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

by Becket

  Key regarded her puppy-wolf with love, for she did indeed love him very much, whether puppy or wolf.

  Miss Broomble bravely stroked his fur. “Where in the name of DIOS did you find him?”

  “Actually,” Key began to say, “it was you who —”

  “Wait,” interrupted Mr. Fuddlebee, raising his hand. “I’m sorry. I cannot allow this to proceed any further.”

  He turned to Miss Broomble.

  “This young one is from two hundred and fifty years in our future. And as you know, section forty-two, paragraph nine, sentence three-hundred-seventeen-and-five-eighths of the SPOOK handbook clearly states that we must avoid at all times, if at all possible, any knowledge of our future by means of paradoxes, for it will in itself create little paradox bubbles, which I will not abide. Popping them is madness.”

  The elderly ghost then returned his attention to Key. “My dear girl, I do not mean to be rude, but however little you might think you saw of the progress of time from within your dungeon, you still possess certain knowledge of futures that Miss Broomble and I have not yet lived. So please share with me no more information about who I will be, what I will become, or whether I will eventually pass the tap-dancing round in Pundicle.”

  Miss Broomble leaned behind his back. “I don’t mind,” she mouthed at Key. “You can tell me more about me later.”

  Mr. Fuddlebee and Miss Broomble then approached Past Key. She was still lying helpless on the floor, drifting between wakefulness and sleepiness. They spoke about how she had become a vampire; about taking her to the City of the Dead; about the hard life ahead of her. And Key remembered all of it. She looked at the birthday dress that Past Key had on; it was the same wonderful birthday gift from her mom and dad. And she wept. She had not seen it in a long time. The last time she had, it bore some resemblance to a hundred-year-old rag. She looked down now at the clothes and the gears strapped all over her; they were completely covered in soot and ash, and utterly shorted out; nothing worked, not even the Crinomatic that Miss Broomble had given her. Yet as she hugged Tudwal’s leg, she knew what she had to do next. She had come to the end of one time paradox. She had become Future Key; and there was one more thing that Future Key did for her.

  She remembered how Future Key had let go of Tudwal and drew near to her; so she did the same with Past Key. Then she remembered how Future Key had knelt and offered her kind words; so she did that now, too. She could not recall all the words that Future Key had spoken, yet she could hope that the words she offered now to Past Key would be comforting, and she could only trust that all things would somehow work out in the end. All she had to do was participate in the plan of DIOS in time. Finally, she recalled how Future Key had kissed her on the forehead; so she did the same with Past Key. Then she told her the words that she knew she would have liked to hear, and they were indeed the same words that Future Key had said to her centuries ago.

  “You’re going to be all right, Key the vampire.”

  Thus the paradox was complete.

  Mr. Fuddlebee and Miss Broomble talked for a few moments more, and he told her about all that she’d missed while being frozen in time, how Old Queen Crinkle from the future had turned seven hundred and seventy-seven years old, how she had tried to escape the Hand of DIOS by using the Eye to return to the past, how Margrave had overpowered her, and how Key’s mom and dad had saved her by knocking themselves along with Margrave Snick into the Abyss of Time.

  Then the elderly ghost cheerfully gave Miss Broomble a field promotion, from Assistant to Asylassin.

  Miss Broomble stood a little taller, a little prouder with her new rank. And with an equally impressive mien of determination, she asked, “Where’s the Future Queen now, Mr. Fuddlebee?”

  “I fear, Miss Broomble, that, just as she escaped our future selves, she has escaped us also. She was hurtled into the fields outside. Yet if you go and look for her now, you will find that she is no longer there. As the ranking Asylassin, it is now your responsibility to go after her.”

  Miss Broomble’s hard attitude started to falter a little as her mouth grinned at the corners. “Really?” she said trying to control her eagerness. “By myself?”

  “Yes, Miss Broomble, I believe you’ve earned it.”

  Unable to contain her excitement any longer, the witch crowed for joy, threw her hands up into the air, and sent up enchanted fireworks that exploded all around them.

  “Please, my dear Miss Broomble,” the elderly ghost said, brushing away from his mustache fireworks in the shape of tiny butterflies. “Although I too was proud when I received my Asylassin rank, our work tonight is not yet finished. Try to maintain a little more restraint. Celebrating will come later. No pumpkin rum with the Morrow Dwarves before then. All right?”

