Free Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault by Adam-Troy Castro

that as long as their child got to go outside and enjoy thesunshine and spend time with other children and grow up to be whatever he wanted to be in life, she would be proud to raise him in the house inside the house; and that she was sure he’d be all right, because my father had grown up there, too, and he was the best man she’d ever known.
    “I’ve been told that he kissed her and told her that if this was what she wanted, then it was what she would have.”
    He took a final deep breath and spoke the next words all in a rush.
    “Unfortunately, they had this conversation in the kitchen, on one of those nights when their good friend October was over for dinner. They thought he was on the living room couch. They didn’t know that he’d gotten up and headed toward the kitchen to refill his glass of wine…or that he’d stopped right outside the door and heard everything they’d just said to each other. Neither one knew that he was their enemy, and that this was the very worst thing they could have said in his hearing.
    “One week later, the woman who
would have been
my mother was dead.”
    He looked down at the floor and stared at it for a long time.
    Fernie had no idea what to say, and like most people who have no idea what to say, said the right thing. “They must have loved each other very much.”
    Gustav looked up, his eyes red, even though he hadn’t shed any tears. “Yes,” he said. “That’s what I’ve been told.”
    He almost said more, but then came to a decision and stood. “I don’t think we have much time left,” he said. “He’ll find us soon. But there’s still something else you have to see.”
    He headed for the hallway.
    Fernie saw him turn at the stairway, glance at her, and start heading up.
    She hesitated. She didn’t know why, but she had the impression that whatever he wanted to show her up there was the worst part yet. She found herself afraid, for him and for herself, of whatever it might be. She also found herself wanting to turn her back and run, find her way out of the house, and never find out what it was.
    One thing made that impossible. Gustav was her friend.
    She got up and followed him to the second floor of the house inside the house.

CHAPTER NINE
    THE PROPER USE OF THE WORD
SMELLY
    There were no horrible monsters at the top of the stairs, but there was something much worse, something so obvious that Fernie sensed it almost as soon as she reached the second floor.
    It took her a second to recognize it as sadness.
    The air on the second floor of the house inside the house tasted entirely different from the air downstairs. It felt, or tasted, or at the very least
smelled
, like a place where somebody who had once hoped for a happy future had lost everything and had been reduced to sitting by himself, thinking about what might have been.
    A short hallway alongside the stairs led to three rooms, one in the front of the house and one in the back, with an open bathroom door midway between them. She couldn’t see where Gustav had gone, so she checked the room in the front first. It turned out to be a baby’sroom, with a sweet little crib, a changing table, and walls painted the same gentle shade of blue as the fake sky outside. The same mobile with rocket ships and biplanes that she had seen through the window when approaching the house from the front yard hung over the crib, spinning slowly.
    Nothing in it looked real to her. It looked a little like a cartoon, all outlines and bright colors, and she had trouble figuring out why until she realized that there wasn’t a single shadow in it, not even where shadows should have been cast by the fake sunlight coming through the window.
    Fernie had never realized before how much shadows help solid objects look real. She found that interesting until she remembered that she didn’t have a shadow anymore, and then found it very frightening. Was the same true of her now? With her shadow gone, would people always look at her and