Turnkey (The Gaslight Volumes of Will Pocket Book 1)

by Lori Williams

  It was the card of the Fool, and as my bony digits clutched it, my thumbnails pressed small marks against the figure’s printed head, marks that bent out in a shape half-resembling a pair of ridiculous fox ears. The Fool. That damned, bestial trickster, seemingly dominant over any hunter, any trap lain in his path. The card felt like it was melting in my hand. My shaking, pale thumbs slid across the surface and brushed the stiff edge of the thing. Suddenly, I noticed that a second card was stuck to the back, half-glued by some sticky substance. Old booze, I suspected. Carefully peeling the second card free, I saw that it was appropriately the Hanged Man, a grotesque pantomime mimicking the young man above me.

  “Kitt,” I uttered. “Kitt, no…”

  Refusing the reality presented to me, I took the Hanged Man between my digits and tore it angrily in half. Tossing the pieces away, I turned my rage upon the serpent general and spit on his boot. He responded by kicking me upside the chin.

  “Oh yes!” he mocked, pandering to the observers. “You have nothing to be afraid of here! No harm can come to the great Will Pocket from the hands of buffoons like us! We are just a bloody farce, aren’t we?”

  He kicked me again and wound up for a third when a subordinate interrupted him.

  “Sir!” the other exclaimed, pointing up. “Look!”

  The serpent general turned his face to the sky, and his eyes bugged out. Trying to ignore the flashes of pain beneath my skin, I propped myself up on my elbows and looked up at Kitt.

  His right foot was now wiggling in his thick binds.

  The crowd squealed and pointed frantically as the hung man began moving. Kitt’s cracked fingers began to bend in their joints, and astonishingly, his eyes opened.

  “Kitt?” I called up, stupefied.

  He looked at me with a tired smile and blinked. “How’s it going, Pocket?”

  I shook my head and landed somewhere between malaise, guilt, and amusement. “Not great, Kitt,” I responded to the sky. “Someone’s gone and spilt blood all over my coat.”

  “You should get it cleaned then,” he weakly shouted back.

  “It’s not my blood.”

  “Then someone else should get it cleaned.”

  “Enough of this!” the snake-wearing Magnate yelled to another. “I was told that this man was already dead!”

  “We thought he was!” the other said.

  “Shoot him! Now!”

  “Kitt!” I exclaimed.

  The hung fox quickly began shaking his body as the soldiers readied their shot. Soon, Kitt was swinging like a pendulum as bullets whizzed by him. It wasn’t a perfect plan, as evident by the grazing shots that cut his skin open, but the Magnates were unable to get a bullet properly buried within him.

  “Kill him!” the serpent general demanded, stamping his feet like a spoiled child. “Do it already!”

  Kitt was trying to swing, I realized, closer to the abbey, specifically toward a thin ledge decorated with a pair of stone gargoyles. A bullet caught his rope, snapping it, and the fox was just within reaching distance of the left gargoyle to grab on before plummeting below. Quickly pulling himself up and catching a shot in the leg in the process, Kitt threw his tired weight past the stone creatures and crashed headfirst through another window of stained glass.

  The crowd screeched and hooted as he disappeared into the building. More angry bullets sparked against the hole, leaving the Magnates thoroughly infuriated.

  I, in the meanwhile, used this distraction to hobble to my feet, and as Kitt entered from on high, I broke into an aching sprint and hurried into the only unguarded direction: back inside of the cathedral.

  “Gren!” I yelled, seeing my partner, now unguarded, leaning against a wall.

  “I’m fine,” he winced, clutching a red spot on his shirt. “Don’t worry. I’m not—”

  “Don’t let him go!” shouted a soldier from outside. The troops entered in quick pursuit and began blasting. Little points of dust and fire bounced playfully after me as I ran frantically down the aisle in my socked feet. Cherry-colored pews spit up their wood as bullets diced them. I ducked near the altar and a shot punched the hat from my head.

  “Close the doors!” the serpent general demanded. “Seal them!”

