Turnkey (The Gaslight Volumes of Will Pocket Book 1) (57 page)

I felt ill.

Minutes passed,
maybe hours. I don’t know. I just sat and thought for awhile, thoroughly
frustrated and lonely. After avoiding the moment for far too long, I followed
the
Prospero’s
trail until I was rejoined with what was left of the
steam car.

The front of the
carriage was completely wrecked, smashed into a pair of gnarled, thick-bottomed
trees. Shiny parts littered the ground, and with a sigh, I placed a finger
against one of the propellers, its pole now hanging completely bent at the
side, and spun its small blades. The back of the
Prospero
was sitting
slightly lifted, its rear wheels floating above the ground.

Then a thought
struck me and I jumped onto the rear of the broken carriage, feverishly clawing
at the backseat. I returned to the earth disheartened, clutching a beaten box
and wand.

The Watchmaker’s
Doll’s toy, the quaint little bubblemaker made out of her own insides, was now
noticeably bent and knotted. I dropped to my knees, feeling like I would weep
yet completely unable to do so. I ran my hand along the device. Even in such a
small way, I thought, I couldn’t keep the girl I love safe. I offered a silent
apology to the toy, and turned the crank. Incredibly, a single, pink, soap
bubble appeared and floated over my head into the sky.

I smirked. Then I
smiled. Then I laughed. Perhaps the Doll was of tougher stuff that I had given
her credit for. As if serving to reawaken my resolve, a ringing of church bells
flowed to me from the distance.

I was near the
city, I remembered.

And just maybe, it
wasn’t too late to act.

Tucking the toy
under my arm, I left the
Prospero
and hurried through the brush, lifting
my feet toward the city lights. I hoped to God that Gren knew where he had been
driving us.

Gren.

My thoughts shot
back to that flash of an image I had seen in my escape, of the swarm of
soldiers descending upon my fallen friend. He was surely in their custody now,
if they hadn’t shot him on sight.

I’m sorry, Gren.

Anger swelled up
within me. Damn it, Spader! Why couldn’t you have just stayed behind on the
Lucidia
like I told you to?!? Damn him! And damn Kitt for sending us out on this
stupid chase in the first place! Damn them both! And damn myself for that
matter, standing foolishly by and letting all of this come to pass! Damn this
whole, filthy, ugly…

I stopped myself
and tried to calm down. Losing my temper would do nothing but hinder me now. I
had to keep progressing forward. It was all I could do.

Eventually I came
to a stretch of cobblestone that led into the back of a pork processing
factory. I traced the length of the building and crossed over to an adjacent
alleyway squeezed between a strip of shops. The rise of familiar, urban chatter
told me I was back into the city.

Welcome home,
Mister Pocket.

“Surprisingly
easy, eh Pocket? After all of that madness and gunfire, no barricade, no patrol
around the pork plant? Seems odd.”

“Maybe the Magnates
are bred with noses too tender and sophisticated for such ‘earthly’ smells.
Maybe, unlike me, they cared whether or not their clothing took on the smell of
hog’s fat.”

“Hmph. Seems like
it would fit them.”

I moved through
the city surprisingly easily for a wanted man, shooing away citizens claiming
to the “somewhat familiar” nature of my face and sustaining myself with the
bills I was given from the investors’ ball heist. Still, I wasn’t comfortable
or foolish enough to get within speaking distance of any royal official, no
matter how oblivious they may have seen.

There was one
moment when I thought I may have been spotted. I was rounding a corner when I
came face to face with my own likeness pasted upon a wall amidst other wanted
individuals. A bony-armed old woman stopped upon seeing me. Slowly her eyes
bounced back and forth from the posters to yours truly. I grinned innocently at
the woman, trying to cover my nerves. I could nearly hear the old lady’s mind
turning, working, trying to make the connection. Fortunately, her thought
process was interrupted before it could come to fruition, as a postman appeared
and covered the wall with a fresh batch of criminal portraits. The one that
covered mine did not even contain a face, just a crude sketch of a man in a
round, latticed diver’s helmet with a caption that read “Ken Atlantic, of the
Sea Gypsies.” The old lady chewed on her teeth for a moment, staring at me, and
finally shrugged the matter away and scuttled off. I let out a breath of
relief.

