Key the Steampunk Vampire Girl and the Dungeon of Despair (9780989878531) Read Online Free Page A

need to know – that I love you very much, and that you’re going to be all right, Key the vampire.”
    Now the other Key’s smile seemed a little happier.
    “Happy birth-night,” she added.

— CHAPTER FIVE —

    City of the Dead

    Key awoke in the back of a black carriage.
    Outside it was night; the half-moon was high in the sky. The carriage was riding through a dark forest.
    All of a sudden she noticed she wasn’t alone. Mr. Fuddlebee the elderly ghost was sitting beside her, inasmuch as an elderly ghost can sit in a carriage bumping along a dirt road. Key had the impression that he was not riding in the carriage, but floating in a seated position along with it because, whenever the carriage hit a bump along the way, he briefly passed right through it, or it passed through him – Key could not tell which.
    He had been looking through one of the windows. And when he sensed that she had awoken, he turned to her and smiled a warm greeting. “Welcome back to the living,” he said, “so to speak.”
    Key looked around the carriage. She’d never been in one before, and she wondered now if all carriages looked like this one.
    All around her were dials and gauges and copper wiring. There were levers and switches and buttons with blinking lights. There were clocks and gears and brass rods with currents of electricity zapping between them.
    There was also a strange brass horn coiled into a dumbwaiter on the other side of the carriage. In case you don’t know (because Key didn’t and she had to ask Mr. Fuddlebee about it) a dumbwaiter is a little elevator about the size of a shoebox. “Having them in your carriage is a rare treat,” Mr. Fuddlebee explained, “for most dumbwaiters are in mansions. All sorts of things are sent through them from one part of the mansion to another.”
    “What sort of things?” wondered Key aloud.
    “Well,” replied Mr. Fuddlebee thoughtfully, “things like books and bells and breakfast for normal mansions, and for Mystical Mansions things like fangs and bats and bedgoblins.”
    Key had heard of hobgoblins before, but never bedgoblins . She was about to ask Mr. Fuddlebee about them when he leaned forward and spoke into the mouth of the brass horn. “Chai tea with maple syrup, please.”
    Then he leaned back in the carriage seat and waited until steam rushed out from the sides of the dumbwaiter. That must have been the sign he was looking for because, with a contended smile, he slid up the dumbwaiter’s door and reached inside. But his smile quickly vanished when he discovered that the shoebox-sized elevator was empty.
    The elderly ghost sighed irritably, muttering to himself, “The GadgetTronic Brothers must make another update to this infernal contraption.”
    Then he leaned so deep inside the dumbwaiter that Key wondered how far down it went below the carriage. She could hear Mr. Fuddlebee repeating his order in a louder, more commanding tone, his voice seeming to echo a great distance. “I said, Chai tea with maple syrup!” He closed the door abruptly, but opened it once more to add into the dumbwaiter, “Please!”
    Then he shut the door again and sat back on the carriage seat. He looked over to Key to say in a calmer tone, “It’s always best to be polite, you know.”
    Then he took out his ghostly pocket watch and studied it for a moment.
    Once a brief spell had passed, he seemed satisfied. Mr. Fuddlebee then slid open once more the dumbwaiter door, and to Key’s great surprise, now inside was a silver tea tray. On the tea tray was a china tea set and beside that was a bottle of maple syrup.
    Mr. Fuddlebee took out the tea tray. Metal legs automatically extended beneath it so that the tea tray became a tea table.
    Then he set the tea table before Key. He poured a generous helping of maple syrup into the teacup and filled the rest of the cup with chai tea. He stirred it with a teaspoon and then brought the teacup to his nose to smell the flavorful scent. His