Wild Boy

by Rob Lloyd Jones

“Our subjects are all convicted criminals, sentenced to death by the courts. Each has been offered a choice. Should the machine prove successful in transferring them into a new body, they will be granted a stay of execution. If not, a Christian burial. Are those not more generous terms than the hangman offers?”

  They came to a door. Marcus Bishop tapped his cane against the iron surface.

  “What’s any of this got to do with me?” Wild Boy said.

  “Nothing whatsoever. You are the one who involved yourself the moment you stole that letter from Charles Griffin. And I am afraid you are now involved rather deeply indeed.”

  The door swung open. Wild Boy followed the man into the vast cavity of the tower’s stone hall.

  “I heard what you said to Miss Everett,” Marcus said. “You wish to use the machine upon yourself. That could indeed be an effective way of escaping your predicament. But Miss Everett is correct too. The machine is as likely to destroy you as it is to save you. Almost certainly your mind will never function in the same way again.”

  Wild Boy looked up at the colossal wheels of the Gentlemen’s machine. Clarissa’s words kept ringing in his head, but he tried to forget them and remember how badly he wanted to be normal.

  The pistons slowly began to pump again, the wheels turned, and steam hissed from the ball of twisting pipes. “How does it work?” he asked.

  Marcus Bishop smiled. “First, permit me to ask a question of my own.” A blue spark crackled around the pipes, reflecting off his dark lenses. “What do you know of electricity?”

  Clarissa Everett had never been so angry in her life. Wild Boy was a liar and a thug. They were meant to be finding the killer, but all he cared about was that stupid machine. What an idiot he was to think he could change. He’d always be a thickhead!

  A rush of wind sent an eerie howl along the corridor. Clarissa’s head pounded with pain. She wiped a trickle of blood from above her eyes. She was furious with him, but she wished he were here now. She’d stormed off in such a hurry — running past those prisoners, down one passage and another — she’d not paid any attention to where she was going. How could she get out of here without him?

  Maybe there was another secret door, she thought. These Gentlemen were obsessed with them. How did Wild Boy find them? She ran a hand along the wall, prodding stones, kicking others, kicking harder in frustration.

  No — she had to calm down and think. That’s what he always did.

  Think!

  A window!

  If she could find a window, she could climb out. She was an acrobat after all — heights didn’t trouble her. She could scale any surface, balance on ledges, and jump at least thirty feet without injury, just like her father and her mother. He couldn’t do that!

  Another few steps and she came to a door. She felt a breeze coming from underneath. There had to be a window on the other side. She was proud of that bit of thinking — better than any he’d have done in the circumstances. He’d have started swearing and getting angry.

  She took out her picks and unlocked the door.

  He couldn’t do that either.

  The door creaked open. Murky morning light cast a window-shadow on a long mahogany table. Antique rifles and pistols hung in rows on the walls. At the other end of the table, another door was open a fraction. Clarissa considered it, but decided that the window was still her best chance of escape.

  The window opened easily, and misty drizzle speckled her face. Outside, the sky was as gray as the walls that surrounded the courtyard. She could just see a stagnant pond following the curve of the wall to the other side. It looked like a moat. But this couldn’t be a castle, could it?

  More than ever she wanted to get out of here.

  The stones would be slippery but she was confident she could climb down, jump to the wall and into the moat on the other side. She turned to slide out.

  And her grip tightened on the window frame.

  At the other end of the room, the door slowly opened. A cloaked figure stepped from beyond.

  In a rush of panic, Clarissa tried to climb from the window. But she was shaking with fear. Her grip slipped and she tumbled onto the floor beside the table. She scrambled back and bashed against the wall. She was too scared to get up, too terrified even to scream.

  The hooded man towered over her.

  A breeze rustled from the window, blowing the killer’s long leather shroud. The cloak flapped open — just for a second, but for long enough . . .

  Clarissa stared, barely able to believe what she had seen beneath that cloak. Who she had seen. “No,” she breathed. “It’s you.”

  A flash of electricity lit one of the pipes on the Gentlemen’s machine. Marcus Bishop removed his spectacles, and the brilliant blue light glinted off his golden eyeball.

