Wild Boy and the Black Terror

by Rob Lloyd Jones

  “It’s the demon,” Clarissa said. “It’s Malphas.”

  It was Malphas – a twelve-foot high statue built from factory salvage. The bulk of its body was a soot-blackened furnace. Chains hung around it, like a puppet’s strings suspending the monster’s limbs. Tarpaulin wings flapped from chains that rose to the girders of the missing first floor. Its clawed hands were shards of glass, its head was rusty machinery. The blade of a scythe swayed in front of its face; a curving beak that seemed as if it might strike at any moment.

  Wild Boy reached for the door of the furnace: the demon’s chest.

  “What are you doing?” Clarissa said. “Don’t touch it.”

  “Remember Oberstein’s story about Lord Dahlquist? He had a statue of Malphas in his cave in that village in India.”

  “So?”

  “That was where he kept the Black Terror.”

  He opened the furnace door.

  Inside sat the four diamonds. Wild Boy didn’t know what he had expected. Something dazzling, perhaps, an incredible treasure. But not this. All he saw were four stones sat on a wad of dirty rags. These jewels had caused so much misery, from that village in India to here in London. And yet suddenly they seemed so plain and pathetic.

  He reached for them, when a groan echoed around the factory.

  “It’s the killer,” Clarissa said.

  Wild Boy raised the lantern, scanning the gloom. Nothing moved other than a rat scurrying between the barrels. Maybe the sound was the wind, or the factory’s metal beams moaning in the cold. Or perhaps Clarissa was right; it was the killer. They had to search the factory, but not yet. First they had an even more important task.

  “We gotta stop that poison getting over the city,” he said.

  “No!” Clarissa kicked another of the barrels. “We have to get the killer.”

  “Miss Everett.”

  Lucien strode closer, wheezing from the effort of catching up. “You are not thinking,” he said. “The killer is trying to poison London. Once he sees that he has failed, he will return. We will be waiting. So let’s get on with it.”

  They worked for several minutes, raising the barrel and disconnecting the pipe, careful to keep away from the smoke. Gradually the black fumes from the vat reduced to wisps. Then, just as the smoke disappeared altogether, they heard another groan. This time it was louder, all around them at once. It wasn’t the wind or the beams.

  “Someone else is here,” Lucien said. He took his pistol from his coat. “Split up.”

  They each took a different path, weaving between the barrels. Wild Boy’s feet slid through the sticky black liquid seeping from one of the caskets. He listened for any sound, but all he could hear was his own breathing growing deeper and faster with fear. Sliding a hand into his pocket, he flicked the cork from the syringe. His arm muscles were as tense as tightropes, ready to strike.

  Then his feet crunched on something hard and he stepped back. It was stone. Green stone.

  “Jade,” he said.

  Another groan, right in front of him. Wild Boy staggered back and slipped onto his backside. “Spencer!” he gasped.

  Oberstein’s bodyguard lay between the barrels. His chest rose and fell with deep moaning breaths as he woke from some sort of stupor. His jade mask had shattered and was scattered across the ground. A new disguise hid his face.

  A crow’s mask.

  The killer’s mask.

  “Over here!” Clarissa called. “I got him.”

  “And here!” Lucien called.

  Wild Boy slid back and scrambled up. Barging through the barrels, he rushed to Clarissa, then to Lucien. They had found the other suspects – Gideon and Dr Carew. Both men lay on the factory floor, unconscious. Both wore the same black mask as Spencer.

  “So?” Clarissa said. “Which of them’s the killer?”

  Wild Boy watched the three men, hoping he’d got the answer right. He’d been so certain back at the palace, but suddenly he’d begun to question his own deductions. He had to check, had to be sure. And there was only one way to do that.

  “Let’s wake ’em up and find out,” he said.

  36

  “I don’t know what happened.”

  Gideon reached for someone to help him up, but the help didn’t come. Wild Boy moved back a step, making it clear that he was not here to rescue anyone.

  If Gideon noticed the snub, he didn’t react. His bleary eyes rolled as he pulled off his crow mask. “We were in the wax works museum,” he said. “Someone hit me.”