“Thanks, Sea
Gypsy,” I whispered to the poster, “whoever the hell you are.”

I rented a room.

A dusty, dingy
hole of a room.

But my renter was
an ask-no-questions kind of bloke, so I raised no complaints. Besides, I wasn’t
planning on a lengthy stay. I remember sitting on that bumpy rock of a
mattress, kicking my heels on the floorboards. The great shine of the Red
Priest’s golden boots made a horrible contrast with the place, and they seemed
to me suddenly ridiculous. Even my renter, discreet as he was, raised a brow at
them, the pile of progress’s scraps clad to an unfitting pair of skinny legs.

I spent the rest
of the day in that room, trying to put together a plan of action. The
realization struck me that this was the first time in awhile that I was truly
alone, free from the noise and clatter and shouting of this bizarre escapade,
and the silence quickly annoyed me. In the evening, rain fell outside of my one
grimy window. I took out one of the Frenchman’s remaining cigarettes. As I put
my lips to it, a bitter thought rose in my brain.

“Is this why?” I
muttered to the lonely room, cigarette hanging out over my shadow. “Smoke in
the rain, find a little magic? Was that my failure?”

The rain against
the window provided my only conversation.

“Had I made it
work, gotten a flicker in a downpour, would I be somewhere better?”

The cigarette
slipped from my mouth and fell. I caught and clutched it with my left hand.

“Or someone
better?”

The rain fell
harder. I rose from the stone bed and looked out at the drenched London. An
empty smile crossed my face.

“So what if I try
it now?” I whispered. “I’m under the rain. Sure, there’s a roof between it and
me, but what’s that but a technicality? Maybe I could still squeeze a little
magic out. Hell, maybe that’s all magic is. Just a well-spun technicality.”

I rummaged through
my pockets, then through the room. There was no match to be found. I cried a
mournful laugh, slapping my hands together, and shoved the cigarette back into
the depths of my coat.

“Oh, well played,
Frenchman!” I howled. “Not about to let a cheat slip by in your little game,
eh? Well played, indeed!”

I laughed until I
wept, or I wept until I laughed. One of the two.

Evening became
night and I tried in vain to sleep. The hours passed, the blurry moon bending
the shadows of my possessions, which I had left scattered carelessly on the
floor. The stone I lay upon grew more and more rigid as the clock clicked
forward. Not that it mattered. I could have been resting on the most
luxuriously-crafted bed in existence. My mind was not going to offer me any
rest. My thoughts plagued me, conjuring up images of Dolly and Kitt and Gren
before sending them drifting off to melt into a grand, crashing nothing. So
what was left then? Me? I was beginning to question just who was the lost in
this damned chase, them or me.

Just before
daylight, I finally passed out from sheer exhaustion, sprawled haphazardly on
the mattress in my worn trousers and stained, half-buttoned shirt. A dead sleep
took me over. I remember a soft-edged darkness, not so much a dream as the
performing space a dream would typically occupy.

And then I heard a
voice.

“Mister Pocket?”
it softly said. “Can you hear me?”

I felt myself gasp
and in the dark I could suddenly discern my own hands, my own feet.

My voice.

“Dolly!” I
shouted. “Is that you?”

“Mister Pocket,”
she spoke. “You have to focus to make it work.”

“Make
what
work?!?
Where are you?” I hurried in a panic through the emptiness, swatting with my
arms. “I can’t see a thing!”

“Please focus.”

“Where are you?”

“Please…”

“Damn it, I’m
trying! But I can’t see my way through this!”

Frustrated, I
stomped my foot hard against whatever constituted the bottom of that blackness.
Where my heel connected, a spark popped, and from that spot, a shaking road of
ruby-colored glass appeared and began to flow like water into the distance.

“Come to me,” I
heard the Doll say.

“This is glass.
It’ll shatter.”

“Please…I want you
to.”

“Dolly—“

“I’m scared!”

“All right!
Just…okay, just give me a moment.”

I stepped onto the
translucent path. It felt…cold. I could feel myself curling my toes. As I did,
small points of light appeared above me, seemingly lighting my way.

“Are you still
there?” I heard the Doll ask.

