Wild Boy (17 page)

“The machine what changes you,” he whispered.

D
ownstairs in the dining hall, Clarissa sat beside a fire that smoldered in a square of bricks. Her bruises had darkened into a storm that raged down the side of her freckled face. A spot of blood seeped through the bandage she’d wrapped around her forehead. With a scrap of cloth, she scrubbed dirt from the sequins of her dress.

“You angry again?” she said, without looking up.

“No,” Wild Boy replied. “I’m tired.”

“Me too.”

He sat down beside her and pulled his coat around himself to let the fire dry it out. “You all right, then?” he asked.

Clarissa shrugged, touched her bruised neck. She wasn’t all right, Wild Boy knew that, but she wasn’t going to say so. Acting tough, that was how you got by in their world. Acting tough even if you were screaming inside.

They sat in silence for a while. It didn’t feel like awkward silence — they were both just pleased to rest and get warm. For the first time, Wild Boy realized that he was glad to have Clarissa there. But he could see how upset she was, how fragile she seemed all of a sudden. It was as if the hooded man’s attack had shattered her confidence. He tried to think of something he could say to make her feel better, but in the end it was Clarissa who broke the silence.

“Do you really think we’ll catch him?” she said.

“Course we will,” Wild Boy replied, sounding more sure than he felt.

“But you saw how tough he is,” Clarissa said. “He hardly even felt that fire on his legs.”

“He ain’t as tough as us. We’re fairgrounders, remember? You’re a circus star.”

“I know. Only . . . Only maybe the circus ain’t so great as I say.”

Wild Boy poked the fire, and sparks crackled into the dark. He realized that it had felt good talking to Sir Oswald about his past. Maybe Clarissa needed to talk about hers too. “Why’s your mother so angry at you?” he said.

Clarissa rubbed harder at her sequins. “Because I remind her of my father. Funny thing is, I look like
her.
I mean, how she used to look before he ran away. She was beautiful, you know. And the circus used to be nice too. But now she only hires crooks and thugs. The show ain’t fun no more neither, not like it was. The animals are too thin, the clowns are always drunk and fighting. I seen people walk away from it crying, not laughing.”

“Were you going to run away an’ all?”

“I dunno what I’d have done. Dunno what I’ll do now, even if we do catch the hooded man. What about you?”

Again Wild Boy thought about the machine. “I dunno either,” he said. “I reckon we’ll work it out.”

“We ain’t enemies no more, are we?”

“No. Not no more.”

“I didn’t think so. We ain’t so different really.” She stopped scrubbing her dress and looked at him, considering the hair on his face. Grinning, she reached and brushed some dirt from the hairs on his cheek. “Only, you could be cleaner. Do you
ever
wash?”

Wild Boy was surprised that he didn’t flinch back. In fact he didn’t mind her touching him. But he pushed her hand away, pretending to be annoyed. “Leave off, will you.”

“But your hair is so filthy. I use oil on mine, so it’s shiny. Look, see?”

“Yeah, I see!”

“You smell dirty too — you did even before the sewers.”

Wild Boy touched the hair on his face. He’d never really tried to look nice. He’d always thought it wasn’t possible for someone like him. But he shook the idea away. “Ain’t we meant to be talking about the killer? Let’s see that list again.”

“My list!” Clarissa said.

Wild Boy shuffled closer, and they studied the paper in the firelight.

Clarissa tapped her pencil against the page. “We need to add the new ones,” she said. “I couldn’t hear what the hooded man said at the house. Did he tell you anything useful?”

“What about?”

“This machine he’s after.”

“No,” Wild Boy said quickly. “He didn’t say nothing about it.”

She looked at him curiously, and immediately he felt bad. He didn’t know why he’d lied to her. He still thought that what the killer had said sounded ridiculous. But if it
was
true . . .

The truth was, he didn’t want Clarissa knowing how interested he was becoming in this machine. They were meant to be finding the killer, after all.

