Key the Steampunk Vampire Girl and the Tower Tomb of Time (9781941240076) (3 page)

“How can that be?” asked Key as she dodged a pendulum that had come swinging down out of the ceiling.

“Sometimes all the words on a page are too much for one reader to take in during one reading. At those times, readers see what they want to read, instead of every topic, every double meaning, every simple statement or question on the page. Then one must read a book more than once to see the same words, as though for the very first time. Mr. Fuddlebee once put it to me, ‘Often, my dear Miss Broomble, we read what we need to see while seldom do we see what we need to read.’ Perhaps you wanted to read that incantation at the time. Perhaps I didn’t when I read it. And perhaps we both needed to see it at work now.”

“Books can be peculiar,” remarked Key in a thoughtful tone.

“Readers can be particular. The words some people read are not always the same words read by others.”

“Words change on the page?”

“Words are like food. They are ingested and digested. And then they change each of us in different ways, sometimes wonderfully, sometimes woefully. But about that incantation, perhaps it was magical. Perhaps it only appears when a reader most needs to see it.”

Miss Broomble and Key both had to hopscotch over a group of mechanical mini-goblins who were trying to bite their ankles.

“Did I recite the incantation poorly?” asked Key.

Miss Broomble smiled kindly at her as a mini-goblin latched its teeth onto her boot. “You incanted it as perfectly as I could have,” she said, kicking off the vile little monster. “Have you been practicing?”

“I used to practice it,” admitted Key, “but it never worked until now. I just thought it was because vampires couldn’t use magic. I don’t understand why the incantation worked now.”

“DIOS,” was all Miss Broomble said.

Key found this remark rather mysterious. She remembered what Miss Broomble had already told her about DIOS. It spells out D-I-O-S, and it stands for Dimensionally Intelligent Operating System. Yet she could not help but wonder aloud, “What does DIOS have to do with magic?”

“All Mystical Creatures can use magic. Some more than others. And DIOS works with us all, no matter what we are.”

“Are witches better with magic than most?”

“It depends on how much they trust DIOS. I’ve known some witches whose magic is about as potent as a Sepulcher Slug.”

“Does DIOS affect all magic?”

“DIOS
effects
everything, I believe.”

Key did not understand.

“Sometimes using magic is not about knowing how it works,” Miss Broomble told her. “It’s all about trusting a feeling that magic
does
work. Instinct, you could say. Look at what you just did. You incanted words. You did not know if the words would do anything, yet you trusted a feeling you had that something magical would happen.”

“That spell surprised me,” admitted Key, looking back in the direction where her incantation had flung Raithe far down the long hall, which was now filled with a horde of Grouchy Garden Gnomes, chasing after them, calling out, “Oi! Get back here and I’ll plant my foot up your —” Key didn’t want to hear the rest.

“Magic often surprises me too,” Miss Broomble continued saying.

Key looked quizzically at the witch. “How can you use something that seems so…”

“Mercurial?” said Miss Broomble with a smirk.

Key had no idea what
mercurial
meant, but it sounded like a nice, grand word to say, and she practiced saying it to herself.

Seeing this, Miss Broomble explained that the Insanely Bouncy Sprites of San Francisco were said to be mercurial. “Magic can indeed seem like that, always bouncing back and forth without any clear plan. But the opposite is closer to the truth, as long as you trust that DIOS always knows best what you need most. If some magic does not seem to work, then perhaps it’s not the one speaking the incantation. Perhaps DIOS knows that the magic of another method would work better, and is allowing that to happen instead.”

“I don’t understand,” Key said with some exasperation, partly because she didn’t know the answer to her next question, but mostly because a Sort of Dead Octopus reached its rotten tentacle up from a hole in the floor to trip her. “What is a Dimensionally Intelligent Operating System?” she asked.

“No one really knows,” Miss Broomble admitted, helping Key back to her feet. “We can computize all we like, but the more we discover about DIOS, the more we see that her mystery is more endless than the cosmos.”

“Then why should we trust it?”

“Her,” Miss Broomble corrected. “We call DIOS a her.”

“But DIOS isn’t a her, or a him.”

“No more than I am a Mausoleum Mouse. But we’ve always called DIOS a
her
, so we continue to do so. And in
her
we trust.”

“Why should I trust her?”

“You have to decide that for yourself.”