  “What do you know of electricity?” he asked again.

  Even through his thick hair Wild Boy felt a blast of heat. The machine towered in front of him like some giant industrial engine, almost filling the hall. Several Gentlemen rushed about its base — reading dials, inspecting fittings, and adjusting fixtures on the mechanical helmets that had been strapped to the tiger and Doctor Griffin’s corpse.

  “Perhaps you observed some of Henry’s performances at the fair?” Marcus asked.

  “You mean Professor Wollstonecraft?”

  “Indeed. Henry pioneered our understanding of electricity.”

  Electricity, Wild Boy thought. That strange new force was at the heart of all of this. “Don’t know nothing about it,” he said. “Some clever new science.”

  “Not new. Electricity is older than mankind. Indeed, electricity is mankind. Allow me to ask you another question. Why do you wish to use the machine?”

  Wild Boy looked up sharply. He saw himself reflected in Marcus’s golden eye — a mess of hair and dirt, in his tatty red-and-gold coat. “Cos I’m a freak,” he said. “Cos I’m being hunted by half the city. Cos some mad killer set me up just cos I look different from other people.”

  “Is that is all you see yourself as?” Marcus said. “A freak? No, I agree with Miss Everett. I do not think that is how you feel. It is, perhaps, how you felt once.”

  Wild Boy remembered Clarissa’s words before she left him. “So?” he said.

  “So, you have survived for days with half of London on your scent. Not only survived, but pieced together the clues that led you here, solved the mystery of your predicament, and asked several questions to which I believe you already knew the answer.”

  “What of it?”

  “Do you not grasp my point? A human body is flesh and bones. But a human being is his thoughts, memories, reason, and beliefs. All of these things, however, are simply electrical pulses shooting around the brain.”

  Marcus stepped to a table that was cluttered with parts from the machine. He picked up a copper rod and touched it against a thick coil of silver wire. A blue spark zapped from the end.

  “Who you are and how you think is all electricity,” he said. “Fireworks in your brain. We call it the Life Principal. You might call it the mind. Others of a more spiritual disposition call it the soul.”

  The soul. Wild Boy shuddered. “This thing sucks it out, don’t it?”

  “Crudely put, but accurate. The wheels act as dynamos, channeling electricity into precise points in a subject’s cranium. It fuses with the human electricity inside the brain. Both are extracted, and then transferred into the receiver’s body.”

  Marcus zapped the metal rod again. “Thus the whole individual is relocated to a new body — his thoughts, memories, reason, and beliefs.”

  It changes you, Wild Boy thought. He could still hardly believe it was possible. “But why? Why build it?”

  “I will not pretend that such a device does not have certain military applications,” Marcus replied, “but can you not imagine the good it could also achieve? The sick taken from failing bodies. Cripples made to walk.” He tapped the rod against his false eyeball. “The blind to see.”


  “Did Professor Wollstonecraft build it?”

  “It was his design,” Marcus said. “But he was unhappy with it. He made plans to rebuild the machine, a much smaller device but even more powerful. However, Charles — Doctor Griffin — would not allow it. So Henry left our organization, taking his plans with him.”

  “He joined the circus,” Wild Boy said.

  The golden-eyed man smiled. “He always was an old romantic. Sadly he was also a hopeless drunk with an utter disregard for our oath of secrecy. It seems he spoke about the machine to the wrong person.”

  “The hooded man,” Wild Boy said.

  Marcus nodded. “Shortly after Henry left us, he was proved correct. There was an overload in one of the machine’s capacitors, and it has not functioned correctly since. We believe that the killer is using the Professor’s plans to build a machine that works. But he cannot do so without the crowns.”

  “Crowns?”

  Marcus raised the rod and prodded one of the mechanical helmets that hung on wires from the machine. “Crowns,” he said. “They are not in the Professor’s plans.”

  A valve on the machine burst, blasting an angry jet of steam. The other Gentlemen rushed about as they struggled to contain the malfunction. Only Wild Boy and Marcus remained calm, watching the commotion from the side of the hall.

