And with that joke he left us. We didn’t bother turning to watch him leave. We stood before the ant piles silently until the sound of the digger’s vehicle had completely fallen away.
I bent down and sifted some ash through the cracks where my fingers meet.
“So, when were you going to tell me, Kitt?”
“Tell you what?”
“This.”
“I didn’t know. Swear on my life.”
I dusted my hands off against my pants.
“What about all of that ‘research’ you did on the Doll? I would think that this would’ve come up.”
“I’d think that, too. But it didn’t. Somehow. Believe me or not. I don’t care.”
“Hmph.” I seized a shard of glass and pitched it into the distance.
“Damn it, Pocket,” Kitt said. “I don’t expect you to forgive me for what I’ve done—”
“Good,” I cut in.
I began wading through the waste, slowly clearing my way to where I could best determine once stood the watch shop’s front room. I sighed and scraped away the pieces to reveal the black-charred flooring beneath.
“What are you doing?” Kitt asked me.
“Looking for the way downstairs,” I replied. “There’s a good chance that the basement survived the fire.”
“You don’t actually believe that ‘chance burning’ story, do you?”
“Of course not,” I said, still pawing at the floor, “but it’s still worth exploring for—“
“Pocket, the men who destroyed this place did it for a reason.”
“I know that.”
“It’d be ridiculous to think that that they’d just walk away with even an inch left unscathed.”
“Well, what do we do then, Kitt?!?” I snapped. “What do we do besides stand here, gawking at this shattered wasteland?!?”
“We wait,” he said. “We sit and we wait for Dolly.”
I exhaled and nodded in sullen agreement. We would wait. The Doll didn’t deserve to be alone when she discovered what had become of her home.
If she hadn’t already.
No, I told myself. She hadn’t. I don’t know what made me so sure of this, maybe just desperate, wishful delusion, but there was a whispering voice, deep-rooted and instilled, that kept saying to me, not yet. Not here.
My eye caught a small, sharp corner piercing out from the rubble. Clutching it, I fished out a small, framed photograph that had survived the burn, as some might say, miraculously. It was the same portrait I had noticed in the basement during my first night in the shop, the portrait of the young watchmaker and his bride. No, of Robert and Violetta. Their eyes and smiles seemed all the more innocent, all the more free as they stood on that sepia-toned pier before the captured sea of eternity.
If I were a more talented storyteller, I would lie at this point and say that the encased photograph had been horribly mangled in the burn, its glass pane broken, its frame bent, and the portrait’s once crisp edges singed and eaten up by fire.
Or some such dramatic exaggeration.
But as it was, the blaze left Robert and Violetta only slightly dusty, and even that was soon rectified by my calloused thumb.
I guess not everything burns, after all.
I propped the photograph up against an exposed beam as tribute and returned to Kitt.
We sat down and awaited the Doll’s arrival.
We sat for hours.
When the sun began to rise, I noticed Kitt start to anxiously tap his boots against the ground.
“Is there a problem?” I muttered.
“We should go,” he said.
“No.”
“Pocket—“
“We aren’t leaving this spot,” I said in no uncertain terms.
“It’s a miracle we haven’t been noticed yet. Now, I’m all for continuing the search, but to sit around here in broad daylight, where the Magnates will absolutely—“
“I don’t care.”
“You don’t care if we’re found?!?” Kitt challenged.
“I’ll kill them all if I have to.”
“How?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “but we’re staying here until she comes.”
“If she was coming, she would’ve made it here by now.”
“Not necessarily.”
“She probably got here before us.”
“She wouldn’t have left.”
“You don’t know that!” Kitt objected, rising. “We need to move along!”
“Sit down!” I commanded. “She’s going to come and we are going to be here when she does!”
I violently clutched his wrist and forced him down.
“You’re losing your damn mind!” Kitt shouted, pulling away. “If you want to stay, be my bloody guest! But I’m going back to the shuttle! If I’m lucky, it’ll still be waiting for me!”
