Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault Read online

  GUSTAV

  GLOOM

  AND THE NIGHTMARE VAULT

  by Adam-Troy Castro

  illustrated by Kristen Margiotta

  Grosset & Dunlap

  An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  GROSSET & DUNLAP

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Text copyright © 2013 Adam-Troy Castro. Illustrations copyright © 2013 Kristen Margiotta. All rights reserved. Published by Grosset & Dunlap, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014. GROSSET & DUNLAP is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Manufactured in China.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012012898

  ISBN: 978-1-101-61094-7

  This one’s for Gabriel, Julian, and Chance

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author and Illustrator

  CHAPTER ONE

  GUSTAV MEETS FRIED CHICKEN

  In the big front yard of a big black house, four people and a number of shadows sat down to what looked like the most ominous picnic in the world.

  It was a friendly occasion that only looked ominous because of the dark gray cloud that always hung over the sprawling Gloom mansion, blocking out sunlight and giving an eerie cast to the yard, which was always covered with a thick layer of rolling gray mist. The only tree on the grounds was a brown, barren thing that looked exactly like a clutching hand reaching up out of the earth. It somehow looked even less cheerful with the child’s swing that hung from one of the fingers.

  Given a choice, most people would have moved the picnic to the yard of the Fluorescent Salmon house on the other side of Sunnyside Terrace, where the lawn was green, there were no gray mists, and the sun shone like a jewel in the sky. But the strange young boy in the black suit didn’t have a choice; he could not venture beyond his own front gate, so his new friends, the What family, had brought their folding tables and chairs, their picnic coolers, their checkered tablecloth, and their flying discs over to his place.

  The result had been a perfectly acceptable picnic so far, even if the game of catch with the flying disc had ended unsatisfactorily when it suddenly disappeared in midtoss and didn’t appear again for twenty minutes, finishing its flight when there was no longer anybody in place to catch it. Even Gustav had been unable to explain where it had been in the intervening time, though everybody noticed that it was now, somehow, half-melted.

  “This,” ten-year-old Fernie What said, “is fried chicken.”

  She served him a drumstick on a paper plate.

  Gustav Gloom regarded her offering with deep suspicion. He had never eaten fried chicken. In fact, until two weeks ago, when Fernie and her family brought freshly baked chocolate chip cookies to his fenced-in front yard, he had never actually eaten food.

  Growing up in the big black house, Gustav had survived on the meals his shadow ate. It was shadow food and could not be eaten by human beings, but it had nourished Gustav for all his life without his ever eating a meal with his own mouth. This was an intolerable situation that the What family, including Fernie’s twelve-year-old sister, Pearlie, and their father, Mr. What, had promised to correct.

  Stalling, he asked, “Shouldn’t I also get those things to eat with—what are they called again?”

  “Utensils,” Fernie said. “You’ll get to use a fork in a little bit, for the coleslaw and macaroni salad. But most people don’t use one for fried chicken. You’re supposed to eat it with your hands.”

  Gustav appreciated any opportunity to show that he was paying attention. “Like that round thing you cut into slices a few days ago.”

  “Pizza,” Pearlie said.

  “Piece Of,” Gustav recalled.

  “No. Pizza.” She spelled it: “P-I-Z-Z-A.”

  “Spelled that way, it should be pronounced pizz-zzuh.”

  “Well, it’s not,” Pearlie said. “It’s pizza.”

  “Why can’t we just have that again?”

  “Because you can’t have pizza for every meal,” Fernie said, uncomfortably aware that it was the kind of thing a mom would have said. “This is fried chicken, one of my favorites. Just pick it up and eat the meat around the bone.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. What. “Be careful with that bone. You don’t want to choke on the bone.”

  This was a pretty typical thing for Mr. What to say. He was a professional safety expert and made his living teaching people how to avoid deadly accidents. Fried chicken was, in his view, so very dangerous that he’d written an entire book, The Deadliest Cluck, about the terrible catastrophes it could cause. According to the book, choking on a swallowed bone was not even the worst. Chapter 7 described one case where a woman had hiccuped at the wrong time and inhaled an entire chicken leg up her right nostril, then sneezed it out and shot her husband through the heart.

