Wild Boy (14 page)

“Or so the Doctor thought.”

The color drained from Clarissa’s cheeks. “No . . .” she whispered.

“The killer never broke in; he was
brought
in. He must have watched this house, known how secure it was. The only people allowed inside that the Doctor didn’t know were these corpses. So the killer disguised himself as a dead body — naked, in the sack. He waited until the Doctor lifted the sack onto the table. And just as Doctor Griffin opened it, the killer grabbed his knife and struck.”

“But . . . What sort of person would do that?”

What sort of person
could
do that, Wild Boy wondered. The resolve, the determination. How long had the killer waited in that sack, how patient and still?

He looked up from the table. Clarissa was staring at him. “What?” he said.

“You’re grinning again!”

“I . . . No, I ain’t.”

“All right,” Clarissa said, “so now we know how it was done. But the students who found the Doctor forced their way in as soon as they heard him scream. So the killer was still in this house. Where did he go?”

Wild Boy paced around the table, searching for another clue he’d spotted among the bloodstains. The Doctor’s blood was everywhere — dried in splatters about the floor and glistening in the grooves between the boards. Crouching low, he circled one of the stains with his finger. The dark drip tapered away from the murder scene, toward the stairs at the end of the classroom.

“Answer me!” Clarissa demanded. “Where did he go? The doors were all locked, remember?”

“That way,” Wild Boy said. “The killer went downstairs.”

“But why?”

Wild Boy felt that tingle again in his hair. He looked up and his emerald eyes twinkled in the candlelight. “I dunno,” he said. “But we’re about to find out.”

W
ild Boy had no idea what he’d expected to find on the first floor of Doctor Griffin’s house, but he hadn’t expected
this.

He raised his candle, scattering glittery light around thousands of glass jars crammed onto shelves and into cabinets up and down the long room. Each jar was filled with golden fluid, and suspended in the fluid was part of a human corpse. Grisly objects loomed from the dark — a severed hand, an amputated foot, the honeycomb lining of a human stomach.

“Looks like a museum,” he said, gazing along the rows of pickled organs and limbs.

Clarissa peered anxiously over his shoulder. “It’s horrid,” she said.

Wild Boy nodded, pretending to agree. In fact, he was fascinated. He wished he had time to look around the Doctor’s museum properly, and examine each object in every jar. But he could hear the police officers’ voices through a window at one end of the long room, and he knew they could come into this house at any time. He had to focus, find more clues. He was certain the killer had come down here. He’d followed the blood trail from upstairs, and there were more marks on these floorboards.

He moved slowly through the room, crouching with his candle to study the drops of dry blood. What he saw didn’t make a lot of sense — the trail led one way and then the other, as if the killer had walked back and forth between the cabinets and shelves. Then it returned to the door and vanished.

Clarissa snatched up one of the jars and gave it a shake. Eyeballs bobbed inside, like tadpoles with sinewy tails. She considered them for a moment, torn between fascination and revulsion. “My father took me to a museum once,” she said.

Wild Boy was surprised. It was the first time Clarissa had mentioned her father. He was curious to know more. “What was he like?” he said.

Clarissa considered the question for a moment, staring at the floating eyeballs, but didn’t answer. Instead she dumped the jar back onto the shelf, causing the others to knock loudly against each other. “So why did the killer come down here?” she said.

“He was looking for something, but I don’t think he found it.”

“Why not?”

“He was in a rush. He had to get out the front door before the students came down from upstairs to search the house.”

Rising to tiptoes, Wild Boy examined the jars on the shelves up high. Then he crouched and checked those down low. Judging from the thick sheen of dust around their bases, none of them had been moved for months.

“Hey, look at this,” Clarissa said.

He hurried to join her at the other end of the room, where a large oil painting hung between the shelves, set in a twisting frame of gilded leaves. The painting showed three smartly dressed men, their faces lit by sparks that flew from some kind of scientific contraption on a table.

Clarissa tapped one of the figures. “Ain’t that Professor Wollstonecraft?”

Wild Boy nodded slowly. It was strange to see the old showman dressed so neatly, and without his shaded spectacles. But there was no mistaking that crooked frame and wine-red nose.

“And that man’s Doctor Griffin,” he said.

“So who’s the other bloke?”

The hairs bristled on Wild Boy’s back. He recognized the third man, who was taller than the other two, with a thin face, slicked silver hair, and a patch over one eye. “That’s the man from the fair,” he said. “That’s the man with the golden eyeball.”

“It
is,
” Clarissa said. “Look, there’s some writing. . . . ”

She crouched and read a brass plaque at the base of the frame.
“To
Dr. Charles Ignatius Griffin. For serving your country as a Gentleman.
”

“Gentleman?”

“Says it with a big
G.
”

Wild Boy stepped closer, staring at the scientific device in the painting. Sparks flew from a ball of copper tubes fixed to an axle between two wheels.

“A machine . . .” he said.

Clunk, thunk!

They both turned. The noise had come from downstairs.

“What was that?” Clarissa hissed.

Wild Boy stood still, trying to listen for any other sounds above the thumping of his heart. There were none. He couldn’t even hear the police officers out on the street.

“We should go,” Clarissa said.

He knew she was right, but he wasn’t ready to leave. He felt as if he were close to finding out why the killer had come here. It couldn’t just be for this painting.
Think! He had to think!

