Key the Steampunk Vampire Girl and the Tower Tomb of Time (9781941240076) (15 page)

Before she could consider this any further, however, Old Queen Crinkle spoke next, after a long silence ensued. “Look,” she huffed in a tired tone, “I don’t know what you think you can accomplish with this Dungeon Troll, but it’s a pretty poor attempt to stop me. The Eye will unite the Sparks of Timefire, open the Doorackle Alleyway, and I will then take —”

“Oh my dear Matilda,” interrupted Mr. Fuddlebee. “If opening the tomb were as easy as all that, don’t you think we might have hidden the Eye somewhere other than with Gary?”

Penelope the Hobbeetle made gestures with her mandibles.

“Ah, very well put, my dear,” Mr. Fuddlebee responded, able to read beetle-speak too. “Gary is indeed something of a chatterbox, isn’t he.”

Old Queen Crinkle could only stare in bamboozled silence.

“At this present moment,” the elderly ghost continued, “there is only one
key
that unlocks Thomas à Tempus’s Doorackle Alleyway. And she is our very same Key, the only one who can and does unite the Sparks of Timefire.”

Key looked up at him. “Me?” she inquired softly. “I’m the key?”

“You’ve always been,” Miss Broomble said with a smile. “The Sparks are as close as they can be, but they cannot touch without you. You are the force that binds them together. The Eye does not open the Doorackle Alleyway. You do.”

Key shook her head. “How is that possible?”

Mr. Fuddlebee offered as an explanation a sympathetic shrug. “DIOS is such a complex machine. Who can guess all Her ways?”

“I don’t understand the will of a Dimensionally Intelligent Operating System,” Key argued.

“Mistress,” Pega chimed in timidly, as Key felt the ghost maid’s hand rest on her shoulder, “I don’t think anyone really does. We try to understand the Plan of DIOS, and sometimes we see a little bit of the right road ahead, but…” She faltered.

 
“We see as much of the road ahead as a rabbit sees from its rabbit hole,” Mr. Fuddlebee added. “Time travel all you want, you’ll still only see the road just outside the hole of your particular warren. DIOS sees all rabbit holes and all warrens instantly and forever.”

Old Queen Crinkle rolled her eyes. “I’m completely fed up with this talk of rabbits,” she snapped. “If no one’s going to stop me, I’m just going to go.”

The Hobbeetle made a gesture with her mandibles at the Queen that made Mr. Fuddlebee blush a darker shade of green.

“Why me?” asked Key, ignoring the Queen. “Why must it be me?”

“That’s a part of the paradox, my dear,” Mr. Fuddlebee said. “In my hindsight, you’ve ended it already. By your forethought, you haven’t even begun it yet. This moment in time is when the snake bites its own tail.”

Key looked once more at the baldric slung over Miss Broomble’s shoulder – the mechanical snake with its tail in its mouth. Before the snake bit, it had been merely a straight line. Now that it had bit, it was a circle. “For you,” Miss Broomble said, running her fingers over the snake’s metal skin, “this moment must come full circle.”

As bravery and a sense of purpose began to fill Key, she asked, “What must I do to make the snake bite?”

“All you have to do,” Mr. Fuddlebee said, “is place your hand on the Eye of DIOS. Nothing more. Time will do the rest – well, actually, come to think of it – DIOS will do the rest. And we must let it happen in time.”

Key turned and faced Old Queen Crinkle. She felt she was now facing a future that seemed even more puzzling than ever before. Could she do it? Could she go back in time to the night she was made a vampire? Would she see her mom and dad again?

The Old Queen looked horrified as Key slowly approached. “Keep away,” she demanded. “Keep away!”

The Sparks of Timefire – the past, the present, the future, and all possible and impossible futures – were very close now, a hair’s breadth from touching just above Key’s head, yet they seemed unable to do so. It seemed as if they needed some help.

“Wait,” the Old Queen said, “I’m not so sure this is a good idea anymore.”

“Neither am I,” admitted Key.

Pega lifted up Tudwal and set him in Key’s arms. Not caring if the Old Queen heard her or not, the ghost maid kindly said, “Mistress, you shouldn’t go without a friend.”

Key smiled at the invisible air. In the light of the Timefire she could just make out an outline of the ghost maid’s face smiling at her with a mother’s love. “Thank you, Pega.”

