Turnkey (The Gaslight Volumes of Will Pocket Book 1)

by Lori Williams

  “…kill you…” I babbled, delirious. “I swear…you miserable devil, I’ll…I’ll kill you…”

  The bearded man shook his head in disdain and tossed the key aside.

  “You’re wasting time and breath, Pocket,” he said.

  But I didn’t care. Nothing mattered in that lost moment but to empty my flesh of the ugly hate that was eating into me.

  “You can’t have her!” I bellowed. “Not ever!”

  “Last chance, Pocket,” the Motorist said, grabbing Gren’s weapon once more. “I get the same pay for handing you over dead, so unless you wanna tell me where—“

  “Why?!? Why her?!? Take any other woman, any in the whole world—“

  “Tough luck.” He aimed the Half-Luck at my chest.

  “What is she to you?!?” I screamed. “What is she?!?”

  “To us?” the man said. “Nothing at all. We’re just after what’s inside.”

  He pulled the trigger and there was a resounding blast.

  Everything went black.

  “What the hell?!?” I heard the Motorist shout.

  I could feel nothing but a great dizziness in the dark. It seemed as though my soul was being pulled up and out from my nostrils.

  Was this death, I wondered. Had my last moment come and gone, just like that?

  Finally, in that empty drift, I heard a voice speak out to me.

  The Watchmaker’s Doll, you ask?

  No.

  It was Gren.

  “You can open your eyes now, Pocket.”

  Oh.

  Light and shape and form returned to me...well…because…I opened my eyes.

  I hadn’t been shot? I quickly looked down at my body for blood splatter. There was none. I looked at Gren for confirmation and he rolled his eyes.

  “Idiot,” he muttered, hiding a bit of a relieved smile.

  I hadn’t been shot. I took a moment and convinced my heart to resume beating. I hadn’t been shot.

  But then what of that clamor? That sudden, piercing blast?

  The Motorist was now at the stairwell, shouting to his men up above.

  “You wanna tell me what that was?!?” he shouted up, putting aside, for the moment, his interrogation.

  “We don’t know!” a voice shouted back. “Came from the top. I think something sparked some of the powder.”

  “Jesus…” the Motorist swore. He cast the Half-Luck the floor and gave us a very serious warning.

  “This isn’t over,” he growled. “Try anything while I’m gone and you’re both dead where you stand.”

  He huffed and marched up the stairs, complaining to the other Motorists as he did. Once we were alone, Gren cast his eyes on me in disbelief.

  “Wow,” he said.

  “Wow, what?” I wheezed back.

  “I’ve never seen you that upset.”

  “Never had a good reason to be.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know. Trying to calm down a little…but…I hurt.”

  “You should. He beat on you pretty good.”

  “Anything look broken?”

  “The hell do I look like, a doc—”

  “Gren!”

  “No. Nothing looks too serious.”

  “Good. Same to you. Where he hit you, I mean.”

  “Right,” Gren nodded. “I really thought he was gunna put a bullet in you for a second.”

  “Yeah, me too. Why didn’t he?”

  “Who knows?”

  “No, Gren. I mean your gun. When he pulled the trigger on me, nothing happened.”

  “Of course nothing happened,” he retorted. “It’s not loaded.”

  “It…it’s not?”

  “No. I used all my rounds in our failed, little raid on the Magnates.”

  “But you said you tried to get to the gun last night when you were ambushed.”

  “Why wouldn’t I? Just because I knew I was out of ammunition didn’t mean they did.”

  I thought about this. “Wait…so…a moment ago…when that man stuck your weapon to your chest…and you didn’t care…you weren’t bluffing?”

  “Hell, no! You think I’d let him point a loaded scattergun at me?!? That maniac would’ve shot me!”

  I smirked and even chortled.

  “What’s funny?” Gren demanded.

  “For a moment I thought you were doing one of those dangerously heroic stand-offs like you see in the theatre. Battle of the wills and all that.”

  “Pfff…” Gren replied. “If being ‘dangerously heroic’ means getting your damn head blown off, count me out.”

