Wild Boy

by Rob Lloyd Jones

  “Well then,” Marcus said. “This is your show, Wild Boy. Shall we begin?”

  Augustus Finch and Mary Everett.

  Seeing them together, Wild Boy didn’t know who presented the more grotesque figure — Finch, with his black and white hair and his scars all shiny across his face, or Mary Everett, who watched him from behind her thick white makeup. They would have made a fine couple. Both, he thought, were quite capable of murder.

  Mary Everett lit a cigar and blew smoke into the face of her Gentleman guard. If she was worried by the man’s pistol, she didn’t show it. “So, freak,” she growled at Wild Boy, “you’re in charge now, are you? You gonna tell us what this is about?”

  Wild Boy stepped closer, trying not to show his fear. He looked the ringmaster straight in the eye. “You know what this is about,” he said. “Murder.”

  “Ha! You ain’t pinning no murder on me.”

  “You pinned one on me,” Wild Boy said.

  “That was Showman’s Law. It was right and proper.”

  Showman’s Law, Wild Boy thought. It was her twisted idea of justice that had allowed the killer to escape undetected. Until now.

  He brought out the list of clues. The page trembled in his hands as he read it again, making absolutely certain that he’d got this right.

  “Master Wild?” Sir Oswald asked. Wild Boy’s friend sat on the stumps of his thighs at the side of the ring, watching with worried eyes. “What is that paper?”

  “This is Clarissa’s list,” Wild Boy said.

  “Clarissa?” said Mary Everett.

  “Your daughter. The one you set the dogs after, remember?”

  “She sided with a freak.”

  “No. She sided with a friend.”

  The ringmaster snorted. “So you really think it was me that done them killings?”

  Marcus limped forward on his cane. “You are a suspect. After all, you knew about Wild Boy’s abilities.”

  “When I was in that cage,” Wild Boy explained, “you said to me, I’m told you can see things no one else can.”

  “Ha! That all the evidence you got?”

  “No, I got plenty more. See them marks in the sawdust? If you didn’t know they was from your crutch, you might think they looked like marks from a cane. And you were an acrobat once, weren’t you? You’re trained to make high jumps, just like the one the killer made from the Doctor’s house.”

  Wild Boy stepped so close that her cigar smoke tickled the hairs on his face. “Why do you hide your face?” he said.

  “Say that again, freak?”

  “Ever since Clarissa’s father left, you’ve hidden your face behind that powder. Is it because you blame yourself, or you hate yourself? Maybe you wish you were someone else, the sort of person your husband wouldn’t have run away from. Maybe you used to drink with Professor Wollstonecraft. And maybe you discovered his plans to build a new machine. . . .”

  Mary Everett looked to the ground. Flakes of makeup fell from her face. When she spoke again her voice had lost its venom. It was soft, distant. “I . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Wild Boy wondered if buried somewhere beneath that makeup was the mother Clarissa once loved. “What happened to you?” he said. “Why do you hate Clarissa so much?”

  The ringmaster looked up, and now her eyes burned like hot coals. “She sided against me,” she said. “She sided with him. She sided with her father. You see her again, freak, you tell her that. You tell her I ain’t her mother no more.”

  She flicked her cigar at him, and the ash burned the hairs on his face. Wild Boy staggered back, but resisted the urge to fight. He had to stay focused on the killer.

  Marcus placed a hand on his shoulder. “What about Finch?”

  This whole time, Augustus Finch hadn’t said a word. He’d just stared at Wild Boy, still running a finger over his longest scar. But now, finally, he spoke.

  “Yeah. What about me?”

  “There’s evidence against you an’ all,” Wild Boy said, holding the showman’s glare. “That hair at the Doctor’s house — maybe it was white. The killer has a funny walk and you been limping ever since I cut your foot. And you got hobnails on your boots — they could look like cane marks on the ground. And you would have known about my skill — maybe from when you heard me and Sir Oswald talking. Maybe you’re the murderer.”

  One of the Gentlemen raised his pistol, warning the showman to stay put. But Wild Boy knew that even a gun wouldn’t stop Augustus Finch when his blood was up. So what happened next came as little surprise.