“I will miss you, Mistress.”

“I hope we meet one another again.”

“Me too,” Pega said as she burst into tears and flew off muttering, “Oh dear! Oh dear! This is breaking my ghostly heart!”

Key now looked at Penelope the Hobbeetle, whose large antennae were wiping tears away from her compound eyes.

“I hope to see you again one night, too.”

Penelope made more signs with her mandibles. And although Key could not read beetle-speak, she understood what the Hobbeetle was saying.

“I’ll miss you, too,” she said with a smile.

Key then turned to Mr. Fuddlebee and Miss Broomble. “Will I ever see you again?” she asked them.

“Yes,” Miss Broomble said at the exact same moment that Mr. Fuddlebee said, “No.”

The ghost and the witch looked at one another in some confusion before she said, “No,” and he said, “Yes,” at the same time, too.

Finally, they played blood, spell, spook (the Mystical Creature version of paper, rock, scissors). Mr. Fuddlebee’s spook bested Miss Broomble’s spell. So he turned to her and explained: “Yes, we will meet again, and you will know us, but we won’t know you.”

Key did not understand what he meant by this.

“You’ll see,” Miss Broomble said, “in time.”

Now, turning back to the Old Queen, mustering all her determination, harnessing all the pain and anger she had suffered in her loneliness, Key reached out and grabbed hold of the Queen’s scepter, right on top of the Eye of DIOS. Tudwal began to leap from her arms while the Old Queen was about to bawl her outrage – but just then, right at that very moment, the Sparks of Timefire touched.

There was a bright burst of white light! It was an explosion of space and time that lasted one millionth of a second. Yet it lasted infinitely longer. Time seemed to stop while the movement of the whole world had never seemed more hectic. The Tomb of Thomas à Tempus opened and it became before them a grand Doorackle Alleyway.

All of a sudden a force greater than the rush of ocean tides, though as gentle as swaddling cotton, whisked Key, Tudwal, and the Old Queen inside. The feeling was like freefalling and complete weightlessness. It was dizzying and centering, like finding one’s feet in the eye of a storm. All around her was the plume of the universe. The whirling of great big planets was the exact same twirling of itty-bitty particles. Key forgot that she and Tudwal were still locked together in a struggle with Old Queen Crinkle; yet at the same time, there was no struggle at all. The sensation surrounding her was one of energy and peacefulness, like wading in a womb of warmth. Knowledge of the whole universe filled her mind, and she could immediately explain the mysteries of black holes and quarks and spam. She knew everything that had happened in the past, everything that was happening in the present, and everything that would ever happen in every possible future. She knew your name, and my name, and the secret name for our self that we will one day learn. She knew what you wore last year on a rainy Tuesday afternoon, what you will snack on tomorrow, and even what you’re thinking right now. Indeed, in that microscopic instant of infinite knowledge, Key never felt more alone in her whole life, yet it was not the same sort of aloneness she had experienced in Despair; she did not feel lonely anymore. On the contrary, she felt completely connected to every living creature throughout all of space and time. She was with me as I wrote her story a while ago. She was with you as you read her story now. She was at one with everyone and everything that has ever been, that is becoming, and that will ever be.

— CHAPTER NINETEEN —

Homecoming

“Key,” a voice spoke from somewhere within this stellar soup, a voice that she had not heard in over two hundred years. Before she could recall who it was, another familiar voice called out, “Key! Key!” These two voices encircled her like echoes in a cave. Tudwal could hear them, too; his ears perked up as he turned his head this way and that, looking for them. They seemed to come from above, from behind, from around, yet also through them both. Key searched all throughout the vastness of space and time, yet finding them was like searching for a particular grain of sand on the shore of the sea. She could not see the face belonging to those voices, although in her mind she could envision them plainly. She had known them quite well during the first nine years of her life, not as an immortal, but as a mortal.

“Key,” the two voices called out again.

