Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault (18 page)

Fernie didn’t mind. She only cared about Gustav.

Unhurt, in the center of what looked like a tornado of swirling light and darkness, she rose to her feet and watched October deflate like a punctured tire. The more shadows escaped him, the more saggy and wrinkly and flat he became, until he was revealed as the only thing he’d ever been: an empty sack of skin, filled with the shadows he had stolen.

The top of Gustav’s head emerged from that gaping, boneless mouth. More of Gustav’s body appeared as what was left of the shadow eater sank lower and lower around him, until all that was left was Gustav standing in a now-rumpled black suit and the deflated shadow eater bunched around his ankles, like a pair of pajama bottoms Gustav hadn’t gotten around to kicking aside yet.

Fernie cried out. “Gustav! I can’t believe you beat him!”

“That’s because I haven’t,” Gustav said.

“B-but—”

“He might not look like much now, but as soon as the last of the sunshine inside him spills out, he’ll be able to start swallowing shadows again. If we don’t do something to stop him from doing that, he’ll fill up again in no time. It’d only take him a few days to get back to being every bit as dangerous as he was.”

Fernie gave the sack of empty skin a worried glance. Did October’s eyes roll a little toward her, like marbles in that fleshy, empty face? Did that face look a little less flat, a little bit more like the monster he had been only a few seconds ago?

She gulped and stepped away. “What’ll we do?”

“Don’t be silly,” Gustav said. “What do you think I tossed you the bedsheet for?”

He picked up the empty, loose sack that the shadow eater had become and carried him, dangling streamerlike arms, yellowish uniform and all, to the sheet Fernie had laid out on the lawn. He dumped the empty monster in the
middle of the sheet and started curling up the edges.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Fernie said. “How can it possibly be that simple?”

“He’s a shadow eater,” Gustav said. “He’s only as powerful as the number of shadows he can capture. Keep him wrapped up somewhere he can’t have any shadows to eat and he’s just an empty sack of nothing that can’t even stand up by itself.”

But then, just before he covered up the shadow eater’s face, Gustav hesitated, and asked him, “You might as well tell me: Where’s the real October?”

The empty lips flapped. “In…the Dark Country…”

“Is he with Lord Obsidian?”

“Yes…”

Gustav hesitated. “Is
he
Lord Obsidian?”

“Yes…”

“And my father? Where’s my father?”

“He’s there, too…a prisoner…beyond your reach…forever.”

Gustav’s habitual frown became a fierce scowl. “We’ll see about that.”

He resumed wrapping. Within minutes, he
had a nice tight bundle, all tied in a knot.

“There,” he said, and glanced down at Fernie’s feet. “One secured shadow eater. Now that he’s harmless, you’ve even got your shadow back.”

Fernie looked down and saw that Gustav was right. Where her feet touched the ground, Fernie’s shadow sat protectively circling her legs. She didn’t look much like Fernie right now, but then, she wouldn’t; not with the indoor sun hovering right overhead, making her most comfortable as a little patch of darkness at Fernie’s feet. Even so, Fernie was delighted to see her. “Thanks for helping me back at the house.”

“It was nothing,” her shadow said. “Thanks for helping Gustav free me from that smelly pig.”

They went back inside the house inside the house, which was, in the aftermath of the battle, no longer the nice family home that Lemuel Gloom had built and that Hans and Penelope Gloom had known. The shadow eater’s tendrils had shattered furniture and poked hundreds of holes in the walls. Entire steps had been ripped out of the staircase leading to the second floor.
Fernie didn’t think the structure would remain standing for long, but Gustav said that it would be all right for now and that he would see to it that repairs were made. He led her upstairs and carried the bundle imprisoning the shadow eater into the master bedroom, which was covered with dust from holes tendrils had poked in the ceiling, but had otherwise escaped the very worst of the damage.

As Gustav began to climb the ladder to the ridiculously tall bed, Fernie tried to show him that she had everything all figured out. “It’s the bed, right? The Nightmare Vault, I mean.”

“Not quite,” Gustav said as he reached the top of the ladder and shoved the mattress to one side. “It’s actually
under
the bed. Grandpa must have built the bed around it, because he wanted to guard it himself and wanted to make sure nobody else could get to it while he slept.”

“How long have you known?”

“Since Hieronymus told me.”

“I heard everything Hieronymus told you, and I don’t remember his telling you that.”

“You weren’t paying enough attention. He said, ‘I didn’t see your grandfather hide it. I only know what he told me.’ And then he said that
my grandfather had ‘seemed to say’ he needed to think the matter over.”

Fernie remembered all that. “So?”

“So,” Gustav said, “my grandfather didn’t
actually
say that he had to think it over. He just
seemed to say
that he had to think it over. I just had to think of something he could have said that could have meant, ‘I’m going to think it over,’ while really meaning something quite different.”

Fernie honestly didn’t get it. “What did he really say?”

“In a minute. Come up and take a look at this.”

Fernie climbed up the ladder and saw the sliding panel the mattress had hidden. Gustav opened it, revealing a large empty space, and below it, a massive antique chest lying on its back, its handles bound together with heavy chains. It was impossible not to think about the terrible Nightmare Vault, the dangerous creatures imprisoned inside it, and how close October had come to freeing them.

Gustav dropped the tightly wrapped bundle containing the shadow eater through the open panel. It flopped on top of the chest and sat there,
where it might stay forever, its own monster as imprisoned by a bedsheet as the monsters inside the Nightmare Vault were imprisoned.

