Wild Boy and the Black Terror

by Rob Lloyd Jones

  The Queen was carried to the royal physicians, who wrapped her in blankets, fed her laudanum solution mixed with treacle and waved lights at her eyes. But the doctors knew that nothing could be done for her, not without the killer’s blood. Not without the cure.

  Watching from the doorway, Wild Boy wasn’t surprised that the Queen had survived. She was strong, like Marcus, and able to cope better with whatever horrors rampaged through her mind. Like Marcus, too, she was quiet. She muttered instead of screamed, a very royal way of living through your darkest fears.

  Wild Boy’s coat was soaked from the snow. He couldn’t stop shivering. One of the doctors tossed him a blanket and he pulled it around him, wishing he could sink into it and never come out. Everything had gone wrong. The black diamonds were gone. And now, somehow, the killer would unleash his terror all over London.

  A clock began to strike eleven.

  Behind Wild Boy, Lucien slumped against the corridor wall. His face looked as if it had slipped down his skull. His jowls sagged lower, and his mouth hung open, whispering the same two words over and over. “My God… My God…”

  He swigged whisky from a crystal decanter. The drink spilled down his shirt front but he didn’t notice or didn’t care. “My God…”

  He dropped the decanter and charged at Wild Boy, slamming him against the door. “This is your fault,” he seethed, his boozy breath blasting the hair on Wild Boy’s face.

  This time Wild Boy didn’t fight back. Lucien was right: he was to blame. It had been his plan, his responsibility. Everything that had happened, that might happen, was down to him. The pit inside him grew deeper, sucking in air.

  Lucien shoved him harder against the door. He was about to yell when the decanter was swung from behind and thumped Lucien in the side. He groaned and collapsed to his knees.

  Clarissa stood over him, a wild look in her eyes. She raised the decanter to strike Lucien again, but it fell from her fingers. She staggered forward and grasped her head. Her deep moan echoed along the corridor.

  “Clarissa,” Wild Boy said. “Whatever you’re seeing ain’t real. It’s the terror, the poison still in you like Dr Carew said. You gotta fight it.”

  She looked at him with eyes full of sadness. Then she saw Marcus lying by the fire. Clutching the wall, she pulled herself up and barged past Wild Boy into the drawing room. One of the doctors moved to stop her, but the look on Clarissa’s face convinced him to step back.

  She knelt beside Marcus and took his hand.

  The clock stopped chiming.

  “Sir!”

  A Gentleman rushed along the corridor, waving a black cloak. “We found this under the marble arch. The killer dropped it when he fled.”

  Wild Boy burst forward. The pit inside him filled with sudden hope. It wasn’t much of a clue, but it was something. “Stop shaking it,” he said. “Hold it still.”

  The man panicked and shook it harder.

  “Stop it, you imbecile!” Lucien barked.

  He took the garment and laid it on a table. “Miss Everett?” he said.

  Clarissa turned, surprised by Lucien’s tone. Not anger; an appeal for help.

  “At the wax museum,” Lucien said, “you thought the killer had been elsewhere.”

  Clarissa shrugged, reluctant to cooperate. Marcus’s hand tightened slightly around her fingers. It was just a spasm, but it was enough to remind her that there were more important things here than her feud with Lucien.

  “The killer had a new carriage,” she said. “And his sack and that cloak.”

  “So there could be clues on the cloak to show where he went,” Lucien said. “Where his hideout is.” He looked to Wild Boy, their fight instantly forgotten. “Can you see anything that might tell us where? Anything at all?”

  Wild Boy stood over the cloak, rubbed his tired eyes. He saw a few feathers stuck to the garment, but they were just … feathers. His senses were dulled. The magic had stopped working.

  “I can’t. I can’t see nothing,” he said.

  Clarissa grabbed his wrist so hard that her nails dug through his coat sleeve. “You have to see,” she said. “You have to.”

  She was barely recognizable, her mouth twisted and her eyes like hot coals. Wild Boy realized now why he couldn’t spot any clues. It was Clarissa. He couldn’t concentrate on anything but her. Whatever was going on in her head, whatever the terror made her see, it was taking control of her.

