Wild Boy

by Rob Lloyd Jones

  Wild Boy grasped Clarissa’s arm as she helped him stand. His wounded shoulder bled onto his coat, his hair was scorched, and his lip was bloody. But it wasn’t pain he felt — it was anger.

  “I never asked for your help!” he yelled at the killer. “I don’t owe you nothing!”

  The hooded man looked back. The fire lit his white mask bloodred. “Soon, Wild Boy,” he said, “you will owe me everything.”

  In a smash and a shower of glass, he jumped through the window.

  Wild Boy charged after the killer. The hairs crackled all over his body as he pulled his coat up over his head and burst through the flames. He leaped into the secret chamber and rushed to the broken window, certain that he’d see the hooded man lying injured in the yard below.

  “No!” he yelled, slamming his hand against the wall.

  The killer was gone. Wild Boy didn’t understand — it was twenty feet down. How could he have jumped that without breaking his legs?

  “Wild Boy!” Clarissa yelled, climbing into the chamber. “The police!”

  More officers appeared in the museum doorway, shielding their faces against the blaze. Through the fire they saw their fallen colleague on the floor, and Wild Boy and Clarissa in the secret room. “It’s him!” one of the officers yelled. “It’s the Wild Boy of London!”

  “It’s both of ‘em!” another said. “I claim the reward!”

  “Go!” Wild Boy cried, urging Clarissa through the window.

  She climbed through and jumped. The drop was no problem for her, even onto stone. She landed in a roll, sprang up, and set off running down the alley. “Hurry!” she called. “I see the killer!”

  “Clarissa, wait!”

  Wild Boy clambered out onto the ledge. For a moment he feared he might slip. He pressed himself back against the wall. He wasn’t an acrobat — he couldn’t jump this.

  The police were getting closer.

  Jump, he thought. Jump!

  His coat snapped through the fog as he fell. He landed on top of the outhouse, but his feet plunged through as the shed collapsed. Pain roared from his injured shoulder as he crash-landed in the broken wood.

  “There! There! He’s down there!”

  Policemen’s truncheons thwacked onto the ground. Wild Boy rose and staggered to the alley. He saw Clarissa in the distance and went after her as fast as he could. His side throbbed from the impact of the cabinet, but fear and adrenaline kept him moving as he followed her across the street and into another alley.

  And then he stopped.

  Clarissa leaned against the alley wall, breathing hard. “I nearly caught him,” she said.

  The alley ended in a wall that was as high as those on either side. A couple of rats scurried over a pile of crates.

  “Where’d he go?” Wild Boy said.

  “He came down here,” Clarissa said. She kicked one of the crates over, as if she expected to find the killer beneath. All she saw was cobbles. “But he disappeared.”

  “Wrong alley,” Wild Boy said.

  “No, it ain’t!” Clarissa snapped. “I said he disappeared! Look!”

  On the ground beside the crates lay Doctor Griffin’s journal, still smoking from the fire. “He must have dropped it,” Clarissa said, snatching it up.

  That confused Wild Boy even more. The killer had gone to such lengths to steal that book, and . . . “He dropped it?” he said.

  “Yeah, and he disappeared,” said Clarissa firmly. She ran to the end of the alley and looked out into the street. “Coppers!”

  The police officers stumbled from the Doctor’s house, coughing on smoke. One of them saw Clarissa and blasted a shrill warning from his whistle.

  “Run!” Wild Boy cried.

  He followed her, praying there was another drain they could crawl into, a way back into hiding. But there were none.

  Clarissa threw an arm around his back to help him run. But they were too slow. The police were now thirty yards away. Now twenty.

  “They’re catching up!” Clarissa said. “What do we do?”

  And then — a crack, a cry. “Ya!”

  Several police officers dived aside as a carriage burst through the fog, jolting over potholes in the road.

  “Master Wild! Miss Everett!”

  Sir Oswald sat in the driver’s perch, the stumps of his thighs tucked under a strap. He lashed the horses harder. “Ha-ha! Old Ozzie’s got your backs!”

  Clarissa leaped onto the footplate and swung open the door. She leaned from the carriage as it clattered forward, calling to Wild Boy. “Gimme your hand!”

  One of the policemen charged up behind Wild Boy and tried to grab his coat, but Wild Boy gripped Clarissa’s hand and she hauled him up into the carriage. Sir Oswald thrashed the reins and they raced away along the street.

  Wild Boy tumbled into the footwell beneath the seats, breathing hard. Clarissa glared down at him. Her face was bruised, her coat was burned and speckled with broken glass, and her eyes were raw from the preserving fluid. She dropped Doctor Griffin’s journal to the carriage floor.

  “I hope this was worth it,” she said.