  “I think I need to visit the hospital,” Dr Carew groaned.

  Dr Carew seemed the worst affected by the killer’s attack. His shattered spectacles kept slipping from his face as blood slid from the top of his head. He tried to stand, but an icicle fell from one of the girders and smashed beside his feet. He staggered back as if the sound was shotgun fire, and collapsed again to the floor.

  Only Spencer remained silent, glaring at Wild Boy through his crow mask. Behind him, the statue of Malphas writhed and jangled as the wind blowing through the factory windows swayed its chains. Its metal eyes glared down at the suspects, and its glass-shard claws flexed in anticipation of violence.

  One of these men had built that statue. That same person had struck the others in the wax works museum and brought them here. Then he’d struck himself when he heard Clarissa break in. He didn’t expect anyone to know which of them was the killer.

  He had underestimated Wild Boy.

  Wild Boy watched the killer, searching for fresh clues to confirm his deductions. But the man gave nothing away.

  “Are you certain that one of these men is involved?” Lucien said.

  “They’re all involved,” Wild Boy replied. “But only one is the killer.”

  “Now is the time to explain.”

  “This is all about what happened in that village in India sixteen years back,” Wild Boy said. “You remember that, don’t you, Gideon?”

  Gideon lit his pipe. He sucked on the end as if it contained all of the air left in the world, and breathed out a plume of smoke. “I told you, I got nothing to do with that place.”

  “No,” Wild Boy said, “you want nothing to do with it. Back at the wax museum you said that village was in south-east India, remember?”

  “So? I heard it off Oberstein.”

  “No, she said it was in south-west India. She got it wrong, and you were right. You knew where that village was. Because you’ve been there.”

  Gideon sneered. He was trying to act cool, but his hand shook so hard his pipe fell to the floor.

  Wild Boy kept talking, refusing him a chance to respond. “That passage you circled in the Bible about sin and forgiving. How quickly you loaded that pistol at Oberstein’s shop. That tattoo on your arm. You were in the army, weren’t you, Gideon? And remember when Oberstein mentioned the smell in Dahlquist’s cave? You said it was the hearts. That was no guess. You knew because you were there. You were one of the soldiers sent to fight Lord Dahlquist.”

  “You?” Clarissa said. “That means you helped burn them villagers’ bodies.”

  “You made it like they never existed,” Wild Boy said. “That’s why you’re so ashamed, reading about forgiving.”

  Dr Carew lunged at Gideon, grasped his arm. “Is this true? Dammit man, is this true?”

  “Get your hands off me!”

  Gideon shoved him back, causing the doctor to stumble into Spencer. He stood for a moment, wheezing. Then he untied his neckcloth and pulled it away. In the lamplight, a scar gleamed on his neck, a shiny ring around his throat that the cloth usually kept hidden. The scar of a man who had tried to hang himself.

  Gideon wiped his eyes with the scarf. His face relaxed, all of its usual tension easing away. “Marcus knew what happened in that village. He knew what I’d done and how much it had messed me up. He came to see me, gave me a new life, a second chance. You know that, Mr Grant.”

  Lucien’s grip tightened on the pistol. “Marcus was worried
for all of those men. It was a lot to ask of a soldier. But he never told me you were one of them. I did not know.”

  “I didn’t want anyone to know,” Gideon said, his voice cracked and weak. “I wanted to forget it. But I never could. I knew it would find me again some day.”

  “This sounds like a motive for murder,” Lucien said. “You are ruined by your past. You sought justice for those villagers, and revenge against those who profited from your misery. Is that right, Wild Boy?”

  Justice for the villagers. That was that a good motive.

  Wild Boy turned to Spencer. “What about you, masked man?”

  Spencer continued to glare at Wild Boy from behind his mask. Muscles strained at his sleeves; the veins in his neck stood taut.

  “One thing confused me about Oberstein’s story,” Wild Boy said. “How did she know so much about Dahlquist and the Black Terror?”

  “You’re right,” Clarissa agreed. “She said that the soldiers hid the evidence, but she knew every little detail. Sounded like she got the story from someone who was there. Someone in the middle of all that horror.”