  Mr. What knew almost every terrible thing that could possibly happen to people in any situation, but was adjusting to the special challenges that went along with living across the street from a house populated by shadows.

  Gustav tore off a piece of dark meat with his teeth. He chewed, perked up, and swallowed. “You were right. This is really good. It may even be my new favorite food.”

  “See?” Fernie said. “I told you.”

  He examined the drumstick, which now had one bite removed. “And you say that this comes from a bird?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “That’s pretty strange,” Gustav said. “Doesn’t the bird object?”

  Fernie and Pearlie glanced at each other. “I guess it would,” Fernie said finally, “if anybody asked it.”

  “What about pizza?” Gustav wanted to know. “Is that a bird, too?”

  Fernie said, “It would be an awfully strange bird
. Spinning through the air like a flying saucer and dropping tomato sauce and green peppers on people as it passed by.”

  “So,” Gustav said, inevitably, “is it?”

  “That would be neat,” Pearlie mourned, “but no.”

  Gustav nodded and went back to attacking his chicken.

  For Fernie, watching him eat was almost like tasting fried chicken for the first time herself. Gustav enjoyed it so much and would never have known it if he hadn’t become such a good friend to the Whats in the three weeks since her family had moved in across the street.

  In that time Fernie had experienced the discovery that shadows were alive; the revelation that the house across the street was one of only a few in the world with gateways to the Dark Country where shadows came from; the unsettling report that the Dark Country was home to an evil shadow named Lord Obsidian, who dreamed of conquest; and an introduction to this young boy raised by shadows who, for some reason not yet explained, couldn’t ever leave his property without going up like a puff of smoke.

  These were not things she’d ever expected to encounter, but they’d changed the way she looked at the world forever. Even when away from home, like on the day her father had dragged her to a nearby city for an exciting all-day symposium on safety railings, she hadn’t been able to avoid noticing all the shadows drifting to and fro on their own important errands; some had even said hello, and only Fernie and her father had noticed.

  A couple of days ago, she’d asked Gustav why she hadn’t been able to notice them before. Gustav had explained to her that most people in the world of light made a habit of keeping themselves from noticing because it didn’t make sense to anybody unless they already knew. Once people noticed, though (which they could hardly help doing once they’d gotten too close to the Gloom house), there was really no way of stopping themselves from noticing. It would be, he told her, a little like trying to have a conversation with somebody who had a bit of ink at the tip of her nose. As long as you didn’t see that it was there, it wouldn’t bother you. But once you’ve seen it, it’s always there, and you just have to get used to it. (This had been as good an explanation as any, and not so incidentally was Gustav’s gentle way of telling Fernie that she did, in fact, have a bit of ink at the tip of her nose.)

  As Gustav started on his second piece, a pillar of gray-black darkness rose from the mist swirling around the table legs and said, “I must say, girls, it all looks terrific. I almost wish I could have some myself. But I’m afraid it would go straight to my hips.”

  This was Gustav’s great-aunt Mellifluous, the elegant and somewhat overweight shadow of a Chicago woman now deceased, who was as close to an adoptive parent as Gustav had ever known. She was kidding, of course, as any solid food going in her mouth would have fallen through her before it ever got to her hips.

  Gustav spoke through a mouth filled with chicken. “Why would it go to her hips?”

  “Too much fried chicken can make you fat,” Pearlie explained.

  Gustav stopped chewing. “I thought too much of any kind of food could make you fat.”

  “Yes, but fried chicken does it faster.”

  He regarded his second piece of chicken with significant alarm. “How much faster?”

  “It’s not gonna happen in the time it takes you to finish that piece.”

  “So it’s not like magic,” Gustav confirmed. “No sudden ‘Poof, you’re fat’?”

  “Nope. No sudden poof.”

  “Okay,” he said, and went back to eating.

  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 r
ight?”

  “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.”