  Finch pulled the knife from inside his waistcoat. “I’ll show you murder, you ugly mutt!” he spat. He rushed forward and lunged at Wild Boy.

  But before the showman had taken three steps, Marcus lashed out with his sword. The Gentleman was so fast that even Wild Boy’s quick eyes saw only a blur of metal and a spurt of blood.

  Finch fell back with a cry, the sawdust speckled crimson. A new cut had opened across his cheek — a bloody, dripping letter G.

  Sir Oswald rushed forward on his hands and snatched away the showman’s knife. “Master Wild? Are you hurt?”

  Wild Boy looked at Sir Oswald, and slowly shook his head.

  Marcus wiped his sword with his handkerchief. “You were right,” he said to Wild Boy. “He did attack.”

  He stood over the wounded showman and slid his sword back into its cane. “Augustus Tiberius Finch,” Marcus said. “You were named after Roman emperors. Your father must have had high expectations of you. Alas, he could not see past the birthmark that covered your cheek. Ever since, you have tried to hide it, picking fights to add new scars to your face. One might say that you have scratched away your past. I wonder, do you dream of being the sort of man of whom your father would have approved? Do you, too, dream of being someone else? Is that why you wanted the machine?”

  Wild Boy expected the showman to fight back. But instead Finch curled up tighter in the sawdust, hiding his face with his bloodied hands.

  “No . . .” he whimpered.

  And then he started to cry.

  Despite everything, Wild Boy felt sorry for him. Finch’s life, too, had been defined by the way he looked. Until now, Wild Boy had never realized what a tragic man it had made him.

  But there was someone else Wild Boy needed to speak to. “And what about you,” he said, “Marcus Bishop?”

  Marcus’s single eye turned to him curiously. “Me again?”

  “There’s as much evidence against you as anyone else. The cane marks, the hair, the way the killer limped. And that jump from the Doctor’s window . . . That’s possible if you’re drugged up on laudanum and don’t feel pain.”

  “Except of course that I was beside you when the killer took Miss Everett.”

  “So maybe you were in it with another of these Gentlemen,” Wild Boy said. “Maybe you set it all up, created a killer so you could steal the machine’s crowns without anyone else knowing.”

  “And my motive?”

  “Your eye and your knee. I seen how much pain they give you. Maybe you wanted a new body. Or maybe it’s about money. You were gonna sell the new machine for the highest offer.”

  “A traitor?” Marcus said. “Now that is cruel. So you think it is me?”

  For a long moment, Wild Boy looked at him. Then he turned away. “No,” he said. “You ain’t the killer.”

  “Then who is, Wild Boy? Time is running out for Miss Everett.”

  Wild Boy breathed in deeply, trying to calm himself. He wished he’d gotten this wrong, wished there was another solution. But he was certain that he was right.

  “I almost didn’t work it out,” he said. “There was one clue that got me — the killer’s disappearing act in that alley. But once I solved that, everything else made sense. How the hooded man walked, the marks in the mud, that silver hair . . . In that alley, Clarissa kept saying the hooded man had vanished. But that ain’t possible, and there were no secret doors nor drains neither. The
killer must’ve been hiding, but there was nowhere to hide. There was just them rats and them boxes. And no one could’ve hidden in a box, not unless they was really small. Someone like a boy or a girl . . .”

  Wild Boy’s big green eyes were filled with sadness as he turned to face the killer. “Or maybe if they had no legs,” he said. “Ain’t that right, Sir Oswald?”

  Sir Oswald Farley sat on the stumps of his legs, one hand gripping the rope that tethered the big top’s chandelier. He didn’t look surprised by what Wild Boy had said — that he was the hooded man, that he was the killer.

  This was supposed to be a moment of triumph, but all Wild Boy felt was sadness. He wished that he were wrong. He hated that he was right.

  “The answer was right in front of me,” he said. “I just couldn’t see it, or maybe I didn’t want to. You didn’t scream when the fire caught your cloak at the Doctor’s house. Them marks on the ground — they weren’t from a crutch or a cane or hobnail boots. They were from wooden legs. Weren’t they, Sir Oswald?”

  Around the tent, the Gentlemen turned their pistols from Finch and Mary Everett, and aimed them at Sir Oswald.

