by Becket
“Gary, open the lid,” the Old Queen snapped irritably, rapping her scepter on his coffin.
Another long pause ensued. The coffin never opened, but it shook violently, as if the Grim Goblin was floundering nervously about inside.
“Gary, stop spinning in your grave!” the Old Queen snapped, rapping her scepter on the coffin with such force you might have easily mistook her for a lumberjack. “Open this lid right this instant!”
The coffin stopped shaking. A short silence ensued. Then the Grim Goblin replied rather sheepishly, “I can’t.”
Old Queen Crinkle blinked in confusion. “And why, pray tell, not?”
“You see – the thing is,” the Grim Goblin stammered nervously, then lowered his voice to an embarrassed whisper: “The thing is – I have coffin breath.”
“Coffin breath,” she sighed flatly.
“You understand.”
Old Queen Crinkle rubbed her brow in frustration.
“Gary?”
“Hello? Yes?” came the Grim Goblin’s voice, trying to act natural, as though surprised to have visitors.
“Look, I just need the Eye of DIOS.”
“Sorry, but I can’t.”
The Queen furrowed her brow, looking even more puzzled than before. “Did Fuddlebee put a spell on you?”
“No.”
“Is the Eye magically bound to you?”
“No.”
“Is magic or mechanics in any way preventing you from giving it to me?”
“Not at all.”
“Well,” growled Old Queen Crinkle, “why can’t you?”
“It’s hanging over the fireplace.”
“Over the fireplace,” the Queen repeated deadpan.
“That’s right!” the Grim Goblin replied, his voice merrily bright. “It’s become quite the center of attraction at my parties. Dead friends are always saying to me, ‘Gary, you’ve outdone yourself this time. You’ve got quite the conversation piece.’ So you see, Matilda, I just can’t give that up. No one would come to visit me anymore. And being lonely is quite grim, you know.”
Old Queen Crinkle looked as though she might tear out her hair at any moment. But she calmed herself and said, “Gary.”
“Yes?”
“This is a nice coffin you have.”
“Why, thank you! This season’s top model. The Caskettron 2021.”
“If you don’t give me the Eye of DIOS now, I’ll bury you in the Caskenator.”
There was a sudden shriek from inside the Grim Goblin’s coffin. Following this were the sounds of feet thumping down stairs, doors slamming, mugs clinking, and finally more feet thumping back up stairs.
Then the Grim Goblin’s hand shot out from the coffin again. Between his knobby, gray-green fingers was a pinpoint of light, as small as a grain of sand.
“The Eye of DIOS,” said Key softly, in wonderment.
Filled with great curiosity, she leaned a little too far forward on her chair and slipped off the edge of her seat. She tried to stop herself from falling by grabbing on to one of her control panels. In doing so she accidentally struck an ominous-looking green button.
A small compartment opened on the Hobbeetle’s machinery and out rolled Maggie Incanto’s Magical Immobilization Laser. It shot a bright blue beam at the Grave of the Grim Goblin. In a second, the Grim Goblin’s hand, Old Queen Crinkle, the skeleton sextons, and a group of Slightly Lifeless Leprechauns on a lunch break at a nearby cafe – all froze to their spots. The only thing they could move were their eyes, which now glanced back and forth in frozen, wide-eyed bewilderment.
Key slid off her Hobbeetle and dashed towards the Grim Goblin’s Grave. Tudwal scrambled after her while Pega went shouting after him, “Get back here, you ragamuffin of a puppy!” And Penelope the Hobbeetle, not wanting to be left behind, chased after them, as Key had forgotten to press her parking brake.
With slowing steps of trepidation, Key approached the Grave of the Grim Goblin. She was not sure if the effects of the Magic Immobilization Laser would last long, and she had no desire to be around to find out, yet she could not help the concern she felt, or the fear shivering down her spine. What if they started moving again? What if the Grim Goblin’s hand snatched her into his coffin, too? What would the Queen do if she caught her? All sorts of terrible possibilities rose and fell like sandcastles in Key’s imagination. Yet, in reality, there was only one thing she could do, which was to get the Eye of DIOS before the Queen did. So, continuing with very cautious steps, she crept past Old Queen Crinkle, whose eyes followed Key like the eyes in a haunted painting, as she slipped nearer and nearer to the Grim Goblin’s knobby hand.