“I even kept my promise to him,” Gustav said as he shut the panel and once again shifted the mattress over it. “I did bring him to the Nightmare Vault.”

Fernie still burned with the need to know. “What did your grandfather really
say
?”

The answer was one of Gustav’s very rare smiles. It was not a happy smile, like the one he’d flashed on his first taste of a chocolate chip cookie, but it was a satisfied one, in its own way one of the scariest expressions Fernie had ever seen.

“He said he was going to sleep on it.”

GUSTAV’S MOTHER

As they made their way out, so relieved that the danger was over that they talked about anything but what they’d been through, they saw signs of the shadows returning to the Gloom house.

The bubbling gray mist that usually covered every room to ankle height and that had been missing most places that Gustav and Fernie had been began to roll out again; the dark shapes began to reappear, wandering on their various errands again; the dim, forlorn wreck the house had seemed to be with the shadows gone gave way to the dark, magical place Fernie had remembered, with floating figures and silent presences drifting by everywhere.

None seemed eager to thank Gustav for saving them. When Fernie expressed irritation at this, he shrugged. “Why would they? Most
of these aren’t the shadows I know, the ones like Great-Aunt Mellifluous who raised me; they aren’t even the ones I’ve lived with all my life. These are the ones who were imprisoned inside the shadow eater, the ones he stole from all over the world before coming here in search of the Vault. Mine will be back later, as soon as they learn it’s safe to come out of hiding. It’s probably going to be a lot more crowded here for a while, until the others get around to going back to wherever they were when the shadow eater captured them.”

“It’s still not fair,” Fernie protested. “They owe you.”

“Shadows aren’t always fair,” Gustav said. And then, before she had a chance to say anything, he added, “Few things in life are.”

It would take her a while to realize how sadly he’d said that.

When they reached the front door, Fernie hesitated a moment before it would have opened for her. She realized that Gustav was no longer at her side. She turned around and saw that he’d walked away and was now just a tiny figure at the end of the hallway, returning to the strange places where he’d spent so much of his
life. Though the familiar form of Mr. Notes’s shadow now stood next to him, no boy had ever looked sadder or more alone.

She almost went after him, but it had been a long and nightmarish night, and she knew that her father and sister would be worried. She told herself that there’d always be time later to get back to Gustav and whatever was bothering him. She even told herself that maybe he was just tired, and that she’d see him again soon, anyway. So she offered him a wave, which he returned, before she left the Gloom house alone. She crossed the overcast front lawn alone and opened the gate to take her first steps into a bright sunny day.

Of course, she wasn’t alone for long, because as soon as she stepped outside the gate, her father and sister, who had been holding a sleepless vigil waiting for her, burst from their Fluorescent Salmon home and almost knocked her down, wrapping her in a tight, teary embrace.

Pearlie What hadn’t taken a deep breath since beginning her own account of what she’d experienced the night before.

“…so when I ran into the meeting, Dad was telling everybody, ‘A neighborhood is not a place where every house looks the same as every other house! A neighborhood is a place where everybody takes care of one another and lets people be!’ I walked in just in time to see people
cheer
him. Mrs. Everwiner looked like she’d just swallowed a big old plate of mud. They all voted her down
easily
!”

This was half an hour after Fernie’s reunion with her family. They were all sitting around the dining room table, enjoying pancakes. Fernie had already provided her father and sister a breathless accounting of her night’s adventures, and Pearlie was now doing the same for everything that had happened since the two sisters had seen each other last.

“So then I told Dad about October and about how you said we had to drive far away from here, and he was all, ‘What? Well, we’ll just see about that,’ and he ran right back to the Gloom house, climbed the fence, and slammed his fists on the door, demanding to be let in, but of course the door wouldn’t open, so he ran around the house looking for a way in, and…”

The way Pearlie told the story, Dad was a
hero; and Fernie had to agree that he was, even if he’d never really had a chance to actually do anything heroic.

But it was impossible to look at his glum expression, while Pearlie sang his praises.

It wasn’t until breakfast was over and Pearlie ran to her bedroom to deal with some urgent business there that Fernie asked her father the big question, the one with the answer she was afraid she already knew. She said, “We’re moving away, aren’t we?”

Mr. What couldn’t look at her. “Yes.”

“But, Dad, none of it was his fault. He’s my friend.”

“I know he is,” Mr. What said. “And I think he’s a great kid. I like him as much as you do, and feel sorrier for him than I can ever say.”

“If this is about my breaking your rules—”

“That’s not the problem, honey. I know I told you never to go inside his house again, and that you disobeyed me by going, but there will always be times when I’m not around and you have to make judgments for yourself, even if that means doing things your nervous old nelly of a father considers too dangerous. You were clearly right about where you had to go in order to find help.
But you were only in danger because you lived here.”

Fernie said, “The whole world was in danger from him, Dad. I wouldn’t have been any safer from the monsters inside the Nightmare Vault if I’d been in Timbuktu or Antarctica or—what’s that place—Liechtenstein.”

“No, but you’d have been a little farther away from the danger, at least for a while. I’m sorry, Fernie. But we’ve only lived here a couple of weeks and you’ve already had to run for your life twice. So I’m afraid I’m going to have to start making arrangements to find another place to live, someplace
safer
, before something even more terrible happens. If I can help it, we’ll be out of here before the school year starts.”