Turnkey (The Gaslight Volumes of Will Pocket Book 1)

by Lori Williams

  “Yeah, sure,” Eddie said. “Let's get you someplace safe before—”

  “No,” I interrupted with grave certainty. “I'm not going anywhere until I find the Doll. She's at a church right now, somewhere downtown.”

  “Well, fine,” Alexia replied. “We can pick her up. But it really would be best to leave you somewhere first, so that—“

  “No,” I said. “There's no time. I've...I've got to get there now.”

  Alexia's face quickly changed from liveliness to fear, and her voice dropped to a hush.

  “Mister Pocket,” she murmured, “is she in some kind of trouble?”

  “Not yet. But if we don't reach her before sunrise, she'll—” I stopped myself as I noticed young Iago's eyes upon me. “She, um, she could have a pretty rough morning.”

  Alexia looked at me, confused. I frowned and gestured to the boy. I could see the understanding come to her, and she nodded.

  “Eddie,” she said quietly, “why don't you take Iago for a walk real fast?”

  The brawler scratched his head. “Yeah, sure.” He grabbed onto Iago with one arm and hoisted the child up to his shoulders. “Come on, kid. Let's go find some dragons for you to fight.”

  “Mistah Pocket!” Iago called to me. “Wanna come hunt dragons with us?”

  I half-smiled at the boy. “Sorry, Ig. I'm afraid I'm in the middle of my own quest right now.”

  “Oh...well, hurry and win it and come play with us!”

  “I'll try,” I sadly said.

  Eddie gave me a silent nod of support, and the two galloped off down the alley.

  “All right, what's going on?” Alexia asked as soon as we were alone.

  I hung my head low in the night and told her everything. The tea lady gasped and covered her mouth with her hand.

  “No,” she wavered. “No, that's not true. She wouldn't ever.”

  I didn't say a thing. I just stood and watched her with dead eyes. My silence hit her hard, and she collapsed on my shoulder, weeping terribly.

  “No...” she whispered to me. “No, please don't tell me that she will.”

  “I can't,” I said, empty of tone.

  “You...you're going to stop her, right?”

  “I'm going to try.”

  “You’d better!”

  We stood for a moment.

  “Alexia?” I finally said.

  “Yes?”

  “You're getting my shoulder wet.”

  She lifted a hand to her face and wiped her eyes. “Shut up, Pocket.”

  When the boys returned, Alexia quickly took Eddie aside and informed him of the situation. Iago started yawning and rubbing his eyes.

  “You're getting sleepy, aren't you?” Alexia asked the child, petting his head.

  Iago nodded.

  “I never should've brought him along,” the lady sadly said to me, “but there was no one to stay with him, and he was insisting—“

  “It's okay,” I reassured. “Eddie, is your bike nearby?”

  “Right down this way,” he said.

  “Good. Take them home.”

  “Not without you, pal.”

  “I'm taking this wagon downtown. Hopefully no one will notice that it's stolen just yet. But I'm not risking them getting captured alongside me.”

  “Alexia can handle herself on the motorbike. I'm coming with you. I don't care about the risks.”

  “I don't know.”

  “You want to narrow your chances of getting there alive?”

  I took a deep breath. “All right, Eddie,” I said, looking at my feet, “all right.”

  The brawler recovered his motorbike, and I was soon saying goodbyes.

  “Be safe, tea lady,” I said. “You too, Ig.”

  The boy scoffed and puffed up his chest. “I'll kill all of the monsters.”

  “Yeah. I'm sure you will, kid.”

  The mystic Lady Alexia gave me one final word of advice before they left.

  “Goodbye once again, Mister Pocket, and good luck,” she said, hugging me. “Oh, and please remember, if all else fails and defeat seems inevitable, never be too proud to cast aside logic.”

  “What?”

  “Reality is a compromise for those who toss away the rules,” she winked, her ever-cryptic self.

  “Um, thanks.”

  The would-be nun and her young accomplice sped away in a cloud of dust on Eddie's motorbike.

