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

think she wasn’t quite real?
    Something else bothered her as she glanced out the window. Despite that bright sunlight, the yard looked darker somehow. A pale mist, not shadow-stuff but the fog that forms on a cold morning, rolled across the fake grass. A thinlayer of frost had formed on the fake flowers.
    Gustav was right. It could not be long before October found this place.
    Somewhere in the back of the house, Gustav said, “I’m over here.”
    Fernie left the baby’s room, passed the bathroom, and went to the room in the back, which turned out to be the master bedroom.
    Gustav stood just inside the door, his arms at his sides. “This was their room.”
    Fernie entered. Most of the furnishings were exactly what she would have expected to find in such a place, including the king-sized bed, a beautiful antique chest of drawers, end tables, lamps, a painted portrait of Hans and Penny Gloom at their wedding, and even a smaller bookcase lined with dog-eared paperbacks. There was no closet, but there was a freestanding wardrobe for hanging clothes, its doors open and all its contents removed. The door to the master bath led to exactly what it was supposed to. Everything looked bright and clean, just as if the family living here had moved out only yesterday. The view outside the windows was the same rolling countryside and the same blue sky she had seen through all the other windows.
    But it was a strange place in other ways. From what she could tell, the mattress looked normal enough, but it was almost ten feet off the floor and rested on a wooden platform so massive that a ladder was built into its side to help whomever may have wanted to sleep there. Maybe it was a special kind of bunk bed, designed to reflect the fact that nobody ever wants to sleep on the bottom mattress—but there wasn’t even space for a bottom mattress, just the platform itself. The end tables were on stilts to bring them to bedside level; one was covered with the remains of white candles, melted to nubs. Fernie saw the edge of a big book poking over the side.
    She gave Gustav the kind of look she always gave him just before telling him that his house was stupid. “Why did their bed have to be so high up?”
    He gave her the same kind of look. “They lived in a little house inside a bigger house, and that’s what you find strange?”
    She wilted. “It’s just…it seems like the kind of strangeness that doesn’t have a point.”
    “Lots of strangeness doesn’t have a point,” Gustav pointed out. “That’s why it’s called strangeness.”
    Fernie had to admit to herself that this made asmuch sense as anything else she’d encountered in the Gloom house.
    He said, “Stay here,” climbed the ladder up to the bed, grabbed the book, and brought it back down to her. “This was their photo album. Most of it is pictures from their life together, but my father lived long enough to add a clipping from the morning after she died.”
    He put the book in her hands and turned to a page that he must have known well, because he found it without looking. The item he wanted to show her wasn’t pasted to the page like all the happy photos preceding it, just folded up and tucked in the book, like something that had been forgotten there. It was a yellowing newspaper story, with a picture of Penny Gloom’s smiling face under the headline: L OCAL W OMAN , 27, D IES IN W RECK ON D EAD M AN’S C URVE .
    Fernie’s heart broke a little. “Oh, Gustav—”
    “You already know that she died,” he said with impatience. “Read the story.”
    Fernie skimmed it. Penny had been driving the family car late at night, after a quick trip to the grocery store, when it suddenly sped up and went off a curve into a ravine. The police believed that she’d accidentally pressed theaccelerator when she’d really wanted to press the brake. It was the kind of thing that could have happened to any innocent driver who wasn’t paying enough attention to what she was