Oh, but ladies and gentlemen, never underestimate the breadth of my stupidity! It could fill the country twice over!
So, Alan, sing it again. Past the first two verses, if you will, this time. Because that’s how far the needle rolled before I was found in my place of electric rest.
“I think I'm singing this too early, far too early for this tune.
But I find myself here crawling, searching beneath an autumn moon.
And I've got my worst foot forward, yes, this time, I'm on my own.
Spun and shaken, I am looking, waiting just to be shown.
I found a hole deep in my pocket, and what I put in there is gone.
Because of you I am down crawling, and I've been down here far too long.”
Someone was coming for me.
I could hear the broken glass crunching under their feet as they got near.
“And I think it's far too early to admit that I have lost.
I'm a fool and you are lovely, so I'll search at every cost.
You're a beauty on a string, hiding somewhere in the night.
And I need you hanging on me, so I have to make this right.”
A silhouette came forward and extended his hand. I closed my eyes and grasped it. Slowly, I was pulled up, and I could hear the pieces of glass fall from my body to the ground. The sound mixed with the music.
“Was it I who cut this hole here? Did I fumble you away?
Is it my fault that I’m crawling? Did things have to turn this way?”
I opened my eyes and saw the soldier who had been chasing me. He took one look at me after I was steady on my feet and punched me back to the ground. I landed in the dirt, and saw dots of red blood against the clear sparkle of the broken glass.
“Oh, I’m crawling,
crawling, crawling,
for the jewel I used to know.
They would call me
just appalling
if they saw me in my woe.
I may be stalling,
stalling, stalling,
but I just can’t bear to see you go.
So I’ll lie here,
stiff and sprawling,
lest my eyes can catch your glow.”
The Magnate ripped the cylinder from the music box and threw it mockingly onto my belly.
“You enjoy your little ride down the streets?” he asked me.
“Not really,” I coughed.
“Looks like you’ve got more enemies than just me.”
I took the miniature wax cylinder and shoved it into my coat with the other tokens of my stupidity, mementos of a life poorly chosen from moment to moment. “So it would seem.”
The Magnate led me at gunpoint to a boxy, electric vehicle fitted with a barred-windowed back cage. A police wagon. I could hear the shouts and cheers from the firework-lured mob in the near distance. The man took my gun and pressed the barrel of his own into my neck. It made a sickly chill against my skin, and I didn’t speak as he opened the wagon’s cage and shoved me inside.
The door shut with a screeching clank. It was miserably dim and shadowy. Another prisoner was inside, sitting slumped in the dark. The Magnate spoke a curt warning to the both of us through the single, small window.
“I’m leaving now, but you boys can be damn sure that I will be back to handle you. If you’re wise, you’ll make less noise in this wagon than you did out on those streets.”
Good, I thought. He didn’t seem to know who I am, perhaps the only good thing about the situation.
The Magnate gave me a parting glare before turning back to the boisterous crowd. As he dissolved away from the thick, rust-speckled bars, I grunted and knocked my head back to the wood behind me.
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered in anguish.
The poor soul who shared my captivity in that dark cage dropped a strong hand on my shoulder and snickered.
“Hey, you keeping together, mate?” he asked me.
“No,” I spat. “Far from it.” I began furiously kicking the bars that held me prisoner. “I have to get out, I need to get out, I must—why are you laughing?!?”
“Heh, sorry. Nothin’ personal, you know?”
“Wait,” I said, peering at the man’s shape in the shadows. “Eddie?”
“You forgot me that easily?” the brawler teased, tilting his rough, spiky-topped head into my line of sight. “I might start crying.”
“What the hell are you doing here?!?”
“I met up with a few of the King’s thugs. They didn’t like me. Asked me for a lot of annoying, pointless information. Like my name. So I told them what I thought of that. Then they really didn’t like me.”
“Damn it, Eddie!”