  A sad smile spread across Sir Oswald’s wrinkled cheeks. He turned Finch’s knife in his palm. “Master Wild,” he said softly. “Look out. . . .”

  He whirled with the blade and sliced the rope.

  Above the ring, the chandelier plunged down, straight at where Augustus Finch lay on the ground.

  “No!” Wild Boy cried.

  He grabbed the showman and dragged him to safety just as the chandelier crashed down in an explosion of sparks and sawdust.

  The Gentlemen staggered back, coughing and calling out: “He’s gone! The killer’s gone!”

  Now Wild Boy was away too — leaping the wreckage and running out of the back of the big top. This had gone wrong, but he could still save Clarissa. He knew that Sir Oswald had fled to his new machine. That was where he’d find her.

  It was eerily quiet behind the circus tent, the clamor of the fairground muffled by the closely parked caravans. The only sound was the rain pounding the ground, and Wild Boy’s bare feet splashing in puddles as he ran between the vans. He knew where he’d find Sir Oswald’s machine. He should, he thought, he’d seen it enough times — only back then he’d had no idea what he was really looking at.

  He kept running until he reached one of the vans on the far side of the square. Wiping wet hair from his eyes, he looked up at his old home, the freak show. The caravan’s sides were still decorated with those garish banners, that beast with glowing eyes and torn clothes. THE SAVAGE SPECTACLE OF WILD BOY.

  For most of the time that he’d lived here he hadn’t regarded himself as anything better than the monster on those banners, a freak only good for being mocked and laughed at by slobs. But he knew now that he was more than that. He had a friend. He had a skill. And he had solved a mystery.

  He reached up and tore down a banner.

  It was as if he’d opened a treasure chest. The wooden walls were covered with shiny copper and silver tubes, snaking along the sides, over and underneath. Wires connected one tube to another and were fixed by clips to the axles of the iron wheels. Wild Boy could see now that Sir Oswald’s changes to the van weren’t for ventilation, or heating either. The whole time he had been building his machine.

  “Clarissa?” Wild Boy called.

  He swung the van door open and gasped. Clarissa was inside, tied to the wall by a rope that fed through the wooden slats and with one of the Gentlemen’s mechanical crowns fixed by screws to her head. Spiked copper rods jutted from the top of the crown. They were the same rods that had been driven into the tiger’s head, and transferred the animal’s mind into Doctor Griffin’s body. A tangle of wires connected the device to the tubes that crawled over the top of the caravan.

  Clarissa yelled into her gag. Her eyes flashed Wild Boy warnings that someone was approaching from behind. But he already knew who was there. He just didn’t want it to be true.

  Something landed in a puddle by his feet. It was the hooded man’s mask. Its porcelain beak curled up into the rain.

  “Congratulations,” the killer said.

  The hooded man stepped from between the caravans. Rain streamed over his sagging hood. “I knew you would solve the mystery,” he said. “Master Wild.”

  Wild Boy turned to face him. He wasn’t scared anymore. He just felt heavy with sadness. “You don’t need to hide no more,” he said.

  The hooded man slid back the shroud — revealing salt-and-pepper hair, and the wrinkled face of Sir Oswald Farley. “You were wrong about one thing, though,” Sir Oswald said. “They are not wooden legs.”

  The rest of the cloak fell away. Even though Wild Boy knew what he would see, it still made him step back in shock. Sir Oswald balanced on two iron legs — stilts with narrow metal points, springs for suspension, hinges in place of knees, and straps fixing them to the stumps of his thighs.

  He smiled at Wild Boy sadly. “Professor Wollstonecraft made them for me.”

  “You and him were friends,” Wild Boy said.

  “We drank together some nights,” Sir Oswald replied. “He drank too much, and spoke too much. That was how I learned of the Gentlemen, and his idea of building a new machine. But the Professor refused to build it, refused even to tell me where he hid the plans.”

  “So you killed him.”

  “No! Master Wild —”

  “Don’t call me that!” A wave of anger surged through Wild Boy, washing away his sadness. “My friend called me Master Wild,” he seethed. “You ain’t that person no more. You’re a cold-blooded killer.”

