Turnkey (The Gaslight Volumes of Will Pocket Book 1) (87 page)

“They're trying to
force their way, aren't they?” Gren asked, not raising his head from the stack
of hymnals.

“Certainly appears
so,” I frowned. “Don't worry though. The grenadiers who barred us in here were
pretty thorough when they closed shop.”

I watched uneasily
as the men outside banged against the barricaded entrance.

“Won't last long,”
Gren glumly stated, taking a deep breath. “You have to move fast now, Pocket.”

I stood from my
seat and clenched my fists.

“It's been a
taxing night, Gren,” I said, walking to where he was sprawled, “so I'm going to
give you one chance to rework that sentence and change that 'you' into a 'we.'”

“Stop babbling,”
Gren quietly responded, turning his eyes away from me. Gone was the usual,
combative young man I was accustomed to. Instead, he just shrugged his
shoulders and spoke uncommonly softly.

“You've got one
chance left to reach the Doll,” he said in a hush. “You take it.”

I couldn't believe
the implication. “Gren...” I said, “I would never...”

The so-called
bulletproof gambler surprised me, lifting his tired body up onto his feet.

“Hey,” I started,
“come on. Don't stir. You need your re—”

He slugged me, and
an immobilizing burn spread across my cheek. I could only stare at him, stunned
and without the ability to speak.

“Stop wasting your
breath, Will,” he uttered, shaking his head. “Help me move this thing.”

He limped to the
heavy confessional, and began pushing his body against it. The borrowed
crucifix tumbled out of the path, and fantastically, the iron box slid a bit. I
studied my friend and then studied the side doorway he was leading the
confessional toward. The look in Gren's eyes was something that—forgive me,
audience—I am unable to recreate in simple words. There was almost a
strange…comfort…about him.

“Would you hurry
up, already?!?” he coughed.

I couldn't argue.
I don't know why. Maybe I'm more selfish than I ever let on, but I couldn't say
one word against him. So silently, I joined Gren at the side of the iron box
and helped him push, onward and onward, until it nearly covered the archway
that led to the cathedral’s inner stairwell.

“Thanks,” my
partner gruffly said. “I can take it from here.”

“Gr...Gren...” I
managed at last, “Are you sure about this?”

“Up the stairs,”
he responded. “That's your last shot. I'll hold off the dogs for as long as I
can.”

Again, I wanted so
much to argue, but I couldn’t. My stomach turned over.

“Go on,” Gren
said, as both thunder and the outside poundings grew in volume. “Hurry.”

I nodded sadly and
patted his shoulder.

“I'll be seeing
you, all right?” I murmured.

“Sure,” he said.
“Sure, you will, Pocket.”

I turned my eyes
to the dark doorway ahead. With my heart in my throat, I began to move.

“Hey, hold on,”
Gren said from behind me.

I turned in
confusion and saw him limping away down the main aisle. He picked up something
I had left behind and carried it over to me. That heavy lump in the sling. I
tried not to sigh.

“Before you go
sulking up to the roof,” Gren said, dropping it into my hands, “you should at
least remember to collect your toys.”

I frowned, rubbing
my fingers on the clothed weight with little more than indifference.

“I don't know,
Gren,” I exhaled. “I don't think an old cannonball's gunna give me much help at
this point.”

My friend took a
step back and raised his eyebrows.

“Cannonball?” he
said, confused. “Pocket...what...is that what you think is in that sack?”

I looked down at
the dull heaviness that I held. I squeezed my eyes at it. And then, holding my
breath, I loosened the rope and let the brown cloth slip away.

I couldn't feel my
heartbeat.

“Gren...” I
breathed, paling, “…this is...”

“Yeah,” he said.
“I know.”

“H-how? How did
you get your hands on this?”

“After you
deserted me, I didn't have a lot to do but walk the town. Day after you vanished,
I found a group of beggars banging it against a stone wall.”

I half-laughed.

And half-cried.

“Couldn't get into
it, could they?” I smiled, running my thumb over the familiar glass beneath the
rough coating. It was smooth and cold as I ran my hand down its slick curves.

“They chewed off
the tag,” Gren said, “but otherwise, no. That’s as far as they got.”