  It’s strange, but that little admission of humility made me feel a little better. Maybe that would prove to be the key to our survival, I wondered. For once, I was ready to pull my head out from the storybooks and look upon the situation as it truly stood.

  “All right, Gren,” I then quietly said, my mind a little sharper, “whatever made that noise, it’s bought us some time. So how do we get out of here?”

  My yellow-haired partner started mumbling to himself, thinking aloud. Then he started an odd, little movement, bobbing his chest up and down against his restraints.

  “Uh…Gren,” I began, lifting a very sore and very tired eyebrow, “what are you doing?”

  “Some of these ropes are resting against one of my boiler plates,” he explained. “The metal’s not sharp, but with enough time, maybe I can use it to cut through.”

  “I doubt we have that kind of time,” I frowned.

  “You have a better idea?”

  “No.”

  “All right, then.”

  I hated it, but he was right, so I quieted down and watched Gren try to work his way through the ropes. As you could guess, he didn’t have much luck, and I was soon praying for a miracle.

  No, I told myself. No miracles. No surprise twists of fate. That’s storybook talk. Get over it, Pocket.

  I took a long breath, finally reassured.

  Then, in a surprise twist of fate, something miraculous happened.

  Damn.

  Another cracking pop rang from above us, followed by some kind of mechanical whine.

  “What in God’s name is happening up there?!?” Gren yelled to our unseen captors.

  Instead of answering, the Motorists began swearing loudly and firing ammunition. Large billows of black smoke started creeping down the stairs. It filled the space, saturating the air even more densely than Gren’s shouts were. My eyes began to water over, and soon I couldn’t see a thing. The hacking and grunting coming from my immediate left told me Gren was faring similarly. So, over the next few minutes, we responded in a manner that I’m sure you, dear reader, are by now well accustomed to us behaving.

  We kicked and coughed and swore and screamed, accomplishing nothing.

  In the madness that ensued, the sound and the smoke, I never heard the footsteps of the man who approached me, never saw the blade in his hand. Had he come to take my life, he would have done so easily.

  But he hadn’t.

  The next thing I felt was a great rush of blood to my hands as the rope that held them split apart. As the binds fell off, my knuckles briefly brushed against the dull side of a knife and the gloved thumb arched upon it. The hand pulled away from me, leaving only air for me to clutch.

  And that was all.

  No explanation, no word spent at all. Someone had, quite simply, entered, freed my hands, and that was all. I couldn’t even make out a shape or shadow, and honestly, I had to take a moment for my dizzy head to confirm that my sanity hadn’t splintered like a struck piece of glass and imagined it. I wanted madly to shout out to whoever had just cut me free, but words stuck together in my throat. I resorted to just stupidly shaking my hands around in little circles.

  “Who’s there?!?” I finally shouted out in my delirium. I panicked, thrashed, reached out behind me in the smoke, but was unable to clutch onto the one who had cut me free.

  “Hey, calm down!” Gren said. “It’s
just the two of us here!”

  “The hell it is!” I pulled my aching arms forward from the post that had been holding them and hurriedly tore at the ropes around my torso.

  When I was free, I moved stupidly through the smoke, my fists up in defense.

  “Whoever’s cut me loose, thank you!” I called out. “But if the act was a trick, I’m in no mood!”

  “Did you get free?!?” Gren exclaimed. “Then get your damn self back here and untie me!”

  I ignored that for the moment and continued to scurry about the room. I heard the faintest of footsteps before me, but when I pursued them, I only came in contact with the tables that held our possessions. Startled, I reached out and clutched the familiar glass of my bottle.

  Only then did I hear two words, barely a murmur, creek into the corner of my ear.

  “We’re even.”

  Alarmed, I spun, throwing punches about for no true reason and shaking in fear.

  The one who came to my aid must have melted into the smoke itself, for as I traced the room, I found no one. Well, apart from Gren.

  “Would you stop running around and get me out of this?!?” he rumbled.

  “That voice. Did you hear—“

  “Pocket! Ropes! Untie!”

