Key the Steampunk Vampire Girl and the Tower Tomb of Time (9781941240076) Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    Finally, Miss Broomble took her, Pega, and Tudwal up another flight of stairs, then through an open doorway that led out to the top of the castle wall, where there was a long walkway with rails along the side. The castle looked even larger from the outside – “It’s massumongous,” as one vampire once put it. Key could only see a small part of the wall as it stretched on beyond the darkened horizon. She was not at all astonished (in fact she laughed) to see how the vampire castle was not at all perfectly round or square, but instead perfectly lopsided and crooked. The complete wonkiness of the castle made its wall quite wonky, too, sometimes sloping up, sometimes down, almost always bumpy and snaky.
    Two hundred and fifty years ago, on the night Mr. Fuddlebee first brought Key to the Necropolis Castle, she did not have a chance to see much of the City of the Dead. Through the window of his black carriage she had glimpsed many marvelous-looking graves and mausoleums. But now that she was standing atop the castle wall, she was seeing it all as though for the very first time. The sight was very impressive indeed. Cropping up before her were countless graves that looked like one bedroom houses; graveyards that looked like gated communities; mausoleums that looked like apartment complexes; tombs that looked like manor houses, and more and more, stretching out all around her like a great cemetery sea. But before she could take it all in, Miss Broomble took her by the hand again, and hurried her onwards.
    Every hundred paces or so, there was a turret in the castle wall. No two turrets were the same. Some looked new, some old; some seemed straight, others zigzagged; some were inside out, others outside in; some were as wobbly as an hourglass while others were more cockeyed than the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
    Inside each turret was a room, and each room was completely unlike any other. In some were benches, in others were chairs, in a few were windows for looking in all directions, and in several were winding stairwells that went up or down or upside down. But then in one turret was a mouse library with teeny-tiny tea tables while in another was a giant’s gambling hall with enormous snooker tables. In one turret the Distinguished Lobster League met for coffee while in another the Owl & Oyster Club practiced dancing. One turret was a cinema while another was a mid-castle eatery, packed with that delicious snack, Snuckle Truffles the Bloody Bonbon – compliments of the Partly Dead Brownie Folk of Boston, of course. And in a very popular turret Mystical Creatures of all kinds (some cheering, some jeering, some playing, some slaying) were standing on large black and white checkered tiles, vigilantly waiting for someone to make a