“That’s all right.
I’ve given up on selling it, anyway.”

I swirled the mess
in the glass. My sloppy soul swashing about in all of its lack of glory. The
juice of the faeries. Stupid, unnecessary nonsense.

It felt good to
hold it again.

“I’m glad. Better
shared than sold,” Gren weakly said, pushing his voice out of his body. “One of
these days, Pocket, you come find me, and we’ll have a few drinks out of it.”

“Soon as I figure
how, right?”

He nodded. “Soon
as you figure how.”

My eyes brought
their bloodshot gaze up from the glass bottle toward the altar before me. It
was backed by tall curtains, and from one I took a once-golden length of velvet
rope, now stained and mottled by the great fight, and threaded it through my
bottle’s glass handle. Tying the velvet together into a loop, I threw my
fashioned sling over my aching shoulder and felt the bottle bobble against my
thigh.

Exhausted and
drained of color as he was, Gren made a wry smile at my pose.

“Feel good to have
your spirit back on ya, Pocket?”

“Actually, Gren,”
I sighed, “it’s putting a bit of a strain on me.”

He weakly punched
me in the arm and pushed me toward the stairwell. I nodded and squeezed myself
through the thin, remaining crack between the entryway and the makeshift
obstruction. Once I was on the other side, I stood silent and waited for my
friend to finish the act. With a sour grunt, Gren again shoved the confessional
over the passage like a stone before a tomb. 

“A strain, huh?”
Gren repeated to me when there was no more than a sliver of open air between
us. “Of course. That’s how ya know it’s still there.”

Clunk! The iron
box shuffled into its final place of rest, and I was left alone, no company
except stairs, no place to walk except up.

“So long, Spader,”
I said to the floor.

I turned and
lifted myself onto the first step. Steadying my weak posture with the handrail,
I took one long, heavy moment and then began climbing.

I climbed for what
seemed like hours, the empty plodding of my feet on the steps echoing in the
dim space. The Bluebird Abbey, I soon learned, was gruelingly tall to traverse.
The stairwell spiraled up to floor after floor, and I climbed forever, passing
levels of the church that split off into the abbey’s housing quarters, where
the nuns who pitied my Dolly made their home. I didn’t pause my climb to
explore these rooms and corridors, but as I passed each floor, I found no sign
or sound of anything human.

The sisters, like
the clergy of the altar below, were noticeably missing. The Magnates must’ve
run them all out when they first arrived.

Thunder rumbled
outside and seemed to wrap around the church’s thick walls.

Better than me
finding their bodies, I suppose.

I continued
upward, dragging my weight and my bottle along. You may have noticed, dear
reader, that in this incredibly hostile and dangerous situation, I opted not to
take a weapon from the bottom of the church with me as I climbed. As to why I
didn’t make such an obvious choice for my own security, well, I’m not sure. I
can offer plenty of excuses…I was too weary to focus the sights of a weapon, I
wanted to leave the wounded Gren with as much firepower as possible…but the
truth of it is…I really don’t know. If I had to wager a guess, I’d have to say
that I was simply tired of them, tired of the aesthetic and the smell of the
powder.

I grimaced as I
walked, my already-mounting fatigue growing stronger. I battled on, fighting
the very bands of muscle in my body. But the stairs seemed endless, and with
each ascending step, a little drip of willpower would sink from my head and
drain out through my toes. I could no longer hear anything that may have been
transpiring below, and I couldn’t decide whether to attribute that silence to
the climb, the breaking down of my body, or my ears’ refusal to pick up any
distant sound in fear of listening in on Gren’s demise.

No. I couldn’t
think about anything like that, or else it might come to be. A child’s resolve,
but damn fitting. I kept moving and kept breaking down, as Eddie would say,
piece by piece. I soon grew lightheaded and delirious. The steps fuzzed around
the edges and I started questioning if they were even really there. Exhaustion
started choking my neck, and I could barely breathe through its grip. Looking
down, I saw that the steps were more than fuzzy now. They were completely
washing away, and I began to wonder if I was only moving through an extended
delusion. Maybe all of this, this madcap run against daylight, was little more
than a passing thought in my mind, a momentary hesitation in a watchmaker’s
basement. Maybe I was still down in that little room I’d awoken in. I
remembered the stairs I had perched upon before returning to the surface of the
city. Maybe those were truly the steps I felt beneath my heels. Was I still
down there, still anxiously looking up at the door in the ceiling? Was this
whole night a fleeting “what if” bred in the head of an overcautious coward?
Maybe, I pondered, exhaling thin breaths against the handrail, this is what
happens when a boy’s sanity falls and cracks over the surface of his
imagination.

