Wild Boy and the Black Terror (3 page)

2

T
he floorboards creaked under Wild Boy’s feet, sounding like a moaning ghost.

Clarissa glanced back and scowled. “Can’t you be a tiny bit sneaky? This is a spying mission.”

“I
am
being sneaky. See, I’m on tiptoes.”

“I’ve heard sneakier railway trains.”

“Shut your head. You’re being loud an’ all.”

He was lying and they both knew it. Wild Boy was certain he’d traced her steps down the stairs. How did she move so silently, even in boots? It was as if she was floating.

He raised a foot, determined his next step would be silent. Just as he set it down, footsteps thundered along the corridor below.

Wild Boy and Clarissa pressed against the wall. The men from the courtyard marched past the stairs, carrying their wooden crate. A lantern rested on top, rocking light around the corridor below.

“Quick,” Wild Boy whispered.

They leaped down the last few steps and ran along a hallway. The windows were leaded and frosted, letting in only murky moonlight. Woollen tapestries sagged from the weight of their own dust.

Wild Boy remembered how surprised he’d been the first time he saw the inside of the palace. Everything was so shabby. After the Gentlemen’s last headquarters, the Tower of London, were partly destroyed by fire, Queen Victoria granted them this palace as a new base. They had kept only a few of the most trusted staff, and barely a handful of its dozens of rooms remained in a condition that anyone might call palatial. Stucco decorations on the ceilings were black from lamp smoke, and peeling paper revealed walls that glistened with damp.

“Come on,” Clarissa said.

They ran faster, turning a corner in time to see a door slam and hear the
clunk-thunk
of a lock turning on the other side.

“Can you open this?” Wild Boy said.

“Course I can.”

Clarissa pulled a slim leather pouch from her boot and flipped it open. Inside were several thin metal picks. She’d learned another skill at the circus, from her father. He’d been a star there too –
an escape artist
.

She studied the lock, selected two picks and slid them into the keyhole. A twist. A turn. The door creaked open.

No light shone through. The only sounds were their own heavy breathing and thumping hearts.

Wild Boy pushed the door wider, revealing a room that might once have been elegant but was now musty and dusty and falling apart. Suits of armour stood along a wall, splotched with rust and clothed with cobwebs. There were a grandfather clock, a grand piano and a fire that looked like it hadn’t brought warmth or light to the room in decades.

Otherwise the room was empty.

The Gentlemen had vanished.

Wild Boy looked at Clarissa, and his smile grew wider. Just because there were no doors didn’t mean there were
really
no doors.

“Your turn,” Clarissa said.

He began a slow walk around the room. His heart settled and his breaths deepened, rustling the hair on his chin. His eyes began to move, taking in every inch of the wood-panelled walls, the faded carpet, the clock and the armoured knights.

A thrill ran through the hair on his back, like a crackle of electricity. It was that feeling he got when he stopped looking and started
seeing
.

This was what
he
did best.

For most of his life, Wild Boy had been locked up alone, first in the workhouse and then the freak show, watching the world through gaps in curtains or cracks in caravan walls. He’d studied people, wishing he had their lives. He learned to read their stories from tiny details he spotted on their faces or clothes. Hardly anyone passed without some scar or stain or tear or tick that revealed who they were or where they were going. His eyes homed in on each clue, and his mind instinctively processed its meaning. Magic happened in his head.

Clarissa leaned against one of the wall panels, pretending to look bored. “Get on with it then,” she said.

Wild Boy moved faster around the room. He pressed a palm against one panel, leaned in and smelled another. He stepped up to one of the suits of armour, ran a hairy fingertip over its metal arm and then peered into its open visor.

“You found it yet?” Clarissa said.

“Eh?”

“The secret door. You found one yet?”

“Oh. No.”

“What? You’re meant to be a great detective!”

“No, I mean I didn’t find
one
. Found four.”

He didn’t want to show off, but he couldn’t help it. Back at the fairground he’d kept his detective skills a secret, in case they made him even more of a freak. Now they made him proud.

“The first hidden door is easy,” he said. “That wall panel there opens. See the carpet? It’s worn down where people have climbed through. And there are small scratches on the panel next to it, where it slides open.”

“I don’t see any scratches.”

“They’re
very
small.”

“So how does it open?”

Wild Boy rushed to one of the suits of armour. “See this feller? Why’s his face mask thing up when all the others got theirs down?”

Rising to tiptoes, he slid the visor down.

A hollow
thunk
came from inside one of the walls, then the rattle and jangle of a chain somewhere in the ceiling. The wooden panel slid sideways. A stale breeze rustled from the darkness beyond. The first secret door.

Clarissa’s eyes lit up. Wild Boy knew she loved watching him use his skills as much as he enjoyed her acrobatics. But she would never show it.

“All right,” she said. “What clue shows a second door?”

“Something we can hear.”

“I can’t hear nothing.”

“Exactly. This grandfather clock. Why ain’t it ticking?”

“Ain’t been wound.”

“No. See these wax drops on the floor? They’re about five hours old, I’d say. Someone’s been here today, right by this clock. And look at the hands. Stopped exactly on midnight. Funny, that. The hour hand’s all rusted, hasn’t moved in months. But the minute hand is nice and shiny.”

He turned the minute hand a full circle, round and back to midnight.