“So what should we add?” Clarissa asked.

Wild Boy thought for a moment, replaying the scenes from the Doctor’s house over in his mind, and picking out the important details. “Well, the killer can jump. That drop from the window was high. Most people would break their legs.”

“I jumped it easily.”

“But you’re an acrobat.”

Clarissa added the fact to her list. “And he can disappear,” she said.

“Eh?”

“In the alley.”

“He didn’t disappear. He just made it look that way.”

“You mean a trick?”

“What was in the alley?” Wild Boy asked.

“Boxes. The walls. Oh, and some rats. Maybe he turned into a rat.” Clarissa examined the list, as if all the answers they needed were there. “The killer is the man with the golden eyeball,” she decided. “He’s the only one in the Doctor’s painting that ain’t dead, and he had the same ring as him and the Professor. There’s that hair an’ all and the cane marks at by the Doctor’s body.”

“I only said they
looked
like cane marks.”

“What else could they be? Hobnail boots maybe?”

“Maybe,” Wild Boy agreed. He felt more alert every second they spoke about the investigation. It was as if the misery of this workhouse, that heavy black shroud, had lifted away. His thoughts became clear and focused.

There was one big clue that they’d not yet considered. “Here, give us the Doctor’s notebook,” he said.

“Don’t get so close,” Clarissa said.

“I wasn’t!”

“You just did.”

“Just give us the book, will you?”

“Here,” she said. “Lucky for us the killer dropped it.”

Wild Boy wasn’t sure it had been luck. But he could only think of one other reason why the killer would have left the book — he didn’t need it anymore. The hooded man had already seen what he needed to see.

The hairs prickled all over his body as he opened the book. Most of the pages were charred from the flames, but he could still read some of the Doctor’s writing. The notes seemed to be the results of experiments. He flicked through and read the entries.

“The machine,” Wild Boy whispered. He kept flicking.

“Look,” Clarissa said. “One of the pages is missing.”

Wild Boy held the book nearer to the fire and examined the line where the paper had been ripped out near the back. The next page was blank. “It’s a clean tear,” he said. “No smoke stains. The page got torn
after
the book was burned.”

“
I
didn’t tear it out!” Clarissa said.

“No, the killer did. There must’ve been something important on that page, some clue to finding the machine.”

“Great,” Clarissa muttered. “So the book’s useless now.”

“Nah,” Wild Boy said, getting an idea. “We just gotta look harder.”

He tugged his coat sleeve over his hand and plucked a smoldering stick from the side of the fire. Clarissa slid closer as he ran the charred end of the stick gently over the blank page at the back of the book. As the paper darkened they could just make out faint impressions from the Doctor’s pencil on the missing page. All they could see were a few words that had been written harder than the others. Wild Boy recognized the first two immediately.

“Amazing,” Clarissa said.

Wild Boy felt a strange feeling right then, a warm glow inside. It took him a few moments to realize that it was pride. He was pleased to have impressed her. But he tried not to think about it, as he rubbed the paper, teasing more words from the darkness.

“That word looks like
burned,
” Clarissa said.

“There’s another two here.”

Wild Boy held the page closer to the fire and read the ghost writing. “Looks like a name.
Mary Somerset.
”

Clarissa snatched the book, checked it herself. “Mary Somerset?”

“You know who that is?” Wild Boy said. “Maybe if we find her, we’ll find the machine, and then the killer an’ all.”

A smile flashed across Clarissa’s bruised face. She
did
know, he could tell, but she wasn’t going to say just yet. Her knees clicked as she rose from the fireside. “Well, don’t just sit there,” she said, dropping the book in Wild Boy’s lap. “We got a killer to catch.”

She crossed to the workhouse window and leaped into the night.

“Bloomin’ cow,” Wild Boy muttered. But a wide grin broke across his face too, and a familiar tingle ran through his hairs.
Mary Somerset.
Somehow Clarissa knew that name. The hunt for the hooded man — and for the machine — was back on.