  Night seemed suddenly all the darker. I balled a fist and felt the blood squeeze through my hand. Now is the time, I told myself. No women, no children, no softness around the edges. I had been stripped of my revolver, I remembered, in the struggle that led to my arrest. But the loss mattered little to me. In that moment, my words could stand for bullets, my fingers for knives.

  “Let's go,” I said to Eddie.

  We got in the patrol wagon and traveled along until we were forced to stop at an unusual obstruction in our path.

  “The...the hell is this?” Eddie grumbled behind the wheel.

  A city worker in a round helmet was tugging at a thick black cable that was stretched across, well, pretty much everywhere.

  “It's like a spiderweb,” I commented.

  It truly was. Round, man-made strands of webbing made a sloppy latticework as ends of the cable ran up and down the buildings that lined the backstreet. I quickly recognized the cable as the same that had pulled me by the ankle through the streets.

  The man paid little mind to our approach, keeping his hunched back to us.

  Eddie opened his door.

  “Don't,” I said. “Just turn around and let's...”

  But he was gone, out and marching to the worker. I slid down in my seat and tried to remain calm. A minute went by and Eddie didn't return so I looked up through the windshield. The two were grappling and exchanging punches.

  “No...” I mumbled, feeling a cool panic wrap around me. “No, no, no. Not again. I'm not getting captured again.”

  In a moment of too much cowardice and too little thought, I leapt over and seized the controls. I quickly spun the wagon around and sped away from the scene, leaving Eddie on his own with the stranger.

  I could hear the brawler's surprised shouts as I took off.

  “Hey!” his voice called out. “Pocket, wait! Come back!”

  “I'm sorry, Eddie,” I kept repeating out loud as I drove. “I'm very sorry.”

  He was soon just another shade of black in the dark, and I hated myself for it. Should something happen to him, it would be on my hands. No, I tried to convince myself. Eddie's a large bloke. He can handle himself. Still...if something did...what would I say to Alexia? To Iago?

  I put it out of my head. Unfortunate, I thought, steadying my nerves. Unfortunate, but necessary. All that mattered was the Doll. All that ever mattered.

  The death of Will Pocket was quickly hastening with that desperate and selfish attitude, but I didn't care. I've always said that a true lover will fall on any sword, take any death in place of his beloved.

  But death takes many forms.

  And so do swords.

  Time ticked forward as I raced around London, each moment a second closer to dawn. I had no true direction other than forward. I began to notice more of that strange cabling hanging and looping over roofs. It almost appeared to be growing like moss and spreading like vines.

  Was it all connected? It appeared to stretch for miles. What possible purpose could this all have?

  For a moment, I actually lost focus of my mission and brought the wagon to a halt so I could trace my eyes along the cable work.

  This was both an incredibly stupid and coincidentally fortuitous decision.

  A hand swung the door of the prison wagon open and pulled me straight to the ground. My hat spun and flew away. Before I could say a word of protest, a boot was shot into my side and a cold blade was pressed against my throat.

  “Move and you're cat food,” a woman spoke.

  “Cat...food?”

  A chorus of meows c
ame a-singing from behind my assailant.

  “That's right,” the stranger said. “Now, tell me what you know about Will Pocket!”

  “Wh-what?”

  “Where's Pocket? What has become of him?”

  I coughed. “Each day I have less of a clue.”

  The woman paused and quickly removed the blade.

  “Pocket?!?” she exclaimed. “Is that you?”

  “If I say yes, will you take your foot off of me?”

  “It is you!” The young lady quickly hopped aside and helped me to my feet. “Sorry, can't see a damned thing in this darkness!”

  The girl stepped into a sliver of moonlight.

  The great Madame B, Queen of the Pirates.

  And a surrounding posse of what had to be half of the Red Priest's collection of stray cats.

  I wheezed and spat on the ground. It was becoming quite a night for reunions.

  “B, where did you—”

  “I'll ask the questions now, thank you!” she growled, retrieving my hat. “Here, you dropped this.”