Right then another explosion shook the castle again. Silas was still attacking.

“Come on,” said Miss Broomble. “We must hurry.”

As they dashed out of that corridor and up a flight of shifting stairs, Key’s mind was filled with countless questions. She wanted to know more about DIOS, and about how Miss Broomble planned to stop Silas, and about what Mr. Fuddlebee would do once he caught the Old Queen. But the one question that came foremost in her mind, she put to Miss Broomble right when the stair beneath her feet exploded like a firecracker.

“Why would the Queen use Silas to help her escape? She’s the Queen. She could have used anything and everything in the Necropolis. Why Silas?”

Ahead Miss Broomble was hopping over a stair that had suddenly vanished. “The Queen must have some power over him that we haven’t seen yet. Silas was a dead enough Cyclops to be entombed in the Necropolis, yet the cybernetic parts of him are still quite operational – thanks to the GadgetTronic Brothers. Every few centuries or so, the cybernetic part of him revivifies his living tissue. He reawakens from his sleep of almost death, rises from his tomb, and then once again tries to escape. Vampire patrols always catch him, though, and always stuff him back in his tomb. He’s never happy about it. He always vows his revenge on all vampires. Same old, same old. But if the Queen is using some leverage to make him help her, then he’s no doubt doubly angry, and we’re in for a rough night.”

Another shudder shook the castle. Somewhere in the distance, Silas the Cybernetic Cyclops was bellowing his outrage.

“I know how he feels,” Key said under her breath, thinking about the long centuries she’d spent locked down in the Dungeon of Despair.

“I suspect the Queen is taking advantage of Silas,” said Miss Broomble.

“You mean he’s innocent?” asked Key.

“I’m not a judge of guilt or innocence. But I can say that Old Queen Crinkle does not have friends or helpers. From her point of view, she has servants and tools. I do not believe Silas is a servant. No indeed, he’s a tool, and she’s using him for her own advantage.”

Miss Broomble led Key out of the stairwell, around a corner, and then into the Hollow Wood Hall, where there was a long table surrounded by tall chairs. Everything in the room was soaked in gold blood, dripping off the edges and pooling on the floor.

Another explosion rocked the castle. Dust drizzled down from the rafters. Another bellow came from the Cyclops. The ground began rumbling as though there were an earthquake.

A wrought iron chandelier broke free from its chain and fell from the ceiling rafters straight towards Key’s head. But right before it came crashing down, the chandelier was tossed in another direction.

“Don’t worry, Mistress,” came the grandmotherly voice of Pega the ghost maid. “I’ve got it. You’re safe.”

Key could have hugged her right then, even though the ghost maid was still invisible, and even though she would have passed right through her. Pega, however, did not sound like she was in the hugging mood, muttering to herself, “Oh dear, oh dear, I hope no one finds out I spoke. I’ll have to clean the Blood Goblets for a century, I know it, if I survived the Toag Cage, that is.”

Miss Broomble took Key by the hand and led her out of the hall. “Hurry!” she said. “Old Queen Crinkle’s getting away. And we still have to get past the Wicked Watchmen.”

— CHAPTER FOUR —

The Wicked Watchmen

Miss Broomble hurried Key, Pega, and Tudwal from the lower parts of the castle up towards its main floor. As they went, she explained that many laws govern the Society of Mystical Creatures. “In fact, you could say that, in the City of the Dead, there are almost as many laws as there are Mystical Creatures, living, dead, and Mostly Dead,” she remarked, providing several examples, too. There was the Law of Ravenous Books, the Law of Enchanted Fountain Pens, and the Law of Pig Juggling. There was the Law of Poetry Fighting, the Law of Harrumphing, and the Law of Using Higgledy-Piggledy In A Sentence At Least Once A Night. Most importantly there was the Law of Bedcovers, which ensured that all children (whether human or demon) would be safe from monsters hiding beneath the bed, as long as those children kept all their hands, legs, and tentacles safely under their bedcovers.

The law that most immortals feared was the Law of Mortality. In one of its numerous paragraphs, in betwixt its many knotty (and sometimes naughty) sentences, there was one statement that actually stated the law with uncanny clarity: Any and all immortals turning seven hundred and seventy-seven years old must be changed back into a mortal.

Key had only just turned two hundred and fifty years old that very night. So she would not be subject to the Law of Mortality for over five hundred years.