  Gunfire was briefly suspended and I rolled beneath a pew for cover, barely able to breathe. From where I lay, I watched the feet of the Magnates surprise me by marching out of the church until only two soldiers remained. The grand doors, as ordered, were sealed.

  But why would—

  Plunk-clunk! A black-metal globe the size of an apple was thrown to the ground. It bounced and rolled a little down the aisle.

  Another grenade?!?

  A few more globes plunk-clunked behind it, and I fearfully backed away on all fours.

  “Are you mad?!?” I screamed to the pair of blackcoats who stood within the abbey. “You’ll blow us all away!”

  But to my surprise, it was not fire that came forth from the scary little spheres. It was a spiraling line of dirty grey smoke. Without thinking, I stood up, exposing myself. The two soldiers immediately began firing again, and I barely avoided their shots. As I dodged across the front of the altar, I noticed two things: the Magnates had donned gas masks, and the dirty smoke was spreading.

  I gagged and coughed as I ran, and in a moment’s decision, I made a flying leap toward the nearby confessional and shut myself within, barricading against the sickening air that festered on the other side. The sound of gunshot clinked against the outside of the thick cast-iron door, now my only barrier from death. I heard the Magnates yell and break into a charge, and panicking, I pushed my feet up against the tight frame of the box and threw my weight against it.

  Thud! The heavy confessional toppled and hit the church floor hard, door-side down. My chest bounced against the iron as I fell over with it. It stung, but I knew that, if nothing else, I had bought myself a little more time to think. The ornate box was far too heavy, I suspected, for those two men to lift up—it was only through the assistance of gravity that I barely managed to topple the weighty thing—and with the door beneath me, they had no way to enter. The drawback, of course, was that I was now trapped inside of the booth, but at least I was trapped somewhere that they could not shoot through. And I could breathe.

  Such a clamor then rang out. I heard yelling, tumbling, breaking, firing. My name was sent into the air like it was the trigger word for some demonic spell. Gren was out there, I knew, and thinking about that made me sick.

  I clenched every muscle in my body and felt a line of tears squeeze out from my sagging eyes.

  It was over, I thought. I had literally nowhere else to run, no motion to make. The tremendous clamor eventually ceased and was replaced with a stale hush. All that was left for me to hear was the soft, rolling thunder that was starting to build.

  I thought of the Doll.

  Morning had come. She would soon appear on the roof of the cathedral and take her position. And even if she stood above the world and had a change of heart, the surrounding forces would notice her at once.

  I cringed at my own colossal idiocy.

  I had led them all straight to her.

  And there I was, so infuriatingly close to her, just a few measly floors below, and unable to intercept, to stop this, to put things right.

  All I could do was loaf around in my cast-iron tomb and wait. Wait to be removed and killed. I may as well have just stayed buried in that desolate basement. At least that would’ve saved my friends a few wounds.

  I sighed and pressed my palms against the cool metal below my face.

  “Dolly,” I whispered, “I’m sorry. I tried. I really…”

  A thought came to me. I took a slow, cautious breath and closed my eyes.

  “Dolly,” I murmured, “you can hear me, can’t you?”

  I waited, my heart beating near its breaking point.

  “Dolly,” I whispered once more, “close your eyes and find me.”

  In the blackness behi
nd my lids, I tried to find her. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t summon up a dream, but I continued to whisper her name. A small flicker of color appeared in the darkness, and I tasked my imagination with shaping it into a proper form.

  “Doll,” I spoke.

  And then she was there, before me in my wretched mind, as beautiful and as daunting as ever.

  “I can see you,” I whispered. “Now go on. Speak to me.”

  Her eyes looked up at me.

  “Mister…Pocket?” I heard her say. “Is that you with me?”

  “Yes, girl.”

  “Where have you brought me?”

  “Same place as always.”

  “No…no, this is different. It doesn’t taste like your dreams.”

  “Dolly, listen to me. I’m here.”

  “What?”

  “I’m in the church.”

  “What?!? But...how?”