“Oh, relax. Not the first time these pissers threw me behind—”
“We’re not talking about a night in a jail cell! You’ve been named as my accomplice!”
“I know that!” he snorted. “Why do you think I let ‘em catch me?”
“You did this intentionally?!? Why?!?”
“I was trying to find you. Thought the quickest way would be to get myself arrested. No offense, but you don’t survive too well on your own. And when I talked to the fox—”
“You found Kitt?!?”
“He found me. Nearly crashed the pirate’s little whirligig into the cat’s tea house, said he hasn’t been able to find you for days, and—”
“Yeah, wonderful. I don’t have time for explanations,” I griped, continually banging my feet against the bars. “I have to get free!”
“Well, keep that up, and you’re bound to be.”
“What? Really?!?”
“Probably. Because, you know, we’re—“
“Nevermind! I’m on it!” I exclaimed, pounding my boots away, assuming that the rusty bars were weakening against my kicks.
God, was I ever wrong.
After a particularly strong heel to the iron, I felt the entire police wagon begin to wobble. I hadn’t considered that as a possibility.
“Uh…Eddie,” I sheepishly whispered, “you feel that?”
My companion only giggled in that sort of knowing wheeze that makes you feel your stomach drop.
“Eddie…” I said, bracing myself, “I think this thing is rolling.”
“Well,” he replied, the voice of ominous, foreboding prophesy, “we are at the top of the hill.”
And then it happened.
“Eddie!” I mouthed, glaring at him in the dark as if he was pulling the strings of this puppet show. “Eddie, what are we—?!?”
“Just hang on!” he laughed, hooking his arm around my shoulder. “Hang on and enjoy the ride!”
“GAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!” I believe I shouted when it happened.
Although I could be mistaken. My memory of the moment is a tad fuzzy.
It could’ve been more along the lines of “GAAAAAH!!! WE’RE GOING TO DIE, EDDIE! I SWEAR TO GOD, IF THIS IS HOW I DIE, I AM TAKING YOU WITH ME! GAAAAAAAH!”
But, yes, for all dramatic purposes, let’s simplify and just assume it was “GAAAAAAH!”
I locked my jaw as we sped helplessly down the slope, heading straight for a rather sturdy-looking brick wall. I tightened up as much as could, hoping I could properly survive behind those cast-iron bars instead of, you know, braining myself against them upon impact.
Crash!
We were soon brought to an abrupt and noisy halt as metal hit brick. I guess I’m lucky that the impact didn’t separate my skeleton into easily-classifiable piles. In fact, I found myself relatively unharmed.
That was the good news.
“Eddie…” I dizzily said to my still-laughing cellmate, his face flush with excitement, “you all right?”
“Having the time of my life, pal!” he grinned. “You wanna push this thing back up the hill and go again?”
I sat there and stewed.
“Come on,” he said. “That was a little funny.”
“Wouldn’t have been if we died.”
“Not to us, no. Bu
t we wouldn’t be around to care.”
“Death’s that casual for you?”
“Just mine. I mean, if I’d found you dead…well, that’s different. I dunno.”
Eddie got a bit solemn, and I looked at him with surprise as he continued.
“It’s just…we’re all getting closer to the Reaper every day, you know? And if that lout’s staring me down all day, I’m not gunna let him see me blink.”
I shook my head and reached out to feel the bars. The crash had only bent them in a little. We were still trapped, now with our only view to the outside world replaced with the cold flatness of the bricks. Few lines of light cracked into the space, and I could now hardly see anything.
I pressed my fingernails into my forehead and spat out a bitter sigh.
“Just keep your head wired right,” Eddie said. “We’ll get out this. I promise you that, Will.”
My ears perked and I snorted quietly.
“What?” Eddie prodded me with a chuckle. “What’s that for?”
“Guess I’m not used to hearing my first name.”
“Mmmm,” he nodded. “I can switch it back to Pocket.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I huffed, rubbing my elbows against the confines of the wagon. “I’ve never really preferred either. Pocket’s too formal, there’s no life in it. My father’s a Pocket, my sister as well, and my mother made herself into one through marriage.”