— CHAPTER FIFTEEN —
The Eye of DIOS
The Magic Immobilization Laser seemed to have turned them into unbreakable blocks of marble. Key, despite all her vampire strength, struggled to free the Eye from the Grim Goblin’s grip. While she did this, Tudwal was playing with the hem of the Old Queen’s patchwork dress, clutching it in his teeth and tearing at it as though it were a chew toy. Pega wrung her invisible hands and did her best not to make a sound around Old Queen Crinkle, but at the same time she could not let the puppy go undisciplined. She kept thumping him on his puppy rump and hissing at him, “Stop that this instant, you wicked beast!”
Neither Key nor Tudwal noticed the Hobbeetle making gestures with her mandibles. Only Pega happened to see them, but Penelope’s beetle-speak was moving so frantically in her mandibles that it took the ghost maid a few moments to understand their meaning. Yet she did. And if Key could have seen the ghost’s invisible eyes, she would have observed them widen with sudden shock; for the Hobbeetle’s message was that Old Queen Crinkle’s lips had begun to move ever so slightly.
The ghost maid took a closer look at the Old Queen and saw that the Hobbeetle was correct. Pega leaned her ear a little closer and she heard whispers as soft as hissing snakes slithering past the Queen’s lips.
“Twisters, bats, and blackened oceans, give my limbs back their motions.”
Suddenly the Queen’s dark magic broke the immobilization spell. The force of her counterspell knocked back Key, Tudwal, and Pega; and even the Hobbeetle was bowled over on to the back of her shell. The bones of the sexton skeletons scattered like leaves in all directions; their skulls looking at one another helplessly, hoping someone would put them back together again. The Grave of the Grim Goblin was lying lopsided now, over his headstone. His hand was still extending outward, trembling frightfully, with the Eye of DIOS still pinched between his fingers.
The Old Queen snatched it away from him and hobbled off down the street. Key instantly got to her feet and dashed towards the Old Queen, without any plan, without any hope, only the drive to stop her from hurting anyone else. But the Queen immediately tucked the Eye of DIOS into the folds of her patchwork sleeves, reached her hand out towards Key’s chest, and cast another evil spell.
“Meteor, hail, stones, and owls, fly this thing like winged fowls.”
A force like a shockwave shot forth from the Queen’s hand and thrust Key backwards. She went tumbling through the air, head over feet, as if she were nothing more than a mere ragdoll tossed carelessly away. The power of this spell cast her one full city block and thrust her through the wall of a shop that sold teacup dragons as family pets. She came to a stop against the metal mesh of several dragon cages. The cages broke open and released a flock of teacup dragons into the City of the Dead like pigeons. And also very much like pigeons, the teacup dragons ruined many windshields that cruel night.
Witnessing the ruthlessness of Old Queen Crinkle triggered something magical and horrible in Tudwal, for despite the fact that he could only transform from his puppy form into his wolf form during the half-moon, and despite the fact that the half-moon was still many nights away, the immortal puppy suddenly started to transform into an immortal wolf monster. How this happened, no one knew – and it’s still a mystery to this day. But beholding this could only be compared with watchin
g a teddy bear transmogrify into Sasquatch. Old Queen Crinkle looked on with great curiosity, while his hindquarters became upright legs, his paws exploded into humungous claws, his snout enlarged, and his canines lengthened into long daggers.
All the while, Pega was fretting with frustration. “You naughty little boy! Stop that right this instant!”
Old Queen Crinkle heard Pega and knew it was a castle servant letting her voice be heard. It was clear that she meant to exact punishment befitting a criminal ghost who had broken the castle rules in the presence of the Queen. But right at that moment, Tudwal’s surprising transmogrification was a much more urgent matter to deal with, as the puppy was growing and growing and growing into a twelve foot tall wolf monster, with fiercely glowing eyes and claws that could easily crush the Old Queen’s bony body. So, taking the Eye of DIOS from her sleeve and placing it on Tudwal moments before he became fully wolf, Old Queen Crinkle incanted words she’d never uttered before, but words she knew would have a powerful affect on any Mystical Creature – even herself, if she wasn’t careful.