  “Fine! Hold on.” I began working the knots, and soon had my friend free.

  “All right,” I heard Gren say. “God, I’m sore. Hurry, let’s go before my body falls to pieces.”

  “Not yet,” I said, moving back to where I had found the tables. I felt around and retrieved everything. My boots, my coat, calling card, hat, bottle, bubblemaker, everything.

  “Come on!” Gren barked.

  “Okay,” I said, folding the turnkey and shoving it into my coat pocket. “Let’s move.”

  I rushed back in the direction of Gren’s voice. Moving to the bottom of the stairwell, I heard him trip and yelp.

  “What happened?” I gasped. “Gren?!?”

  Gren coughed. I heard him retrieve something from the floor. “I found my gun,” he said.

  Another small explosion cracked somewhere above us. We found and hurried up the stairwell, the only discernable way out of the windowless chamber now quickly clogged with the thick smoke. The floor above, we soon learned, wasn’t much better off. A round of fresh, if you can use such a word in this instance, smoke met our faces and we promptly gagged. The faint, clicking, grinding sound that had been ever constant in the distance of this nightmare now grew louder, or rather, closer. It was much like the droning, monotonous tune of machinery at work.

  “Over here!” Gren shouted. I worked my way, half-blinded, over to where he stood. A beam of daylight was traced through the smoke, entering the room through a small, sealed window.

  “Stand back,” Gren advised. He then mashed the butt end of the Half-Luck through the glass pane, shattering open a hole to outside England. Unfortunately the hole was too narrow, too small for either of us to squeeze through. It did however serve us in providing fresh air into the stale and polluted chamber. Gren and I acted fast, moving our arms to waft the dark smoke out through the window. As visibility slowly increased, we turned our stinging and bloodshot eyes upon the revealed machinery that filled the room. Great turning wheels and connecting compartments working a tall, wooden shaft in the center of it all. It stretched far above our heads through a hole in the wooden ceiling and continued, I would soon see, up further floors.

  “We’re in a mill,” Gren murmured.

  “Are you sure?” I responded.

  “Pretty sure. Worked in a corn mill for a short time when I was younger. Had a lot of pieces, gear wheel, grinding stone, that looked a lot like this. Well, somewhat.”

  I stood and watched the pieces clicking and moving in seemingly measured time.

  “Why the hell are the Motorists working out of a corn mill?” I uttered, asking the obvious.

  In response, another loud crack shook the floors above us, followed by another angry chorus of rants.

  “Because I don’t think they’re milling corn here,” Gren said.

  And he was, of course, correct. The Motorists, we would later come to know, had found and occupied this property, long abandoned in the shadow of Alexander’s new city. They began using it as a hideaway, a place outside of their city stations to conduct their questionable business and the occasional interrogating of abducted, young street bards looking to hunt down peculiar, slumbering maidens. They also replaced the aged machinery and restored the property in secret to serve its original purpose.

  As a powder mill.

  “Powder mill?!? They were bootlegging gunpowder?!?”

  “Crazy as it sounds, yes. Apparently, no one ever took notice.”

  “So, all of that smoke, those loud sounds…”

  “Well, Alan, that’s the thing. Manufacturing gunpowder can be a risky endeavor. The operation tends to trigger the occasional explosion. Bit dangerous. That’s why the mills are always built out by some empty field or river, with its weak side facing away from anything important.”

  “Where did you learn all of this, Pocket?”

  “I’ll come to that shortly.”

  “Heh. So that’s what happened? Those thugs weren’t even competent enough to keep their own stock from igniting?”

  “That’s a possibility, sure. Or there’s the chance that someone was intentionally setting off that powder.”

  “But why would the Motorists purposely do something like that?”

  “Oh, not the Motorists, Alan. Someone else.”

  When the noise cleared, Gren and I weighed our options. We could stay put, find something to hide behind, and attempt to overpower the Motorists when they returned. Or we could take advantage of the confusion, continue up the stairs until we found a way out of our stone prison, and make a run for it. Either decision would be incredibly risky, but since Gren and I are both the impatient type, we went with the latter.

