Turnkey (The Gaslight Volumes of Will Pocket Book 1) (91 page)

“…”

“Alan?”

“...”

“Sigh. Looks like
you just solved my problem for me. I guess I kept you up too late, after all.
Oh, well. Sleep soundly, then. As soundly as you can in a place like this.
Here, I’ll slide Miss Hatter’s music box beside you. It’ll give you a sweet
sound to wake to.  I’ll just…let myself out…now. All right. Goodnight,
Alan. Or rather, good morning.”

“…”

“I should be
leaving now.”

“…snore…”

“So, why aren’t
I?”

“…sn-snore…”

 “What’s
stopping me, Alan? Why aren’t my feet walking to the door?”

“…hmph-sn-snore!”

“Maybe you’re
right. Maybe I just can’t bear to leave a story unfinished.”

“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. 

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