I let my knees
buckle down as I wrestled with that possibility, but after knocking one softly
against my bottle of juice, I conceded that I was more than likely not
delusional, so I continued upward.

The next pain I
felt was one both instantly familiar and uncommonly absent from the night so
far.

Hunger. Deep, deep
hunger.

I gritted my teeth
as my stomach squeezed itself into rope and reminded me that entire days had
passed since my last meal. I wasn’t sure why it hadn’t reminded me sooner, and
in that moment I blamed it on the faerie juice. Regaining my essence may’ve
very well restored appetite and lust along with it, and I began to wonder if I
would’ve been better off leaving the green behind.

I snorted away
such qualms and stretched my shoulders out. I had lived through so much this
night, and was not about to be done in by a lack of nourishment. Starvation be
damned, I declared to myself, climbing with stronger, pronounced stomps. I am
not so weak to be thus defeated.

Five steps later,
I crumbled down and moaned at another sharpness in my belly.

“God help me, I’m
hungry,” I spoke out.

“You too?”

Every speck of my
skin prickled at the unexpected voice, and I almost sneezed out my ghost.

The voice came
from a very small alcove on the above floor. I moved off of the stairwell
towards the source of the sound. It was a terribly littered area. Broken glass.
I nearly cut my foot on a piece. Scattered staples of the church. Bibles and
candlesticks and such. I assumed that the alcove was being used as a place of
storage for these items. Drops of blood. Which I’d been finding so many places
lately that it didn’t even seem unusual in my presence. And the centerpiece of
this great turbulent scene, the breaker of the glass, the giver of the blood,
the source of the other voice, lay outstretched before a shattered mural.

“Hi Pocket,” the
voice said.

I knelt at the
young man’s side and watched his chest desperately rise and fall, as if it
forgot exactly how it was supposed to accomplish the feat of breathing.

“Hi Kitt,” I said.

The troublesome
little cutpurse grinned at me then hid his eyes behind his lids. He looked so
unfamiliar there, his head bare and bereft of his beastly ears. I know this
will sound like dramatic posturing, silly, storyteller talk, but without his
cap, he really seemed like he’d been scalped and robbed of his vulpine nature,
his magic.

But he was still
Kitt.

“You look
terrible,” he said, reopening his eyes and blinking at me.

I scowled and
plopped back against a wall to rest. “You aren’t a picture of health yourself,”
I grumbled.

He gave me a sad
smile and looked away. “I know.”

I sighed. “Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about
it.”

I noticed the
severed length of rope was still tightly knotted to his ankle, so I removed it
for him. A deep, red mark crusted with blood was left on the skin.

“Thanks,” he said,
stretching his foot. “That was really bothering me.”

“I can imagine
so,” I nodded, taking a deep breath. “Kitt…are you…are you dying?” He laughed a
little too hard at that, and it annoyed me. “What?” I sneered.

“You say such big
and dramatic things. Even when they’re appropriate, they just sound so funny to
hear.”

“Hmph,” I frowned.

“Don’t get mad,”
he said, his split lips again making a smile. “It’s good to be dramatic and
silly.”

I closed my eyes
with a reluctant smile and shook my head. “I guess so,” I replied. “Bastard.”

He laughed and I
laughed. We chuckled until we coughed, which was far too early.

“You’ve got your
bottle back,” Kitt said.

I looked at the
faer—the absinthe—and shrugged.

“Believe it or
not, it came back after me.”

“I believe it,” he
said. “Pocket, I’m sorry.”

“Look, we’re far
past—”

“For taking your
bottle in the snow. And, yeah, everything else, but the bottle. You should know
something. I really wasn’t concerned with whether or not you’d have it back. In
fact, I probably would’ve just left it lying around somewhere when I was done
with it. I didn’t expect for you to follow after me.”