Wild Boy (22 page)

A rush of wind sent an eerie howl along the corridor. Clarissa’s head pounded with pain. She wiped a trickle of blood from above her eyes. She was furious with him, but she wished he were here now. She’d stormed off in such a hurry — running past those prisoners, down one passage and another — she’d not paid any attention to where she was going. How could she get out of here without him?

Maybe there was another secret door, she thought. These Gentlemen were obsessed with them. How did Wild Boy find them? She ran a hand along the wall, prodding stones, kicking others, kicking harder in frustration.

No — she had to calm down and think. That’s what he always did.

Think!

A window!

If she could find a window, she could climb out. She was an acrobat after all — heights didn’t trouble her. She could scale any surface, balance on ledges, and jump at least thirty feet without injury, just like her father and her mother.
He
couldn’t do that!

Another few steps and she came to a door. She felt a breeze coming from underneath. There had to be a window on the other side. She was proud of that bit of thinking — better than any
he’d
have done in the circumstances. He’d have started swearing and getting angry.

She took out her picks and unlocked the door.

He couldn’t do
that
either.

The door creaked open. Murky morning light cast a window-shadow on a long mahogany table. Antique rifles and pistols hung in rows on the walls. At the other end of the table, another door was open a fraction. Clarissa considered it, but decided that the window was still her best chance of escape.

The window opened easily, and misty drizzle speckled her face. Outside, the sky was as gray as the walls that surrounded the courtyard. She could just see a stagnant pond following the curve of the wall to the other side. It looked like a moat. But this
couldn’t
be a castle, could it?

More than ever she wanted to get out of here.

The stones would be slippery but she was confident she could climb down, jump to the wall and into the moat on the other side. She turned to slide out.

And her grip tightened on the window frame.

At the other end of the room, the door slowly opened. A cloaked figure stepped from beyond.

In a rush of panic, Clarissa tried to climb from the window. But she was shaking with fear. Her grip slipped and she tumbled onto the floor beside the table. She scrambled back and bashed against the wall. She was too scared to get up, too terrified even to scream.

The hooded man towered over her.

A breeze rustled from the window, blowing the killer’s long leather shroud. The cloak flapped open — just for a second, but for long enough . . .

Clarissa stared, barely able to believe what she had seen beneath that cloak.
Who
she had seen. “No,” she breathed. “It’s
you.
”

A
flash of electricity lit one of the pipes on the Gentlemen’s machine. Marcus Bishop removed his spectacles, and the brilliant blue light glinted off his golden eyeball.

“What do you know of electricity?” he asked again.

Even through his thick hair Wild Boy felt a blast of heat. The machine towered in front of him like some giant industrial engine, almost filling the hall. Several Gentlemen rushed about its base — reading dials, inspecting fittings, and adjusting fixtures on the mechanical helmets that had been strapped to the tiger and Doctor Griffin’s corpse.

“Perhaps you observed some of Henry’s performances at the fair?” Marcus asked.

“You mean Professor Wollstonecraft?”

“Indeed. Henry pioneered our understanding of electricity.”

Electricity,
Wild Boy thought. That strange new force was at the heart of all of this. “Don’t know nothing about it,” he said. “Some clever new science.”

“Not new. Electricity is older than mankind. Indeed, electricity
is
mankind. Allow me to ask you another question. Why do
you
wish to use the machine?”

Wild Boy looked up sharply. He saw himself reflected in Marcus’s golden eye — a mess of hair and dirt, in his tatty red-and-gold coat. “Cos I’m a freak,” he said. “Cos I’m being hunted by half the city. Cos some mad killer set me up just cos I look different from other people.”

“Is that is all you see yourself as?” Marcus said. “A freak? No, I agree with Miss Everett. I do not think that is how you feel. It is, perhaps, how you felt once.”

Wild Boy remembered Clarissa’s words before she left him. “So?” he said.

“So, you have survived for days with half of London on your scent. Not only survived, but pieced together the clues that led you here, solved the mystery of your predicament, and asked several questions to which I believe you already knew the answer.”

“What of it?”

“Do you not grasp my point? A human body is flesh and bones. But a
human being
is his thoughts, memories, reason, and beliefs. All of these things, however, are simply electrical pulses shooting around the brain.”

Marcus stepped to a table that was cluttered with parts from the machine. He picked up a copper rod and touched it against a thick coil of silver wire. A blue spark zapped from the end.

“Who you are and how you think is all electricity,” he said. “Fireworks in your brain. We call it the Life Principal. You might call it the mind. Others of a more spiritual disposition call it the soul.”

The soul.
Wild Boy shuddered. “This thing sucks it out, don’t it?”

“Crudely put, but accurate. The wheels act as dynamos, channeling electricity into precise points in a subject’s cranium. It fuses with the human electricity inside the brain. Both are extracted, and then transferred into the receiver’s body.”

Marcus zapped the metal rod again. “Thus the whole individual is relocated to a new body — his thoughts, memories, reason, and beliefs.”

It changes you,
Wild Boy thought. He could still hardly believe it was possible. “But why? Why build it?”

“I will not pretend that such a device does not have certain military applications,” Marcus replied, “but can you not imagine the good it could also achieve? The sick taken from failing bodies. Cripples made to walk.” He tapped the rod against his false eyeball. “The blind to see.”

“Did Professor Wollstonecraft build it?”

“It was his design,” Marcus said. “But he was unhappy with it. He made plans to rebuild the machine, a much smaller device but even more powerful. However, Charles — Doctor Griffin — would not allow it. So Henry left our organization, taking his plans with him.”

“He joined the circus,” Wild Boy said.

