“Hrmph-grmph!”
“Fine, fine, if you’re going to complain about it. Here, I’ll just borrow a napkin from the bar and scribble on it for a bit. Just enough to for me to spin a little closure. Let me think, now…ah…”
All was peace.
It fell over me like the chilled rain.
But peace seems designed to always be short-lived.
The Watchmaker’s Doll is alive.
That should be enough.
That sentence alone should be all that I need to call this ending happy.
But it’s not.
As I sit and write, here in this tavern, I find myself unable to feel any semblance of joy at the conclusion of my story. And even if I was able, I wouldn’t allow my heart the lightness.
The Doll is alive.
She is with me.
But she is no longer whole.
The limbs that she lost on that ugly morning have not been recovered, rebuilt, or replaced. Such a large portion of her body has fallen away to the earth. The lovely, little pieces, the golden gears that spilled away, have rendered her half-hollow.
Because I couldn’t stop it from happening. Because of me.
Oh, Alan, you sleep now, but if your eyes were open, how you’d see me spit upon the dirty bar top, spit upon myself!
But…
No.
That’s not how she’d have me act. Or think.
She is alive. We both are. The Red Priest’s quick thinking, I later learned, saved us both. Upon realizing that Dolly and I had fallen onto his runaway craft, he signaled to Hack-Jack, the only pirate still at work on the streets. I don’t know the details, but apparently Jack ignited a few “incendiary diversions” he had planted amongst the buildings in case the good captain should need a moment’s distraction. A bit of noise and smoke and fire allowed the Priest just long enough to fight the flying machine into a shaky cooperation. We glided away through the clouds then coasted into a bumpy landing on some dirty farmland. As Dolly and I slept, the captain hurried to hide us before the pursuing gunships caught up.
I was sent to a hospital…I think. Somewhere with a doctor, at least, or if not a doctor, then a very skilled individual who easily mimicked that role. My wounds were treated, sterilized, and wrapped in bandages. The gears and glass that roughly bit into my skin were plucked like cherries by my caretaker and sent away somewhere. Wherever I was, I was lucid enough at least to understand that what was happening was thanks to the Red Priest’s seemingly-endless connections. It’s simply amazing what can be accomplished by the sticky and pockmarked underbelly of a well-dressed city.
Long explanations were babbled into my ear, and I scarcely remember a word apart from “lucky” and “not fatal” and “however” and “torn apart.” They told me the bullet that cut through my skin hadn’t hit anything important, and in my haze, I remember being momentarily insulted that there were parts of my fleshy form deemed unimportant. They told me the bullet passed clean through my side, and I should consider myself incredibly lucky that it lodged itself in some floating cloud instead of my body.
There was that word again: “lucky.” I couldn’t feel any further from such a classification.
They brought a mirror to me and showed me the bruises and lacerations that were left upon me. My arms and torso were thoroughly tattooed with marks made from battering my body against the falling, breaking clockwork of the Doll. The wounds left upon me were so precise, in fact, that it was noted that my upper body now presented a near-perfect blueprint of the Doll’s partial anatomy, or as the pirates would later joke, “a black-and-blueprint.”
I didn’t laugh.
We were smuggled out of the city, and while I slept, the Priest tried his damndest to decipher a way to restore the Doll’s broken body. But it was futile. Too many pieces were lost and too little was known of the girl’s uncommon construction. Her turnkey, thankfully, remained with her in complete working order. Ultimately, the pirates could only offer cobbled prosthetics in place of functional limbs and a lace-trimmed eye patch, crafted by Madame B in the charming shape of a heart, to cover her empty socket. Her new arm and leg were crafted out of smooth porcelain, pale silver in color, and hinged at the elbow and knee, respectively, for simple bending.
My porcelain doll.
She lives with me now, the two of us tucked away in my little scrap of a home. I never imagined I would write such a sentence, but that is our situation. I know that sharing a life while unwed is seen as a great and detestable sin, but I see no other option available. Besides, I dare say I like living this way, and it’s not as if I could find anyone willing to marry a boy to what they so basely consider a machine. But what is important is that we are together. She cannot move easily, keeping off of her feet most of the time and wearing her false arm bent in a sling. The splitting of her body, beyond the cosmetic hindrances, has also affected the working of her clockwork. It clicks much more jaggedly and at an inconstant volume. She sleeps frequently, often without control and at seemingly random intervals. Her “new dream time,” she calls it. I’m not certain of exactly what has happened or why, but I think the loss or damaging of some internal element has set her “two weeks” schedule off-kilter. I've since spent days awake with her only to be followed by lonely weeks staring at her sleeping form. But she smiles at me every day, awake or asleep, and comes to me in my dreams with open arms. Complete, unscarred, pink, fleshy, open arms. She tells me that she is happy, but I know that her heart must ache. And I would give anything to make her whole again.
