Turnkey (The Gaslight Volumes of Will Pocket Book 1) (61 page)

“Dear sir,” she
cooed, “I promise to keep you warmer than that beaten old rag. I'll keep you
warmer than a thousand candles, sir.”

“No,” I insisted.
“Leave it for now.”

She snorted and
somehow did so in a girlish manner. Rolling her eyes, she pushed her argument
once more.

“Sir, you'll enjoy
yourself
far
more if you'll just relax and let me—”

“I thought you
said that I was the customer.”

She bit her lip
and shrugged. “Suit yourself.” Across her noticeably boney shoulders she wore a
shawl that was nearly as weathered as my “old rag” of an overcoat. She let the
garment drop, and, shoulders bare, sat down at a small vanity. “I know this is
terribly improper,” she said, fiddling with various tubes and tins of makeup,
“but since you are warming yourself anyhow, would you permit me a moment to
prepare myself? I wasn't expecting, as I said, to find a client in my chamber.”

“By all means,” I
replied.

“Thank you.”

I smirked and
nodded. But the truth of the matter is that I should have been the one to give
thanks. This girl was, unbeknownst to her, unfolding seamlessly into my
unspoken plan. She had it, I was convinced.

She had what I was
needing, what I had come to collect. I had nothing but a rumor and my own blind
instinct to bet upon, but somehow, I knew she did.

 I watched
attentively as she glamorized herself, and with each additional coat of thick,
white face powder, she seemed to slowly transform into the more traditional
appearance of prostitute. It disappointed me slightly, to be honest, though I
cannot tell you why.

And then she went
for it, the small key that she wore at the end of a chain around her neck. I
held my breath and watched as she brought out a small lockbox that was tucked
somewhere. From it she produced a brown bottle. It was simple, dull in the
light, and a little smudged-up. That made me smile. No faerie juice tonight,
Mister Pocket. Oh, no. No bottleful of soul.

“Cheers,” I wryly
said as the girl put her lips on it and swallowed.

She winced as she
drank, shivering a little.

“Strong stuff?” I
asked.

“Bitter,” she
replied. “You'd think I'd be used to it.”

“You know, I'd
kill for a sip of that right now.”

“Sorry,” she
smiled. “This isn't normal booze.”

“Is that so?” I
said, slowly unbuttoning my coat. Lustfully, I set my eyes on the bottle.
“Laudanum?” I asked.

“Maybe,” she said,
taking another cringing gulp.

I freed the last
button on my coat and slipped my hand inside. Laudanum. Opium mixed into
liquor, in this case what smelled like whiskey. Rumor held that the local
ladies of the evening often abused the drug to put themselves into a numbing
fog, presumably to get through their night's work in a slightly more amiable
humor. It was a lousy rumor to hear, but I was glad to find it true.

Because what I
craved more than anything on that night was to be without feeling, to glide
away, and to at last find sleep. The girl kept nursing the bottle, and I
watched, getting frustrated and impatient.

“I'm sure I can
handle it,” I said. “How about it? I've got a terrible ache.”

“Mister, you let
me tend to that,” she flirted. “I've got something much better than a bottle to
make you feel good.”

“I want to feel
nothing, you stupid tart,” I grumbled to myself.

“What?”

“Just one sip.
That's all I'm—”

“Look, it's not
going to happen,” she spat, clearly tired of playing cute. “You want some? Go
find a druggist.”

My eyes fell to
the dirty floor. It lacked atmosphere. The whole, bloody scene did. So I
decided to pass on theatrics and get my point across.

“No,” I said.
“I'll be taking yours.”

“Excuse me!” the
girl proclaimed. “I don’t care how much you’re paying me. I’m not about to—”

And then she
stopped. She buckled her knees slightly and started to quiver.

“Hand me the
bottle,” I quietly said.

She did as
instructed without protest, without speaking at all. Why she decided to comply
with my request is anybody’s guess, though I’d like to think it was because at
just that moment, I had revealed the weapon I was wearing on a strap beneath my
overcoat. Yes, the same firearm Gren had stolen from the overtaken Magnate was
now resting in my weary, but steadied hands, its dirty muzzle pointed at the
whore’s pale bosom.

“Are you…are you
going to kill me?” she meekly questioned me.