  “I came after you.”

  “No! No, why did you do that? You’ll get hurt!”

  “I know.”

  “You have to leave here now! If anything happens to you, I’ll hate you for it forever!”

  “Dolly—”

  “No, please! Go now!”

  The image of her tried to run away, but my mind chased after. I pulled her to me and kissed her hard and deep. Embracing her felt like holding a hand near a candle.

  “Don’t do this!” I begged. “Don’t go up to that roof!”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, melting through my fingers. “I can’t play with you anymore.”

  She started to move into the distance, and just as all seemed hopeless, a strange and maddening spark lit up within me.

  No, I told myself.

  I can control this.

  I can stop this.

  I raised my perceived hands and up from the darkness rose a line of thick, golden bars. They curled around the two of us and formed an interlocking cage. The Doll gasped and tugged at the bars.

  “What are you doing?!?” she squeaked.

  “As long as you’re here with me, you can’t kill yourself. I’m not letting you go.”

  “Y-you can’t do that! You can’t keep me locked up in your mind!”

  “I can if I have to.”

  She looked at me in disbelief and returned to childishly banging on the bars. I realized that in my vision, the girl was comprised of actual bone and blood and flesh, and as she looked back at me, tears rolled down her human face.

  She wiped them away with her gloved hand, and as the tears touched the velvet, the girl began to turn to fog, fading away from my desperate, little prison.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered as she became ether. “Goodbye.”

  “No!” I shouted, reaching into the emptiness where she had stood. “Don’t go!”

  On the outside of my curled cage, she reappeared, her keyless back to me. Without a word, she started walking away from me.

  “Dolly, wait!” I yelled.

  “Your eyes will open soon, anyway,” she sadly said, moving into the darkness. “Nothing lasts forever.”

  “Everything does!”

  She stopped and looked over her shoulder at me. And then, she put on the saddest little smile.

  “Everything and nothing,” she wondered.

  The golden bars of my cage dissolved into sand and I raced after her. She was suddenly miles away, a blurry little walking sketch, and I jumped and jogged upon the very air to catch up. She was my last desperate grasp at something real and I was prepared to keep her at whatever cost.

  I can do this, I told myself. I must do this! Even if I must lock her up in the pit of my mind the way her father locked her in the pit of his basement. But the more I pushed after her, the harder it became to discern the edges of the world.

  “You’ll kill me!” I cried out. “If you destroy yourself, you’ll destroy me with you!”

  “A piece of you, maybe. But wounds can heal.”

  “No…not one like this...”

  “Then maybe you’ll learn to live without that piece of yourself.”

  The scene blinded me with a horrendous glow of burning light. My jaw felt like it was unhinging and fire seemed to break out of every tooth as I spoke my final plea.

  “I’ve lost too many pieces.”

  And then the vision was over, and all that was left was me and the confessional. My eyes must’ve surely been bleeding, but not a drop fell from my face.

  I howled in anguish, purpling my knuckles against the hard iron of my casket. Was this what happens, I wondered, when the unwilling dead are buried?

  Suddenly, I felt my body being lifted, being pulled upright. I realized that the iron confessional was rising at one end. I braced myself inside of the small space as it tilted upward to its proper positioning.

  “All right,” I thought. “This is it.”

  The door was opened and I looked tensely forward, expecting death.

  The cold, lifeless eyes of a gas mask were fixed on me, accompanied by the metallic hiss of filtered breath.

  Luckily, that mask wasn't attached to my would-be executioner, but to a very sweaty, very wheezy, and still considerably bloody Gren Spader.

  “Gren?!?” I blurted, blinking in surprise.

  He tore the mask from his cherry-red face and took in a chestful of air. It dawned on me as I watched him inhale that the surrounding atmosphere was notably poison-free.

  “You…” Gren huffed, trying to catch his breath, “…you are…a pain…to look after...you know that?”

  I stumbled out of the box and looked at my exhausted friend. In the distance, where the doors remained completely sealed, were the two Magnates. They were lying limp with exposed faces to the floor and hands clutching their necks. Their weapons sat in puddles of red, and the mask that Gren hadn't stolen was now a pile of broken pieces.

