by Becket
“Floating Mansions,” the witch said with a smirk.
Key remembered the time Miss Broomble had visited her in the dungeon, the same night she gave her Tudwal. The witch had told her that she had returned from a long trip in her floating mansion. Once again Key marveled at her friend. Miss Broomble always seemed full of wonderful surprises.
Now she gave Key a knowing smile as she took from her belt a thin bracelet bejeweled with a black circular device. It looked just like the one she wore on her wrist.
“This is your own Scuttlecom,” Miss Broomble said, offering the bracelet to Key. “Take it. When you want to speak with me, talk into it. I’ll hear you through mine. You’ll hear me through yours.”
The realization of why Miss Broomble had shown her how to fly the MotorHog, and why she had given her a Scuttlecom, now fell on Key like a hail of stones.
“You’re leaving!” she exclaimed, a chill of fear trembling her voice.
From a compartment in the side of the MotorHog, Miss Broomble took out an old beat up Crinomatic. “Here,” she said, handing it to Key. “I haven’t used this in years, not since its program glitched and it dressed me as a prima ballerina.”
Key noticed the large dent in one side of the Crinomatic and could picture how Miss Broomble had, for being dressed in ballerina attire, probably hurtled it in a rage across her Floating Mansion.
“The Crinomatic might have one more charge left in it,” the witch explained. “Confronting the Old Queen who locked you in a dungeon for over two hundred years might go better if you were in something speckled with fewer jack-o’-lanterns.”
Then she stood up on the seat of the MotorHog and unhooked the dynabow from her belt. “Somatic Wrench,” she said to it and its metal parts began folding over one another until they formed back into her old brass spyglass. It stayed in this shape very briefly before it folded into an even smaller instrument, no larger than a fork. At one end were two prongs; between them crackled two arcs of electricity, one gold, the other violet.
Miss Broomble flashed a mischievous grin at Key. “I’ve always wanted to try this,” she remarked. Then she set the Somatic Wrench between her teeth like a pirate biting down on a dagger. Muttering the incantation, “Si ascendero in caelum DIOS,” she was magically launched from the MotorHog and she went soaring through the air, straight towards Silas’s great mechanical leg.
Key suddenly remembered an important question she should have asked earlier. “Wait!” she called out to Miss Broomble, forgetting to use the Scuttlecom. “How do I land the MotorHog?”
The Scuttlecom crackled to life on her wrist. Bringing it to her ear for a better listen, she could hear Miss Broomble speak over the static: “You trusted your instinct with the electronet. Trust your instinct with this also.”
“Isn’t there a button I could press or a lever I could pull?” she replied, but she never heard Miss Broomble’s response, for the witch had suddenly collided into the giant’s mechanical leg.
SMACK!
Silas never noticed, but kept moving forward, carrying Old Queen Crinkle towards the Grave of the Grim Goblin.
Miss Broomble gasped in pained breaths. “Okay, I don’t need to try that again.”
Key put the Crinomatic in a pocket of her nightgown. She would have to change later, when she wasn’t flying the MotorHog. Key could see Miss Broomble clambering up the long strides of the Cyclops’s cybernetic leg. At this pace, Silas would probably be at the Grim Goblin’s Grave in a few moments. Key did not know how Old Queen Crinkle would get the Eye of DIOS, but she would do everything she could to stop her.
Yet what could Key do to help? What should she do?
Despite the firm resolution of her heart, she felt helpless watching Miss Broomble take the Somatic Wrench from between her teeth and point it between the gears of the cybernetic leg. Bolts of violet and golden electricity shot from it. Key watched in amazement as Silas’s knee came completely undone. Screws and springs and gears went shooting out every which way. They were so large that they crashed down on to the various burial places of the Mostly Dead. Great gears pelted the Mausoleum of Misfits. Massive springs crashed into the Burial Chamber of the Black Beast of Great Britain. A few colossal screws shot like arrows into the Crypt of the Witch Coven of Covington.
The result was pure pandemonium – well, at least it was a little more pandemonium than a usual night in the Necropolis. Witches from the Witch Coven came from their Crypt and started throwing curses like snowballs at anything they could see. The Black Beast came charging from his Burial Chamber like a bull towards a suddenly panic-stricken ghoul in a red cape. And many Misfit Monsters burst from their coffins and ran wildly through the streets in search of something they called, “The Lobster of Destruction.”
