Wild Boy

by Rob Lloyd Jones

  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.

  It 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 . . .

  Another man cried, “Now!”

  The rods in the helmet shot down. Over the drone of the machine, Wild Boy heard the tiger wake and roar as the metal spikes drove into its head. Streams of electrical fire shot from the ball of pipes and blasted into the poor cat’s brain. The tiger shook. More and more blue light rushed into its body until the whole animal glowed.

  Clarissa shot up and screamed, “Stop! Stop it!”

  There was a loud whoomp and the light cut out.

  The pistons hissed. The wheels ground to a halt. The tiger gave a feeble whimper and slumped back to the table. />
  The tiger did not move.

  The machine stood still.

  The hall was silent and dark.

  Wild Boy heard Clarissa’s breathing going even faster than his own. He touched her arm and she flinched. “What happened?” she said. “What did they just do?”

  Down in the hall, a flash of orange light broke the dark as the men relit the torches. One of them edged closer to the tiger and placed a stethoscope cautiously to its side.

  “The cat?” another of the men asked.

  “Dead.”

  “And the Doctor?”

  The man put his stethoscope to the corpse. Then he stepped back.

  Wild Boy’s fingers tightened around the edge of the balcony. “Did you see that?” he gasped.

  “What?” Clarissa said.

  Now she saw it too.

  One of the Doctor’s hands moved. His gray fingers strained at the straps, curling like claws.

  “His eyes,” Wild Boy said. “Look at his eyes!”

  The Doctor’s eyes had opened. Blazing with ferocity, they glared at the men around him. His lips peeled back and he bared his teeth like fangs. A growl rose from his throat — a feral, savage growl that snarled around the hall, causing the men to leap back in fright.

  The Doctor slumped back to the table. His legs and arms began to shake.

  “The Principal’s not fixed!” one of the men cried. “Secure it! Morphine!”

  The others grappled frantically with the convulsing body, but they were too late. The corpse had stopped moving. Its head lolled. Doctor Griffin was dead again.

  One of the men removed his spectacles. “Bring another animal,” he said. “Tell Marcus we are not ready for further human trials.”

  Clarissa dragged Wild Boy away from the balcony, her face as pale as the corpse. “Doctor Griffin . . .” she said. “That machine brought him back to life. But he sounded like . . . like . . .”

  “Like the tiger,” Wild Boy said.

  “He became the tiger?”

  Wild Boy gazed into the hall as a spark of electricity crackled over one of the wheels and then fizzled out. Even though he had seen it with his own eyes, he could barely believe it. The machine didn’t seem to work, but it existed. And the Doctor’s notes said it had worked, it could work.

  He and Clarissa had hoped to save themselves by catching the killer, but Wild Boy couldn’t put the clues together. Instead, wasn’t this machine a better way out — a machine that changes you, transferring your mind into a different body. If he was no longer a freak, he wouldn’t be hunted. He could live a normal life.

  His eyes glinted in the machine’s brilliant sparks. “It is possible,” he said.

  Clarissa’s tongue flicked over her broken tooth. “What is possible?”

  “The machine. I could use it on myself.”

  “What? Are you insane?”

  The idea thrilled Wild Boy but scared him too. He closed his eyes, trying to stop his head from spinning. “The Doctor said it could work.”

  “But it doesn’t!” Clarissa spat. “You saw what just happened. This is dangerous, Wild Boy! These people are dangerous. Catching the killer, that’s how we’re going to get out of this.”

  “But what if they can make the machine work? What if they could really make it change people?”

  “We don’t need it, though. We can still catch the hooded man. We’re partners, remember?”

  Wild Boy was so confused, so tired. Clarissa kept saying they were partners, but it wasn’t that simple. She was normal and he was a freak. But he could change; he could be like everyone else.

  “Wild Boy,” Clarissa said, “you seen what that electricity does. It goes into people’s brains. What if you never think the same way again? What if you lose your skill?”

  “I don’t care. . . .”

  “Yes, you do!” She stepped closer and shoved him furiously in the chest. “I seen how it makes you feel. I seen it in your eyes and your smile when you’re using it. It’s like how I feel when I’m up on the high wire. Nothing else matters, not my mother or my father or nothing in the world. I’m proud of what I am, and you should be too. That skill is what makes you you.”

  “No!” Wild Boy said. He grabbed the thick hair on his face and pulled it angrily. “This is what makes me me.”

  “You don’t think that,” Clarissa insisted. “Not no more, not after all this.”

  Part of him knew she was right. But all that time he’d spent watching people, this was what he’d dreamed of — a chance to be normal.

  “I gotta try, Clarissa.”

