Read Online Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault by Adam-Troy Castro - Free Book Online Page B

now that it’s a shadow house, but it was pretty big even when it was only an ordinary house. It wasn’t nearly as big on the inside as it is now, but even
before
Grandpa Lemuel made his deal with the shadows, even
before
the inside filled up with shadow-stuff and became so much larger than any ordinary house could ever be, the Gloom house was a great big sprawling mansion and the kind of place that would have been much too big for one husband and one wife, since it was originally built whenthe family was much larger and had enough room to house cousins, second cousins, third and fourth cousins, entire branches of the family nobody ever bothered to speak to, and I-don’t-know aunts.”
    “What’s an I-don’t-know aunt?”
    “Everybody has an I-don’t-know aunt,” Gustav said. “They’re related to you in some way, but if you’re ever asked to explain how, you have to say ‘I don’t know.’”
    Fernie had to admit to herself that, yes, she did have several I-don’t-know aunts, most of whom she saw just often enough to make it embarrassing to keep forgetting exactly who they were. “All right. So it was a big house. And…”
    Gustav said, “It was too much house for Grandpa Lemuel, when most of the family had moved out and he was a young man married to my grandmother and raising my dad. It didn’t feel cozy enough to him. So he built this house inside the house for his family, and they spent most of their time here. When he gave the rest of the big house to the shadows, he still kept this room with the smaller house for himself, so he could take a break from the shadows and everything they were whenever he wanted.”
    Fernie supposed that made sense, in the same way that anything crazy makes sense when you’re living with the craziness. She said, “Okay. So when your dad and your mom—”
    “The woman who
would have been
my mom,” Gustav said, reminding her that he wouldn’t give ground on this particular point.
    “When your dad and Penny came back here to have you, they weren’t interested in getting the rest of the house back, or interfering with whatever October was doing; they just wanted to stay in this small part of it for a while.”
    Gustav nodded. “They were friendly about it. They invited him to come over from whatever part of the house he was spending time in, to eat dinner with them every night. They practically made him a member of the family.
    “But they’d been away for a couple of years by that point, and didn’t know that he’d come to consider the Gloom house his own and resented their being back. From what I was told, he was also deathly afraid that they’d get around to asking him what he’d been doing all this time…and he was secretly working on a project so evil that if they ever did find out, they’d throw him out of the big house forever and never let him back in.
    “Before long, it wasn’t just a matter of pretending to be their friend. It was a matter of pretending that he didn’t hate and fear them enough to want them dead.
    “But even then, they might have survived knowing him. Even then, it might have been all right if they’d just moved out when the house being built across town was finished.”
    He sighed, and looked more miserable than Fernie had ever seen him. She realized that, despite the habitual serious expression that made so many people consider him the saddest little boy in the world, his usual intense interest in everything amounted to a kind of enthusiasm. It was an awful thing to miss when he was telling a story that gave him less reason for enthusiasm with every sentence.
    He said, “Then one day Penny surprised my father with a decision. She said that she’d been thinking about it and that it wasn’t so important to live in a normal house after all. She said that normal was overrated, and that people who open their hearts to different experiences get to enjoy life more than people who just want to be the same as everybody else. She said