Silas the Cybernetic Cyclops took another great step and his great weight crushed his dismantled knee. The giant crumpled down to the ground, like a broken toy. The Old Queen fell from his hand with a hateful howl. Tudwal fell off, too, but Pega’s invisible hand caught him yet again and swept him to a safe distance, ignoring his energetic barks to bite the giant while he was down.
The Cyclops’s yellow eye-beam began to flicker with failure again. And it seemed as though the Queen’s plan was about to fail. But in less than a minute, Silas’s cybernetic parts repaired themselves and he became mostly operational once more. His eye-beam fixed on Miss Broomble still clinging to his leg, only now the light darkened from yellow to a bloodier shade of red, as if he were really enraged.
Grimacing, the giant cyborg raised his mechanical claw and slammed it down where Miss Broomble had been, but she leaped out of its way as it smashed his own systems to bits. He bellowed in pain and fury, and he swat at Miss Broomble again and again, as if she were a pestering bee. She was too fast for him, though, and he kept missing her, slapping himself and smashing his systems even worse.
Several Mostly Dead bystanders rose from their coffins to watch the spectacle. They set out lawn chairs and sipped fizzy lemonades through crazy straws. Many shot amateur footage on videophones while a goblin vendor sold cauldron corn and cold dogs at half price.
Miss Broomble leaped to the ground and dashed through Necropolis streets. She might have been fast, but giants have a long reach, and Silas’s reach was much longer than most; for, as he reached out his mechanical arm, his claw shot out like a grappling hook, with metallic wire spooling out the slack. It soared through the air and then came down hard upon Miss Broomble, pinning her down to the ground. The metallic wire reeled in like a fisherman with a catch. Key feared that Silas was about to do something awful to Miss Broomble, but she didn’t know what to do to help her friend. Fortunately, Pega released Tudwal and the immortal puppy eagerly scrambled up the giant’s foot, up his leg, up his middle, over his chest, up his chin, until he stood right at the tip of the giant’s nose, which he promptly bit off like a bite of cheese.
The Cybernetic Cyclops bellowed in agony. He flung Miss Broomble into the far distant darkness of the Necropolis and with that same mechanical claw, tried to pin down the immortal puppy-wolf. But Tudwal was faster than Miss Broomble. He leaped from Silas’s nose just as the giant smashed his claw into his own face, crushing his fleshy nose and smashing his cybernetic eye lens, which shattered the glass entirely.
“Great!” the Cyclops spat sardonically. “Now all I see are the cracks. Do you know how much it costs to replace a broken screen?”
Silas might have been furious, but his fury could not compare with Old Queen Crinkle’s. She had plopped down into the marshy grave of the Swamp Thing of Thousand Oaks. With her scowl and her patchwork dress all covered in filth and mud, she huffed off his grave as fast as she could go, using her long scepter as a cane. She hobbled quickly down one of the Necropolis’s backstreets, but several Gnomarazzi from the Welkin City News noticed her.
“Look! It’s the Queen of the Necropolis,” they shouted, flocking all around her and snapping photographs with their Cadaver Cameras. But she beat them away
with her scepter and then threw a curse at them.
“Smelly brutes, squeaky boots, turn this gaggle into newts.”
In a sudden poof! all the Gnomarazzi with their Cadaver Cameras shrank into slimy little things like salamanders. They all blinked at one another, licking their shiny black eyes in some confusion, wondering how they would enjoy the taste of bugs. With that, cackling low, the Old Queen hobbled down Nightfall Alley.
Key was about to turn the MotorHog and go after Miss Broomble when she heard the witch’s voice fizzling to life on the Scuttlecom. “Don’t worry about me. I’m all right – I think. I’ll catch up with you soon. It’s up to you now. You must stop the Queen.”
With that, the Scuttlecom fizzled off.
Nervous but resolved, Key turned the MotorHog towards the direction of Old Queen Crinkle, who seemed to be moving at a suspiciously quick speed past the endless rows of tombstones and crypts. Revving the engine, she gunned the MotorHog straight towards her.