  Miss Broomble was bursting at the seams, but she did her best to contain her excitement.

  Mr. Fuddlebee then left with Past Key, taking her to her future, in the Necropolis, to live for the next two hundred and fifty years in the Dungeon of Despair. Key watched them get into his black carriage, which he’d summoned with another GadgetTronic Brothers device. Key remembered little of what had happened and she thought it was strange to behold her past play out from a new point of view.

  Miss Broomble and Tudwal remained in the living room while Key walked through her old house one final time before leaving it all behind. She gathered a few things, like the saddle stone her dad had given her along with the crook her mother had given her, too, on the night of her ninth birthday. “Birthday,” Key said to herself with a tone of nostalgia, “not birth-night.” She had dreamed countless times about what it would be like to return home, what she would do, how she would feel or think. But now that she was there, the house seemed “smaller,” she said to herself, even though she was the exact same size she had been before she was thrown into Despair.

  Key returned to the living room and was amused to discover Tudwal the wolf trying to fit his massive bulk through the front door while Miss Broomble was also trying to shove him through from behind. At length he popped out, but he destroyed half the house in the process. Looking back at Key with the rueful expression of a naughty puppy, he seemed to be saying simultaneously, “Sorry,” and “Let’s do that again!”

  Key and Miss Broomble followed him through the large hole in the house, and once outside Key recalled that she was still holding the dynabow. Returning it to the witch, Miss Broomble studied it with great interest. Then she commanded it, “Spyglass,” and the dynabow shaped back into the spyglass that fit perfectly on her forearm.

  “I just got this from the GadgetTronic Brothers,” she said. “The spyglass seemed like the least complicated gadget in there. The salesbeast snickered at me when I bought it, growling that I was in for a world of surprise when I figured it out. Honestly, I haven’t been able to get it to work, not until tonight. How did you know it would turn into a – what did you call it? – a dynabow?”

  Key smiled at the strangeness of this situation. “I heard you call it that first.”

  Miss Broomble laughed. “Mr. Fuddlebee is not going to be happy about that paradox.”

  The witch then took out something that looked like a pocket watch. Squiggly script and curving symbols were written on both sides; they looked like the markings etched into Key’s old Crinomatic. Miss Broomble opened it and Key saw that the watch face glowed with a soft light.

  There were no numbers circling the face. Instead there were words like Danger Ahoy and Dance Now and It’s a Trap! And the words did not circle around the face either, but were all over the place, sometimes right-side up, sometimes upside down, sometimes slanted, sometimes crooked, so that Miss Broomble had to turn the watch to tell the time, or whatever she was seeing when he looked at it.

  “What is that?” inquired Key, looking at it with great curiosity.

  Miss Broomble showed it to her. “It’s a Gnostike Timepiece.”

  Key had no idea what “Gnostike” meant, but she had the impression that it wa
s much more than a mere pocket watch, especially when Miss Broomble tapped her thumb against the face and out from the top came a miniature abacus with very tiny beads. Miss Broomble had to shift them around with her fingernail, shaping them into a pattern that Key could only guess was a special combination.

  The witch laughed with delight, seeing Key’s amazement; and the melodiousness of her laughter seemed bursting with magic, for Key found the familiar sound very healing.

  “The Gnostike Timepiece unlocks my home.”

  This explanation was not as helpful as Key would have liked. But she understood that, even though she had seen many wonderful things in the City of the Dead, freedom had in store for her many new wonders. Fortunately the next wonder happened at the very next instant, when a shadow floated serenely past the half-moon.

  “Home,” said Miss Broomble as she looked up at the floating shadow.

  Oddly, it was in the shape of a house beneath a hot air balloon.

  Key recalled that the witch had mentioned having a floating mansion, but she had not quite believed her until now. And she almost didn’t believe her even now, not until she saw the Floating Mansion drift into view.

  Candles were flickering softly in several cockeyed windows. The sides had several turrets and the roofs were either gabled or shaped like a witch’s hat. The porch appeared to wrap all the way around and was adorned with many inviting rocking chairs. The front door was shamrock green, yet circular with a brass knob in the middle, and made of many metal plates. And although the Floating Mansion looked sturdy, it also seemed more crooked than a mansion should be. Key thought it looked like the perfect house for a ghost to haunt and she wondered if Mr. Fuddlebee had done some haunting of his own within those wonky-looking walls.

