Wild Boy and the Black Terror (16 page)

“
T
his don’t look so scary.”

Clarissa pulled the window shutters closed, but sunshine sneaked between the wooden slats, giving just enough light to see the room they had broken into. “It’s just an ordinary bedroom,” she said, sounding disappointed.

The fire was unlit, but the air was warm, prickling the hair on Wild Boy’s face. The walls were decorated with faded green paper and golden fleurs-de-lis. Heavy woollen drapes enclosed a four-poster bed. The door was open, inviting them into a long, dark corridor.

“Come on,” Clarissa said. “Let’s find the black diamond.”

She moved towards the door, but Wild Boy held her back, sensing danger. It was an instinct he’d learned to trust, and so had Clarissa.

“What is it?” she breathed.

He still wasn’t sure. His breaths slowed as he scanned the room. He saw a sheen of dust on the door handle. He saw a dead fly, dried and shrivelled, on the bed. He saw how the
fleur-de-lis
, bright against the dull green wallpaper, were unevenly spaced. And above, he saw a pinprick of light on the ceiling.

His hand tightened on Clarissa’s arm. “Don’t move,” he said.

“What do you see?”

“That light up there. What’s it coming off? There’s something we ain’t seeing.”

“Don’t be a thickhead, you see everything.”

Not now I don’t
. “You got a light in that bag?”

Clarissa brought a candle from Gideon’s bag, a black wax stump. She lit it with a tinderbox and raised it to the gloom. As the light spread they saw that the air was filled with jewels.

Dozens of crystals hung on impossibly thin threads, so transparent they were invisible without the reflection of the light. The crystals were suspended at different heights. Some kissed the rug. Others dangled at eye level. Some even hung from the canopy of the bed.

Clarissa held the candle close to the nearest crystal. The light bounced off its facets, speckling the walls. “These ain’t for decoration, are they?” she said.

She tilted the candle and prodded the jewel.

“No,” Wild Boy said. “Don’t!”

Psst
. Something fired across the room and shot into the candle. A hiss of steam rose from one of the fleurs-de-lis.

The candle quivered in Clarissa’s hand. A small shard of glass was stuck in the wax. “A dart,” she said.

Wild Boy plucked a hair from the back of his hand and let it flutter over the dart’s edge. The brown strand split in two as it fell. He’d never seen anything so sharp.

“Why would someone do this?” Clarissa said.

“Protection,” Wild Boy guessed. “Oberstein’s scared of something.”

He watched steam drift from the fleurs-de-lis and began to understand why the room was so warm. “There’s machines in the walls,” he said. “I reckon each stone sets off a dart if it moves.”

“It’s impossible,” Clarissa said. “No way through the room.”

Wild Boy took the candle and raised it high, studying the suspended stones. His gaze moved among them, searching for the best passage; the wider gaps between the jewels and the dead ends where the spaces were too slim to pass. A map formed in his head, a twisting path through the maze.

“Follow me,” he said.

He pressed the hair down on his face, fearing it might brush the stones. Then he stepped through the gap. He tried not to think of punctured organs, knives slicing through butter…

“You sure you know what you’re doing?” Clarissa asked, edging carefully behind him.

Wild Boy didn’t reply, for fear of unsettling the stones. He kept moving, inch by inch, following the map in his mind. Clarissa followed as they shuffled forwards, backwards, ducked to slide under one jewel, turned sideways to move around another.

“Almost there,” Wild Boy said.

There were only two threads left between him and the bedroom door, but the gap between them was less than a foot wide.

“You ain’t gonna make it,” Clarissa warned.

He could do it. He was sure of it. He breathed in, held the breath and moved. A hair on his nose sprang up and brushed one of the crystals.

Psst
.

Wild Boy closed his eyes, waiting for the impact. None came. Sliding a hand to his back, he felt a tear where a dart had sliced the fabric of his coat.

He sighed with relief.

Several threads swayed.

“Jump!” Clarissa cried.

Psst. Psst. Psst. Psst
.

Glass darts shot across the room as they leaped into the doorway. Wild Boy rolled over, feeling for rips in his coat or cuts on his limbs.

“You all right?” he gasped.

Clarissa rose, brushing back her hair. Wild Boy expected her to grin, or say something cocky. Instead she turned and yelled along the corridor: “Hey, Oberstein! We’re still alive and we’re coming for your black diamond.”

A moan echoed back from the darkness.

“That don’t scare me,” Clarissa said in a voice suddenly full of fear. She helped Wild Boy up from the floor. “Who was that?” she whispered.

Wild Boy didn’t think it was someone, but rather
something
. The air was filled with a haze of steam, and the whole building trembled. His feet felt warm against the carpet runner.

“We gotta watch out,” he said. “Come on.”

17

W
ild Boy led the way down the corridor. None of the lamps on the walls were lit, but he didn’t need them. He’d spent most of his life locked up in dark rooms, so he was used to it. He saw several closed doors along the passage, between shelves crammed with books.

