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

Pega, and Tudwal past this main office, through a series of doors into smaller backrooms, and finally into a broom cupboard covered in old flowery wallpaper.
    Before entering, Miss Broomble grabbed a lit candlestick from off a wall sconce. Key followed her and turned around just when the deathly butler closed the door with a final, grim grin, as though he were saying, “Farewell, poor souls.”
    “Miss,” Pega whispered to Miss Broomble in the broom cupboard’s gloom, “I fear we’ve hit a dead end.”
    “Not necessarily,” Miss Broomble said as she began shifting mops and brooms and rags out of the way. “There is a way out somewhere, as in most cases. We just have to seek to find it.”
    Key helped Miss Broomble move things around, even though she had no idea if she was moving them to the right place, or if she was supposed to be looking for another stained glass window.
    “Have you come this way before?” she asked.
    “No,” Miss Broomble admitted, “and I doubt I’ll ever come this way again.”
    “Then how did you know to come here?”
    “I trust my instinct,” Miss Broomble confessed. “It seems like the right way to go.”
    “Do all Doorackle Alleyways work this way?”
    “Not all lead to a snowy, grimy street, if that’s what you’re asking.”
    Key rephrased her question: “Whenever you use a Doorackle Alleyway, do you always have to guess where you’re going?”
    “It’s not guessing; it is trusting,” Miss Broomble answered. “Mr. Fuddlebee could explain it better. But from what I understand, it’s not the Doorackle Alleyway that leads us from one place to another; the Alleyways are simply places. It’s the Eye of DIOS that helps us find the right way to go through all time and all space.”
    “So you didn’t know that you would come here?”
    Miss Broomble shook her head. “Each time I use a Doorackle Alleyway, it’s always different. The last time, I ended up traveling through a doll house.”
    “You shrunk?”
    “I think it was time and space that shrunk.”
    “Did you become a doll?”
    “Not like the ones already in the house.”
    “What kind of dolls were they?”
    “Hungry.”
    “So,” said Key, giving this idea some consideration, as this was all very new to her, “when we entered the Doorackle Alleyway a few moments ago, you had to guess – sorry, I mean trust – you had to trust which way to go, when to quit the crowded street, and which door to knock on?”
    “I trust that the Eye of DIOS helped me come to this place,” Miss Broomble said. “I trust that DIOS knows I would have naturally knocked on the red door. DIOS – with her Eye and her Hand and all her other parts – works with us intuitively.”
    Key did not know what intuitively meant, but she felt that it might be: Understanding more by feeling than by knowing .
    “Even if I hadn’t been traveling by Doorackle Alleyway,” Miss Broomble continued to explain, “I would have still knocked on that door. To me, the door felt inviting.”
    “It didn’t seem inviting to me at all,” Pega confessed.
    “Me neither,” Key added, but then instantly regretted having blurted that out, fearing that she might have hurt her friend’s feelings.
      But the witch was not the kind of friend who would be hurt or threatened by the differences in other people. In fact, adoring Key and Pega’s point of view, Miss Broomble smiled, which made Key feel instantly better.
    “The way I trusted about knocking on the door to this shop,” the witch went on to say, “is the way I trust about being in this broom cupboard now. Trusting my self , I did not doubt that it was the right thing to do, and so I do not doubt now that this broom cupboard is the way out – aha!” she suddenly announced. “Found it!”
    Miss Broomble had accidentally torn away a small piece of the old flowery wallpaper. Shining out was blue light. She peeped through the tiny tear and exclaimed, “Yes, here it is!”
    Then she and Key