Wild Boy and the Black Terror (21 page)

A wisp of dark smoke floated past Wild Boy’s face. He slid back, swatting in panic at the fumes. But it wasn’t the smoke that had chased him in the tunnel. Rather, it rose from a blackened cauldron over a fire at the side of a small, windowless room. Inside the cauldron, something thick and pink bubbled.

“Wax?” he said.

The room was crammed with disembodied parts of wax statues – leather torsos stuffed with straw, carved arms, tins filled with staring marble eyeballs. Wax heads on a shelf had begun to melt. Dark streaks slid down shiny faces.

There were two doors. Through a glass pane in one, Wild Boy saw snow falling in an alley. Beyond the other, silhouetted wax figures stood on plinths, perfectly still.

“Is this a wax works museum?” he said.

“We are in its workshop,” Dr Carew replied. “The museum is closed for the season. You are safe here.”

“I don’t understand. What happened?”

Wild Boy sipped from a mug of tea that Dr Carew held to his mouth. It was hot and sweet and soothed his dry lips. His body felt stronger already, but his mind still whirled as he tried to make sense of his memories.

“I saw my veins,” he said. “They turned black, just like them others with the terror. How did I survive?”

Dr Carew dipped his quill in his inkpot and made a note in his ledger. “That is what I have been trying to establish ever since Gideon found me. I took blood samples from you and Miss Everett. They confirmed that you had both been affected by some sort of toxin.”

“The hallucinothing you and Lucien talked about?”

“
Hallucinogenic
. Yes, but from what Gideon described, you and Miss Everett were only exposed to a very small amount of it.” He checked his notes. “This
black smoke
.”

Wild Boy remembered how the smoke had faded by the time it caught them in the tunnel. That was why they’d survived. The other victims – Prendergast, Marcus, Lady Bentick and Oberstein – had all breathed in much more of it.

“Do you know what caused the black smoke?” Dr Carew asked.

Wild Boy shifted and looked around the workshop. Spencer stared into the fire, as still and silent as one of the wax statues. Firelight shimmered off his cracked jade mask. Beyond him, hunkered against the wall, sat Clarissa. Her head hung low and her hair covered her face like a veil.

“Clarissa?” Wild Boy said.

She didn’t look up.

“She is well,” Dr Carew said. A hesitance in his voice suggested that he was unconvinced by his own diagnosis. “Whatever caused the black smoke,” he continued, “there is too little of it in your blood to kill you. Sadly, there is not enough to formulate a cure either. But I must warn you that it is
still
in your blood, just a little. You will continue to experience some of its effects for a short time, at least.”

Dr Carew leaned closer. “Tell me, how would you describe those effects?”

Wild Boy shifted back further, uncomfortable under his stare. “What about Marcus?” he asked. “You seen him?”

Dr Carew returned to his notes. “His condition had deteriorated, but he remains alive.”

For now
, Wild Boy thought. He rose and crossed the workshop. The pale skin beneath his hairs was covered in bumps and dark bruises, like a rotten cauliflower. Every limb ached.

“Clarissa?”

Finally she looked up. Her eyes were pink, and salty tracks of tears stained her cheeks. He hoped she might jump up and hug him. He needed her to. But she simply gave a weak, flickering smile, like a flame struggling to stay alight, and returned her gaze to the floor.

Wild Boy understood now why Dr Carew had sounded unsure when he said she’d recovered. Whatever Clarissa saw when the terror struck had almost broken her. He tried to think of something to say, some way to help her.

“We did it, Clarissa,” he said. “We got the black diamond.”

No reply. Did she even hear him?

“Dr Carew said the terror is still in us, just a bit,” he said. “Said maybe we’ll still see some of them bad things. I … I saw the freak show. I was back there again, alone. Did you see your mother?”

Clarissa’s fists clenched so tightly that her nails drew blood from her plams. “No,” she said softly. “I didn’t see nothing.”

At any other moment, on any other day, seeing Clarissa like this would have crushed Wild Boy’s heart. But right then, as he felt his pocket, a realization struck him so hard that he felt as if it had punched right through him, bursting his lungs.

He checked his other pocket, then checked both again, making sure he wasn’t mistaken. Praying he was.

He wasn’t.

The black diamond. Oberstein’s black diamond.