“Which door should we take?” Clarissa said.

“None of them. Don’t open any.”

“How are we gonna find the black diamond if we don’t even look?”

“Those ain’t the places to look. None of these doors have been opened in months. See the dust on the handles?”

“Reckon there are more traps inside?” Clarissa asked. “That would explain all the machinery in the walls. What’s got Oberstein so scared? All this security can’t be just to protect her jewels.”

Wild Boy stopped at one of the bookcases and leaned close to read the titles on the spines. His hairs bristled. All of the books were about the same subject:
The Hierarchy of Demons, Occult Philosophy, Banishing Evil Spirits
.

“Demons,” he said.

“So how we gonna find the black diamond?” Clarissa asked. “Ain’t no other way out.”

There was always another way out, Marcus had taught Wild Boy that. You just had to look hard enough. He turned, letting his eyes and instinct take over.

There
.

“The lights,” he said.

He rushed to one of the lamps on the wall, then another. All of them had full bowls of oil except one, which was almost empty. Only that lamp had been used. It was only there that someone had needed illumination.

He sank to his knees and pulled back the carpet.

Underneath was a hatch.

Clarissa joined him and they lifted the trap door. A blast of steam rose into their faces. The cavity beneath the floor was filled with pipes and pistons, as if a locomotive engine were squeezed into the space. A bronze pole, rutted with grooves, hung from the machinery and into the darkness below.

Clarissa struck another flint from her tinderbox and lit a candle. She waved the flame through the hole. Whatever was down there made her gasp.

“What is it?” Wild Boy said.

“Jewels!”

She swung through the trap door and into the dark.

Wild Boy lowered himself awkwardly through the hole, clinging onto the pole. His hands scraped against its metal ridges. “This looks like a screw,” he said, as he reached the floor.

“It ain’t the only one,” Clarissa replied.

The candlelight gleamed off a dozen shafts that rose from floor to ceiling around a small, wood-panelled room. Each screw ran through the centre of a metal disc, like a giant cog but with sharper teeth.

The poles surrounded a table, and the table was covered in jewels.

Clarissa rushed to it, guiding her light around the stones. There were pearls as large as hens’ eggs, fat blue sapphires, and emeralds bigger and greener than Wild Boy’s eyes.

At any other time, Clarissa would have shoved them in her pockets. But now she was only interested in one jewel. She grabbed a handful of the stones and hurled them against the wall. “None of ‘em are black diamonds,” she said.

Wild Boy hadn’t looked. He stared at the poles, then one of the walls, where he spotted a dark splatter mark. A thought occurred to him so terrible that it took him several seconds to find the courage to say it out loud.

“These poles ain’t screws,” he said. “They’re saws. Clarissa, that thief Gideon told us about. Wasn’t his head
sawn
off?”

“Oh my God…”

The jewels began to shake.

Spits of steam rose through cracks in the floorboards, scalding Wild Boy’s feet. The screws began to turn; first slowly, then as fast as toy tops. The cogs whirled up and down the shafts, their teeth glinting blurs. Now the screws started to move, sliding back and forth along grooves in the ceiling.

Hot air rushed around the room as the blades whirled from all directions. One of them fizzed past Wild Boy so close that it trimmed the hair on his cheek. He tumbled back, then rolled over as another saw screamed from the side.

“How do we turn them off?” Clarissa yelled.

Through the saws Wild Boy spotted a wooden panel hanging crookedly on the wall, as if it had been replaced in a hurry. Was there a hidden lever?

“Clarissa!” he called. “See that panel? You gotta get to it.”

Clarissa ducked another blade. It spun over her head and chopped off the top of her candle. The flame fluttered, and the room plunged into darkness.

“I can’t see!”

“You can do it, Clarissa. Remember what Marcus said. You gotta concentrate. Think!”

Wild Boy didn’t see everything that happened next; it was too fast. He glimpsed Clarissa flip over a saw, duck under another, spring up and dive between two more.

A saw came at him from behind, another from the front. One of them tore his coat at the back. Another whirred at his belly, slicing the hair, kissing his skin. He closed his eyes.

The saws stopped.

“Wild Boy? Wild Boy!”

He tried to reply, but all that came out was a gasp. A few more seconds and he’d have been cut in two.

Clarissa lit another candle. Her hair had been cut short on one side, and her dress had new tears, but she wasn’t bleeding. The panel in the wall hung open; a lever had been forced up among a clutter of pipes and machinery. “Got it,” she said.

Wild Boy edged delicately away from the saws and moved through the blades to her side. One of the stitches on his head had come undone and warm blood slid under his hair. But he couldn’t stop grinning.

Then something happened that lifted away the pain.

Clarissa grinned too.

“Easy,” she said.

Wild Boy was about to reply when another trap door opened beneath them and they fell through.

The drop was short, to a steep wooden slide. They hit it hard and shot down its polished surface. Before they could find their screams, they crashed through another door and tumbled across a cold stone floor.

The ground floor.