Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault

This one’s for Gabriel, Julian, and Chance

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

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.