The golden-eyed man smiled. “He always was an old romantic. Sadly he was also a hopeless drunk with an utter disregard for our oath of secrecy. It seems he spoke about the machine to the wrong person.”

“The hooded man,” Wild Boy said.

Marcus nodded. “Shortly after Henry left us, he was proved correct. There was an overload in one of the machine’s capacitors, and it has not functioned correctly since. We believe that the killer is using the Professor’s plans to build a machine that works. But he cannot do so without the crowns.”

“Crowns?”

Marcus raised the rod and prodded one of the mechanical helmets that hung on wires from the machine. “
Crowns,
” he said. “They are not in the Professor’s plans.”

A valve on the machine burst, blasting an angry jet of steam. The other Gentlemen rushed about as they struggled to contain the malfunction. Only Wild Boy and Marcus remained calm, watching the commotion from the side of the hall.

“I can tell you this,” said Marcus. “I have no intention whatsoever of letting you use the machine. And I do not believe that you truly wish to use it either.”

He was right. Wild Boy had known since the moment he pushed Clarissa against the wall. The look in her eyes . . . It was as if it had woken him from a daze. They were partners, and they had gotten close to unmasking the killer. Maybe they could have done it too, but he had let her down.

Marcus placed the rod back on the table. “May I ask what clues you and Miss Everett have discovered so far regarding this hooded man?”

Instinct urged Wild Boy not to tell the man anything. But he was so tired. He felt as if the clues were slipping away. He needed help. “There’s one thing I can’t make sense of,” he said. “The killer disappeared in an alley, just vanished, and he dropped the Doctor’s notebook.”

“Dropped it?”

“I thought it was because he’d already read it. Only, he couldn’t have. We were chasing him.”

Another smile flashed across Marcus’s tight face. “And this book led you here?” he asked.

“What’s so funny?” Wild Boy demanded.

“You see so much, Wild Boy, yet I fear you have been blind to the utterly obvious. Do you really believe the killer dropped that book?”

“I dunno . . .”

“Yes, you do.”

Right then, a realization shot through Wild Boy, as bright as a spark from the machine. He saw now what he’d been too lost in self-pity to notice before: not only why the killer had dropped the book, but also why his own name had been written at the crime scenes. . . .

“Of course,” he said. “Of course!”

He had been used. He’d been lured to the Doctor’s house to find the secret room. Then the killer had
deliberately
left the book in that alley, drawing his attention to the name of Saint Mary Somerset church. And there, Wild Boy had found the entrance to the tunnel. . . .

He hadn’t been set up because he was a
freak,
he realized. He’d been set up because he was
unique,
the only person who could read the clues. He’d led the hooded man straight to this machine.

Wild Boy turned, his eyes wide with panic. “He’s here,” he said. “He’s in the tunnel.”

Marcus simply tilted his head, as if to suggest the matter was dealt with. He raised a hand and showed Wild Boy the ring on his finger, the raised letter
G.
“As you know, this is a very difficult place to enter without the correct key. We are safe for now. I have sent men to —”

“No,” Wild Boy said. “He stole the Professor’s ring. He has the correct key. He’s
already
here.”

“Indeed I am,” said a voice.

The hooded man appeared on the balcony. Clarissa stood beside him, bound by a rope that pinned her arms to her sides. A rag around her mouth smothered her cries.

Beneath the killer’s hood, the white mask peered down into the hall — first at Wild Boy, then at Marcus Bishop, and finally at the machine. His muffled voice echoed around the stone walls. “At last.”

The Gentlemen reached into their coats for their weapons. But the hooded man raised a knife to Clarissa’s neck, and they hesitated.

“I have not harmed her,” the killer said. “If you wish it to remain that way, I suggest you do exactly as I say. Especially you, Wild Boy.”

Wild Boy was desperate to make a run for the stairs, to save Clarissa. But he couldn’t risk the killer using that blade. He had to think, find a way to save her.

“What?” he said. “What do you want?”

“You have proved extremely helpful to me so far,” the hooded man replied, “by finding the clues that led me here. Now I must ask one final favor.”

With his free hand, he threw a sack over the balcony. It landed on the floor by Wild Boy’s feet. “Remove the crowns from the machine and put them in that bag.”

“You swear you’ll let her go?” Wild Boy said.

“You have my word,” the hooded man replied.

Marcus Bishop stepped forward. “Do not do it,” he warned.

But there was no choice. Wild Boy didn’t care about the machine anymore — the killer could have every piece of it as long as he set Clarissa free. He grabbed the sack and ran to the mechanical helmets that hung from the machine’s pipes. He had no idea how to detach them, and no time to work it out. So he simply jumped up and tore the devices from their wires.

“Wild Boy,” Marcus insisted. “He will not release Miss Everett.”

Wild Boy barely heard him. He stuffed the crowns in the sack and rushed back across the hall. By the time he returned, a rope hung from the balcony.

“Tie the sack on,” the hooded man instructed.

Wild Boy did. As it rose, he looked up at Clarissa. She was staring at him, flashing urgent signals with her eyes and screaming into her gag. She was trying to tell him something, but he couldn’t understand.

The sack slid over the balcony.

“Now let her go!” Wild Boy demanded.

But the killer didn’t lower the knife. “Thank you,” he said. “But I am afraid you should have listened to Mr. Bishop. He was right, I have built a machine of my own. One that works. And now that I have the crowns, it is complete. But I need a subject for its trial run, and I believe Miss Everett would make a perfect candidate.”

Wild Boy didn’t look at the hooded man. He kept his eyes fixed on Clarissa. He saw tears slide down her cheeks and soak into the rag in her mouth. “I won’t let that happen,” he told her. “I’ll save you, I swear.”

She looked at him, and he saw in her eyes that she believed him. But the hooded man dragged her back into the darkness.