  “Now!” I declared in a hush. Gren and I raced up the stairs, my friend taking the lead and wielding his empty weapon. I looked about. More machinery, sacks, and spilt gunpowder. There was a dirty set of boot prints tracked through the powder, across the room, and ultimately up to the top floor. There were also signs of an explosion, as drops of blood, broken crates, and smoldering, blasted machinery decorated the room. I wondered if the individual who had cut my ropes was the source of this attack or had crossed paths with the Motorists, who were still nowhere to be seen.

  “Look!” Gren announced. There was a tall door resting in the curved stone wall to our immediate right. A half-moon window at the door’s top, pulling in daylight, told me we had found our exit. We ran over to it, only to find that it had been locked from within.

  “Damn!” Gren said. “We’re gunna have to break it down.”

  “Let’s do it,” I agreed, setting down the Doll’s bubblemaker, which had been tucked under my arm. I lifted my right foot, now rejoined with its shiny golden armor, and placed it against the door with a swift thud.

  I could almost see the Red Priest in my mind, confidently smiling, arms crossed and most likely draped in kittens, saying, “See there, Mister Pocket? I told you those boots would be helpful.”

  I then couldn’t help but picture Madame B marching into my mind in time to lecture the captain about distracting me while I’m in the midst of an escape.

  “It’s not my fault!” the Priest would respond. “He’s the one daydreaming me up in the first place.”

  “Pocket!” Gren snapped. “Wake up! What’re you doing?”

  “Uh, sorry,” I said, returning focus to the door.

  “Don’t be sorry! Just kick!”

  And kick we did. We kicked, we shoved, we rammed, and we fought, but the door still stood impossibly intact.

  “Now what?” Gren wheezed.

  “You want to figure out which of them has the key?”

  “No.”

  “Then we keep running. Up. Toward the roof.”

  “The roof. What happ
ens there?”

  “We find a hatch or something. Some way outside and, I don’t know, climb down the windmill.”

  “And what if we hit a dead end?”

  “No idea.”

  “Nothing like a good mystery,” Gren muttered. He picked up the bubblemaker and shoved it into my hands. “Here. Don’t forget this.”

  I smiled. “Thanks.”

  We turned back to the stairwell, but just then, a figure appeared from above. He was wounded, bleeding steadily, and crawled sluggishly down the stairs on all fours.

  It was the bearded Motorist, suspenders and all, crawling his way until he was hunched at our feet.

  “And they say there’s no justice in the world,” Gren sneered.

  The man wouldn’t put his eyes to us. He just winced and gasped.

  “You got a key for that door?” Gren continued. “Hey, louse. Listen to me.”

  “Go rot, Spader,” the man mumbled. Gren snorted in amusement and checked the Motorist’s pockets.

  “No key,” Gren then said. “Who’s worthless now? Come on, Pocket. Let’s—”

  “GAAAAAHHH!” the Motorist screamed out in pain. Gren jumped and stared back in shock.

  What he saw was me, hunched over the Motorist in a great rage. The bubblemaker sat at my side, a rightful audience containing the Doll’s very pieces, as I repeatedly kicked my metal boot as hard as I could into his bleeding side. He bawled in pain, rolled over on his back, and wept.

  “Pocket!” Gren yelled. “Hey!”

  I couldn’t stop. I dropped down, beating my fist into his face until my fingers felt like they would crack.

  “Pocket!” Gren shouted, quickly intervening and pulling me back. “Hey, Pocket! That’s enough!”

  “You are nothing!” I screamed to the wounded man as Gren held me away. “Just an ugly lump of skin and hair and bones!”

  I slipped free of Gren long enough to deliver one more kick. The man’s blood gummed up onto my boot.

  “For God’s sake, Pocket!” Gren said, grabbing me back again.

  “I’m surprised you even bleed!” I yelled to the Motorist. “You as much as speak the Doll’s name again and I’ll pull your insides out one handful at a time!”