  “Everyone get out,” he said. “Just me, Clarissa and Marcus.”

  One of the doctors began to protest, but Lucien cut him short. “You heard what he said. Everyone out. We shall carry Her Majesty to the library next door. Doesn’t make a damned bit of difference where she is right now.”

  There was a debate over the correct manner in which to handle an incapacitated monarch, until Lucien simply slung her over his shoulder and marched from the room. He stopped in the doorway and looked back. “Find something,” he said.

  He closed the doors.

  For what felt like an eternity, neither Wild Boy nor Clarissa spoke. The only sound was the wind rattling the window and the crackle of the fire in the hearth.

  Clarissa stared into the flames. Her wet eyes glistened. “I don’t understand what’s happening to me,” she said. “I’m so angry all the time. It’s like there’s a tiger in my head. Sometimes it just sits there purring. Then it lashes out and I can’t stop it.”

  Wild Boy stayed back, giving her space. “It’s the terror,” he said. “The memories are making you angry.”

  “No, it ain’t just that. It was there before; you know it. The terror just made it worse.”

  “What is it, Clarissa? What did the terror make you see? Your mother?”

  “No…”

  “I know she turned against you. But she was crazy.”

  “That ain’t what I see.”

  She looked at him, tears welling in her eyes. “I see you, Wild Boy. I see you leaving me, just like everyone else has. My mum, my dad and now Marcus.”

  The words hit Wild Boy like a punch to the chest so hard that he stepped back.

  “You’d leave me,” Clarissa said. “I see it in your eyes. If we don’t save Marcus, that’s what you plan. You’ll think you’re helping me, and no matter how many times I say don’t, you would eventually. That’s what makes me so angry, that you would leave me too. That’s why we have to save him. Then everything can go back to how it was.”

  Back to how it was. Wild Boy didn’t know if that was possible, but he realized something just then. He’d been wrong. He would never leave Clarissa, no matter what. They were together through everything. Without that, there was nothing.

  Clarissa crouched beside Marcus. She wiped her eyes, sniffed back tears. “He always told us to clear our heads and think. That’s what you got to do now, Wild Boy. Think like you ain’t never done before. The killer’s got all the black diamonds. That means he thinks his demon is strong again, right? Now he’s gonna spread that poisonous smoke all over London. So how can he do that?”

  “It ain’t that simple, Clarissa. It’s… It’s…”

  And then it happened. The magic returned. Wild Boy stared at Clarissa as a sharp thrill ran up the hair on his back. It was that simple. So many puzzles and clues had crowded his mind. He’d not been able to see through them to see the important question.

  How would the killer do it?

  There was only one way.

  He rushed to the window, rubbed mist from the glass and looked out to the palace forecourt. Dark flakes swirled among the white storm. Polluted flakes.

  How would the killer spread poisonous smoke over London?

  “A factory,” Wild Boy said. “He’d use a factory chimney.”

  But that wasn’t enough. There were hundreds of factories along the river, and no time to search them all.

  “What else, Wild Boy?” Clarissa urged. “Keep thinking.”

  “Well, whatever the killer burns to make the black smoke, he’s gonna need a
lot of it to poison all of London. He must’ve been planning it for a while, been in and out of the factory, taking supplies, setting it up. That means the place is probably shut down, where no one would see him come and go.”

  “So we look for a shut-down factory?”

  “Yeah, but there must be a dozen. There’s gotta be something else, something I’m missing. Of course! Feathers!”

  “Eh?”

  “The bloomin’ feathers!”

  He rushed to the killer’s cloak and examined the white feathers stuck to its coarse black fabric. “Feathers,” he repeated.

  He threw open the doors, strode down the corridor and burst into the library.

  Lucien was stoking the fire as the physicians laid the Queen on a couch. Ignoring them all, Wild Boy marched across the room. His eyes roved around stacks of books that filled the walls.

  He pulled one of the books out and dumped it on a table. Dragging a lamp closer, he leafed through the pages. It was a book of birds – alphabetically listed descriptions of species, with sketches of beaks, feathers, claws. Wild Boy turned the pages, searching for a particular entry.