“Tonight Old Queen Crinkle turns seven hundred and seventy-seven years old,” Miss Broomble reminded Key, when they finally reached the main floor of the castle, entering into a grand hall with wood floors and lined with Portal Paintings, Ice Statues, and Snooty Suits of Armor. “Once we catch the Queen, Mr. Fuddlebee will turn her back into a mortal with the Hand of DIOS.”

Key was trying to pay attention to the witch, but she had never before walked freely in the castle’s main floor. All the wonderful smells and sounds and sights amazed her. She could smell the ghost cooks in the kitchen baking a blood cake for the Queen’s birth-night party; she could smell ghost servants sprucing up the wood floors and furniture with bottles of Willoughby Wart’s Wonderfully Magic Wax & Delicious Scuttlebutt. Key could hear the ghost servants singing, and Pega humming with them, The Song of the Castle Servants; Key could also hear enchanted chairs and sofas stretching their wooden legs and moving to more comfortable rooms of the castle; and she could hear flying books flapping their leaves as they migrated south, since the Labyrinth Library was too cold in winter. She could see some floors rippling like waves while other floors were invisible, which Tudwal cautiously paused to sniff, just to make sure that they were in fact invisible and not altogether absent. All sorts of objects floated through the castle, too, such as goblets and hand mirrors, pots and cauldrons and typewriters and pincushions, and much more; Key knew that ghost servants like Pega had to be carrying them. Yet the servants, the chairs, the flying books, none of them seemed to mind that Silas was still attacking the castle, giving it a good shake every now and again. For the furniture, it was life as usual. For the servants, it was work as usual, too, which they had to finish before the night’s end, or else they’d have to suffer the consequences, one of which might be a journey into the Perpetually Burning Forest, to collect ash honey from the Hive of the Firebees.

The castle’s main floor was also filled with many wonderful and inviting chambers. Key wished Miss Broomble would pause for a moment: She would have loved to pop inside the Soothsayer Reception Room, or the Crawling Kitchen, or even the Sinister Scullery. But to Key’s great disappointment, they could not pause even for a second; Miss Broomble was in too much of a hurry as she led them quickly through the castle. They were on a mission: They had to prevent Old Queen Crinkle’s escape.

As they went, Key felt a little sorry for the Old Queen. Yes, she had locked Key in the Dungeon of Despair for the last two centuries. But in Key’s heart of hearts, she didn’t like seeing anyone in torment, even if they had been cruel to her. In fact, Key would have gladly taken the Queen’s place. She’d never wanted to be a vampire in the first place. She’d never wanted to be a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old Mystical Creature in the body of a nine-year-old girl. She would have rather turned ten, then eleven, then seventeen, then ninety-seven, but never seven hundred and seventy-seven. She would have rather stayed a mortal and lived the rest of her numbered days on her mom and dad’s farm. And she was most definitely looking forward to the day when Mr. Fuddlebee would work the magic of the Hand of DIOS on her.

While they hurriedly dashed past the Menacing Minstrel’s Galley and the Great Hall of Guy Goosepimples and the Interior Courtyard of Ursula the Uneasy Mummy, Key began to think that, in all honesty, she would not mind if Old Queen Crinkle escaped. As long as she didn’t bother Key again, she was welcomed to go. But Key would nevertheless help Miss Broomble, who’d always been so kind to her throughout her long years in Despair. And she could not deny that Mr. Fuddlebee had been kind to her, too, notwithstanding the fact that she didn’t entirely understand why he had taken her to live in the City of the Dead with the Necropolis Vampires who had been so cruel to her for so long. She was more than happy to help her friends, even though she did not fully appreciate all the laws of the Society of Mystical Creatures. She wondered if she ever would.

Miss Broomble rushed Key, Pega, and Tudwal past many more marvelous castle rooms and chambers and broom cupboards, such as the Terrifying Treasure Vaults, the Basilisk’s Ball Room, the Gremlin Game Room, the Appalling Armory, and the Bloodcurdling Broom Cupboard of Brunhilda the Bellowing Banshee. Key would have loved to explore all their interesting nooks and crannies, despite the fact that they would have probably eaten her – for most nooks and crannies in the Necropolis are very hungry. But because the castle was so large and the rooms seemed so innumerable, Key calculated that it would have probably taken her at least a decade or two (or twelve) to explore each one safely.