  Sir Oswald’s metal legs clacked against the ground as he came closer. Flecks of spit gathered in the corner of his mouth. “I did not mean to kill anyone,” he insisted. “That mask, this cloak . . . I thought I could scare the Professor into giving me his plans. But you saw; he used his knife against me. It was the same with Doctor Griffin.”

  Wild Boy edged back, confused. Maybe Sir Oswald was telling the truth, but it didn’t matter. “You still set me up,” he said.

  “I had to. I couldn’t find the Doctor’s secret chamber on my own, or the Gentlemen and their machine. But I knew that you could.”

  His head sank, and gray hair fell around his face. He looked tired and sad. “I was . . . I was trying to help you,” he said quietly.

  “Help me?”

  “I told you that things could get better, remember? That is why I built this machine. For us. We could be normal, Master Wild, like everyone else. And not only you and me, but all the performers in these degrading freak shows. Everyone who knows how it feels to be mocked. To be reviled. Twenty-six years ago I lost my legs to a cannon blast at Waterloo. It has been been twenty-six years since I last felt like a human being. I lost my legs for my country, and ever since I have been called a freak.”

  As he spoke, Sir Oswald crouched and unclipped the metal stilts from the tops of his legs. He laid them on the ground and sat again on the stumps of his thighs.

  His voice cracked with emotion. “And what about you, Master Wild? Just because you happen to look different from other people, that will define your whole life. You will never be anything other than a freak. That was why I built the machine. For us, Master Wild. I built it for us.”

  Wild Boy tried not to listen. He glimpsed Clarissa again through the half-open caravan door. He had to do something.

  “Did you not dream of it?” Sir Oswald said. “When you watched people around the fairground, did you not imagine living their lives? And when you saw the Gentlemen’s machine, when you knew that it was real . . . Did you not want it for yourself?”

  Wild Boy shook his head. He had wanted to use the machine, but not anymore. “You’re wrong,” he said. “I ain’t just a freak and neither were you. You were my friend.”

  “I still am, Master Wild.”

  “Then let her go.”

  Sir Oswald gave another sad smile. “No, I cannot. I
have come too far now. The machine works, and I will hang if I do not use it. And for that, I am afraid I require Miss Everett. You see, I have made some more improvements to our old home. . . .”

  He reached up and pulled away another of the banners, and then another, exposing the van’s extraordinary skeleton of machinery — a mesh of copper wires and twisting pipes that looked like the heart of the Gentlemen’s machine in the tower.

  “This device operates in the same way as their machine,” Sir Oswald said. “The wheels generate the electricity, which is channeled into the crowns. I shall wear one crown, Miss Everett the other. Once we travel fast enough, this machine will come to life. My mind will be transferred into her body, and hers into mine.”

  For the first time, Wild Boy realized that the van’s horses were harnessed and ready to ride. He had to get Clarissa out of there now.

  He burst for the door, but something hard crashed against the back of his skull and he collapsed to the ground. He tried to get up, but his head whirled and he slumped back. Through the rain and dizziness, he saw that he’d been struck by one of Sir Oswald’s metal legs.

  Sir Oswald came closer, walking on his hands. Carefully, kindly, he raised Wild Boy’s head and slid his cloak beneath. “I am truly sorry, Master Wild,” he said. “I never wished to hurt you.”

  He climbed up into the driver’s perch and fastened the other mechanical crown to his head. Wires trailed from the device into the caravan behind him — into his machine. “I hope we will meet again, old friend. And when we do, I will look very different.”

  Sir Oswald lashed the horses, and the machine began to move.

  “No . . .” Wild Boy groaned. “Please . . .”

  He struggled up and staggered after them, but he was too slow. As the machine rumbled onto the street, it gathered pace. Its pipes and wires began to crackle and glow, turning white with heat and then blue with electrical fire.

  “Clarissa!” Wild Boy yelled.

  “Ya! Ya!” cried a voice.

  Wild Boy dived aside as another carriage burst into the street. He was stunned to see that it was the Lord Mayor’s golden coach, and Marcus was driving it. The Gentleman slowed the carriage down as he waited for him to catch up. “Hurry!”