  They rode east through the waking city, as the last wisps of fog peeled from the houses, and dawn blazed across the sky, scattering the cobbles with gold. Tired-looking figures emerged from doorways, buttoning waistcoats and stretching stiff limbs. Some of them stopped to watch a poster-boy plaster new signs to a wall, demanding the capture of the Wild Boy of London and the Fairground Fiend Clarissa Everett. The price on their heads had risen.

  Wild Boy curled up tighter in the carriage footwell. He didn’t know where he was headed and he didn’t especially care. For now, he was happy to let Sir Oswald carry them to safety. Everything hurt — his shoulder, his side, his jaw, his teeth. Each time the carriage rattled over a pothole it felt like someone was punching his head.

  Clarissa lay across the carriage seats, her coat draped over her like a blanket. The hooded man’s attack had left a sunset of bruises across her face. Wild Boy kept thinking how close she’d come to death. Just seconds away, the squeeze of a hand . . .

  And for what?

  Doctor Griffin’s journal sat beside him in the footwell. He knew there would be clues in it to help catch the killer, but he couldn’t bring himself to look. He wanted a few minutes to close his eyes, to think about anything else. But it was impossible. His mind was now occupied by just one thing — what the killer had said at the Doctor’s house.

  “The machine what changes you,” Wild Boy whispered.

  The hooded man had claimed the machine could make him normal, like everybody else. Could such a device really exist?

  The carriage shuddered to a stop.

  “We are here,” Sir Oswald said as he swung from the driver’s perch. “It is safe for now. But hurry.”

  Wild Boy slid across the footwell and poked his head from the door. They’d arrived near the river, where a rickety wharf buzzed with the activity of a market. Grizzled watermen hauled barrels of brandy and crates of fish from decks to dock. They were much too busy to notice this carriage parked at the far side of the wharf.

  A gust of wind swished off the river, but that wasn’t why Wild Boy shivered. He climbed from the carriage and stared at a dark building that rose beyond the wharf. It was a miserable building, abandoned and left to rot by the riverside. Every window was smashed, and crows perched like gargoyles on their crumbling ledges.

  For a moment Wild Boy forgot all about being seen. He didn’t even notice the racket of the market, or the sewagey reek of the river. Right then the only thing in his world was that building.

  A drum began to beat inside him. He whirled around and yelled at Sir Oswald. “Why did you bring us here?”

  A shadow fell across Sir Oswald’s face. “The circus and showmen are camped in a warehouse on the other side of the wharf,” he said. “This building is deserted. It seemed like a good place to hide.”

  “No! You don’t know what this place is.”

 
“I do, Master Wild. And I know how you must feel. But you cannot stay outside any longer. It is too dangerous.”

  He was right, Wild Boy knew. They were lucky they’d not been noticed already. Part of him felt that he’d rather be caught than hide in there. But after all he’d been through, he couldn’t just give up. He pulled his coat tighter around him and led the way to the dark building.

  Clarissa climbed from the carriage, watching curiously. “Sir Oswald?” she said. “What is that place?”

  “My dear, that is the workhouse where Master Wild grew up.”

  The workhouse. His workhouse.

  As he looked up at the ugly block of bricks, Wild Boy’s insides twisted with dread. He leaned against the wall, trying to fight back the painful memories that flooded his mind. But it was no use; there were too many. This was the place where he’d been abandoned as a baby, where he’d spent eight miserable years until Augustus Finch had taken him away.

  It was a coincidence, he knew. The fair had camped in a warehouse near the docks while they prepared for Bartholomew Fair in the city. But still, he felt as if the building had dragged him back, to remind him of what he was.

  As if he could ever forget.

  He climbed through one of the broken windows and gazed around the empty brick shell. The building was derelict, but it hadn’t been much more cheerful when he’d lived here — the same bare walls, the same bleak cold. Only the table had disappeared, and the stench of rotten food was now replaced by a powerful reek of damp and stale urine.

  Clarissa clambered inside and glanced anxiously around the room, as if she half expected someone to leap from the musty darkness. Seeing that they were alone, she looked at Wild Boy and bit her lip. “Is it true?” she asked softly. “That you lived here?”

  “This was the dining hall,” Wild Boy said. “Where the other boys ate.”

  “Not you, though?”

  “No. Not me.”

  He walked out of the hall and up the stairs. With each creak in the floorboards he remembered another beating from Master Bledlow. He could almost hear the chants of the other boys echoing around the moldering walls — Mon-ster! Mon-ster! At the top of the stairs, the door still bore that mocking charcoal sign. WILD ANIMAL! BEWARE!

  He breathed in deeply, trying to fight the emotions that were overwhelming him. Don’t cry, he told himself. Don’t you dare cry. He’d spent eight years here refusing to cry, never giving them the satisfaction. He was desperate not to now.