“Yeah,” I called
back. “Yeah, Doll. I’m here. I’m coming.”

I walked, my eyes
on the glass beneath me. There was a blurry silhouette under my red road, and
as I traveled, the shape slowly formed into my reflection. I looked tired.

“Over here,” the
Doll spoke.

I glanced up. And
nearly fell off of the path. In the distance, where the glass ended, I saw her.

The Doll.

She was just
standing there, head hanging low, hands clasped. I wanted to shout something to
her, something encouraging, but every word that came to me seemed so pointless.
Instead I ran, creating cracks below as I moved toward her. When I nearly
reached her, she lifted her eyes, and the glow that they cast shattered the
remaining path between us.

“Dolly!” I gasped,
teetering on the edge of a broken road in my lonely sleep. I stared into the
gap between the girl and me, the dipping hole.

“Hang on!” I said
to her, assessing the situation.

“There’s something
between us,” the Doll quietly said.

“There’s nothing
between us,” I argued. “Just a hole.”

“A hole is
something.”

“It’s
just…emptiness…”

“And that is a
very big something.”

I frowned. She
matched it and looked apologetically away.

“It doesn’t
matter,” she continued. “I’m not real, anyway.”

“How…” I
whispered, angry and clenching a shaky fist. “How can you dare to say something
like that when all I’ve done is try and try and
try
to make you feel as
completely human as—”

“No,” she
interrupted. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Then what?”

“I’m not real
where I stand. Nor are you.”

“What?”

“Haven’t you
figured it out yet?” the Doll said to me. “You’re dreaming again.”

The boundaries of
this void began to shrink. I again looked down the hole that separated us. I
closed my eyes and lifted a foot.

“Stop!” Dolly
exclaimed. “What are you doing?!?”

“If I’m dreaming,
then I’m dreaming,” I said. “But that doesn’t make us any less real.”

“Please, don’t!
You’ll fall away from me! I don’t want to be alone!”

“If this is my
dream, then it’s mine to control. I’m coming to you.”

“Please! If you
fall, you’ll probably wake, and we’ll be separated again!”

“I won’t fall.”

“Don’t!”

I stepped into the
gap. The Doll surprised me by leaping forward to push me back, and in doing so,
dropped in my place.

“Dolly!” I
shouted, swinging my hand to grab hers.

Our fingers
brushed.

And that was all.

She closed her
eyes as she fell away from me, sinking into the empty chasm like it was a body
of water.

“No!” I yelled.
The ruby glass began breaking into pieces. And up from the abyss came a great
swell, an arcing splash of clock gears that spewed high and then rained down
upon me.

One fell into my
hand. It was shaped much like a heart. The teeth that bordered the gear were a
deep red. And embossed upon the piece were two words.

GUTSPLITTER FOXLEY

I awoke in a deep
sweat, lying face-up on the cluttered floor.

“Gutsplitter
Foxley?”

“That’s right.”

“Strange, the
things we conjure in our dreams, eh?”

“Sure. Unless…”

“Unless what,
Pocket?”

“Unless I took the
words as more.”

“More?”

“Than just simple
dream-speak. That’d make me, what? Crazy, right?”

“Well…it would
seem to point in that direction. I mean, what further meaning could you derive
from such random, unfitting words?”

“I’ll tell you.”

The Gutsplitter,
I knew, was a “refreshment parlor” of sorts located in one of the slummier
areas of the city. Fortunately, so was the room I had rented. As I stood before
the establishment, I took a tense breath and entered. It was reek with booze
and decorated with unfriendly eyes. The Gutsplitter
wasn’t a legal pub,
as the rumors went, but rather a place of opportunity for any soul wanting to
stay out of the daylight to get a drink or whatever else he might need. It was
a draped curtain behind Alexander’s great window of a city, a refuge for the
forsaken. Hearsay put forward that it fronted an opium den or possibly a
brothel. I didn’t care to sort out the truth.

“You looking for
something?” a double-chinned potboy asked me.

I was standing in
a haze, unsure of how to proceed.

“Foxley,” I
uttered. “I’m…uh…looking for Foxley.”

“Foxley?”

“I think so.”

“Oh,” the man
said. “Yeah. Foxley, sure. Hang on a tick.”