  If the mansion was huge, then the hot air balloon was colossal! Attached to the mansion’s rooftop by several cables, it was covered all over in large black and white stripes. Also, all over the balloon were many marvelous devices, much like those strapped around Key and Miss Broomble, made of brass and copper, only much larger. There were, for instance, mechanisms like a copper clock, an iron cannon, and a turret; a periscope, a holoscope, and an astroscope; a vent for steam, a stack for smoke, and an exhaust port for steam-chocolate; and there was also a crow’s nest from a pirate ship, only made of brass and outfitted with ink rifles.

  As Key and Tudwal eagerly watched Miss Broomble’s Floating Mansion drift down to the ground, the witch talked with Key about what her new responsibilities would entail, working for SPOOK. Since Mr. Fuddlebee had already mentioned how they did much more than change immortals back into mortals, Miss Broomble shed more light on this, explaining how they’d once negotiated a peace treaty between the Bedgoblins of Biloxi and the Boggarts of Birmingham; how they’d also once played a perilous Pundicle match with the Maniacal Mummy of Massachusetts; and how they’d once raided the Castle of Countless Candelabra during a temporary alliance with the Victorian Vampire Squad.

  “Last week,” added miss Broomble, “we had a minor skirmish with the Goblin Queen in her Patch of Jack-O’-Lantern People.”

  The Floating Mansion drifted gingerly down and came to rest before Key’s old house, which looked incredibly dwarfish in comparison, so small in fact that Key imagined her old house fitting inside the mansion’s mouse holes, if there were any.

  “I’m not sure if the Goblin Queen is the one we should be worrying about right now,” Key said, pointing towards the field where Old Queen Crinkle had been blasted into. The Old Queen was indeed no longer there, just as Mr. Fuddlebee had said. “Crinkle has escaped again.”

  “Well then,” Miss Broomble said with determination in her voice, “from the future or not, she has come of age, according to the Law of Mortality. She must be turned back into a mortal. And we must find her before she does any damage to your history.” Miss Broomble then gave Key a playful wink. “Ready for a chase?”

  Key nodded, beginning to grin again, too.

  Tudwal growled in agreement.

  Miss Broomble smiled broadly now. “Then let’s be on our way.”

  The three of them walked towards the front door of the Floating Mansion.

  Key the Steampunk Vampire Girl took her beat-up, shorted-out Crinomatic from her pocket. She studied it for a moment, wondering briefly if it would work again. Then she hoped that another was inside; she was completely covered in the ashes of an old life.

  End of Book Two

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not have been possible without several key people…

  Todd Barselow – thank you for being a phenomenal editor.

  Raven Quinn – thank you for capturing the heart of Key’s world. Your illustrations are perfect!

  Mom, dad, and family – thank you for your love and support.

  Stina – thank you for listening to me talk about characters and plot and for listening to me read the various forms of this story.

  Anne Rice, my employer, my teacher, my friend – thank you for being an inspiration since my youth; thank you for sharing your experience, strength, and hope; thank you for everything.

  Credits

  Cover design by Becket

  www.becket.m

  Illustrations by Raven Quinn

  www.facebook.com/officialravenquin

  File 22564648 © Natuska | Dreamstime.com

  About Becket

  Becket is the personal assistant to international best-selling author ANNE RICE. He has a BA in music composition, an MA in systematic theology, and an MS in Industrial/Organizational Psychology. He has been working for Ms. Rice since 2005, and he has spent that time learning from her the craft of writing.

  You can find out more about him at

  www.becket.me

  About Raven Quinn

  Raven Quinn is a Los Angeles based singer/songwriter, recording artist and illustrator. Although Raven is primarily recognized for her work in music, she has also revealed herself to be a passionate visual artist with a unique and whimsical style that is all her own. Her artistic tools of choice are usually simple: a BIC pen, watercolor pencils, and her expansive imagination. Drawing has always been a creative outlet for Raven, but it was only in 2012 that she began making her original artwork available to the public through online auctions. Due to increasing demand, she eventually began taking commission requests as her schedule allowed in 2013. Raven's artistic contribution to KEY THE STEAMPUNK VAMPIRE GIRL marks her debut as an illustrator for a children's book, and is the realization of a life-long dream to help visually bring to life fantastical worlds and characters for young readers. When she is not writing or in the studio recording new music, Raven can inevitably be found working on her latest illustration.

  You can find Raven Quinn here

  www.facebook.com/officialravenquin