“Something wrong with just Will, then?”
“No, William’s fine. Just common. I’ve known handfuls of Williams in my time, and the truth is, most of them are always so much more…well…”
“Rich?”
“Accomplished. It’s stupid, I know. But when you watch one William opening the doors to a five-story hotel with his name on it and then look at the one in the mirror, usually a mirror you don’t even own, I guess you feel like he’s won the name.”
“Ehhh…so what makes those rich arseholes so great? I’m dirt poor and more interesting than the whole pack of them.”
“I’ll give you that. But it’s not the money…it’s…I don’t know. I guess I always felt that if I lived long enough, I’d earn the name, or at least find a more fitting moniker.”
I’m not sure whether or not Eddie understood what I was driving at, but I’d like to think he did.
One thing he definitely knew was what to say next.
“Well, whoever you are, just stay calm.”
“I’ll try, Eddie.”
The man who had put me inside that box soon came back for it, yelling his way down the hill as he discovered the crash. We listened as he inspected the damage, which was disappointingly little, got behind the wheel, and drove us forward just enough to clear the wall. I breathed in the new air that came through the bars.
“Remember,” Eddie said to me as the driver left his seat and made his way to the back of the wagon, “be calm. I’ll get us out of this.”
The Magnate, as expected, was very furious and, as also expected, very confused. He waved a finger like a schoolteacher at us, and I could tell he was trying to piece together what exactly had transpired.
“You boys want to explain yourselves?!?” he shouted at last.
“Explain what?” Eddie said.
“What in God’s name happened here!”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Don’t you dare play games with me!”
“I’m too tired to play games,” I muttered.
“Not me!” Eddie jeered boldly. “I can go all night!”
“Great,” I glowered aside to him. “Dig our graves a little deeper.”
“You think you’re funny?” the Magnate snorted, crossing his arms. “Well, laugh while you can. The fires will swallow you soon enough.”
He leaned his face to Eddie’s as a challenge and grinned. Eddie grinned right back.
“Is that right?” he growled to the guard.
“Yeah, that’s right. If you boys were smart, you’d start praying for a miracle. Because that’s what you’ll need now. Nothing short of divine intervention.”
As if waiting for an offstage cue, a soft sound waltzed into my ears. It was a sort of clacking sound against the cobblestone, as if a woman was marching along in a pair of stiff heels.
And then, two shadows were cast upon the distance.
Eddie saw it too, and a spark popped into his eye.
“Divine intervention, huh?” he chortled.
He turned and shot me a wink. I didn’t understand. I just shook my head in confusion and shrugged. He responded with an excited nudging of the elbow. The man on the other side of the bars also picked up on the noise and turned his back on us as the shadows took the shape of a woman and a child.
“Watch this,” Eddie said quietly to me with a chuckle.
I focused my eyes on the strangers as they walked into the scene. They were dressed in garments of the church.
A nun and a choir boy, I realized. They approached, heads bowed and hands clasped.
“I don't get it,” I whispered to Eddie. “How will this—”
“Just watch,” he muttered.
The woman came to the bars and was met with the butt of a rifle.
“State your business,” the Magnate said.
“Hey, scrub!” Eddie barked. “Is that how you blackcoats talk to a lady?”
The guard was unmoved. Eddie sighed, irritated, and spoke again.
“I asked her here.”
The Magnate's ear perked at this.
“You? How?” he questioned, his weapon trained on the young nun.
“That boy with her,” Eddie muttered. “He watched your friends throw me in here. The kid took pity, so I asked him to fetch someone I could confess my sins to.”
“Hmph,” the guard snorted. “And what's a child his age doing up before dawn?”
“How should I know? You wanna stick that gun in his face to find out?”
The Magnate held his ground, but after a moment's contemplation, he slowly lowered his rifle.