  He pushed the door open and stepped inside. Memories hit him like a punch to the stomach, knocking the breath from his body. He gripped the door as his legs buckled.

  “No!” he gasped. “Please . . . don’t . . .”

  But he couldn’t help it. He slumped to the floor as tears stung his eyes and soaked into the hairs on his face. He’d tried so hard not to feel sorry for himself, to always act tough. But there had been times in this room when he’d felt so lonely he’d thought he might die. He remembered sitting in the dark listening to the other boys laughing, and how all he wanted in the world was a friend. But he’d known they were laughing at him. Every single person in this building had hated him because of how he looked. And, now, every person in the city did too.

  Something moved.

  He looked up, wiping tears and snot from his face. A crow sat on the window ledge, watching him through the broken glass with unblinking eyes. Its loud caw rang around the room like a shriek of laughter. Wild Boy remembered how it seemed that even the birds used to mock his misery.

  The crow flapped away as Wild Boy picked himself up and stepped to the window. Outside was still the same view — a sliver of street in one direction, the river in the other, and the busy docks below. His view.

  The floorboards creaked. Wild Boy turned, his hands tightening into fists. Suddenly he was that eight-year-old boy again, terrified of whoever came into this room.

  But it was only Sir Oswald, sitting in the doorway on the stumps of his missing legs. He removed his hat and smoothed back his salt-and-pepper hair, as if he were visiting a grieving widow. “I am sorry, Master Wild,” he said. “This was the only safe place I could think to keep you.”

  “What happened to it?” Wild Boy asked.

  Sir Oswald came closer, his upper body swinging between his arms. “I made some inquiries. The workhouse closed down over a year ago. The master in charge met with an accident.”

  “Accident?”

  “He fell into the river. Drowned.”

  Wild Boy turned. He hated Master Bledlow and had dreamed for three years of getting revenge on him. But he’d never wished him dead. He felt deflated, empty.

  “The other boys,” Sir Oswald said, “were mostly placed in families or on apprenticeships.”

  “Lucky them,” Wild Boy muttered.

  He remembered all the visitors who had come to this room, and how his heart had surged with the hope that they would take him away. But they never had — they’d just paid Bledlow to see the freak. And then that night, the night the showman came. Wild Boy had thought that, finally, he was embarking on some sort of new life. But nothing had really changed — the bullies had just gotten more dangerous.

  “Master Wild,” Sir Oswald said. “I am sure that you have nothing but dark memories of this place. But think of it like this — without it you would never have developed your skill.”

  “Skill?”

  “The way you see things. . . .”

  “It’s just looking, Sir Oswald.”

  “Well then, no one else can look the way you do. It is a rare talent, Master Wild, whether you accept it or not. You must use it to save yourself and Miss Everett. She tells me that the killer is still after some sort of machine, something to do with electricity.”

  Wild Boy considered his reflection in the broken window, a monstrous mess of tangled hair, filth from the sewers, blood, and dried preserving fluid. Even his eyes had lost their sparkle. “Sir Oswald,” he said. “The killer said the machine can change a person, change how they look. Do you think that’s true?”

  Sir Oswald thought about this for a moment. “I am hardly an expert on such matters, Master Wild. But I once spoke with Professor Wollstonecraft about electricity. He told me that it was an extraordinary power, capable of incredible things. So, yes, perhaps it is possible. But I know this: you must keep going. Find this machine and perhaps you will find the killer. Do not give up now, Master Wild. If you do, then they have won. Mr. Finch, Master Bledlow, and all those boys who persecuted you here . . . They will all have won.”

  He shoved his hat back on his head. “Now, speaking of Mr. Finch, I must return to the warehouse.”

  Finch. Wild Boy had almost forgotten about him. It seemed strange that only a few days ago his biggest worry had been a beating from the showman. He felt sorry for Sir Oswald — without a show Finch would probably be drunk all day.

  “I will return in an hour with food and clean clothes,” Sir Oswald said. “Promise me you will not go anywhere until I return?”

  Wild Boy managed another slight smile. “Where else am I gonna go?”

  The grin returned to Sir Oswald’s wrinkled face. “That’s the spirit! Miss Everett has lit a fire downstairs, so I suggest you make yourself at home. Quite industrious, that young lady. I knew the two of you would make a fine team. Keep looking, Master Wild. It is not over yet.”

  Sir Oswald raised his hat in salute, and he left.

  Wild Boy turned back to the window. He knew Sir Oswald was right. He had learned his skill here — if it was a skill. Perhaps he could save himself, and Clarissa. But what then? He’d still be a freak. Nothing would have changed. Unless . . .

  Unless it was true.

  “The machine what changes you,” he whispered.

  Downstairs 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 f
orehead. 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?”