Any.
Conceivable.
Thing.
We live more or less unbothered by the Crown. In the aftermath of it all, Kitt and I were awarded full pardons by the King, though we are also presumed dead, with the Doll proclaimed by the papers as “most certainly destroyed, smashed and reduced to scattered parts upon the face of London.” They also reported that the bodies of Kitt Sunner and Gren Spader were never recovered, seemingly lost in the mass of rubble sent down from the now half-destroyed Bluebird Abbey as the church’s higher parts were forced down upon itself by the monarchy’s sickening bombardment. No measure was taken to salvage Kitt and Gren from the beneath the stone.
And I have no further insight to add upon that.
As expected, the rifle sights of the monarchy have now been turned upon the Red Priest and his crew, who are still believed to be in possession of the Doll’s “desired piece.” I have not spoken to any who’ve shared my struggle, my clownish fight, since returning to New London, and while Dolly and I have existed in the city without trouble, I still fear the occasional stare of a passing stranger, uneasy with the possibility of being recognized, being remembered, and the conceivable consequences that would bring.
I have become an apprehensive and thoroughly uneasy man.
But for all of my complaints, for all that I dread, she yet lives.
The Watchmaker’s Doll is here with me, and I shall never again fail to protect her.
Never.
All is quiet now. A sweet, little stillness has overtaken this sleepy place, with only the low rumble of my friend’s snoring adrift in the air.
It’s a good song, Alan.
Sun’s up now. Won’t be long before the people of this city begin to fill its frozen streets again.
The new day always comes.
I’d best be off before the crowds spread and congeal. If I am a corpse of Old London, after all, I wouldn’t want to spook the masses with the shuffling appearance of a hungover cadaver.
The dead tend to prefer a low profile.
Besides, this napkin’s nearly full of words now.
And I have a sleeping girl waiting to wake up to me.
I do not plan to disappoint.
Epilogue
Something More
A – B – C – D – E – F – G
P – O – C – K – E - T
Well.
I still remember how to form the letters.
That’s a start.
> Now...
Let’s see if I can form myself a narrative.
The year of our Lord, eighteen-hundred-and-eighty-eight.
December.
The second.
This page marks the first time in two months that I, William Christopher Pocket, have set pen to paper.
There is both a very logical and very childish reason for this, and I will explain shortly.
But first.
I feel compelled to document, for an equally childish reason, my life as of late.
As I have written, it is December, and the flirting sway between seasons have at last settled into a defined and numbing British winter. I have been passing these cold-tasting days in a self-imposed exile, a nervous relocation demanded by the barking of my own suspicious mind.
No, no. That’s too vague. Too needlessly dramatic.
Disregard.
The Watchmaker’s Doll and I have been living, by very gracious invitation, at the residence of my good friend, Alan Dandy, after my growing fears of personal safety prompted us to vacate my home in the opposite end of London Town. I have not informed my estranged family of this transition, nor have I written a word to them of my persecution and redemption. I suppose it’s a blessing that they do not live within the city walls. My mother, I know, could not sustain the crushing blow of thinking that her only son had died. Still, it saddens me that I have not brought myself to compose some well-phrased letter to them to keep them at ease and, more importantly, to introduce my newfound love, my sweet Dolly.
Alan has been the ideal host, asking for no payment or service in exchange for our indefinite stay. I tried adamantly to refuse, ignoring the stupid truth that I had nothing to offer anyhow. Dolly also hated to feel indebted and soon took to tidying Alan’s home while he was away, dusting and straightening as well as she could manage with her clumsy prosthetics. I’ve since joined her in these chores, a pitiful makeshift butler.
The Doll.
She’s asleep now, as she often is, tucked away under patched blankets with an almost innocent and blissful air about her. Alan is away, filling glasses for his supper somewhere.
Which leaves me to serve as my own company.
I stop for a moment and roll up my left sleeve, observing the sharp purple mark that has been stained upon my flesh. I smile, comforted to know that the color yet remains bright despite the fact that the bruising should have long since faded away. Why hasn’t it then, one might wonder.
Magic? Nah.
Some sort of medical oddity? Of course not.
Has something been keeping the bruises fresh? Ah…now, there’s a thought, albeit a slightly perverse one. After all, maintaining the color and stain would require a consistent and perpetual battering of the wounds, and who, in God’s name, who would ever possess such a drive or need to carry out such barbaric infliction on the human form?
I let my eyes trace over the dark streak upon my arm outlined with faint segments of scarring.
Just like a blueprint of the Doll, they had said.
A black-and-blueprint.
I neatly unroll my sleeve, smoothing the cloth to cover every blemish, every mark, every imprint of my own fingernails left upon the skin.
And I breathe.