He rose again.
“The hell you are!” I barked. “Sit down!”
“Goodbye, Pocket.”
I sprung up and brought my gun out.
“Sit...down!”
“For Christ’s sake, look at yourself!” Kitt rumbled at me. “Shaking that lump of metal around like it’ll make any goddamned difference! Do you know how pathetic that looks?!?”
“I’m not playing, Kitt!”
“Keep saying that! While you’re busy, I’ll go and do something helpful for the Doll!”
“No, you won’t!”
“You can do absolutely nothing to stop me, Will Pocket! You never could and you nev—”
And the gun went off.
The weapon stung hotly in my hand. Smoke was vomited out of its barrel.
It was fired. Someone had fired it.
Someone wrapped my shaking fingers to the trigger and squeezed.
Someone had just stood there and...and...
...shot Kitt. I had shot Kitt.
He thrashed madly about and howled. He was holding onto his right arm, just below the shoulder, as it ran over with red. He swore, cried, swore some more, and staggered away from the scene.
“C-calm down!” I heard myself beg, more afraid of the man with the gun than the one with the bullet in his arm. “I’m...I’m sorry!”
Kitt pivoted back and, rapidly losing color, gave me one final, cold statement.
“I wish to God that you were never thrown out of that bar, or at very least would’ve landed on some other wretch.”
He ran off, and I let the pistol fall from my grasp.
“Wait!” I finally shouted, squeezing words up my throat by absolute force. “Please! Come back!”
The fox’s shape did nothing but shrink into the scenery.
“I said I was sorry, Kitt! Please! Don’t leave me here alone!”
But he did exactly that, and honestly, who could blame him?
So I yelled and shouted until hoarse from my own feverish panic, and dizzily turned to the ruins of the watch shop.
“What now?” I whispered.
“What now?!?” I screamed to the sky.
Exhausted, I fell to my hands and knees. Tears welled up and flowed like cheap beer. Sobbing hysterically, I crawled, a truly pathetic creature, through the pile of debris, searching once more for the basement’s buried hatch. I inched and dragged along until my body eventually gave out. My chest flattened against the ground, and in the process, toppled a mound of waste on top of me.
I closed my eyes in dark hibernation, altogether covered in the heavy scrap.
Well, I conceded to myself. At least I’ve found myself a place to hide. A quiet place.
Peace, as I had said to the gravedigger.
And then, remarkably, I fell asleep.
The rubble upon me melted away, along with my consciousness. I felt simultaneously heavy and weightless.
In my dream, I saw red.
Red-orange, that is. A pushing, pulsing glow. A great stretch of heat that circled me and an otherwise blackened world in a single, fat stripe.
I felt warmth from
it.
Instinctively, I lifted what I believed to be my eyes and sent them searching far and wide for the Doll.
She wasn’t there.
I realized that even though I dreamt, I was still lying on my stomach, still in the same crumpled form I had left the waking world in.
I didn’t bother getting up.
Instead, I became quick-hypnotized by the rhythm and pulse of that red-orange glow, taking in breaths in matched time and watching the focus of my vision slide in and out of fuzziness.
This I did for a great while. How long, I don’t know. I must’ve slept for hours.
Then at once, my senses came back to me. I’m awake, I thought. No...not awake. Just aware...or half-aware. A sharp rush of blood shot through me and the red-orange grew brighter, nearly blinding my vision.
I rolled quickly onto my back and felt a hard floor beneath my shoulder blades. For reasons unknown, I threw my arms upward into the ill-defined sky of my dreams and clasped onto something soft.
It felt like skin, and in my sleep, I wrapped my fingers around it.
I heard the slightest gasp as I dug my fingernails deep into it. With a fast jerk, I pulled the softness forward. I felt the weight attached to that skin fall upon me and press the breath out of my chest cavity. I quickly craved more and brought air into my body.
