Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault (6 page)

Gustav met Fernie at the top of the stairs and was almost bowled over by the force of her grateful hug. As always, he showed only a limited understanding of what to do when being hugged, and demonstrated particular confusion over whether he should hug back. Looking over her shoulder at the new arrival, he said, “That doesn’t look like an ice-cream man. That looks more like a shadow eater.”

“He drives an ice-cream truck.”

“Now I understand why you’re so frightened by him; being chased by a regular old ice-cream man would be just plain silly.”

Fernie couldn’t help feeling that her friend was missing the big picture. “Would it really be too much trouble to hold
off
discussing what’s silly and what’s not until we
get away
?”

“Oh, not at all,” said Gustav. “This way.”

They rushed down the length of the second-floor balcony, the grand parlor to their right and a series of numbered doors to their left. Fernie couldn’t help noticing that the doors ranged in design from polished mahogany
masterpieces to featureless metal slabs, and that the room numbers weren’t even close to being in sensible order, with one white door labeled R
OOM
237, immediately followed by one dowdy green door labeled R
OOM
101 and one bright red door labeled R
OOM
3X2(9YZ)4A.

There was no time to worry about any of this, because the great empty parlor down below was filling up with the horrid black tendrils from October’s mouth. Some were already more than halfway to the second floor, and would probably reach Fernie and Gustav in seconds.

The tips of those tendrils had just begun to poke through the empty spaces between the bars on the second-floor railing when Gustav skidded to a stop before a door reading R
OOM
1 and wrapped his little fist around the jeweled doorknob. “In here!” he cried.

Fernie didn’t have to wait for him to tell her twice. But she had been to Gustav’s house before and knew that its many doors hid many sights as strange as the Gallery of Awkward Statues, as terrible as the Too Much Sitting Room, and as frightening as the basement level with a bottomless pit descending all the way to the Dark Country. So even as she followed him
into a room so dark that she couldn’t tell what it contained at all, a little part of her steeled herself for whatever strange sight might be waiting in there.

It turned out to be just a closet with another door on the other side.

Gustav opened that one and led Fernie into another closet that led to another that led to another that led to another.

Fernie could tell that they were putting some distance between themselves and October, because the unearthly cold he brought with him seemed to be going away. But after the ninth or tenth door, she still found herself getting exasperated. “I’m waiting for an explanation.”

“For what?” Gustav asked as he led her into yet another small dark room with yet another identical door on the far wall.

“Why, out of all the other possible doors you could have picked, you picked the one that led to this.”

One more closet and door later, Gustav said, “Why? What’s wrong with this?”

“What’s
right
with this?”

“Oh,” Gustav explained as he led her into the latest closet in line, “this is a
very
useful
place when you’re being chased by a monster. It’s always good to have a door between you and monsters. Two doors are better, three doors are better still, and five hundred doors are best of all. There were nights in the old days, when I was trying to stay ahead of the People Taker, when I put four or five thousand doors between myself and him, and didn’t stop adding doors until I could hear him yelling, far behind me, that he was giving up for the night. He always got tired of it before I did.”

“Unfortunately,” Fernie pointed out, “you were so good at running away from him that you didn’t get around to doing anything about him for months.”

“That’s true,” Gustav had to admit.

Gustav led Fernie through another fifteen or sixteen doors.

“How long does this go on?” she demanded.

Gustav opened the next door in line. “Forever, I think. I always had to quit when I got hungry, but I’ve been told that if you packed enough provisions, you could keep going indefinitely.”

As they walked through the next door after that, Fernie could imagine nothing so
pointless. “What if you could pack provisions for a month? Or a year?”

“You do know what the word
forever
means, right?”

Another fifteen or sixteen doors later, Fernie decided that she had to be a little more aggressive about forcing Gustav to come up with a more helpful plan. “Isn’t there some other safe place we could hide long enough to talk over what we’re going to do?”

“We won’t be able to stay there long,” Gustav warned. “Those shadow tendrils have our scent by now and will be able to track us down if we spend too much time in one place.”

“We’ll wear ourselves down to nothing if we don’t find somewhere we can figure out what to do.”

Gustav surprised her by not arguing about it. “Okay.”

He turned the next doorknob to the left instead of the right and they emerged into a well-lit, circular room with a high ceiling and walls bearing an array of lit torches. About twenty additional doors ringed the outer wall, each bearing the hand-painted words D
O
N
OT
E
NTER
ON
P
AIN OF
D
EATH
! H
ORRIBLE
,
A
GONIZING
F
ATE
A
WAITS
A
LL
W
HO
V
ENTURE
H
ERE
! Y
OU
W
ILL
S
CREAM
F
OREVER
K
NOWING
Y
OU
D
ISREGARDED
T
HIS
W
ARNING
AND
M
ET
A
F
ATE
W
ORSE
T
HAN
D
EATH
! T
HIS
M
EANS
Y
OU
!

Fernie had seen so many terrifying sights on her previous visit to the Gloom house that the prospect of any room horrifying enough to require such an earnest warning gave her chills. “Where are we?”

“The Choice of Horrible Fates Room,” Gustav said. “Do you like it?”

She discovered that she couldn’t tell the difference between the door they’d just come through and any of the others. “Right. This is
much
better than closets.”

“You didn’t say you wanted
better
,” Gustav said. “You said you wanted a place where we could hide until we figured out what we were going to do.”