  Clarissa jabbed him again. Her freckles flared with anger. “Well, you use the machine, then. See if it kills you. I’m gonna catch the killer myself. And when I do, I ain’t gonna tell no one that you’re innocent, so they’ll still think you’re a monster.”

  “Shut your head!”

  “No! And even if the machine does work, it won’t save you, cos you’ll always be mean and a thickhead!”

  Before Wild Boy could stop himself, he shoved her back. A sharp crack rang out as her head hit the wall. Clarissa slumped down and clutched the back of her skull. Blood trickled between her fingers.

  Wild Boy stepped closer, shaking. What had he done? “I’m sorry,” he said. “Don’t you understand? I don’t wanna be Wild Boy no more.”

  She looked up. Tears slid down her cheeks. “I liked Wild Boy.”

  He thought she was going to scream at him. He wanted her to scream at him. But instead she rose and staggered away down the corridor.

  “Wait,” Wild Boy called. “Clarissa, it ain’t safe here.”

  “Let her go,” a voice said.

  Wild Boy whirled around in fright. He recognized that cold steel voice.

  The man with the golden eyeball stepped from the shadows. “You are right,” he said. “It is not safe here at all.”

  “The famous Wild Boy of London. We meet again.”

  The man with the golden eyeball limped closer, leaning heavily on his cane. He wore the same shaded spectacles as his colleagues in the hall. The dark lenses gleamed as, beyond the balcony, another crackle of electricity lit the towering wheels of the machine.

  He extended a hand. “It is a pleasure.”

  The fog in Wild Boy’s head cleared, and his mind came into sharp focus. He considered making a run for it, but he knew the man had a sword in his cane, as well as a pistol in his coat. He wouldn’t be able to escape. He had to fight. He’d go to shake his hand, but instead kick his knee and shove him back.

  “No doubt,” the man said, “you are considering an attack. I wonder, have you already established your method of escape? There is a secret door just yards from where you stand. Had you observed?”

  “I bloomin’ seen it.”

  “Indeed.” The man stepped aside, gesturing with a sweep of his cane. “Then you are free to leave.”

  Wild Boy didn’t move.

  “It is no trick,” the man said. “You have my word that you will not be harmed.”

  “Your word don’t mean nothing to me! Who the hell are you?”

  “My name is Marcus Bishop.”

  “Never heard of you!”

  “But you have been following me.”

  The man struck the flint on a lantern. The light made him wince. He lowered the shutter to a dim glow and raised it against the wall. “I wonder,” he said. “Have you also detected which stone triggers the door?”

  Even though he had, Wild Boy stayed silent. He knew that if the man had wanted to kill him, he would have done so already. But that didn’t mean he trusted him.

  “I imagine that you have many questions,” said the golden-eyed man. He pressed the end of his cane against one of the stones, and a slab of wall scraped away, exposing a dark passage beyond. “I will endeavor to answer as many as I can. In return, I simply ask that you walk with me.”

  “I ain’t going nowhere with you.”

  “Then farewell, Wild Boy. It really was a pleasure.” />
  The man’s coat fluttered as he disappeared into the secret passage.

  Wild Boy stood alone, stunned. Part of him wanted to turn and run. But still he wanted answers — about the murders and about the machine.

  He crept through the narrow entrance and peered down another twisting stairway. The golden-eyed man stood a few steps below, his lantern flooding the passage with light. He knew Wild Boy would follow.

  “Be careful,” he said.

  He set off again, his silver hair brushing the ceiling of the low passage.

  Wild Boy moved faster, catching up. “Where are we?” he demanded.

  “You know where we are.”

  “The Tower of London.”

  “Correct. Specifically we are in the White Tower, the castle’s keep.”

  “You can’t just do what you want in the Tower of London.”

  “Yes, we can.”

  The stairs led to a wider corridor, with swords and shields displayed on the walls. Wild Boy stopped, looked back and forth, then followed again. The golden-eyed man — Marcus Bishop — didn’t slow down.

  “Who are you?” Wild Boy said. “You and them other blokes?”

  “We have no official name. Those aware of our existence simply refer to us as the Gentlemen. We work for the government.”

  “What government?”

  “Your government.”

  “I ain’t got no blasted government. What are you lot? Scientists, like the Professor?”

  The man paused for a moment, selecting his words carefully. “Some of us. We are experts in various fields — science, medicine, military, espionage. We study new technologies and assist the police in matters that are beyond their powers and abilities. One might describe us simply as a society of concerned individuals.”

  “Concerned about what?”

  “Britain. Its security, prosperity, survival. You are a citizen of the largest empire the world has ever known. Such power is not acquired only by good manners.”

  “I seen your good manners,” Wild Boy said. “I seen them prisoners you got locked up. You’re gonna use the machine on them once you got it working.”