“Wild Boy,” Clarissa insisted. “The police are just outside that window.”

He turned, looked at her. “What did you say?”

“I said we’d better hurry.”

“No. You said
window.
”

Could it be possible? He looked past Clarissa to the window at the far end of the museum. Then he turned back to the painting, and a grin spread across his hairy face.

“What are you smiling about now?” Clarissa snapped.

“There’s no window at this end of the room.”

“So?”

“There was outside. You tried to open it, remember?”

“I . . . I
do.
Where’s it gone?”

Wild Boy stepped even closer to the painting. He tried to think like he was back at the fair, picking out clues from the crowd. He let his eyes rove across the surface, let instinct take over. . . .
There!

“What? What have you seen now?” Clarissa said.

“Look. Up there.”

High up, a tiny patch of gilt was missing from the frame. It hadn’t been knocked or chipped. It had been worn away, as if something had rubbed against it. Wild Boy reached for the spot, but he was too short. “Feel under there, will you?” he said. “Where the gold’s gone.”

Clarissa tried to look annoyed at being bossed about, but she couldn’t hide her curiosity. Elbowing him aside, she slid her hand under the spot on the frame. Her palm rubbed against the gilded wood. Her eyes widened.

“There
is
something there,” she said. “Feels like . . .”

“A lever?”

“You mean . . . this painting . . . ?”

“Opens.”

Now Clarissa grinned too. “There’s a secret room?”

“There’s a secret bloomin’ room.”

T
he painting swung open with a hiss of brown air.

Wild Boy and Clarissa stepped back, horrified by the reek that rushed from within. Whatever was in Doctor Griffin’s secret room, it smelled even worse than the classroom upstairs.

The painting creaked on hinges hidden in the frame, and Wild Boy’s candlelight guttered in the stale breeze. “I’ll go first,” he said.

“Why you?” Clarissa replied. “You ain’t braver than me. We’ll go together.”

They lifted their feet slowly through the frame and set them on creaky floorboards on the other side. The room was long and narrow, with a wooden worktable against one of the brick walls. Fingers of fog tapped at a window, eager to be let in.

Clarissa edged closer to Wild Boy. Her heavy breaths tickled the hair on his neck.

“Are you scared?” she said.

“I . . . I ain’t scared of nothing,” Wild Boy replied.

“Me neither.”

They crept deeper into the thin passage. Several jars from the Doctor’s museum sat on the worktable. Except these didn’t contain human body parts.

“Animals,” Clarissa said.

Wild Boy leaned closer, his eyes wide with fascination. “Not
just
animals,” he said.

His candle lit the suspended corpses of a cat, a puppy with its tongue lolling out, a rat shaved of its fur. It looked like the Doctor had experimented on the poor creatures. Thin copper rods stuck from their floating bodies, and wires hung from clips on their limbs. Only one of the animals had been left untouched — a fat eel coiled up and floating in the golden fluid.

Wild Boy tapped the jar curiously. He’d seen an eel like that before.

The eel moved.

Wild Boy lurched back in fright. The candle slipped from his hand, plunging the chamber into darkness.

“What?” Clarissa said. “What is it?”

“It’s alive! That thing in the jar!”

Blue light crackled around the room, and Wild Boy remembered where he’d seen a creature like that. Back at the fair, Professor Wollstonecraft had performed tricks with an eel that sparkled when it got angry. An
electrical eel,
he’d called it.

Clarissa gripped his arm. “I can’t see!”

“Wait . . .”

Wild Boy picked up the jar and gave it a shake. The eel bashed its head angrily against the glass. Blue sparks shimmered around its sluggy body, flashing light about the narrow chamber.

“Sorry, slimy,” Wild Boy said.

There were more jars along the worktop. In these floated human body parts that had also been used for Doctor Griffin’s tests. Metal tubes stuck from the rubbery ventricles of a heart, and silver cogs clung to its fleshy sides. In another jar, a pair of lungs had been grafted with copper wires.

“What is
that
?” Clarissa said.

Beside an empty jar on the worktable sat a small cage made of thin silver bars. Inside the cage was a shriveled gray ball with a dozen copper wires emerging from its sides. The wires were connected to the bars, so that they held the ball suspended, like a fat spider in the center of its web. This rotten object was clearly the source of the stench in this chamber. Green puss oozed from its base and dripped to the bottom of the cage.

“What
is
it?” Clarissa said.

Wild Boy leaned closer, wrapping an arm around his nose to mask the smell. He recognized the object from pictures in the Doctor’s books. “It’s a brain,” he said.

Several more books lay beside the cage, but these weren’t about anatomy. One was titled
Journal of the Inductive Sciences.
Another was called
Electrical Theory of the Universe.
Inside there were drawings of scientific devices like those that Professor Wollstonecraft had used in his circus show.

“Electricity,” Wild Boy muttered.

He picked up a small notebook from among the pile and shook the eel jar to see the pages. It was crammed with the results of the Doctor’s experiments: sketches of bodies and machines, equations, and scribbled writing. The words seemed to swirl in the candlelight as a wave of exhaustion washed over Wild Boy. So far all they’d found were more frustrating questions. He wished he could rest and think, far away from the police and the fear of getting caught.