Turnkey (The Gaslight Volumes of Will Pocket Book 1)

by Lori Williams

  Too early, far too early, made you poor before you knew.”

  And here we are, Alan. This is it. We’re arrived back where we started from. Tell me, how many hours have we passed talking in this beer-soaked hole? Nah, it doesn’t matter. We’ve long passed the need for clocks. Besides, I can see a little sunlight finding its way in through that frost on the panes. Heh, that’s pretty funny. We reach our conclusion at daybreak. So allow me to conclude with one more scene. The “big flash,” I believed you called it when we started. A boy clinging to a steeple, finding sweet reunion with his world’s end.

  The cold British wind, as I’ve earlier commented, never feels quite so present as it does between the cracks of your fingers as you claw your way, tired and broken, to the tip of the highest steeple you've ever seen, your hands charred and dirty, your eyes on the figure poised on the point, framed in her tragedy by that divine moon.

  Or what was left of that moon. Or divinity itself, even. The circle in the air was a washed-out shadow, the faint remainder of what had once been. The unfinished table scraps of the morning’s all-consuming meal.

  The sky was dark, as I’ve said. Morning must’ve gotten too gluttonous and sparked a rebellion from the early sky, which seemed to be actively trying to swallow up the sun. It was blotted, shaded, coated so well with the trappings of a coming storm so that it was easy to forget that it was dawn.

  But I knew. As did the figure on the point.

  She was facing away from me, arms spread like a sacrificial virgin. Her shoulders perked up at the sound of my climb, and slowly she slid her tiny feet closer to the edge.

  “Dolly!” I coughed, crawling slowly over the rough slant. “Please! It’s me! I’m here!”

  My bottle plink-plunked against the steeple as I crawled onward.

  “Dolly!” I repeated. “I’m here! Look!”

  She didn’t turn to me. I kept moving until I was finally able to get enough of a foothold to stand. I was bent like a hunchback, carefully monitoring my own balance. And she was just beyond arm’s reach.

  “Doll,” I spoke again, this time trading my frantic, hoarse shouting for the softest voice I could muster. I had to fight to keep it from wavering. “Please. Look at me.”

  What happened next, I’ll never forget.

  The girl. The girl standing at the edge of Heaven on her tiptoes.

  She spoke to me.

  “Mister Pocket,” I barely heard her say, “I don’t know what to do anymore.”

  “Come to me.”

  The back of her head shook. “I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can. Just take my arm. I’m not far.”

  “No, I mean, I…I shouldn’t. I should go like I planned and—”

  “Please. Just come here.”

  “I said that I’d do it when the sun came,” Dolly said, her voice heavy with shame, “but now the sun’s gone and I haven’t done it.”

  I looked up at the darkened sky. A few raindrops began to fall.

  “You don’t have to do this.”

  “Yes, I do! Don’t say that I don’t when you don’t know! I wrote it down! In a book, no, my book!”

  “All right, so you keep a diary! So what?”

  “So what?!? Ugh!” As cautiously perched as she was at the peak, she took a moment and stamped her feet like a child. “You don’t know anything!”

  “Be careful!” I ordered, about ready to switch from compassion back into panicked anger. The raindrops grew into a light shower, dripping down on us.

  “I wrote it in a book!” she continued, ignoring my warning. “And books are such wonderful things! All I’ve done before I met you was read my father’s books! They say how things are, how things work! You should know that!”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “No buts!” she declared, sounding awfully sorry for herself. “I wrote in a book and I was so proud of that! Proud to be at least contributing to something that I love before I went to sleep forever! But I wrote that I would jump here today when the sun goes up…and…the sun’s already gone.” She started pulling angrily at her own hair. “So I’m a liar now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I can’t do it the way I said! If I don’t jump today, I’ll be a liar in the book. If I jump without the sun, I’ll be a liar in the book. Either way, I’m ruining something beautiful!” She took a bitter pause and added, “I should’ve just curled up in someone’s furnace.”