As I have said, I have not written so much as a syllable since that borrowed napkin in the Good Doctor, and as I have said, there is a reason.
I have been afraid.
Afraid to pursue what I have once loved, what I once held up as the salvation of an otherwise muddy, commoner’s life. In other words, my capacity and appetite for the art have simply drained out of me, and I have been so unsettled at the thought of facing a scrap of parchment and finding nothing of potential value beyond its natural composition that…I haven’t attempted to put down even my own signature. I’ve been just too averse to seeing the familiar shape of my own written hand. It’s a little funny, I suppose, in a horrifying way, because I at first thought that living through what I have endured would’ve granted me with an entirely new flavor and appreciation for life, but all it has done is rob me of the ability to dance around in a fantasy world of ignorant ideals. In the previous two months, I’ve hardly dreamt.
But today I return to the pen, and the spark to do so was as sudden and unexpected as the drain that made me first put it down.
I received a letter today.
It wasn’t delivered by post, but half-crammed beneath Alan’s front door, wrinkled and awkwardly stuffed into a dirty white envelope. I had noticed it immediately after leaving the sleeping Doll’s side and moving into the front room. I would not have given such a dingy envelope much of a thought, but I could see the words “FOR POCKET” type-printed in messy ink across its face.
My heart nearly stopped and, moving slowly to the door and bending down to my knees, I found myself reluctant to even touch the thing for fear that it would steal the life from me in some ghastly fashion.
I shook a little as I took the envelope in my hands and murmured those words aloud.
“For Pocket.”
How? No one in the whole of Creation, outside of Dolly and Alan, knew that I was living here. I glared at the blotchy, inky letters, at the smeared upper curve that made the capital “P.”
With the world standing forever still, I tore a tidy opening across the top of the envelope and retrieved the message within.
“MISTER POCKET.” the message began, the bold type nearly burning black through the page. I held my breath and read on, my eyes growing wider with each word.
By the end of the page, I began to feel the blood in my body move again.
“YOU DO NOT KNOW ME,” the letter had said, “BUT YOU WILL ABSOLUTELY WANT TO CHANGE THAT.”
A line of sweat fell down my forehead as I carried onward down the message, the stranger’s words seeping deeper and deeper into my head until I reached the sentence that made the silent world regain its throaty, desperate voice.
“IF YOU COME TO SEE ME, I CAN HELP YOU. I CAN HELP YOU PUT BACK TOGETHER WHAT YOU’VE SCATTERED AWAY. IF YOU COME TO SEE ME. ALONE.”
And there, pinned to the page, was a small, tidy scrap of something. Something pale and pinkish-white. It was a synthetic, but smooth. Like an artificial skin.
The world screamed at the top its aged lungs.
That’s when it all changed. In just that moment. As I read and re-read that sentence, as I thumbed the smoothness of that scrap of material, the flicker of life was reset. It burned and spread quickly in my stomach.
“IF YOU COME SEE ME.”
I began to feel the blood in my body move again.
“ALONE.”
Temper and opinion and doubt and belief and possibility and whimsy and hunger, it all funneled back into me.
And I was terrified.
I looked at the name printed at the bottom of the page, where no written signature existed.
“WICK.”
A sickly smile developed across my face as I clutched the letter in my fist.
What happens, I wonder, when a bard is unable to craft an ending to a story?
Maybe…
Just maybe...
The story has no choice but to carry on.
- W. C. P.
To be resumed in:
The Gaslight Volumes of Will Pocket: The Crescent Rail
Table of Contents
Prologue – The Story of New London
Chapter One – Pocket and Dandy
Chapter Two – The Bottle and the Fox
Chapter Three – Watch Shop
Chapter Four – The Girl Behind the Glass
Chapter Five – Beggar’s Vacation
Chapter Six – Enemies to the Crown
Chapter Seven – The Bulletproof Gambler
Chapter Eight – Piece by Piece
Chapter Nine – The Gaslight Tea House
Chapter Ten – Tea Dreams
Chapter Eleven – Lucidia
Chapter Twelve – More Than Capable
Chapter Thirteen – The
Oil Sea
Chapter Fourteen – Pocket the Gentleman
Chapter Fifteen – Gifts and Goodbyes
Chapter Sixteen - Chase
Chapter Seventeen – The Doll’s Diary, Part the First: Dreams I’ve Had
Chapter Eighteen – The Red Flower
Chapter Nineteen – Return of the Motorists
Chapter Twenty – The Great Comedy of the Windmill
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two - Catch
Chapter Twenty-Three – The Doll’s Diary, Part the Second: Steps I’ve Walked
Chapter Twenty-Four – Racing Moonlight
Epilogue – Something More
Turnkey (The Gaslight Volumes of Will Pocket Book 1) Page 77