  “D … D… Here: ducks.”

  “Wild Boy?” Lucien said. “Care to share your thoughts?”

  Wild Boy whirled around. His eyes were wide and gleaming. “The killer’s cloak. The feathers on it are duck feathers. Only they’re from two different types of ducks; see, here.” He jabbed drawings in the book. “Neither of them live in London.”

  “So?”

  “So what are they doing on the killer’s cloak?”

  “You mean, where are they from?”

  “Exactly.”

  “A pond?” one of the doctors suggested.

  “An abattoir?” Lucien said.

  “Yeah,” Clarissa agreed. “Somewhere they pluck birds.”

  “No,” Wild Boy said. “The slaughterhouses are all out east, Smithfield way. We’re after something near the factories on the river.”

  “If you know, Wild Boy, just tell us.”

  Wild Boy didn’t know, but he had an idea. “How about a pillow storehouse?” he said. “Duck feathers are used in posh pillows that get loaded into warehouses by the docks. I used to see it from my window, back in the workhouse. Some pillows snag and tear open, spilling out feathers. If we find one of them warehouses near a factory that’s shut down … I bet that factory is the killer’s hideout.”

  He slammed the book shut so hard that everyone jumped. A wedge of paper fell from Lucien’s coat – the artist’s ink sketches of Gideon and Dr Carew. Lucien picked them up and dropped them on the fire.

  “Well,” he said. “How should we go about the search?”

  Wild Boy didn’t hear. He stared into the fire, and the drawings going up in smoke. Suddenly his world was just those drawings and that fire. He felt as if the flames were inside him; a glow of satisfaction unlike any he’d known. Right then the last piece of the jigsaw fell into place, and the whole picture became clear. The feathers, the drawings, the ash rising up the chimney…

  He flicked the book’s pages until he found a picture of a crow, and with a finger traced over the bird’s smooth, hunched shape. Thanks to those drawings and that fire, he knew everything now. Not just where the killer was, but who he was.

  And he was gonna get him.

  35

  Once, at a fairground in Stepney, Wild Boy heard a priest describe the city of London as a spreading stain of sin.

  The man, perched on a soapbox and bellowing through a speaking-trumpet, claimed that London was a godless place, where minds were as polluted as the factory-smogged air and almost everyone was guilty of one vice or another.

  The priest’s rantings gathered a crowd; mostly drunk and, not being from London, they roared with approval and damned the eyes of everyone who was. Only a few objected, hurling oaths, “God-save-the-Queen”s and rotten vegetables, until the priest slipped from his soapbox and tumbled with a cry to the mud.

  Hiding under a caravan, Wild Boy had been thrilled.

  London.

  He should have hated the place. It was, after all, the city where he’d been abandoned as a baby and then locked up in a workhouse. But he couldn’t. Each time he returned, hidden in the back of Finch’s caravan, he watched the streets through cracks in the walls, wide-eyed with wonder. So much to see. So many people to spy on.

  London.

  It had come to mean so much to him. And now it was under threat from the same person who had tried to take Marcus from him. The killer planned to act out Lord Dahlquist’s curse, spreading his terror across the city. Wild Boy couldn’t imagine it. A million screaming souls.

  He wouldn’t let it happen. He, Clarissa and Lucien were in Lucien’s carriage heading to the demon’s lair.

  The carriage jolted. Wind slammed against the walls as if an army was taking cannon shots at the cabin.

  Outside, vagrants huddled under gaslights in a desperate attempt to glean warmth from their glow. Others sheltered in shop doorways. Wind swished the snowflakes so violently, it seemed impossible that any might settle. They had settled though, and so thick that the driver had to steer along tracks carved by other vehicles, turning only to dodge a night mail coach that had skidded across the street.

  Their pace was maddeningly slow. Turning onto Westminster Bridge they waited for what seemed like an eternity for the toll man to open the gate. Factory chimneys rose from the opposite bank, dark giants belching fumes.

  Lucien sat in silence across the cabin. His face, usually saggy and grey, had hardened into a lump of granite. He turned his pistol over in his hands, staring at the weapon as if the solution to all of his problems might be scratched on its barrel.