  “I can tell you this,” said Marcus. “I have no intention whatsoever of letting you use the machine. And I do not believe that you truly wish to use it either.”

  He was right. Wild Boy had known since the moment he pushed Clarissa against the wall. The look in her eyes . . . It was as if it had woken him from a daze. They were partners, and they had gotten close to unmasking the killer. Maybe they could have done it too, but he had let her down.

  Marcus placed the rod back on the table. “May I ask what clues you and Miss Everett have discovered so far regarding this hooded man?”

  Instinct urged Wild Boy not to tell the man anything. But he was so tired. He felt as if the clues were slipping away. He needed help. “There’s one thing I can’t make sense of,” he said. “The killer disappeared in an alley, just vanished, and he dropped the Doctor’s notebook.”

  “Dropped it?”

  “I thought it was because he’d already read it. Only, he couldn’t have. We were chasing him.”

  Another smile flashed across Marcus’s tight face. “And this book led you here?” he asked.

  “What’s so funny?” Wild Boy demanded.

  “You see so much, Wild Boy, yet I fear you have been blind to the utterly obvious. Do you really believe the killer dropped that book?”

  “I dunno . . .”

  “Yes, you do.”

  Right then, a realization shot through Wild Boy, as bright as a spark from the machine. He saw now what he’d been too lost in self-pity to notice before: not only why the killer had dropped the book, but also why his own name had been written at the crime scenes. . . .

  “Of course,” he said. “Of course!”

  He had been used. He’d been lured to the Doctor’s house to find the secret room. Then the killer had deliberately left the book in that alley, drawing his attention to the name of Saint Mary Somerset church. And there, Wild Boy had found the entrance to the tunnel. . . .

  He hadn’t been set up because he was a freak, he realized. He’d been set up because he was unique, the only person who could read the clues. He’d led the hooded man straight to this machine.

  Wild Boy turned, his eyes wide with panic. “He’s here,” he said. “He’s in the tunnel.”

  Marcus simply tilted his head, as if to suggest the matter was dealt with. He raised a hand and showed Wild Boy the ring on his finger, the raised letter G. “As you know, this is a very difficult place to enter without the correct key. We are safe for now. I have sent men to —”

  “No,” Wild Boy said. “He stole the Professor’s ring. He has the correct key. He’s already here.”

  “Indeed I am,” said a voice.

  The hooded man appeared on the balcony. Clarissa stood beside him, bound by a rope that pinned her arms to her sides. A rag around her mouth smothered her cries.

  Beneath the killer’s hood, the white mask peered down into the hall — first at Wild Boy, then at Marcus Bishop, and finally at the machine. His muffled voice echoed around the stone walls. “At last.”

  The Gentlemen reached into their coats for their weapons. But the hooded man raised a knife to Clarissa’s neck, and they hesitated.

  “I have not harmed her,” the killer said. “If you wish it to remain that way, I suggest you do exactly as I say. Especially you, Wild Boy.”

  Wild Boy was desperate to make a run for the stairs, to save Clarissa. But he couldn’t risk the killer using that blade. He had to think, find a way to save her.

  “What?” he said. “What do you want?”

  “You have proved extremely helpful to me so far,” the hooded man replied, “by finding the clues that led me here. Now I must ask one final favor.”

  With his free hand, he threw a sack over the balcony. It landed on the floor by Wild Boy’s feet. “Remove the crowns from the machine and put them in that bag.”

  “You swear you’ll let her go?” Wild Boy said.

  “You have my word,” the hooded man replied.

  Marcus Bishop stepped forward. “Do not do it,” he warned.

  But there was no choice. Wild Boy didn’t care about the machine anymore — the killer could have every piece of it as long as he set Clarissa free. He grabbed the sack and ran to the mechanical helmets that hung from the machine’s pipes. He had no idea how to detach them, and no time to work it out. So he simply jumped up and tore the devices from their wires.

  “Wild Boy,” Marcus insisted. “He will not release Miss Everett.”