The softness wiggled and shifted above me. I moved my hands upward, felt hair, and gripped it in tufts until the squirming subsided.
I felt something bobbing up and down against my ribcage. No, not bobbing, more like...a heaving...of say, a bosom...lifting and falling against my body.
Body. In my strange sleep, I came to the obvious. There were now two bodies adrift in this silly dream, myself and...
“Dolly!” I mouthed, moving my fingers through the hair to the soft cheeks and jawline beneath. “Dolly, please say that it’s you!”
Though a soft, undeniably feminine form was now lying with me, I mean, lying above me, I couldn’t discern any specific features.
“Doll!” I said, holding the shape of an unseen face in my palms.
And then I felt the cool touch from a pair of lips brush my wrist, and an image burst into grand, electric clarity before me.
She was beautiful as ever.
“Mister Pocket,” the Doll said shyly, the strands of her hair glinting in my vision.
“I’ve missed you,” I whispered, watching her locks float upward. The tips smeared into the background. Her legs dipped into the shadows. Drops of her dress melted away. The rest of her remained on top of me, and I held on tight.
“This is still a dream, isn’t it?”
“Don’t think about it.”
“Why not?”
“You have such long fingers.”
“Dolly.”
“I wanted to see your eyes once more.”
“Can’t you see them now?”
“Not when they’re closed.”
“They’ve never been open wider.”
“Only in your dreams.”
“Then wake me up already!”
I pulled her head to mine and tasted her. Shivering, she kissed back, giving no resistance to my approach. We kissed a span three times over the history of man. I pictured the ridiculous timeline of human events unraveling about my ankles like a great spool of time overtaking itself.
I saw in my sleep a human heart, transparent and spit-sloshing thin, bubbling blood through its rubbery walls.
Pumping, pumping, pumping away.
The blood poured a red waterfall out of the muscle and pooled around our touching bodies. I took a hand off of the Doll and ran it through the puddle. The wash was filled with little watch gears, and as I dipped my arm, some stuck to my skin, rinsed by that cherry red.
“I don’t think I can make you wake up,” the Doll said,
I responded only with my lips and hands, the former pushing forward for another sweet sensation and the latter pulling the girl’s body down, down into the suddenly deep and bloody torrents. I went with her and watched as our faces dropped beneath the surface of the blood. We sank like proverbial stones, our limbs fused together, lips spot-welded. My body’s shadow shook and dissolved in the ruddy liquid, and as it vanished, I could only look at the girl’s form for confirmation of my own.
We kissed. We pushed. We twirled in the deep. I ran my world-weary tongue into the corners of her mouth and felt the seam where artificial skin met artificial tooth.
My bones ached. Her parts turned.
My heart pounded. Her gears clicked.
My mind raced. Her love kept its pace.
We moved in the great ballet of my imagination. I could nearly feel myself spin and swirl the young lady on an ill-painted stand-in for a ballroom, could nearly see the pose she’d steal as she bounced from my hips.
The further we sank into the flow, the smaller my frustrations, my monsters, seemed to appear.
I fell into her, my body dripping away bit by little bit into her framework. I could hear the click-ticking of clock gears as I was pulled inward. I kissed her. I drank from her eyes. Her cheeks blushed, a feat so remarkably, impossibly human that I had to laugh.
“Don’t laugh at me, all right?” she said in a whisper, burying her face in my shoulder.
“Forgive me,” I murmured, stroking the back of her head.
We sank deeper into the red and, all the while, I sank deeper into her. I began nibbling my way down her neckline. Her skin tasted like strawberry jam. Again she reddened, and I squeezed her hand hard for reassurance.
We sank. We held on. We melted together.
And then darkness came again.
I nearly choked on it, cursing and swinging my limbs like mad.
“Bring her back!” I yelled to the nightmare. “I want her back!”
