Wild Boy (20 page)

Wild Boy couldn’t see a handle or lock — just a tiny curling crack, no bigger than the curve of a penny, right in the center of the door.

“There’s no keyhole nowhere,” Clarissa said. “I can’t open it.”

Wild Boy ran a finger over the crack, studying it curiously. There were tiny scratches around the edges, as if something metal had knocked against it. “I think . . . I think
this
is the keyhole,” he said.

“Don’t look like none I’ve ever seen.”

“No. It looks like a letter. . . .”

He brought out Doctor Griffin’s ring and ran a fingertip over its raised letter
G.
Was it possible?

Clarissa turned, staring down the tunnel. “What was that?” she hissed.

“What?”

“I heard something behind us.”

There it was again — footsteps splashing closer. A dark shape cut through the cobwebs.

“Wild Boy!” Clarissa said. “It’s him, the hooded man!”

“Throw them rocks!”

“What?”

“Slow him down!”

Clarissa grabbed a rock from the ground and hurled it into the dark, then another and another. “He’s still coming!”

Wild Boy didn’t look back. He had to concentrate. He hoped he’d gotten this right. . . . He slid the ring over his finger and pressed it against the crack in the door. The raised letter
G
slotted perfectly into the thin groove. “It fits!” he said.

“Open it, then!”

Behind, the footsteps quickened into a run.

Wild Boy turned the ring. Immediately the iron door began to tremble. He heard the whir of cogs turning inside, and then the
clunk, thunk
of a lock sliding.

“Got it!” he cried.

He shoved the door open and they tumbled through.

Just as they slammed it shut again, something thumped against its other side. Wild Boy and Clarissa heaved against the iron slab, struggling to keep it closed. But slowly, the door began to open.

“Push!”

“I am pushing!”

A gloved hand reached through and grasped Clarissa’s hair. She screamed, and Wild Boy leaped up and bit hard into the hand’s thumb. It shot back, but the door opened wider.

Wild Boy looked over his shoulder, searching for anything to use as a weapon. He saw a torch crackling on a wall. “Hold the door!” he cried.

Leaving Clarissa, he ran to the wall and snatched the torch from its bracket. Its iron handle scorched the hair on his wrist, but he held on tight as he rushed back to the door. He braced himself to stab the fire at whoever was on the other side. . . .

But whoever it was, was gone.

Clarissa finally closed the door and turned her pick in the lock. “It’s sealed.”

They leaned against it, their breaths coming in ragged gasps.

“That was him,” Clarissa said. “That must have been the hooded man. But the golden-eyed man was
ahead
of us.”

Wild Boy nodded, still struggling to breathe.

“That means he’s not the killer. So who is?” She took the torch and raised it against the dark. “And where are we now?”

W
ild Boy turned, taking in their new surroundings. They were in another passage, but it was very different to the rough stone tunnel they’d just passed through. The arched walls were smooth and carved at the top with faces of angels. Suits of armor stood along their sides, shimmering in the glare of fire torches that burned in iron brackets. In one direction was another metal door. In the other, a stone staircase spiraled up into the dark.

“Maybe we should get the police,” Clarissa said. “Tell them that the killer’s in that tunnel. They could catch him.”

There was no way Wild Boy was going to the police. He didn’t think they’d believe him even if he turned up with the hooded man wrapped in ribbons. “No,” he said. “The golden-eyed man will help us. He was after the killer an’ all. It’s him we gotta find.”

But that wasn’t the only reason he wanted to find that man. The golden-eyed man was clearly in charge of the Gentlemen, and the Gentlemen had the machine. It was close, Wild Boy was sure.

“So which way did he go?” Clarissa said.

Wild Boy took another torch from the wall and swept the light around the ground. The Gentlemen carrying the crate had left heavy footprints in the dust near the iron door. But he couldn’t see any marks from the golden-eyed man’s cane.

He turned. At the bottom of the stairs, another torch was missing from its bracket. He moved toward it, his eyes raking the floor for fresh clues.

“This way,” he said.

Clarissa followed him up the corkscrew passage. Their torches flickered, and shadows writhed on the walls. Distant noises drifted down the twisting staircase — the murmur of voices, and a buzzing like a swarm of bees.

And then, from behind them, a loud
clank.

“That sounded like the tunnel door,” Clarissa said.

They listened for a moment, but the only sounds were those voices, and the buzzing, and the quickening of their own breaths.

“You scared?” Clarissa whispered.

Wild Boy nodded. Blooming right he was. But he was also more determined than ever to find out what was happening here. His torch spluttered and fizzed. Raising the smoky light, he continued up the stairs — one step at a time, stopping, listening, moving on.

They came to a sliver of window, no wider than an arrow loop. Eager to get his bearings, Wild Boy peered through. What he saw made no sense. They were high up now, looking out across a patchwork of rooftops that spread toward the Thames. Below was a cobbled courtyard surrounded by high walls, round stone bastions, and spiked iron gates. A clutter of buildings hugged the wall — a stone chapel, a brick bungalow, and wooden stables. Ravens hopped around the cobbles, pecking for scraps.

“Looks like we’re in . . .
a castle,
” Wild Boy said.

“We can’t be. There ain’t no castles in London.”

There was one, Wild Boy knew, but they couldn’t be
there.