“Convertat ad DIOS,” was all she said, and she said it quietly, too, as if she only half-believed the words.
Magic flowed from the Eye, beginning with a burst of bright radiance, like the light that shines forth from a Crinomatic. The light completely enshrouded Tudwal. None could see him, not even the Queen who stood before him. There could only be heard the howl of a great wolf that, in the same pitiful note, reduced to the tiny trumpeting of a lost puppy. When the light receded an instant later, Tudwal the wolf was gone. All that remained was Tudwal the puppy, and a frightened puppy at that, trembling in fear and confusion, the poor thing.
In the meantime, as Penelope the Hobbeetle lay knocked upon her back with her legs flailing helplessly, a compartment on her shell opened and out came the Terrific Tarantula’s Turner-Over Jack. In another minute it rolled her back over on to her claws. The Hobbeetle then scurried over to the ruin of the pet shop and pulled Key out from the rubble with another device extending from another compartment on her shell – Ulrick Candlewart’s All-Purpose Crane.
The crane set Key back upon the driver’s throne. Key’s head was swimming with dizziness. The controls around her seemed even more confusing than before. She did not know which button to push for defense, or which switch to flip for attack, which lever to pull to make the Hobbeetle move forward, or which was reverse. However, the more her disorientation dissipated, the more her confidence grew. And the more her confidence grew, the more she knew she had to trust herself more than ever.
Now, feeling her way around the controls, she drove the Hobbeetle straight towards Old Queen Crinkle and backed her into a corner. Pega and Tudwal hurried after them just as Key pressed a button that drew out all the Hobbeetle’s most impressive weapons – Piers Prowler’s Pensive Rifle, Ferdinand Fook’s Funnybone Smacker, Norbert Bumbleson’s One-Hour Snicker-maker, and more.
But much to Key’s surprise, Old Queen Crinkle cackled fiendishly, sneering with a fearless expression.
“You think you can stop me, Troll? You think I’ve survived seven hundred and seventy-seven years, one thousand four hundred and ninety two death threats, two hundred and thirty-eight uprisings, and an argument – a misunderstanding, really – with Warhag, so that I could be stopped by someone like —”
Key pressed the Ferdinand Fook button and a mechanical mitt reached out and flicked Old Queen Crinkle on her funny bone.
“Ow!” she yipped, rubbing her elbow in pain.
Grimacing as heartlessly as she could, the Old Queen then spoke to her scepter the way Miss Broomble had spoken to her spyglass.
“Umbracopter.”
The Queen’s scepter then unfolded into something like an umbrella. Metal ribs stretched out in all directions above her head. The scepter lengthened down to her feet and a small platform unfolded on the ground. She set her foot upon the platform as the ribs above her head began swirling around like the blades of a helicopter.
“Compliments of the GadgetTronic Brothers,” she added as the umbracopter then lifted her up off the ground, high into the air.
Key was not about to let Old Queen Crinkle get away that easily. As the umbracopter carried the Queen farther and farther off, she drove her Hobbeetle onwards, stopping only momentarily for Pega to lift up a whimpering Tudwal and place him by Key’s side. Together the four companions traversed the winding, twisting, looping, drooping streets of the City of the Dead. They crawled around a sepulcher florist, The Black Rose. They crawled over a rather popular catacomb computer company called Pumpkin. They crawled through a churchyard for Mostly Dead Landscaping. They clambered across the roof of a mausoleum apartment complex for yuppie Zombies who worked at the nearby law firm, DeComposé.
But no matter how fast the Hobbeetle crawled, it seemed as if the umbracopter moved much faster, as if something more than mere mechanical was moving it – something like dark magic.
Key was not about to give up hope, but she did not know what else she could do. Penelope the Hobbeetle did, however. Her operating system was the same as the MotorHog’s – DIOS. And like before, DIOS knew exactly what Key needed right then, thus the Hobbeetle did, too. Rising up from a small compartment in her shell was an even smaller panel; and atop the small panel was an even smaller button, below which was just one word.