Another
thunk
. Another jangle.

He stepped away as the clock scraped forward. Behind it was a narrow entrance to a tunnel.

“Brilliant!” Clarissa said. “I mean … what about the third door?”

“That’s the fireplace. Turns in the middle. There’s frost on the inside of the chimney, so it ain’t been used, and soot marks in a half-circle on the carpet from where it swings.”

“Well, that ain’t a door then, that’s a hatch.”

“All right, so three and a half doors.”

“Three and a
hatch
. Anyhow, which did the Gentlemen go down?”

“They took the fourth door. Another one of these wall panels opens. Can’t see no scratch marks on it, so it probably swings. Only, I ain’t sure how.”

Wild Boy continued around the room, his big eyes searching for that last clue. He stopped at the grand piano, his eyes drawn to something on the keys. He wasn’t certain what he’d seen yet; sometimes his instinct worked like that. He just knew that something was strange here. Brushing hair from around his eyes, he leaned closer.

There
.

All of the piano keys were coated with dust, apart from one.

“So which other wall panel opens?” Clarissa said.

Wild Boy looked up and grinned. “The one you’re leaning on.”

He hit the piano key. There was a loud
dong
. The panel swung open and Clarissa tumbled through.

She jumped up on the other side, brushing dust from her coat. “I knew that,” she said.

Tingling with excitement, Wild Boy followed her along a narrow passage, towards murmuring voices. Clarissa glanced back, her expression asking if it was safe to continue.

All that time Wild Boy had spent spying on people at fairgrounds had trained his ears as well as his eyes. He could distinguish the rattles of particular carriage wheels, the barks of different dogs, the smallest sprinkle of an accent in a distant voice. Right then he knew that the voices ahead were muffled by another door, at least half a foot thick. They were safe to continue.

The passage led to a windowless chamber.

“A laboratory,” Clarissa said.

Chemicals fizzed in racks of test tubes. A rat cowered in a cage. On another table, a selection of headgear had been modified into weapons: a soldier’s bearskin rigged with dynamite, a coal-scuttle bonnet concealing a brace of pistols, and a stovepipe hat fixed with tubes to release gas from its crown. They were lethal weapons, designed to kill. But Wild Boy couldn’t help smiling. There was nothing he loved better than snooping and spying with Clarissa.

Light leaked into the laboratory around the frame of a larger, six-panelled door on the opposite wall. Wild Boy crouched by it and peered through a gap. Several Gentlemen were gathered around a table, studying the contents of the crate – a wooden box with a glass lens jutting from the side and metal plates rising from the top.

The men smoked cigars and sipped from crystal glasses. They seemed to be one group, but Wild Boy knew that wasn’t quite the case. There were the two sides to the Gentlemen: military men and scientists. Outdoors, the military men wore black hats and the scientists wore grey, but even indoors it wasn’t hard to tell which was which. Those who had been in the army – the Black Hats – were exceedingly proud of their bushy side-whiskers. Most of the Grey Hat scientists kept their whiskers trimmed in case of accidents during experiments, and their skin was pasty and pale from long days cooped up in laboratories.

None of the fifty or so Gentlemen lived at the palace. Most just came here to work, experimenting with technologies, spying on other governments and whatever other shady activities went on in these secret chambers.

One of the Grey Hats pulled a lamp closer to the device on the table. “We stole this technology from the French,” he said. “An inventor named Daguerre. This box captures images – real images. They’re called daguerreotypes, or photographs.”

“Impossible,” said one of the Black Hats.

“No, it’s quite extraordinary. The device uses iodine crystals to form a light sensitive copper—”

“It is an interesting trick,” interrupted another Black Hat.

The man who stepped through the cigar smoke looked like an antique. His skin was the colour of cigar ash, and grey whiskers hung from saggy jowls. A layer of dust – dandruff, really – coated the shoulders of his frock coat. His eyes, though, were dark and sharp and fiercely alive. They glared at the other Gentlemen with such intensity that all of the men shifted back from the table.

Lucien Grant
, Wild Boy thought.

He’d spied on enough of these secret meetings to know that Lucien was one of the most powerful figures among the Gentlemen, a retired army general and leader of the Black Hat military men.

Lucien retrieved a silver snuff tin from his coat pocket. His jowls wobbled as he snorted a pinch of the powder up his nose. When he spoke again his voice was as deep as a double bass.

“I cannot imagine any use for such a toy,” he said. “We are soldiers and spies, not artists.”

“But we are
scientists
t
oo,” protested one of the Grey Hats.

“Yes, of course. Sometimes I forget.”

“Perhaps we could discuss this device with the Principal?”

Lucien scoffed. Dandruff sprinkled from his shoulders. “I hardly think this would interest the Principal.”

The Principal
. Wild Boy had heard the Gentlemen use that name before, and always with the same note of fear. He didn’t think the person was their leader. As far as he was aware, the Principal never came to the palace.

“It is my information that the Principal intends to come to the palace,” one of the men said.

A thrill ran through Wild Boy’s hair. This sounded interesting.

“Your information is as good as mine,” Lucien replied. “All I know is that we must assemble in the Tapestry Room tomorrow morning.”

Wild Boy grinned, already looking forward to spying on that particular meeting. But what he heard next wiped the smile from his face.

“I have heard the meeting is about the children.”