  I began to shout something angry about the ugliness of such an image, but I was immediately cut off by a considerably louder crack of thunder. White lines of distant lightning swam through the black clouds. I took the moment to reconsider my tone and wisely chose a more diplomatic approach.

  “Listen to me, Doll,” I said, slowly and clearly. “Books can be changed. Edited. Rewritten. Trimmed about.”

  “That’s cheating,” she said bluntly.

  “Dolly,” I continued, trying not to bite through my lower lip, “I’ve come a long way tonight just to see you.”

  “Well, you can see me. You got what you wanted.”

  “Please,” I said, losing strength, “don’t do this to me.”

  “To you?!?” she shouted. “To you?!? Why do you think I’m doing this?!? I don’t want you to suffer anymore!”

  “This is your plan to keep me from suffering?!? You’ve—”

  I stopped before I lost my thin illusion of control in the conversation. Sarcasm wasn’t going to win any battles with Dolly, and I had no room on this steeple for mistakes. I shook away the frustration and tried again.

  “Dolly, I’ll never know anything but pain if you leave me now.”

  “Don’t say that!” she pleaded, her voice a scared whimper. “I don’t want to ever think about that!”

  “Then stop running away and come be with me!”

  “No! You’ll regret it! You’ll be the worse for it for the rest of your—”

  “I’ll be the worse for having finally known love and having it thrown, quite literally, away from me!”

  We waited in silence for the other to say something first. The rain grew heavier.

  “Mister…Pocket…you mean to say that you…you know…you said, ‘love,’ like in my father’s books...”

  I blinked a few times.

  Love.

  Did I?

  I did, didn’t I?

  I frowned. The first time in my life I’ve fallen and confessed, and I nearly didn’t realize it.

  Pocket the Romantic. Idiot.

  “Did you...” Dolly shyly asked, “…did you…misspeak?”

  Wind began to push behind the rain, slapping the water into my face.

  “No,” I said quietly. “I...I didn't.”

  “I see,” she whispered.

  Nothing happened for a short while, and then I saw Dolly nervously twist her fingers up behind her back.

  “I'm sorry,” she then said. “I don't...I...”

  “It's okay.”

  “No, I mean, I just mean...I don't...I don't know if I'm sure what exactly, what it...what that sort of love is supposed to feel...that is, I haven't had much time outside my basement to...but that's not to say I don't feel, I do! I feel some very nice but confusing things for you, Mister Pocket.”

  “Then come over here to me.”

  “I just, I don't know what to call these sensations within me. I like them, but they're scary too.”

  “Doll,” I proclaimed, “I love you. I need you.”

  “You don't know what you need.”

  “Maybe,” I conceded, “but I'll risk being wrong on this one. So, hurry now. This rain's too cold. Let’s go down inside and off of this scary roof.”

  She shifted her heels a little and then very softly nodded. The rain was matting her hair down, and through the wet pigtails, I glimpsed for the first time the pair of metallic antennae that served for her ears. I smiled. They looked really cute.

  “Okay,” Dolly shyly said. “I'll come. Get ready to hold onto me.”

 
Turning carefully on the great steeple, she leaned and reached out for my arm. As she did, her grand, clockwork eyes locked onto my tired face.

  She gasped.

  “M-Mister Pocket!” she shivered. “You've been injured!”

  “I'm fine. Just take my hand.”

  “What happened to you?”

  “A lot, but I'm fine.”

  Her eyes widened and she withdrew her hand from me. She didn't believe me.

  “Whoa, wait! What are you doing?” I asked.

  “It's my fault. You got hurt because of me.”

  “Don't talk like that.”

  “I heard fighting and gun sounds earlier. Who else was hurt?”

  “We can talk about this after—“

  “Who was killed?!?”

  “No one!” I exclaimed before grimacing and turning my eyes away. “But...Kitt and Gren...they aren't...they aren't great.”

  Dolly buried her face in her hands and began to weep. When she again raised her head, the falling rain rolled down her face as if intentionally serving in place for the tears her form was unable to create.

