cheeks bulging and rippling enough to suggest snakes squirming around beneath them. “Yes.”

Pearlie did a cartwheel, wobbled a little because she had never been all that good at those, and danced a silly butt-wiggling dance, as if this were all just one big joke and there was nothing else she’d rather do than make fun of the scary man with the mouth big enough to swallow ugly sculptures. “Well, I wouldn’t mind
your mouth being that big, as long as you did something about your
breath
!”

“I don’t like rude girls,” October said as he took his first step toward her.

Thinking her sister insane but also impossibly brave, Fernie took advantage of the distraction and sprinted to the front gate of the Gloom estate. It was closed, which she didn’t see as a problem, because it was also usually unlocked. She pushed and found to her horror that this was not one of those times; whoever decided whether it should be locked or unlocked had figured on this being one of the nights when it should be locked.

It wasn’t that big a problem, all in all, because one of Fernie’s secrets—kept to herself because her father had a predictable list of terrible things that could happen to little girls who climbed things—was that she could climb trees and other things well enough to make squirrels jealous. She hopped up, grabbed the crossbar at the top of the gate, and in three short seconds pulled herself up.

Perched atop the fence, she saw Pearlie still taunting October with insults. He’d opened his mouth all the way again to release another torrent of shadow tendrils.

“Hey, you!” Fernie yelled, to return the favor and give Pearlie a chance to get away. “I know where the Nightmare Vault is—and I’m going to hide it where you’ll never ever be able to find it, even if you look for a million years!”

October turned, the black hole of his mouth turning with him. Shadow tendrils exploded outward and began to grow in the air as he strode toward the gate.

Pearlie’s fists went to her mouth at the moment the ice-cream man abandoned her to advance on her sister instead. A helpless apology flitted across her face just before she turned her back and began to run.

Fernie jumped down, rolled as she hit the black lawn of the Gloom estate, then scrambled back to her feet and ran for the mansion’s pair of giant front doors. She found herself up against them, screaming for help and pounding on the wood with both fists, as behind her October reached the gate. He wrapped his pale, grubby hands against the iron bars.

Fernie wasted five full seconds hanging everything on the desperate hope that the gate would succeed in keeping him out, before remembering how easily he’d succeeded in
opening and closing a locked and bolted door.

October pushed the gate open with no trouble at all.

“Oh no,” Fernie said.

As October strolled through the open gate, the black tendrils from his mouth cut through the air like cracks in the world. They moved a lot faster than he did. In seconds there were so many of them, slicing the air between himself and Fernie, reaching out toward her like blind snakes, that there was no point in abandoning the Gloom house; those groping shapes would find her, wherever she ran and wherever she hid, even if she learned how to fly and soared to Liechtenstein.

She pounded on the door, screaming, “Gustav! I’m in trouble here!”

“Yes,” October said. “You are.”

The black tendrils were now fewer than three feet from Fernie, and she couldn’t have run in another direction even if she’d wanted to; they’d formed a cage around the two front steps to the Gloom house and blocked every other possible direction.

“You should have cooperated,” October said as the tendrils closed in.

Fernie pounded on the door. “Please, please, please! Somebody let me in!
I’m a friend of this house!
”

The doors opened.

Fernie, who’d been leaning against them with all her weight, fell flat on her belly. She landed on the long red carpet runner that extended down the long entrance hall to the grand parlor, dimly visible at the other end. The shadowy mist that should have covered the floor to ankle depth was missing. She saw nothing else between her and the rest of the house: no shadows, no Gustav, just the long hallway lined with tall vases and jet-black paintings.

Somehow, she managed to get to her feet and run, yelling,
“Gustav! Great-Aunt Mellifluous! Anybody! Help me!”

As she ran, she reached out and toppled the giant vases, turning the hallway into an obstacle course that October would have to cross if he wanted to get to her. She heard the first and second and third ones all hit the floor with mighty crashes behind her as she ran, headed for the grand parlor and the escape it offered.

It was when she got to the grand parlor that she knew just how much the shadows
feared the monster chasing her.

The first time she’d been here, the grand parlor had been a bustling, impossibly vast space, teeming with shadowy figures going about their shadowy business. There had been more of them than she could ever possibly count, gliding through the air, climbing and descending the multiple staircases, hanging out on the couches, and gathered in little knots of conversation everywhere the eye could see. Tonight, they were all gone. The grand parlor was just a room, abandoned by all the inhabitants, the scattered items of furniture as lonely against the great stretches of floor that surrounded them as empty life rafts on a vast, uncharted sea.

As she knew from her last visit, there were too many possible directions to run. She didn’t have a clue where to go and where not to, which directions might offer help and which would only deliver her to worse danger. So she raced as far as the center of the forlorn and empty room and spun around, begging for some idea to occur to her. “Please, somebody! Gustav!
The ice-cream man is here!
”

Somewhere above her head, Gustav said, “So?”

THE ONLY THING THAT COULD HAVE POSSIBLY MADE GUSTAV’S HOUSE ANY STUPIDER

Peering down at her from the second-floor balcony, Gustav didn’t seem particularly frightened, or even worried, just surprised to see Fernie.

He had changed into a different little black suit with a little black tie. Fernie could tell it was not the outfit he had worn earlier in the day, as that one had gotten some watermelon juice on the lapels, and this one looked like it had come straight from the dry cleaner. (This, of course, reopened the question of just who did Gustav’s laundry, but that was something Fernie didn’t have the time to worry about right now.)

Fernie found his look of only slightly confused calm infuriating. “Didn’t you hear what I said? I’m being chased by the ice-cream man!”

“Oh,” Gustav said. “You didn’t say that he
was
chasing
you, only that he was
here
.
Chasing
you is something quite different.”

Sometimes talking to Gustav made her want to stomp her foot.
“Are you going to pick on me or are you going to help?”

“Help,” Gustav decided. “Meet me at the top of the purple staircase, over there.”

The grand parlor had a dozen staircases, including some that bypassed the second floor entirely and went straight to some of the upper levels. There were rickety wooden staircases and tightly wound spiral staircases, a few with missing steps, and one, leading to some high place obscured by haze, that only provided its users with one step out of every five, and therefore promised a painful plunge to the ground level for anybody who couldn’t simply leap the yawning gap between boards. The purple staircase was one of the more regal, as it had ornately carved banisters, a plush runner, and a base that widened at the ground floor, as if to offer open arms to anybody who ever wanted to climb it. Fernie went for that one, her heart pounding as she took the steps three at a leap. Just as she reached the top she looked back and was driven to despair by the sight of October,
entering the parlor with his mouth still yawning wide and a thicket of shadow tendrils invading the air before him.