However, it only took a moment for Key to come to the general conclusion that, in the Necropolis, there was no such thing as a straight line. Its streets were not like those in most cities. Mortal streets are usually well ordered, with some going south and some going north, others east or west, or thereabouts. But the streets of the City of the Dead went every which way. It was as if they had grown naturally, the way Key’s glowing vines used to grow in the dungeon. Each street was as unique as a hair on her head, and just as coily. One street was winding, one was twisting, one was up, one was down, one was horizontal, one was vertical, one was looping, one was in a tree, one was underwater. Before long, Key realized that she would not able to maneuver the MotorHog through the Necropolis’s perilously twisting streets, so she decided she would have to park. Unfortunately parking involved colliding headfirst into the Headstone of the Bewitched Hobbeetle.
The crash flung Key from the MotorHog and she went barreling along the cobblestone street. After smashing through a Coffin Corner sale by the Caretaker Clan, Key came to a rolling stop before the shop of a scary suit maker. Her vampire power healed all her scrapes and bruises almost instantly, but she stood feeling dizzy and queasy, and she staggered back to the MotorHog.
She had never met a Hobbeetle, but she assumed that it must be much larger than a normal beetle because its headstone was much larger than her – or at least it had been before the MotorHog crashed into it. Half the headstone had remained standing while the other half had fallen down on top of the MotorHog, flattening it completely.
Key studied in disbelief the MotorHog’s twisted handlebars and crumpled carriage. “Miss Broomble’s not going to be happy about this,” she said to the lifeless machine. “Maybe the GadgetTronic Brothers can fix it.”
Right at that moment, when Key thought that things could not get any worse, things, in fact, did; for suddenly bursting up from the ground beneath the Headstone of the Bewitched Hobbeetle was the Bewitched Hobbeetle itself, beginning first with its claws, which were so massive that they looked ten times larger than the grave they were buried in. They planted firmly into the ground and pulled up the rest of its incredibly large black body. Though it had been in a very small grave beneath the ground, the Hobbeetle completely overshadowed Key, the way a blimp might blot out the sun. Its black shell gleamed as though freshly polished with oil, its black eyes glared at her without blinking, while the mandibles at its mouth snapped hungrily.
— CHAPTER TWELVE —
The Bewitched Hobbeetle
Key slowly backed away from the Bewitched Hobbeetle, but with every backwards step, the Hobbeetle continued to follow her, as if studying her with as much caution and curiosity as she was studying him. Then the Hobbeetle began making snapping motions with the mandibles around its mouth; it looked like it might gobble her up at any moment. Not really liking this idea at all, she decided to flee.
Key ran up Trick-or-Treat Road, where several shops were just opening up for nighttime services. The Woeful Wandmaker’s Market, shaped like a long magic wand, was selling bone wands at half off; the Blood Brewer Company, shaped like a beer barrel, was having a blood drive; and the Warlock Candy Shop, shaped like a candy corn, was selling a new treat – sugar-coated gummy ghosts. Key dashed past them all, and more, while the Hobbeetle chased after her. She hurried past Monster Monastery, Saint Gingerbread’s Church, and Cobweb Academy. She hurried past several Mostly Dead bystanders, dressed in their burial clothes, dusty and sleepy, having just risen from their graves to do a little midnight shopping. Upon seeing the monstrous Hobbeetle chasing after Key, their dead eyes enlivened with sudden fright and they leaped into one another’s cold arms for fear of being trampled by its great claws.
Key meanwhile had only just turned up Autumn Alley, which was lined with trees covered in leaves of brown and red and gold, when she accidentally tripped and fell over a dead root protruding from the ground. In the blink of an eye, the Bewitched Hobbeetle was looming over her. Trapped beneath its hulk, Key closed her eyes, preparing to be devoured whole in its mandibles – but then she heard a sound that she had heard countless times before in the Dungeon of Despair, a sound she thought she’d never hear again, a sound that at once could lighten her heart while also shatter stone, for it was the sound of her immortal puppy-wolf barking wildly.
“Tudwal!” exclaimed Key gladly as she turned to see him turn off Macabre Boulevard and scuttle as fast as he could towards her.