  “Thanks, I—”

  “You want to tell me where the bloody hell you've been the last week?!?”

  “Well—“

  “We've been searching the whole damn city, trying to find your lanky self!”

  “I—“

  “What were you thinking, leaving Gren like that, without word or warning?!? Do you know how worried he was when we found him?!?”

  “B—“

  “And you're damn lucky we found him! Finally, Pocket, finally, the crew and I get a lift off of our own sinking ship, and the first the thing we find when get back to land is Spader scratching at the walls about you!”

  “I'll explain.”

  “You're damn right, you will! We feed you, supply you with money and the steam car—which Gren told us is destroyed, thanks—and you just up and disappear?!? We had just landed our borrowed shuttle down in that dirt stain village to refuel, and I hear Jack at the window saying, 'Hey, isn't that Gren marching around and shouting?' I told Spader, I did. I said that surely, surely, Pocket isn't stupid enough to just go off in the night by himself. No, I figured you'd wandered away to go stare at the moon and recite poetry or whatever the hell you do when you go away, but to just leave him there—“

  “I don't have time for this!” I shouted. “I'm about to be in serious trouble!”

  “Oh, you're in serious trouble right here!”

  “Dolly's going to die, B!”

  That shut her up. With big, stunned eyes, she looked at me.

  “What…how do you know?”

  “I'll explain on the way. If you want to help, get in. If not—”

  This time she interrupted with a hug, her small stature barely reaching my chest.

  “I'll help,” she mumbled quietly.

  “Okay,” I awkwardly replied. “Thanks. And sorry.”

  “Don't scare us like that again, all right?”

  “You really need to work on your bloodthirsty, pirate attitu—“

  “Never again!” she demanded. “All right?”

  I made a sigh and told a lie. “Never again.”

  And again, the road moved and turned beneath my wheels. Only this time, I had direction. Madame B, as it turned out, was not patrolling the streets alone, and as I explained the situation, I received my first positive lead all night.

  “We can find that cathedral,” Miss B said, determined and stroking one of the cats as the others cooed from the cell in the back of the electric wagon.

  “You can?” I asked, turning down another cable-strewn street. “How?”

  “Quill,” B said. “She's got more maps than hairs on her head, and she's pretty good with the layout of this city.”

  “Is she nearby?”

  “Near enough.”

  I nodded but didn't relax. No, that was a luxury I wouldn't allow myself until Dolly was back in my arms. One thing gave me slight comfort, though. Madame B's demeanor. While sympathetic, her reaction to the news of the Doll's possible demise was a far cry from Alexia's.

  “I see,” she had simply said, angry and almost eerily calm upon learning Dolly’s suicidal intentions. “Well, we're not going to let that happen. Accelerate. Now.”

  As we drew closer to where B directed me, the wagon grew very quiet. Even the cats became mute.

  “So, listen,” I eventually said, unable to stand the dead air, “thank you for coming after me.”

  “I'm not the only one,” she clarified. “The others are lying in wait with Quill.”

  “Priest and Jack, you mean?”

  “And Gren. Though those three boys may still be working around on the roofs.”

  “The roofs?” I repeated. “Are you the ones behind all of this cable work?”

  “Yes, we certainly are,” B said with a smirk and no further explanation.

  “You know, I got dragged through the streets by one of those.”

  “How?”

  “It was wrapped around my ankle.”

  “Well, why did you go and do something like that?”

  “It wasn’t on purp—“

  “We were pulling those things behind an airborne shuttle. You could’ve skinned your face off!”

  “I nearly did!”

  “Tsk. Boys. I swear. Come on, drive faster. We aren’t far.”

  I did and soon pulled the police wagon up beside an unassuming, little building. We released the cats and watched them scatter and hurry between a few loose bricks into the premises.

  “Don’t worry,” B smiled. “They know where they’re going. A lot a better than we do.”

  She led me up a fire escape and onto a flattop roof where cables hung like shoelaces. I took a handful and squeezed them.