EJECT.
Key did not know quite what would happen by pressing that button, although she had a good idea, but she felt she had little choice. She did not know where Miss Broomble was; she did not know if Mr. Fuddlebee could stop the Queen alone. She knew only that it was up to her now: She must stop the Queen.
So, picking up Tudwal, she looked into his large brown puppy eyes.
“Coming with me?” she asked him.
His whimpering now ended – the way most boys similarly stop mewling when easily distracted with candy or toys or being launched from the back of a moving beetle – Tudwal panted his pink puppy tongue and wagged his tail happily.
“Mistress,” said the grandmotherly voice of Pega closer to Key’s ear. “What are you going to do? What sort of plan do you have?”
Key hugged Tudwal closer to her chest with one arm, and with her other she held her hand over the eject button. “The same plan I had in Despair,” she answered. And right before pressing the eject button, she added, “I’m going to break my chains.”
The thrust of her throne launched her and Tudwal high in the air. Together they soared like a missile over the Necropolis, over the Bloodmen & Curdle’s Golf Course, over the Pundicle arena, over the Lantern Tree Grove and over the Labyrinth Garden, all the way towards Old Queen Crinkle on her umbracopter, where Key managed to grab hold of the hem of the Queen’s patchwork dress.
The umbracopter dipped a little with the added weight. But its whirling blades thumped a little harder and thrust them all onwards. Key clung to the hem with one hand and to Tudwal with the other, refusing to let go of either, completely ignoring the Old Queen’s protestations, “Release me, you Troll!” She held on even tighter when she saw in the distance a tall black tower, rising quickly up over the horizon. The umbracopter was flying them straight there with great speed.
The nearer they approached, the more Key realized that she had seen this tower before in Wanda Wickery’s History of the Necropolis. It was not smoothly narrow, but rickety, having been hewn out of black rock by several generations of Morrow Dwarves who had had a different opinion on the meaning of a straight line. It was also the tallest structure around for miles and miles, taller than the Morbid Monument nearby, taller than the Insidious Skyscraper just down the block, and almost as tall as the tallest tower in the Necropolis Castle.
“It’s the Time Tomb of Thomas à Tempus,” said Key.
— CHAPTER SIXTEEN —
The Tower Tomb of Time
The umbracopter carried Old Queen Crinkle, Key, and Tudwal nearer to the Tower Tomb of Thomas à Tempus.
Key could now see that the top of the Tower was
crowned in five tall pinnacles. And each pinnacle seemed to sparkle, as if it were tipped with a large jewel.
Unfortunately, she could not think much more about this as the Old Queen made several violent attempts to shake her off, but Key was determined not to let the Queen escape again. She would do whatever she could to help Mr. Fuddlebee and Miss Broomble turn the Old Queen back into a mortal before the night’s end, even if it was the last thing she ever did.
Finally in desperation, however, the Queen held her hand over Key and spewed out another curse. “Woeful Crow of Glowing Snow, force this thing to let me go.”
At this utterance, a hidden force – like the talons of some ghostly monster – grasped Key’s hands. She tried to keep hold of the Queen and Tudwal with all her vampire strength, but this hidden force was stronger. Slowly and surely it pried one finger after another off the dress and off Tudwal, too. Feeling her grip weakening, she thought she and her immortal puppy would surely fall, most likely to their doom.
But neither did – not until the Old Queen held her hand out away from the umbracopter, and Key dangled beneath her wizened grip, as if she were a puppet dangling from the hidden strings of a marionette. Tudwal was dangling right beside her, just out of arm’s reach, wiggling in the air, trying to get free. But neither he nor Key could; the magical grasp of this hidden force was too powerful for them. The Queen cackled with triumph, relishing for a moment this small victory. Then she flicked her fingers. And it was as though the secret strings holding Key in the air were suddenly cut. She and her puppy fell.
Fortunately, the umbracopter had by now flown them all the way to the Tower Tomb, so Key did not fall far. She landed on the edge of the Tower, right beside the hovering wingtip shoes of a ghost glowing bottle green.
“Hello, my dear,” remarked Mr. Fuddlebee in a good-natured tone. “How wonderful that you could make it.”