She rubbed her forehead. “And once we do figure out what we’re going to do, aren’t we going to have to leave by one of those doors?”

“Sure,” Gustav said.

“But those signs…”

“You like them? I painted them myself, when I was little.”

Fernie looked closer at the hand-painted warnings, all of which persisted in looking ominous despite Gustav’s reassurances. It may have been that the letters were all bloodred, and that they all dripped like blood, but maybe that was just the sloppy painting of a little kid. “So the rooms behind these signs are
not
dangerous?”

“Not all of them. One or two go to terrible places, but the rest are all safe. We’re perfectly fine as long as we go through one of the safe ones.”

Fernie was beginning to sense a big
but
coming up. “And you’re about to tell me that you don’t remember which doors are safe and which ones are dangerous.”

Gustav looked a little embarrassed. “Right.”

“Why didn’t you just paint warnings on the dangerous ones?”

“That would have been a good idea,” he admitted, “but I was bored that day and couldn’t stop after only two.”

Fernie folded her arms across her chest and gave Gustav the hardest look she could muster, which so unnerved him that he had to look down at his shoes.

“Gustav?” she said.

“What?”

“Remember that time I told you your house was stupid?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it is stupid, and you just told me that you once did the only thing that could have possibly made it any stupider.”

“I know.” He sighed. “Every time I’m here, I could kick myself.”

Fernie turned in circles and tried to figure out, just by looking, which doors promised safety and which hid fates worse than death. “So how are we supposed to pick a door and not get ourselves killed?”

“We don’t,” Gustav explained. “At least, not until we
need
to.”

“Don’t we need to
now
?”

“No. We just
want
to. It’s kind of complicated, but the way it was explained to me, the Choice of Horrible Fates Room always lets you decide whether you want to be impatient and leave just because you
want
to, in which case you might pick a door that leads to something awful, or leave when you
need
to, in which case you’ll almost certainly pick one that leads to the place you should go.”

“So if we go before we have to,” Fernie summarized, “we’ll probably pick the door with the giant man-eating rat behind it, and if we wait until one of us really needs a bathroom, we’ll probably pick the door that leads to one.”

“See?” Gustav said encouragingly. “It’s not so difficult, after all.”

Sometimes talking to Gustav made Fernie wish for a handy cream pie to throw in his face. “Except that it wouldn’t have to be even
this
difficult if your house didn’t have so many rooms that led to horrible fates!”

Gustav was thunderstruck. “You mean your house doesn’t?”

It wasn’t Fernie’s first reminder that Gustav hadn’t ever experienced the world outside the Gloom estate, but it was one of the most maddening. “Of course it doesn’t! Gustav, my house only has about ten doors in it, if you include the closets, and they always lead to the same places no matter how long you wait before opening them, and none of them lead to horrible fates no matter what you do!”

“Really?” Gustav asked. “Not even your front door?”

She started to say
Of course not
, but then shut
her mouth. Of course, he was right. All over the world, everybody’s front door sometimes led to normal days and sometimes led to horrible fates, and there was never any way to tell whether it was going to lead to one or the other without walking through it and hoping for the best.

Maybe Gustav’s house really didn’t make any less sense than the rest of the world. Maybe it just made a different
kind
of sense: a mad, constantly changing sense that could actually be understood by somebody like Gustav who had spent enough time there.

So she calmed down a little. “So how long do we have to wait until we know we
need
to leave?”

“I don’t know,” Gustav said. “It could be a few minutes. It could be a few days. It could be forever. There was a skeleton on the floor the first time one of the shadows brought me here; I guess it belonged to somebody who missed his chance and never worked up the nerve to try any of the doors.”

Fernie shuddered. “I’m glad you cleaned it up.”

“So am I,” he said seriously. “It wasn’t the only skeleton I’ve found in this house, but the extra head on its shoulders was really creepy.”

Fernie debated whether to devote any energy to exploring that, and decided not to. The Gloom house could be like that sometimes: so filled with strange sights and dark miracles and unanswerable questions that she had to let some things go unremarked in order to get on with whatever needed getting on with.

After a few seconds of hugging herself, wondering how Pearlie and her father were doing, and hoping that they hadn’t mounted any efforts to rescue her, she glanced at Gustav again and saw him staring at her feet. “What?”

He had just noticed. “Your shadow’s missing.”

THE HOUSE INSIDE THE HOUSE

After all the fury and terror she’d been through, Fernie had almost forgotten. Now she felt a fresh wave of grief as she explained, “The ice-cream man ate her.”

“Oh,” he said, following that up with a heartfelt, “Yes. He does that. I’m sorry.”

“Does that mean she’s dead?”

“No. Shadows aren’t really alive or dead the way people are; they’re just things that exist, and don’t bother with messy business like living or dying. I guess it’s more accurate to say that she’s been
collected
.”

That didn’t sound much better than being
eaten
. “What does he do with them after he collects them?”

“You saw those black snaky things that came out of his mouth? That’s them, or at least the stuff they’re made of. As long as even a part of
them is inside him, they can’t remember who they are, so they do what he wants…which is mostly collect more for his master, Lord Obsidian. You do remember Lord Obsidian, right?”

Fernie would always remember Lord Obsidian, even if she still hadn’t experienced the displeasure of meeting him. He was a power-mad tyrant currently fighting a war to take over the Dark Country, who planned to conquer the world of people as well.