“No,” I said, “I’m
not.”

“Then why…the
gun?”

“I just need a
drink.”

“Why?” The
question kept rolling from her lips in a maddening repetition. My eyes felt
literally cold, as if the blood behind them was beginning to thin.

“Because I am
tired,” I said. “Because I am broken and sore far beyond your capacity to heal.
Because I don’t have the luxury of simply walking into a druggist’s, and even
if I did, I’d rather fall dead than spend one more desperate night waiting for
its doors to open.”

The girl was
naturally confused and, despite my assurance that no harm would befall her,
still fairly frightened. She clutched a small pillow and held it like a shield
before her.

“Please,” I said,
“calm down. I didn’t want to upset you.”

“What is it that
you want from me?” she whispered, starting to tear up.

“Nothing. Not a
single, rotten thing. You were just an access to a drug, a way to her.”

“Her?”

“All I want now is
to keep this poison down, so I can lie and sleep and dream, because it’s the
only semblance of joy I can still hope to find.”

“Are you…a poet?”

“No,” I said,
putting the laudanum to my lips. “I’m a damn joke.”

I drank, and as
the vile taste of the stuff slid down my throat, I began to violently cough and
gag. Somehow I managed not to vomit, and with a sickened glaze, I cast my eyes
on the bottle I held. A simple and ugly bit of brown glass.

Like I said, this
was no night for faerie juice, and no place to find your essence under an
oversized cork.

My essence.

To Hell with it, I
thought. I took another awful drink of laudanum. It burned a fire in me, a hot,
spreading fire that seemed to be eating me from the inside out. I thought about
the turnkey girl, how her insides fell out of her when she stood pierced
against the
Lucidia’s
side. I closed my eyes and began to feel the
approaching fog of the laudanum drift over my mind. I drank until the bottle
was nearly empty, and then offered the remainder to the scared young woman.

“Go on, red
flower,” I slurred. “I told ya…I’m not here to give you any more trouble.” She
didn’t move, so to back up my words, I pulled the gun off of my shoulder and
laid it to rest against a wall. I was half-sure she’d make a move for it, but
for some reason, I put it down anyway. Things make a different kind of sense in
the fog.

We sat there for
years as I held out the bottle, and at last she took it from me and made it
empty. I nodded with a sad smile. “There you go,” I said.

And then the world
became still. Quiet. That fog spread into a swallowing storm of calm, a
contradiction I wasn’t remotely prepared to explain.

And I was at last
numb.

It’s hard for me
to convey, looking back, the emotional state the drug left with me. All I can
really muster up now are more contradictions. A cheerful melancholy? A nervous
calm? Eh, it’s not important. What matters is that I no longer ached, and I
felt like I could finally get back to sleep.

I fumbled to
retrieve the wrinkled bills I had promised the girl and awkwardly left them in
her hand.

“Thanks for
the...you know, the help,” I warbled. “Sorry again for the…well, thanks.”

I turned to leave,
and what happened next completely surprised me. I felt the girl’s scrawny
fingers grab onto my wrist. Stunned, I looked at her, into the vacant look on
her face that told me she was now swallowed up inside the same storm as I was.

“You can stay with
me awhile,” she said, “if you like.”

I didn’t know what
to say. Had she already forgotten the gun I put to her?

“I’ve already paid
you. You can drop this.”

“I like you.
You’re a little strange. You should stay awhile.”

“That’s the
laudanum talking, I’m sure. I’m going.”

“No, I’m being
sincere. You’re…there’s something…I understand why you’d want to hide away in
your dreams.”

“No, you don’t.”

“It’s pretty
common, I think, for a person not to fully understand their own life. I’ve felt
like that often.”

The young woman
was absolutely nothing to me, another passing stranger filling the space, so it
surprised me that I chose to speak such an absolute and ugly truth to her.

“That's
nothing," I had slurred. “You know what's worse than not knowing who you
are? Knowing who you aren't.”

She didn’t have
anything to say to that. She just stood quietly at attention. I sighed and
tried again to leave.

“Please stay,” she
piped up.

“Thank you,” I
replied, “but I really need to get to bed.”

“There’s a bed
here.”

“I know.” I tried
to pull away, but she held my arm tight.