The ravens flapped away as another top-hatted Gentleman wheeled a wooden cart from one of the stables, carrying something large covered in a cloth. As the cart rattled on the cobbles, the cloth slipped and Wild Boy caught a glimpse of the object beneath. It was only a brief glance but he was sure he saw a furry amber paw.

“A
tiger
?” Clarissa said.

Wild Boy remembered the remains of the experiments in Doctor Griffin’s secret room — tests on human body parts and animals. “Let’s keep going,” he said.

The stairs ended in a vaulted corridor with rusty doors set into the walls. Wild Boy stood up on tiptoes to peer through a small barred hatch in one of the doors. The room inside was dark and dingy. There was an iron truckle bed against a wall, a bare table, and a broken bucket oozing excrement.

“Looks like a gaol cell,” he said.

Clarissa elbowed him aside to see. “Another horrid room,” she said. “Why do these Gentlemen always —”

A face burst into the hatch. Clarissa screamed, but before she could step back a hand shot through and grabbed her neck. A prisoner’s face leered between the bars — bloodshot eyes, boils, and insect bites.

“
Kill me,
” he hissed.

Wild Boy dropped his torch and punched the man’s hand. “Get off her!” he yelled. “Get your hands off her!”

The prisoner let go, and Wild Boy and Clarissa tumbled back against the wall.

“You all right?” Wild Boy said, helping her stand.

Clarissa nodded, but she didn’t look all right. Her face had turned as white as snow as she stared at the cell door. The prisoner had slumped against the other side, and they could hear him thumping the wall and sobbing. Wild Boy remembered Doctor Griffin’s journal, and the graves at Saint Mary Somerset. Was this man another “subject” for the Gentlemen’s machine?

“Let’s get out of here,” Clarissa said.

She tugged Wild Boy’s arm, pulling him along the corridor. They hurried past more locked doors, heard prisoners muttering inside the cells.

Clarissa stopped. “Wrong way,” she said.

The corridor ended at a stone balcony that overlooked some sort of hall. That was where the noises were coming from — the buzzing and the voices. The air here was hazy and smelled of smoke.

“How do we get out?” Clarissa said. “I don’t wanna be here no more. We should get the police, tell them what’s happening.”

Wild Boy knew she was right. But he had to see. He had to know if it was true.
The machine what changes you. . . .

As he moved toward the balcony, a burst of blue light caught him in terrified silhouette.

Clarissa shielded her eyes. “What was that? Wild Boy, come back!”

Her protests were drowned by the noise from the hall, like angry insects all around them. Another flash of light shot along the corridor, but this time Wild Boy didn’t flinch. He didn’t even blink. He just stared into the stone hall.

Rising in front of him was the machine.

I
t looked like a metal brain.

A great knot of twisting pipes, grinding cogs, and spinning dials. As big as a fairground caravan, it hung on an axle between two silver wheels. Each wheel was the size of a water mill, and held up by a towering industrial piston that rose and fell with a spit of steam and a slow
vrump, vrump, vrump.
In the middle, the metal brain trembled and buzzed.

The machine was coming to life.

Wild Boy gripped the edge of the balcony. Everything that had happened to him in the past week had been because of this machine. This was what the hooded man was trying to find. This was why the Professor and the Doctor had been killed.

As the machine’s pistons pumped, its wheels turned. Crackles of blue light fizzed from the rims, shot along the axles, and disappeared inside the metal ball.

Clarissa gripped Wild Boy’s arm. “What
is
that?”

“It’s electricity,” Wild Boy said. “It’s filling with electricity.”

In the hall below, men in frock coats rushed around the base of the pistons, tightening screws and reading dials. Shaded spectacles protected their eyes from the light as electrical fire shot from the giant wheels and into the tangle of pipes.

The crate that the men had carried from the church lay open and empty on the hall floor. Its cargo was strapped to a table beneath the machine.

It was the body of Doctor Griffin.

The Doctor’s whiskers remained bushy and vibrant, but the face beneath them had turned gray with decay. A chunk of rotten flesh had peeled from its nose, exposing glistening white bone beneath.

Bound to the table beside the corpse was the tiger. Judging from the heavy rise and fall of its chest, the animal had been drugged.

“What are they doing?” Clarissa said. “What are they doing to that poor tiger?”

Both the tiger and the Doctor had mechanical devices fixed to their heads — steel helmets with cogs and springs around the brim, and copper rods sticking from the top. Wires rose in tight lines from the rods and up to the ball of machinery above, connecting the tiger and the corpse to the machine.

“Wild Boy,” Clarissa said, tugging his sleeve. “Let’s get the police. . . .”

But her words were lost to the
vrump, vrump, vrump
of the pistons. All around the machine, crackles of light gathered into angry balls of blue fire, swirling together.

The heat singed the hairs on Wild Boy’s face. The noise — a buzz, then a hum, and then a pulsing drone — throbbed inside his skull. Clarissa curled up beside him and covered her head. But Wild Boy forced himself to watch, even though it felt like his eyes were being stabbed with hot needles.

All around the hall, torches fell from their brackets and fizzled out. The light from the machine filled the whole space, so bright that the walls and the balcony shone brilliant blue.

Vrump, vrump, vrump . . .

Still the wheels turned faster.

Vrump, vrump, vrump . . .

Still the pipes grew brighter.

Even in shaded spectacles, the men struggled against the light. One of them shielded his face and stepped closer to the table. He reached up and gripped a lever on the tiger’s helmet.

Vrump, vrump, vrump . . .