  Wild Boy barely heard him. He stuffed the crowns in the sack and rushed back across the hall. By the time he returned, a rope hung from the balcony.

  “Tie the sack on,” the hooded man instructed.

  Wild Boy did. As it rose, he looked up at Clarissa. She was staring at him, flashing urgent signals with her eyes and screaming into her gag. She was trying to tell him something, but he couldn’t understand.

  The sack slid over the balcony.

  “Now let her go!” Wild Boy demanded.

  But the killer didn’t lower the knife. “Thank you,” he said. “But I am afraid you should have listened to Mr. Bishop. He was right, I have built a machine of my own. One that works. And now that I have the crowns, it is complete. But I need a subject for its trial run, and I believe Miss Everett would make a perfect candidate.”

  Wild Boy didn’t look at the hooded man. He kept his eyes fixed on Clarissa. He saw tears slide down her cheeks and soak into the rag in her mouth. “I won’t let that happen,” he told her. “I’ll save you, I swear.”

  She looked at him, and he saw in her eyes that she believed him. But the hooded man dragged her back into the darkness.

  “I am afraid, Wild Boy, that it is happening,” the killer said.

  “This is ridiculous,” Marcus shouted. “How on earth do you expect to escape?”

  The hooded man’s voice came back, fainter now, moving away. “Watch and see, Mr. Bishop. Watch and see.”

  Marcus drew a pistol from inside his jacket. He loaded the gun’s plate and issued orders to the other Gentlemen to seal doors and guard exits. But as he spoke, another sound rang around the hall.

  A loud, bloodcurdling shriek, like a pig being slaughtered. Somewhere, a door slammed. Then another, and another, as the screeching grew louder. Wild Boy turned, listening, confused. He could hear now that the noise was a laugh. No — it was several laughs, coming closer.

  “No,” he gasped. “He can’t have. . . .”

  “What the devil is that?” Marcus asked.

  “The prisoners!” Wild Boy cried. “He’s released the prisoners!”

  Black clouds swirled over the White Tower.

  The stone keep
rose from the center of the courtyard, its pinnacled turrets snarling up against the rain. Ravens hopped about the walls, untroubled by the rumbling thunder as they pecked the cobbles for scraps.

  All at once, the birds flapped into the air.

  A door burst open.

  Marcus Bishop limped down the Tower’s wooden steps and into the courtyard, barking orders to the men who followed. “Load your weapons, Gentlemen, they could already be outside. Mr.Beauchamp, seal the west gate. Mr. Rawlins, guard the river dock; make sure the boat is secure. Not one prisoner escapes.”

  Wild Boy raced behind them. “Clarissa!” he yelled. “Clarissa!”

  He pushed one of the Gentlemen out of the way, but the man shoved him back, sending him tumbling onto the stone ground. The other Gentlemen didn’t have time to search for his friend. They had troubles of their own.

  One of the escaped prisoners burst from the side of the tower. Chains rattled around the man’s shackled wrists as he fled for the perimeter wall.

  “Mr. Cullen!” Marcus called.

  The prisoner froze. Wild Boy saw that it was the man who had grabbed Clarissa through the hatch of his cell. The fugitive held his hands open in surrender, smiling to reveal a set of black and brown teeth. “Can’t blame me for trying,” he said.

  Marcus nodded. Then he shot the man in the head.

  The prisoner crumpled in a crimson mist.

  “Gentlemen,” Marcus said. “Here they come.”

  The keep’s door flew open. Prisoners charged down the steps and into the rain. The Gentlemen ran after them, firing rifles and pistols. Another prisoner collapsed in a spray of blood. Ravens squawked in the air.

  Another prisoner fell, then another. The others ran like fury around the side of the tower, committed now to their flight — escape or die.

  “Forget them!” Wild Boy screamed. “Look for Clarissa!”

  But they weren’t listening, and didn’t care. He had to find her himself. He tried to ignore the mayhem around him, to focus his mind on the killer. He didn’t think the hooded man was free yet. He would need another distraction, something even bigger than this to escape the castle walls. In a flash of horror, Wild Boy realized that there was only one thing big enough to do that.