“It’s warm,” she
said.

“Not interested,”
I replied. “Just let me go.”

“The ‘her’ you’re
trying to find in your dreams,” the girl said, “what’s she like?”

I held my tongue
for a moment. “Wonderful,” I then said.

“Then why do you
look so beaten?”

“Too much of a
good thing, I guess,” I said with a tired laugh. She nodded like she
understood, and then said the strangest thing of all.

“Let me be her.”

New strength found
me and I pulled my hand away. “What?”

“It’s my job to
pretend. Let me be her.”

“No.”

“Sir, if you’ll
hear me out—”

“It would do
nothing for me.”

“Look, I know I’m
just a whore to you,” she hazily spoke. “Just an unfortunate woman. A
dollymop.”

“Don’t call
yourself that!” I snapped. Anger shot a hole through my numbing fog. “Don’t you
ever use that word!”

Her dizzy face
turned red and she put her hands up in defense. “I’m sorry!”

She began to cry,
and my flash of anger melted into silly guilt.

“Hey, uh, look.
Don’t cry. I didn’t mean to yell. Here, I’ll stay a little longer. Just…I don’t
want to see any more tears.”

The girl wiped her
face with the back of her hand. “You’ve seen plenty, haven’t you?”

“Not really,” I
said, sitting down on the old bed in the chamber. “But I’ve known plenty of
times that I should have.”

She smiled and
shook her head at me.

“What?” I asked.

“You lied to me,”
she said. “You
are
a poet.”

I didn’t have an
answer. In her stupor, the girl took my hands and pulled me up.

“What are you
doing?” I warbled, trying to keep my balance.

“Dancing with
you.”

She grabbed onto
me, dipped and swayed, and pulled me around the room. The walls blurred.

“I…” I began to
say as we danced. “I don’t really…”

“Shhh,” she said.
“Don’t think. Just move with me.”

My head spun, faster
than my feet, as all of Creation whipped around me. I clung to the girl, if
only out of fear that letting go would send me plummeting from this world. She
began to hum, her throat conducting a silly orchestra for our accompaniment.

“Come on,” she
whispered in my ear. “What do you want me to be?”

My eyes rolled and
my chin bobbed. “I don’t…want anything…”

“It’s all right.
Just tell me about her.”

“I…I love her…”

“Does she love
you?”

“I don’t…I’m not
sure. I think she might, but…”

“She can love you
tonight.”

“I don’t want a
substitute.”

“Oh, but think
now, sir,” she gently spoke. “Why waste a night looking in dreams when you can
have the real thing?”

“It’s…not the
same…”

“Hush, sir. This
flesh is more real than anything you’ll find in your sleep.”

I shook my head at
her in disagreement, but I don’t think she noticed. We just kept dancing,
moving stupidly around her chamber. I was too tired to object and put up no
fight as she began speaking in a predictable performance.

“I’m so very glad
you came to see me tonight,” the whore said, attempting to mimic a woman she’d
never known. “You know how I worry about you. Are you still having dreams about
me?”

“Stop,” I
muttered, feeling increasingly limp.

“I’m so happy that
you’re here,” she continued. “I’ve wanted to confess something to you for a
long time.”

“I’m serious.
Don’t—”

“Oh, my darling.
You are in such foul spirits tonight.”

“Just stop it!” I
said, pulling away. “This is…this isn’t working.”

She tried very
desperately to continue our dance. She tried to hang on to my body, and in my
weakened state, I lost my balance. Falling backward, I grasped for her
shoulder, but clutched her hair by mistake.

It came with me to
the floor.

“I’m sorry!” I
heard the girl say as I lay there. “Are you all right?”

I blinked and looked
at what was resting in my hand.

“A wig?” I
mumbled. The straight, red locks were indeed bound and sewn together. They were
false, and I let them fall from my fingers to the ground. False. That conniving
madame hadn’t sold me a red flower at all. She just painted up a few stale, old
petals. I looked up at the girl and saw her true hair, short, curled, blondish
tresses stinking of rosemary. Her playact of the Doll now seemed all the more
blasphemous.

“Here, let me help
you up,” she started.
I shoved her hand away. Dismayed, she backed up from me and continued to
apologize.