  Wild Boy knew they were getting to Spencer. He could hear it in his silence, see it in the heaving of his chest.

  “How did you get them burns on your face?” he asked.

  “Burns?” Clarissa said. “Wild Boy, Oberstein said Lord Dahlquist’s body was burned, remember? But it disappeared. Spencer is Dahlquist!”

  Wild Boy had considered that, but it didn’t make sense. Why would Oberstein befriend that madman? She spoke of Dahlquist with revulsion, not respect. She saved the respect for someone else.

  “That ain’t who Spencer is,” he said. “Oberstein told us that one villager, the man who found the Black Terror, was tortured by Dahlquist. That man got help, saved the villagers. But she never said what happened to him afterwards.”

  He stepped closer to the bodyguard, holding his glare. “Did she, Sameer?”

  Spencer’s chest heaved so heavily that the seams down the side of his coat burst. But when he finally moved, his action was soft and slow. He reached up and took off his mask. His face, from chin to hairline, was ridged with welts and burns. Some were still raw, oozing pus that glistened in the lamplight.

  “It is true,” he said. “I am Sameer. Oberstein found me. She gave me a new life. She tried to help me forget the past. But how can you forget something like that?”

  “You can’t,” Gideon said. “You can’t forget it.”

  “So that is the solution,” Lucien said. “The killer is Spencer. He is Sameer, and he has killed all of the people involved with the Black Terror to seek justice for the villagers.”

  “No,” Wild Boy said. “Not for the villagers. This ain’t about them.”

  Clarissa kicked one of the barrels. “Well, who is the killer, Wild Boy? What about Dr Carew? He knows about poisons and he was in India. Maybe he was there in that village? He wants justice for them villagers an’ all.”

  Dr Carew nudged his glasses up his nose. He looked around the group through cracked, blood-smeared lenses.

  “No,” Wild Boy said. “That ain’t right neither.”

  “Dammit, Wild Boy,” Lucien said. “Do you know who is behind this or not?”

  Wild Boy was certain now. The puzzle hadn’t been about who did it, but how. How did the killer poison Prendergast, Marcus and Lady Bentick, and then Oberstein in her own showroom?

  “I only realized at Buckingham Palace,” he said. “When Lucien threw those drawings on the fire.”

  “The artist’s sketches? What have they got to do with anything?”

  Nothing. And everything. “They were ink drawings.”

  “So?”

  “Prendergast opened the Queen’s parcel and threw the wrapping on the fire. Moments later he was screaming. That wrapping only had one thing on it – an address written in black ink.

  “And then there’s that other question: Why did the killer save Clarissa at Lady Bentick’s house?” He looked at Clarissa. “Why did he slip you that note? I didn’t know. I couldn’t even study it.”

  “Cos I threw it on the fire, like it said.”

  “Exactly. You threw it on the fire, and a minute later Marcus and Lady Bentick got the terror. And in Oberstein’s shop, the guard took that card from me, the card with Malphas written on it by the killer. The guard threw it on the fire, and then Oberstein got the terror too. That card had the poison on, just like the wrapping on the parcel and the note the killer gave you at Lady Bentick’s house.”

  “It was the ink!” Clarissa said.

  “The ink,” Wild Boy said. “That was what burned. That was the poison that made the black smoke. That’s what’s in all these barrels.”

  He stepped closer to the suspects. He felt his heart racing, the pulse in his neck. “After I realized that, only one question mattered. Who had ink? Who, this whole time, carried a pot of it everywhere he went, saying he was writing notes?”

  Dr Carew stepped back. Lamplight gleamed off his broken spectacles.

  Wild Boy followed him, hoping he didn’t look as scared as he felt. “Only, you was really covering them pages in poison, weren’t you, doc? You threw them on Oberstein’s furnace, causing that smoke to come after us in the tunnel.”

  Dr Carew moved away through the hanging chains.

  “You were in India when all that evil happened,” Wild Boy said. “Only, that was sixteen years ago. You’re a young man, doc, maybe thirty? So you’d only have been fourteen back then. Oberstein said Lord Dahlquist was a family man. Had a wife. Ain’t that so, doc? He had a wife and son.”