It was gone.

23

“
W
anna go for a walk?” Clarissa said.

Her hand was as shaky as her voice as she reached for Wild Boy to help her from the floor. Her fingers gripped his as if she was hanging from the edge of an abyss.

Across the workshop, Dr Carew looked up from his notes. “Where are you two going?”

Spencer’s gaze turned from the fire, stormy eyes watching from behind his cracked stone mask. He seemed to be on the verge of rising, or perhaps even speaking. Wild Boy sensed that he, too, wanted them to stay close.

Even more reason to leave
.

They walked from the workshop and through the museum’s long exhibition chamber. Strips of fading daylight shone through cracks in the window shutters, spotlighting wax statues arranged in strange, imaginary scenes. On one plinth, the Duke of Wellington planted a signature boot on a prostrate Napoleon Bonaparte. On another, the French queen Marie Antionette wore a silver-sequined mask. Courtiers danced around her disguised in cloaks and black-beaked masks. Beside them, Queen Victoria took tea with Henry VIII, the warlord Genghis Khan and the famous opera singer Jenny Lind.

Wild Boy stared at the statue of the Queen, remembering his excitement when she asked him to investigate this case: the thrill of the mystery and the prospect of solving it. He’d hoped that he and Clarissa would be allowed to stay in the palace for as long as they wanted. Only, he’d made a mess of it so far.

Marcus was still alive, but the black diamond was gone.

He didn’t even know how. It had been in his pocket – deep in his pocket – after the crash in the tunnel. It had been safe.

He looked back along the exhibition chamber at the flicker of firelight from the museum workshop. Had someone stolen it while he was unconscious? Apart from Clarissa, only three people had been near him in that time: Dr Carew, Spencer and Gideon.

Was one of them the killer?

It would make sense. The killer was trying to resurrect the demon Malphas, or at least that’s what the killer thought would happen when the four diamonds of the Black Terror were reunited. But one diamond was still missing, the largest of the stones. Oberstein had no idea where it was, so Wild Boy doubted the killer did either.

The killer still needed their help.

But he wouldn’t get it. If the killer was acting out Lord Dahlquist’s curse, that meant he planned to spread his terror across all of London. Wild Boy couldn’t let that happen, not even to save Marcus. The only hope was to get that last stone and use it to catch the killer, and then make him give them the cure. They needed a new plan. But Wild Boy’s mind was so foggy he could barely think.

The chamber darkened as they reached the last statues. These were raised higher than the others, to give the impression that they were leering down at visitors. A sign on the wall was scrawled in crimson writing to look like blood:

Here were models of Britain’s most notorious criminals: the crazy-eyed witch, Mother Shipton, grinning body snatchers Burke and Hare, and the murderous barber Sweeny Todd, slashing the air with his rusty razor.

On the highest plinth stood a monster covered in hair. The creature looked like a werewolf, with blood-red eyes and vicious, curling claws. The sign on its stand said:

Wild Boy and Clarissa stared at the figure. A few days ago they’d have found it funny. They would have blasted it with spitballs, or swapped its clothes with another wax statue. They’d always laughed about those plays in penny theatres –
The Savage Spectacle of Wild Boy
.

But things were different now. This statue and those plays were the reason they had relied so heavily on Marcus’s protection. They were the reason why, if Marcus died, Wild Boy would have to leave Clarissa. She could do anything. But for him there was only one other place.

Wild Boy closed his eyes as dark memories flashed through his head, glimpses of swooping crows and freak-show walls. It was the Black Terror, still affecting his mind, as Dr Carew had warned.

Clarissa reached to him but pulled away and stepped back. “I’m sick of this,” she fumed.

She shoved the model so hard that it toppled from its stand and thumped to the floor. “Even if we do get the cure, no one will thank us. They’ll still make up stupid stories about you.”

“I don’t care about those people, Clarissa.”

“Me neither.” She punctuated each sentence by kicking the model on the floor. “All I care about is Marcus. He’s the only one I’m giving the cure. Everyone else can
get
the terror for all I care.”

Her last kick was so hard that the statue’s marble eyes fell out and rolled across the floor. She stood over it, breathing hard. “Why are we even here? We’ve got the black diamond. How do we swap it for the cure?”