Yet her gladness froze as instantly as it had warmed her when she also happened to notice that chasing after Tudwal with a very bad limp was the very same Mystical Creature that she had been chasing all night – Silas the Cybernetic Cyclops. The giant’s mechanical knee was still broken from the damage Miss Broomble had inflicted with her Somatic Wrench, yet that neither seemed to stop him nor slow him down. He was chasing Tudwal with a vengeful fury, raising his club above his head and knocking down various other shops that had only just opened for business. Heedlessly he knocked over the Banking Burial Chambers, Reaper Realty, and Fire & Brimstone Book Publishers. Impassively he toppled over the Perilous Postal Service, the Dark Deli, and Snake Oil Office Supplies. Remorselessly he crushed Louise Lyte’s Lantern Shop, Peter Prunk’s Potions & Plumbing, as well as Colleen Cringeworthy’s Costumes, Coffee, & Almost Comfortable Coffins. Fortunately, all those Mostly Dead businesses had policies with Imp Insurance Agency, which protected them from rampaging giants, among other usual occurrences that could likely happen in the City of the Dead. Their businesses would be back up and running in no time.
Presently, Tudwal scuttled up to Key, plowed into her, and began a vigorous licking of her face. It would have been a very happy reunion indeed, but they were now trapped between the Bewitched Hobbeetle and Silas the Cybernetic Cyclops. Key could only hug her immortal puppy close and hope for the best; she felt she was all out of ideas and could see nowhere she might flee. But then, as she held him, she felt ghostly arms wrap around her, too, holding her tightly while the grandmotherly voice of Pega, not caring who might hear her now, whispered in her ear, “Hang on to old Pega, Mistress. I’ll take care of you.”
Pega started to lift both Key and Tudwal from the ground, but it was too late. The Hobbeetle looming over them raised its front claws apparently ready to crush them flat, while Silas raised his club to smash them to bits.
Pega started to comfort her instead by saying, “Don’t worry, Mistress. Life’s not too bad being dead —”
However, right before this gruesome fate could ever occur, Silas the Cybernetic Cyclops met eyes with the Bewitched Hobbeetle. For what seemed like a very long, very tense moment, they stared at one another in complete disbelief, Silas blinking, the Hobbeetle rubbing its antennae over its compound eyes. Another moment passed before Silas staggered forward one small step. A large tear rolled down from behind his shattered monocle. In a soft, broken voice, he put a rather innocent question to the Hobbeetle.
“Penelope? Is that you?”
The Bewitched Hobbeetle began dancing back and f
orth delightedly.
“Old Queen Crinkle told me you’d been squashed under a really big boot,” Silas said and then quickly added, “although whose boot could squash you, I’d never been able to puzzle out.”
Quickly the Bewitched Hobbeetle began making signs with her mandibles, signs that Key could not understand, but signs that Silas could clearly read because he responded to the Hobbeetle (whose name Key now understood to be Penelope) as though they were having a completely casual conversation.
“You mean the Old Queen didn’t crush you at all,” Silas said in an incredulous tone. “She lied to me! Well, I guess that’s no surprise.”
The Hobbeetle made more signs with her mandibles.
“She locked you up,” Silas continued to read, “locked you in a…in a bell?”
Penelope’s mandibles made more signs.
“Oh, sorry, she locked you in a well,” Silas corrected himself. “My beetle-speak isn’t what it used to be. Go slower with me, my love. I’ll try to keep up.”
Penelope the Hobbeetle made more signs with her mandibles.
Silas narrowed his eye, really concentrating to read: “The Queen gave you only meat to eat?”
Penelope made more signs.
“Sorry – Treats to eat? – Beets to eat? – Feet to eat? – Sorry, what’s that word you’re making, my love? – Ah, I see – Apple Fritters. Well, that doesn’t sound too bad.”
Penelope the Hobbeetle then hurriedly crawled past Key, up Silas’s leg, around his body, and began nuzzling affectionately into his large neck.
The Cybernetic Cyclops cooed with delight. “Aw,” he growled happily. “I missed you too, my love.”
While he and the Hobbeetle continued their conversation, she with her mandibles, he trying to blow the dust off his beetle-speak, Key quietly hugged Tudwal to her chest and started to sneak away from the very happy reunion of this very dreadful pair. But although Key had the commonsense to let sleeping dogs lie, as the old saw goes, Tudwal was not asleep, and whenever he was not, he was always in the mood for a good free-for-all; so he began barking at the top of his puppy voice to continue his scrap with the giant and his big black beetle.