In my dream, I spun and thrashed upon my back, beating fists in a tantrum against hard ground. I howled, grunted, and groaned, demanding anything other than my own detestable loneliness.
“Dolly!” I screamed.
And then I was awake.
It was incredibly sudden, and I felt as if someone had strolled along and pulled out a plug that had powered some nightmare-generating apparatus attached to my person.
Awake.
I bent my fingers in at the joints and felt the small pockets of air that floated over my heaving chest. My eyes remained shut but conscious as my mouth and nostrils puffed rapidly, drawing air into my body. I arched my stomach and lower back upward. The first thing that struck me as I performed this action was that the heavy rubble that had fallen upon me was noticeably missing. This should’ve been an immediate cause for alarm, as anyone from a beggar to a company of the King’s most skilled marksmen could’ve found and uncovered my body while I slept.
But emergency or not, I just yawned, my eyelids all but glued together as I stretched my arms, legs, fingers, and toes. I shifted my weight and rubbed my weary back against the hard floor below me. There was something lying on my chest, and as my hand dropped upon it, I felt the texture of paper.
My eyelids slowly peeled themselves apart and looked directly upward at......something dark...and brown...that was certainly not the sky.
My lips were cracked, chapped, and near-split. I was clearly alone, so there was no reason to speak aloud. But despite all of this, I made myself talk, maybe to prove I could.
“Hello?”
The sound of my own voice, cutting across the quiet, made me breathe, made me sharpen my focus a bit.
Papers, I thought, feeling the slight weight upon my chest. A stack of papers. And above me, a ceiling. I'm inside.
Ceiling. Yes, there was certainly one over my head, and I stared at it. I wanted to question it, drill it for information. For a moment, I felt insulted at its silence at a time when I needed answers the most.
I was surprisingly well-rested, a state no one would expect to wake to after falling asleep in a garbage pile and being transported to a stiff floor beneath an unfamiliar and noticeably uncoope
rative ceiling. I offered up one final scowl to it and turned on my side.
The papers slid off of my chest and slightly scattered beside me. I scooped them up and brought them before my cocked head. My eyes ran over the familiar, lavishly-written script, and I went white.
I dropped the pages in alarm and backed away, shuffling on my knees and looking upon my discovery with panic and utmost confusion.
“How?!?” I gasped, sounding barely coherent to even myself. “Where?!? How is...”
I stood and began feverishly searching the chamber, clawing the walls as if I thought they were closing in. The room was barren and lit only by a single candle whose wax had nearly melted away. I scratched and felt along for a door, an escape, anything.
And then, in the dim of that hollow chamber, I saw the writing on the wall.
THE LADY VIOLETTA:
TO WORLDS UNKNOWN
I had, at that very instant, come full circle. I had wandered blindly for so long that time had gotten tired of waiting for me to finish and threw me back to the beginning to try again.
Oh, but time is not without its flaws. The chamber where I'd been brought was not the warm, concealed labyrinth of ticking, beautiful innovation I had once known. It was gnarled and burned and vacant. Gutted out.
But make no mistake. I had returned. My body may’ve remained in the dark, but my mind had not. I was not taken away when I slept, I knew. I was taken down. Down beneath the wreckage and garbage and stink.
Down into the Watchmaker’s basement.
Without second thought, I returned to the pages I had cast aside. Delicately, I picked them up, holding them as gently as if the ink were written upon sheets of glass. I then sat down before the melting candle and read, a bit of my mind restlessly wondering if I could make it to the end before the fire fell out.
And as you might have already guessed, the hand who wrote those words was the same that I had been killing myself to reclaim.
The hand of the Watchmaker’s Doll.
“So what are you saying, Pocket?”
“Already this night, I’ve spoken so much about the girl I love. I’ve told how I have enjoyed her company, endured her absence...”
“And you’ve shared her diary.”
“That’s right, Alan. But not all of it.”
Turnkey (The Gaslight Volumes of Will Pocket Book 1) Page 61