  As if they’d fit.

  Wild Boy remembered what Lucien said at Buckingham Palace about giving his whole life to the Gentlemen. And what had it come to? He’d failed in the worst possible way: the Queen had fallen victim to the terror. Surely no one was more determined than Lucien to catch the killer and get the cure.

  The carriage jolted again.

  Clarissa’s jaw clenched so tightly that her teeth ground together. The terror was still in her mind, but she didn’t fight it. Rather, she clamped her eyes shut, inviting more nightmares into the darkness. She was using the terror to fuel her rage, to give her courage to face the killer.

  Wild Boy touched her arm. “Clarissa…”

  She turned to the window. Her quick breaths steamed the glass.

  They rode from the bridge into a warren of lanes that twisted among the riverside factories – the glassworks and soapworks, the brewers and candle makers. High walls blocked whatever moonlight might have reached the lanes, giving the area an eerie, nightmarish feel. Factory workers struggled through the snow, hauling barrels and boxes from dray carts. Coal barges dumped dusty cargoes at jetties along the riverbank. Snow fell through smoke and steam. The sulphurous smell of coal gas seeped into the carriage.

  “Look,” Clarissa said.

  The snowflakes against the window turned fatter and whiter, as if they had been scrubbed clean of the pollution from the chimneys.

  No, not snowflakes. They were duck feathers.

  Outside a factory storehouse, stacks of pillows were piled on a cart, to be transported. Several had been torn open, shedding duck feathers into the wind.

  The carriage stopped. The driver banged on the roof.

  “We’re here,” Clarissa said. She flung the door open and jumped out. “Come on.”

  Wild Boy started to go after her, but Lucien grabbed his arm.

  “We are here to get the cure,” Lucien said, tucking his pistol into his coat. “For that we need the killer’s blood. We must catch him alive, you understand?”

  “That’s what I’m here for an’ all,” Wild Boy replied. He tore his arm free and leaped from the carriage.

  “And Miss Everett?” Lucien called.

  Wild Boy pretended not to hear and kept running. But he knew exactly what Lucien meant. That look on
Clarissa’s face. This was her revenge. Not just on the person who tried to take Marcus from them, but against everyone who had wronged her. This was her chance to act out her anger. To let the storm break.

  The factory rose above Wild Boy, a monstrous block of brick and grime and broken windows. Black smoke drifted from the chimney, even though the factory was halfway through demolition. Wooden scaffolding climbed the bricks where workers had begun to knock down the walls. Barbed wire around the doors reminded Wild Boy of the snarling teeth of Malphas. He ran faster, fear prickling the hair on his neck.

  He scrambled through one of the broken windows and into the factory. “Clarissa?” he whispered.

  Snowflakes settled on his hair. He looked up, surprised to see the night sky high above, where part of the roof had been demolished. All of the floors had been stripped away too, exposing the factory’s criss-crossing skeleton of iron girders. Chains and winches hung from the beams. Baskets of salvaged bricks sat in puddles of melted snow.

  Somewhere across the darkness, a light glimmered.

  “Over here,” Clarissa hissed.

  He followed her voice, weaving through dozens of wooden barrels that leaked a thick black substance, slow and sticky like wax. The barrels were clustered near the source of the light: a huge industrial furnace. One of them was raised on an iron bracket, tilted so that its contents slid along a pipe and into a vat above the furnace. Inside the vat, the fluid boiled and bubbled, sending black smoke gushing up the factory chimney.

  Clarissa pulled Wild Boy away from the smoke. “What are these?”

  “It’s the poison,” Wild Boy said. “That liquid is what the killer burns to make the smoke.”

  “But where’s the killer?”

  Wild Boy crouched, pressed a palm against a lantern on the floor. “Still warm,” he said. “He was just here.”

  Clarissa screamed in frustration. She turned to kick one of the barrels, but stopped. There was something in the darkness beyond them. Something large. It was moving.

  Wild Boy picked up the lantern and struck the flint. Its circle of light was weak and trembling as he stepped closer to the moving object.