Right when she was about to give up looking for them, she noticed that one of the stars surrounding her shone a little brighter than all the others. It, too, was like a grain of sand, yet just within her reach. Letting go of the Old Queen, of her scepter, and the Eye of DIOS (though she held on tight to Tudwal), Key let go of sorrow and fear, and of everything she had ever known. And it was only when she let go that she could move forward. She reached out and plucked this grain of light. Then she recalled the names of the voices – names that she had not called out since she entered the bottommost depths of Despair. They had been names that she had depended on, names that had given her comfort and peace since her earliest memory, names that now made her chin tremble, as though she were a nine year old again, under the safety of a roof that had not sheltered her in centuries.

“Mom?” she said with tears pooling in her eyes. “Dad?”

It seemed as if those two names were utterly filled with magic; for at the mere mention of them both, Key and Tudwal suddenly came tumbling out of the Doorackle Alleyway. Together they landed on the wood floor of a small house.

She had not merely fallen from the Doorackle Alleyway, but she also fell far from her cosmic understanding. In that instant, all the secrets of the stars also tumbled from her mind and she forgot everything she’d just learned. All she knew now was what she had known the second before she touched the Eye of DIOS. But where on earth was she now?

She did not have to wait long for an answer, for just as the question went from her, the scent of her surroundings entered. She could smell sheep and wheat and the scent of the sun that had shone on meadows and fields. Through a nearby window, she could see that it was nighttime outside, with a half-moon rising. Continuing to look around her home, she spotted in one corner a familiar scythe for reaping wheat fields, and in another corner a familiar loom where blankets were woven from sheep wool. She also saw a new shepherdess crook carved out of willow wood, resting against a small table, and on the table was a new saddle stone that had been carved out of gray-green marble. Also on the table was a small birthday cake (no bigger than a cupcake) that had been cut into three slices, though one slice was missing. The cake had had nine birthday candles on it for a girl who had been celebrating her ninth birthday.

The more Key took in of her surroundings, the more she realized that she had been in them before, once, a long time ago –
two hundred and fifty years ago
, she knew – the same night she lost her mom and dad, the same night Margrave Snick turned her into a vampire, the same night Mr. Fuddlebee ushered her to the City of the Dead and the Dungeon of Despair.

Key had returned to her old house. But was it still
home
?

It was exactly the way she remembered it. “Almost,” she said to herself, as she saw just how strange her house now was. The walls, floors, ceiling, furniture were all the same. But everything was frozen in a moment of time, like a picture on a life-sized canvas, only this picture Key could move through.

Slowly, she began to recognize the scene. In one corner of the room was a zombie henchman trying to devour her dad. In another corner was another zombie henchman trying to catch her mom. In another corner a tall vampire was chasing a nine-year-old girl. “That’s me,” Key said to herself, tempted to rush to her old self – Past Key – and help the poor little thing, yet it wasn’t Past Key’s voice she’d heard, but her mom and dad’s.

“Why is everyone frozen in time?” she wondered aloud.

As if in response, Tudwal barked at her, wagging his tail. She was still hugging him close. She smiled at him now, and he seemed to be smiling up at her with his black shimmering eyes and his pink puppy tongue panting. Key wished that he had not gotten lost in time like her, but she was also glad that he was there with her, as a good friend should be.

Behind her, the Doorackle Alleyway appeared to be made of pure energy, like lightning in the shape of a doorway, but frozen in time, too. Looking through it was like looking into outer space, into the thickness of the Milky Way. Through it also, Old Queen Crinkle was tumbling head over heels. She was looking for Key, but couldn’t find her.

Just then, two more vines of light slithered out from the Eye of DIOS, which was no longer the color of blood red, but silvery like starlight. The Old Queen watched them snake away from the top of her scepter and slither through the Doorackle Alleyway. They snaked and slithered into Key’s home, through the air, around her, until they latched onto her mom and dad, wrapping them up the way young vines might wrap up an old tree.

The light brightened and burned into them and disappeared. Her parents blinked with life and inhaled, as if they had been frozen in Coppertine for hundreds of years and were just now waking up. They looked around their house, their eyes searching questioningly for an answer to what was happening. They almost didn’t seem real, more like dolls that had come to life, so young, so fragile. Key had never pictured her dad the farmer and mom the shepherdess as being so defenseless. But that was how they seemed to her, now that she was such an ancient Mystical Creature.

Yet despite her great age, large tears streamed down from her eyes. For longer than she could remember, she had imagined this moment, seeing her mom and dad again. However, now that the moment was here, it seemed as real as a dream that she might awaken from at any moment.