Turnkey (The Gaslight Volumes of Will Pocket Book 1) (86 page)

“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
behind 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.