  “Please don't cry,” I urged.

  “I'm sorry,” she said. “You almost convinced me, but I'm sorry. I can't let anyone get hurt anymore.”

  “No!”

  “I'm so sorry. But you aren't going to talk me out of this. You're going to have to let me fall.”

  She gave me a look that told me that it was true.

  And there was nothing I could do about.

  “Don't be mad,” she whispered, and still shaking, stepped back to the edge.

  The louder the rain fell, the quieter the world became. I turned my palms upward and let them feel a bit of the coolness before I had my decision.

  “Okay, Doll,” my voice cracked, calm, “if I can't stop you from falling, then okay.”

  I stretched a smile over my pained face and winked at the girl. She didn't seem to understand until I started slowly walking to the edge of the roof.

  “No!” Dolly yelled. “What are you doing?”

  I smirked. “The night we met I told you not to call me a follower,” I said to her, “but look at me now, eh?”

  “Stop it!” she yelled. “That’s not funny! How could you ever—“

  “Doll, one way or the other, we’re getting off of this roof. But either way, we’re going together.”

  “No!” she shouted. “No! No! N—“

  Her protests were cut short by a chorus of shrieks and shouts from below.

  “Up there!” some declared.

  “The roof!” screamed others.

  Large beams of light soon started slicing toward us through the rain, connected to patrolling steamships hastily altering their flight paths.

  We had been found.

  I wanted to take Dolly’s hand to comfort her, but she wasn’t close enough to hold.

  The whole of London began screeching and roaring beneath us. I looked at Dolly. She looked back at me. I felt rain on my nose and chuckled a little.

  “What?” Dolly asked quietly.

  “I guess now’s the time,” I said back to her. “I almost forgot.”

  “Time? For...for what?”

  I closed my eyes and slid my fingers ever carefully into my coat pocket. From it I drew that last, fragrant, purple cigarette. I was nearly too weak to hold it between my digits. Miraculously, it was still in one piece, and I squeezed it between my numbed lips. I checked another pocket, and found that a matchbook was still waiting for me. I knelt and struck a frail matchstick against the hard roof, then arose while cupping the flame with my hand, guarding it from the falling water.

  Soldiers aboard one of the patrolling ships were yelling something to me. I couldn’t hear what. Dolly shuffled over closer to me.

  I put the fire to my mouth and inhaled. A glob of rain caught the match and extinguished it, but not before it passed its glint to the stick of sweet-smelling tobacco. Standing over the living world and under the showering heavens, I breathed in the small fire, waiting to see if it would burn. Waiting to see if I could at last find magic where I needed it the most. I watched in great suspense as the red glow, just a little below my nose, began to lightly flicker, and as I was about to have my answer, my revelation…

  The Doll pinched the cigarette between her fingers and tossed it off of the abbey.

  I stood baffled, absolutely dumbfounded, and with a wide-eyed, fixed stare upon the girl, I all but demanded, “Why?”

  She smiled and took my palm.

  “Cigarettes are too filthy,” she says. “I don’t like the smoke they make.”

  I dropped my tired brow and squeezed her hand tightly.

  “But,” I mumbled unintelligently, “how else can I hope to find a scrap of magic?”

  She leaned in close and spoke with her small, pinkish lips. “Perhaps we can make our own.”

  And somehow we were calm. We just stood up there holding hands and smiling as the King’s ships circled like vultures, spitting threats and commands at us. I think…I think it somehow gave us peace knowing that our demise was no longer in our own hands. If we were to be martyrs, at least we wouldn’t also have to play executioner. And that said, I am not so dense to not realize that even if I had persuaded the Doll from taking her life, our chances of escaping the abbey and its pursuing forces were practically nonexistent.

  Some things, I guess, are just meant to die.

  I moved away from the edge of the roof and held the Doll with a more firm footing. I slid my arm around her waist and tried to block the rain from further drenching her lovely dress.

  As the ships circled, I began to spy riflemen aiming their weapons from portholes and exposed decks. I held my love and waited for swift death.

