Free Key the Steampunk Vampire Girl and the Tower Tomb of Time (9781941240076) by Becket Page B

Alleyway.”
    “Why?”
    “It’s on the Fields of the Worm King.”

— CHAPTER TEN —

    The Fields of the Worm King

    Key and Miss Broomble rode on for a few minutes before they reached the Fields of the Worm King. At a distance, the Fields looked almost ordinary, like a farm browned-over by harsh winter weather. As the two flew over more graves and cemetery plots, Key wondered if this Doorackle Alleyway would be like the last.
    But before she could inquire about this, Mr. Fuddlebee’s voice came crackling through the Scuttlecom. “I thought you should know, my dear Miss Broomble, that I just finished having a delightful conversation with Madam Frombone, and one of the many things she happened to mention was that she’d just come from William’s Fields —”
    “William is the Worm King,” Miss Broomble said to Key.
    “— and it seems that,” the elderly ghost went on, “William was in a wonderfully inviting mood this evening, having already set out a table with coffee and biscuits for visitors. His hospitality changed, however, when several frozen gremlins – all cantankerous teens – suddenly came crashing down like a meteor on to Nethermare Street, plowed through the Necropolis and into his fields, smashing his coffee table to bits. The vehemence with which he tore off his flowery apron, I hear, was particularly wrathful. Beware.”
    Miss Broomble sighed. “Well,” she remarked, trying to look on the bright side, “I never liked his coffee. It tastes like mud.”
    “It is mud, my dear,” Mr. Fuddlebee’s voice said in a hard-boiled tone. “He isn’t called the Worm King for nothing, you know.”
    The Scuttlecom fizzled off.
    Key leaned closer to Miss Broomble’s ear. “He isn’t a king?”
    “It’s just a nickname,” the witch replied.
    “Will we need a password to enter this Doorackle Alleyway?” she asked. “Is it also guarded by the Wicked Watchmen?”
    Miss Broomble suddenly swooped down, bringing the MotorHog low to the ground, and sped them onwards, through the crooked roads of the Necropolis. “Have you ever heard the mortal expression,” she asked: “The grass is always greener on the other side?”
    Key had heard it before, but she’d never thought about it much until now.
    “The more we think that our own situation is worse than it actually is,” explained the witch as she swerved past a parade of spectating specters, “the less we can get to where we want to be. So the more we think elsewhere is better than where we’re at now, we’ll never go anywhere. The Worm King’s Doorackle Alleyway has a curse on it. It will not unlock or open for anyone seeking the ‘greener grass.’ So if we can stand long enough in the Worm King’s fields, without wanting to be elsewhere, then the Doorackle Alleyway will unlock and open for us.”
    Key did not think that this should be too difficult, as the MotorHog flew to the entrance of the Worm King’s Field, for she thought also that, if she could learn to be mostly happy in Despair, then she should be satisfied anywhere else. But when the MotorHog flew up to a tall wrought iron gate wrapped up in what appeared to be dead vines, she began to have her doubts. For a second, she thought she saw those vines twist around to get a better look at her.
    Miss Broomble did not land, but let the MotorHog hover just above the ground, as she sped between pumpkin patches and crops of mushrooms. Key noticed how the pumpkins and the mushrooms appeared to be moving, too. No, not moving , Key thought, writhing was the only word that came to mind. It looked as though something was eating them from the inside out. Key’s excellent sense of hearing could just barely make out the munching sounds of tiny mouths – hundreds of them, thousands of them – all gobbling and gobbling and gobbling. It was the same for a cluster of scarecrows and a flock of bats hanging upside down from a dead tree, covered all over in large spider webs, where black spiders