“I'm, uh, sorry, Sister,” he awkwardly admitted, shuffling out of the nun's way. “Carry on with your work.”
The young woman nodded, her habit sitting low upon her forehead and shadowing her face. Tenderly, she slipped her thin fingers between the bars and clutched Eddie's hand.
Hold on, I thought as I squinted at her in the dark. Don't tell me...
Eddie offered up some big story of past wrongs and the nun mumbled through some quiet prayer. More interesting, however, was the young choir boy, who stood politely behind the nun and the Magnate. Like the sister, his face was obscured from me. The boy wore a hooded church robe a size too large for his body, and as a result, the cowl and sleeves hung loose over him. But for a moment, he tilted his head back, and I swore I saw an odd, metal nozzle sticking out where his nose should be. It was almost like the end of a...
“I'd hold your breath,” Eddie whispered to me as the nun spun around and hurried past the guard. Clutched in Eddie's hand was a small, dirty sphere and a lit match.
“Wait a second!” I hissed.
“Oi! Scrub!” Eddie cheered, setting flame to the concealed object. “Catch!”
The Magnate's eyes dilated in surprise as the burning object, hand-delivered from a mischievous nun and her young male companion, flew from the brawler's hand and sailed quickly through the bars. A moment later, it exploded and a blinding cloud of dark smoke filled the area.
I coughed hard, recalling unwelcome memories of my time in that burning powder mill. I heard the Magnate swear and fire his weapon into the sky. I tried desperately to keep the smoke out of my lungs, when suddenly I felt a sudden jerk. The electric prison wagon, I realized, was driving off.
“Eddie!” I gagged, fanning my hand in front of my face.
“Just hold tight!” he coughed at me.
The wagon zipped and bucked around, and soon the smoke filtered out through the bars.
“What the hell was that?!?” I shouted once I could again breat
he.
Eddie, as red-eyed and flushed as I must've been, laughed openly.
“Smoke bomb,” he informed me. “Work's pretty good, eh?”
“Sure,” I glowered. “Works perfectly. Except that the guard just drove us away.”
“No, he didn't,” Eddie giggled. “Like I said, just hold tight.”
The wagon turned down an alley and came to a halt. A masked face appeared suddenly on the other side of the bars as the choir boy hung his head down from the roof of the vehicle. The nozzle I had noticed under his hood was, as I suspected, connected to a complete gas mask.
“Young man!” a familiar womanly voice called out. “You get down from there at once before you hurt yourself!”
The child whined but obeyed, slowly lifting his head and climbing carefully down. He soon reappeared in front of the bars alongside the clever nun, whose own face was covered by a matching gas mask.
“You boys all right?” she cheerfully asked.
“Of course,” Eddie smiled. “I told you it would work.”
The nun produced a key ring plucked from the Magnate in the confusion and proceeded to set us free.
“Ahhh...” Eddie said, stretching his thick legs as he climbed out of the wagon. “That's a hell of a lot better!”
I just sat there, stunned. The nun cocked her head to the side and put her hands on her hips.
“What's the matter, Mister Pocket?” she bubbled. “Aren't you coming out of there?”
“Uh...” I eloquently began, “...Alexia?”
She laughed and removed the mask, revealing at last, the wild and familiar face of the tea lady. “Of course!” she said with a pronounced grin. “Who'd you expect?”
I shrugged dumbly and pulled myself out of the prison wagon. The choir boy hopped excitedly in place and tore his gas mask away.
“Hi Iago,” I said with a great sigh.
“Hiya, hiya!” the lantern boy sang, grinning as wide as Alexia. “We got the bad guy, didn't we?”
“Seems so.”
“Got him real good! Got him with our justice!”
He threw enthusiastic punches into the air.
“All right,” I said, addressing Eddie and Alexia. “As good as it is to see you both, we really must move.”
Turnkey (The Gaslight Volumes of Will Pocket Book 1) Page 65