  And then, the damndest thing transpired.

  “Look!” Dolly breathed against my chest. “There, in the distance!”

  A shape was forming, just on the edge of the rainy horizon, and was floating slowly closer. Merely a silhouette at first, it seemed some ghastly monster, a huge, blackened hulk with stringy entrails flowing wildly from its center down to the rooftops in every perceivable direction. It wafted effortlessly through the wet sky, its tentacles tethered to the earth but allowing enough slack for the aerial beast to glide onward. Forward. Closer.

  To us.

  As it grew nearer, the blackened silhouette gave way to color and form. It was…how can I put it into words? It was such a rare and awe-inspiring sight. A craft. Some manner of floating dirigible, clearly designed and built by an amateur from cannibalized parts. It was, at its very center, an exposed platform hoisted from the ground by a trio of tightly-bound balloons, each of great size! The machine seemed to be guided by small propellers affixed to the underside of the platform, thus tilting and directing the ballooncraft through the sky. As for the aforementioned tentacles, well, it became soon clear to me that they were actually long lines of black cabling, yes, the very same I’d seen woven across the city. They had all been obviously strung together to the central platform before this peculiar, sky-faring craft ascended, and as it approached, I could see the cable lines lifting up from what looked like dozens of rooftops in the distance. There were also what looked like piles of machinery attached to the top of the craft’s deck, and the cables, they all seemed to feed into…something. Some thin, tall, metal device affixed to the exposed platform.

  “What do you think it is?” Dolly whispered to me.

  “Frightening,” I replied.

  A single, solitary figure stood upon the platform, seemingly unaffected by the downpour. Between the distance and the rain, I could not discern the gentleman’s face, but I remember that he was decadently dressed in a long, flowing coat of purest white with a tall, befeathered hat to match.

  Dolly and I watched with solemn attention, like a pair of well-mannered children, as the flying stranger leaned forward and spoke into the metal device before him.

  His voice boomed through the heavens, loudly echoing through th
e sky at such a grand, unnatural, and godlike volume. But the impression was not that the man was yelling. No, his voice was unarguably soft-spoken, pronounced, and calm. It was not a shout we were hearing, but a near whisper seemingly replicated and enhanced, the very sound magnified.

  Amplification.

  “People of New London! Soldiers of the King!” the man’s voice gently erupted. “I demand your attention at once!”

  The Doll gasped at the voice and looked at me for confirmation. I nodded, knowing instantly which man was sounding off in the sky.

  The King’s mechanical birds squawked at each other, hastily turning their attention to the gentlemen in white, who continued his speech.

  “I have come forward today to make both an announcement and a confession, both of which would be in your best interest to acknowledge.”

  Thunder was the only interruption the gent received as he spoke to essentially England herself. I held the Doll as firmly as I could.

  “Let me begin with the confession,” the man spoke, his amplified voice buzzing with unruly electricity, “as I think it will lend a considerable amount of weight to my words. To His Highness, I am known by several names, but I was born into this world under the surname Carmike. By you, London, I have been most commonly known as the Red Priest.”

  A rumble of jeers shot back against this revelation. Yes, the pirate king himself had taken to the sky once again, but for what reason?

  “I haven’t thanked him for my bubblemaker,” Dolly whispered to me. “I’ve got it up on top here with me.” She paused and added, “…with us.”

  “As for the announcement,” the Priest spoke to us all, “let me begin by saying that to slaughter Will Pocket now would be a great and ugly stain on each of your very souls.”

  “What?” I murmured to myself. “What is he getting at here? What could he possibly achieve by exposing himself to this…oh…damn it…no…”

  “Will Pocket and Kitt Sunner are not responsible for the crimes that they stand accused of by the Crown,” the Red Priest declared in the distance. “I know this because the party responsible, the one you should truly be taking into custody, is…myself.”

  Whatever serenity and acceptance Dolly and I had achieved was short-lived. Fear and anger ruled once more.