  Dr Carew backed up against the statue of Malphas. The demon’s tarpaulin wings stretched and snapped. Its claws swung on their chains.

  “You truly are a special mind,” Dr Carew said. “You and Clarissa have solved everything.”

  “Except for why.” Lucien’s grip tightened around his pistol. “Why did you do it, Carew?”

  “Why…” Dr Carew whispered.

  He looked up at the demon statue. His face was pale and twisted, as if being pulled from different directions. “Because I am a Dahlquist,” he said. “I am my father’s son.”

  “Your father was a killer,” Gideon said.

  “You think I do not know that?” he yelled, his voice suddenly so loud it shook the chains. “I saw! I saw, just like you. I saw everything my father did in that cave. He made me watch. He forced me to watch! I lived with that memory, suffered from it like a disease. He tarnished my name. My mother, my dear beloved mother who never harmed a soul, took her own life from shame. But I would not!”

  Spencer moved closer, heavy steps shaking the barrels. He breathed so hard that his words came out in broken gasps. “If you hated your father,” he said, “then why did you not become someone better?”

  Dr Carew stared at Spencer’s face: the glistening, unhealed evidence of his father’s evil. “I tried,” he said. “God knows I tried. I trained as a doctor. I wanted to help people, to make up for his cruelty. But I could never escape him. He was always there, haunting me. I wanted to know why he did those evil things. I had to understand. So I concocted a poison that would bring him back to me. A way to speak to him.”

  “The terror,” Clarissa said.

  “Yes, my terror. I controlled the dose so it would not consume me. Just enough to see my father and talk to him. But I could not stop it. He wouldn’t go away.”

  Tears streaked down Dr Carew’s cheeks, cleaning lines through blood and sweat. “I was always so scared of him. I could never fight back.”

  “He still talks to you, doesn’t he?” Wild Boy said. “In the maze, that didn’t sound like you. It was him, talking through you.”

  “Yes, those were his words. I could see him there, standing beside me. He made me collect the stones, to reunite the Black Terror and give his demon power. He made me act out his curse. He is always with me. There is nothing I can do, just as I could do nothing all those years ago in his cave. I am too weak. I
am his Servant, as he is the demon’s.”

  The man was crazy, destroyed by his own past and drugs. But there was anguish in his face, too. Something good remained in Dr Carew. A light flickered somewhere inside.

  Wild Boy slid a hand in his pocket, felt the syringe. He remembered the royal physicians’ advice. Aim for the neck, the big vein called the jugular.

  “You can still help us stop this,” he said.

  The doctor’s eyes widened. “Yes, my blood. A cure… It could work.”

  He turned and looked at something beyond the statue, something visible only to him. “Father?” he said. “What should I do?”

  The answer, whatever it was, was short and decisive. When Dr Carew turned back, the light inside him had gone out. There was only darkness.

  He reached into the furnace and brought out the four diamonds. The jewels trembled in his hands, catching the lantern light. Their reflection beamed blackness at his twisted, pale face.

  When he spoke again his voice was soft and distant, carried away by the wind.

  “I am a Dahlquist,” he said. “It is in my blood.”

  He turned and fled.

  37

  “Clarissa! Clarissa, wait.”

  Wild Boy thrashed his arms, pushing away the chains that swung from the factory girders. He heard Clarissa cry out in pain, and fear sucked the breath from his lungs.

  Brushing back his hair, he looked up into the derelict building. Iron beams criss-crossed the dark, where the factory floors had been removed. He saw Dr Carew move across one, a tightrope walk with a deadly drop. Clarissa limped after him, chasing the killer to the narrow gantry fixed to the wall, then up a spiral staircase to the next floor of beams. It looked as if she’d sprained her ankle. Wild Boy called to her again, but if she heard she wasn’t stopping.

  Clarissa didn’t have the syringe. If she caught the killer she couldn’t get his blood for the cure. But something deeper than that scared Wild Boy. He feared what would happen if she did catch Dr Carew. Might Clarissa become a killer too?

  He ran up the stairway to the gantry fixed to the first-floor wall. To follow Clarissa he had to cross one of the beams to the next staircase. They were all barely a foot wide and gleamed with frost.