  “What...what happened?” I asked in a daze.

  “What's it look like happened?” Gren coughed, bending and clutching his side. I helped him over to one of the unbroken pews, where he stretched out and tenderly rested his wounds.

  “I jumped them,” he continued. “Made damn sure they got a mouthful of that smoke before I did.”

  “You were able to take them both down?!?” I responded in disbelief. “Unarmed?!? And wounded?!?”

  Gren snorted and rubbed a little of the gummed-up blood between his thumb and forefinger. “Yeah, well, as you can see, I didn't do it very gracefully.”

  “Come on, Gren,” I smiled, taking a few scattered hymnals and propping his head up on them, “when have you have ever done anything gracefully?”

  “Oh, well, you're so welcome for me saving your life!” he snapped.

  “All right, take it easy. You're going to make a big mess.” I looked at the floor, the bullet-chewed pews, the puddles of blood, the broken murals. “Well, a bigger mess, anyway.”

  I sat down in the pew behind him and collected myself. I then looked up at the sky through the shattered glass. It was quickly darkening, almost as if rewinding back to the previous night. Lightning flashed softly in the distance.

  “That thing was a godsend, you know,” Gren commented.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The hole. If those louses hadn't broken up the glass, we'd still be sitting in that sickly bog. And you'd probably still be hiding in that Hail Mary box.”

  I took my eyes off of the sky and looked at the confessional.

  “Did you…lift that thing?”

  “By myself?” Gren wheezed. “Are you kidding? You think I care about you that much? No, you were lucky. I found a little help.”

  He gestured to a large, sturdy, metal, overturned crucifix that was clearly plucked from its place on the altar and used, as Gren explained, as a makeshift lever to pry my heavy tomb up off of the floor.

  “Resourceful,” I breathed. “But isn't that a little sacrilegious?”

  “Pocket, look at this place. I think we're past sacrilege at this point.”

  I looked at
the pew behind me and picked the remnant of a lead bullet out of the split wood.

  “That's a decent point,” I admitted.

  Our discussion was interrupted by a series of thudding knocks at the tall doors. When we didn't respond to the calling, those who knocked began quickly chomping at the bit.

  “They're trying to force their way, aren't they?” Gren asked, not raising his head from the stack of hymnals.

  “Certainly appears so,” I frowned. “Don't worry though. The grenadiers who barred us in here were pretty thorough when they closed shop.”

  I watched uneasily as the men outside banged against the barricaded entrance.

  “Won't last long,” Gren glumly stated, taking a deep breath. “You have to move fast now, Pocket.”

  I stood from my seat and clenched my fists.

  “It's been a taxing night, Gren,” I said, walking to where he was sprawled, “so I'm going to give you one chance to rework that sentence and change that 'you' into a 'we.'”

  “Stop babbling,” Gren quietly responded, turning his eyes away from me. Gone was the usual, combative young man I was accustomed to. Instead, he just shrugged his shoulders and spoke uncommonly softly.

  “You've got one chance left to reach the Doll,” he said in a hush. “You take it.”

  I couldn't believe the implication. “Gren...” I said, “I would never...”

  The so-called bulletproof gambler surprised me, lifting his tired body up onto his feet.

  “Hey,” I started, “come on. Don't stir. You need your re—”

  He slugged me, and an immobilizing burn spread across my cheek. I could only stare at him, stunned and without the ability to speak.

  “Stop wasting your breath, Will,” he uttered, shaking his head. “Help me move this thing.”

  He limped to the heavy confessional, and began pushing his body against it. The borrowed crucifix tumbled out of the path, and fantastically, the iron box slid a bit. I studied my friend and then studied the side doorway he was leading the confessional toward. The look in Gren's eyes was something that—forgive me, audience—I am unable to recreate in simple words. There was almost a strange…comfort…about him.

  “Would you hurry up, already?!?” he coughed.