  “They’re everywhere,” I commented, watching how they draped from one building to the next as far as I could see. “You’re going to attract some attention with this.”

  “That’s why we’re doing it at night,” B said.

  The pirate queen opened a discreet passage and hurried me inside. I carefully traversed my way in the dark until arriving in the connected room down below the roof.

  The room was boxy. Thin chips of white paint stuck to otherwise bare walls. Oil was burning in a dirty lamp. Hack-Jack and Quill were sleepily rummaging at a stubby table when I entered with B, and the pair’s eyes snapped to me.

  “Holy hell!” Jack squawked at my arrival.

  “Mister Pocket!” Quill added, bewildered. “You’re…you’re not dead!”

  “Not yet,” I replied, slumping down onto an unoccupied chair. “Good to see you both.”

  “Good to see you,” Jack said. “Where the hell’ve ya been?”

  “Catching up on some rest.”

  “Eh?”

  “Not important. Where are Gren and the captain?”

  “Out down the street, rigging cables. See, we’re putting up these—”

  “Yeah, I know. Listen to me. Right now, I need some help from you.”

  Jack gritted his teeth and made an unflattering face.

  “Oh,” he moaned. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “You shouldn’t,” B chimed in, rolling a half-serious, half-teasing tone off of her tongue.

  Quill pursed her lips and tossed her head quizzically to the right.

  “What do you need, sensei?” she asked.

  “I have to get to a cathedral,” I said, resting my head on the table, “before daybreak.”

  “That’s all?” Quill asked. “Sure, we can give you a ride to where you—”

  “No. There’s more,” I explained. “I need an address.”

  “Well, we’re not exactly the Sunday service type,” Hack-Jack shrugged, roughly scratching his fingernails through his dark hair, “but maybe we can track something down. What’s the name of the place?”

  “I, uh, don’t know,” I admitted.

  The three of them looked at me blankly.

  “What?” I said.

  It
was B who finally spoke.

  “So…you’d like us…to give you a ride to a place you can’t name at an address you don’t know?”

  “What of it?” I responded. “It's not like London's the largest city in the world. Flashy, glitzy, sure, but not gigantic.”

  “That may be,” B protested, “but it's still littered with steeples and church grounds. And let's not forget that we have to beat the sun there.”

  ”All right,” I said, slumping down in my chair. “I didn’t say it’d be easy.”

  “You didn’t say it’d be impossible either!” the lady pirate sassed. “If I’d known that, I’d have left you on the ground where I found you.”

  “I’ll point out that you were the one to put me on the ground, B.”

  “Sensei,” Quill then said, determined to be optimistic, “is there anything at all you can tell us that might help identify this church?”

  “Yeah…maybe…let me think.” I drummed my fists on the table, recalling the Doll’s diary in my mind. “It’s got tall windows of colored glass.”

  “Is that supposed to narrow things down?” B grumbled.

  “I don’t know!” I spouted, rising from the table and pacing. “I’m trying, all right? I can’t think!”

  I pulled the Doll’s diary from my coat and flipped through it angrily.

  “Hey…Mister Pocket…” Quill nervously said, “…calm down a little. You’re…you’re being a little frightening.”

  I slammed the diary loudly onto the table and groaned.

  “She’s going to die!” I bellowed. “She’s going to die and I can’t even find out where! I oughta save the trouble and put a bullet through my brain right—”

  “Hey!” Madame B shouted, marching over and grabbing me by the collar. “No one is giving themselves a bullet tonight! Not while I’m here!”

  She followed with one of her signature fiery glares, but I was in no mood. Searing a fire right back at her, I spoke.

  “You can’t keep anyone from dying,” I spat, just above a whisper. “Especially not me.”

  A flash of surprise and fear came across B’s pupils before she steadied her gaze on me.

  “And why not?” she said, just as quiet and combative as I was.

  I put on a sick smile. “Because I’ve already started to die.”

  The two of us stood there in tableau for what felt like forever, until our sparring bouts of rage were interrupted by a loud and deliberate cough from Hack-Jack.