Wild Boy and the Black Terror Read online

  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

  Wild 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.

  The shutters were sealed across the shop front. The only light came from a fire that smouldered on the other side of the room. But all around them things gleamed. And hummed. And steamed.

  Pipes covered two of the walls. They rose from underground, hissing and steaming at their joints. The air here was even hotter, like a warm sponge, dampening the hair on Wild Boy’s face. Steam misted the glass of several display cases, empty relics from the chamber’s previous life as Oberstein’s jewellery showroom.

  One case, though, was neither empty nor steamed. It seemed to have been cleaned moments before they tumbled into the room. Inside was a velvet cushion, and sitting on the cushion was…

  “The black diamond,” Clarissa said.

  Wild Boy was amazed by how black it was, as dark as a lump of coal and almost as big. But still, somehow, the jewel gleamed. Black beams scattered across the showroom from a thousand polished surfaces.

  Clarissa moved towards the case, but again Wild Boy held her back. He’d sensed from the moment they landed in this place that they were not alone.

  Four silhouetted figures watched from the shadows. One of them stepped closer, eyes glinting in the darkness.

  18

  Steam hissed from one of the pipes fixed to the wall of Oberstein’s showroom.

  One of the figures silhouetted stepped through the mist, seemingly untroubled by its heat. As the man came closer, the glow of the fire caught his face. The flash of bright, shiny green did not m
ake sense at first.

  No, it was not a face.

  “A mask,” Clarissa said.

  The mask was smooth, like a doll’s face, and fixed around the person’s head with leather straps. It was made of dazzling green jade. The eyes that stared through it were grey and glazed and entirely without emotion. Wild Boy could hear the man’s heavy, steady breathing.

  He had no weapon, nor did he need one. He was not tall but his neck was as thick as a tree trunk. His hands were the size of frying pans, and the muscles in his arms were so large their contours showed through the sleeves of his long leather coat.

  The guards from outside were here too, one armed with a pistol, the other with a knife. They stood over Gideon, who had been forced to his knees beside the fire. Gideon stared into the barrel, fidgeting furiously with his neckcloth. Wild Boy hoped he didn’t try anything stupid. The guard looked worryingly eager to use that pistol.

  A third, smaller, guard remained in the shadows in the corner of the showroom.

  Wild Boy moved closer to Clarissa. He felt her arms tremble, but knew it was from anger, not fear. For the first time since Lady Bentick’s house she had enemies to fight.

  Her eyes flicked from the masked man to the black diamond, and then back to the man. “Are you Oberstein?” she demanded.

  The masked man replied with a slight tilt of his head.

  “Nice to meet you,” Clarissa said. “We’ve come for that black diamond.”

  The man replied with an even slighter shake of his head. With a sweep of a leg, he kicked a hessian bag across the floor. It slid to a stop beside Wild Boy’s feet.

  “Watch out,” Clarissa said. “Could be another trap.”

  Wild Boy didn’t think so. If this man wanted them dead, all he had to do was signal to his guards. Cautiously he unbuttoned the bag. For a moment he just stared.

  “Wild Boy?” Clarissa asked.

  The bag was filled with jewels. Blue, green, pink and blood red, packed so tightly they strained the bag’s seams. A card lay on top, with a single sentence written in ink.

  “Take them and leave,” Wild Boy read.

  The message was so unexpected that he didn’t know what to say. He’d never been interested in wealth, so he was surprised how tempted he was by the offer. With such a fortune, he and Clarissa could live where they liked, however they liked. They wouldn’t need the Gentlemen’s protection. They could probably buy a palace of their own if they wanted to.

  Clarissa barely glanced at the bag. Her glare remained on the jade-masked man. “You ain’t too chatty,” she said, “so maybe you don’t hear too good neither. We’re only here for that stone. The black diamond.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed. Another hiss of steam escaped from one of the pipes, and he used the distraction to glance at the guard in the shadows.

  A curious thought occurred to Wild Boy. So far nothing in this place had been as it seemed. Why should this situation be different?

  “What do we do?” Clarissa whispered. “Oberstein’s gonna kill us if we go for the diamond.”

  “No he ain’t,” Wild Boy said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Cos he ain’t Oberstein. Are you, mister?”

  The man breathed deeper into the back of his mask.

  Wild Boy moved closer, seeking clues to confirm what he already knew. “It don’t make sense,” he said, “that someone so obsessed with safety should show himself so fast. And think of the things you’d expect to see on someone who’s spent a life studying jewels up close, cutting and polishing. Squinty eyes, hunched back, scars on their hands. You ain’t got none of them, mister. Real straight back, in fact. You do have soot marks on your fingers from shoveling coal into whatever furnace gets all these pipes steaming. Why would the master of this place stoke his own furnace when he’s got all these guards to do it? No, you ain’t Oberstein.”

  He looked beyond the masked man, to the guard in the shadows.

  “You are,” he said.

  The figure stepped into the firelight. The person was so small that Wild Boy thought it might be a child, until a long coat fell away to reveal an old woman, frail and hunched. Her face was round and wrinkled like a walnut, and grey hair hung in wisps from her liver-spotted scalp. Dark spectacles hid her eyes. Her ragged, sack-like clothes were more suited to the slums of Seven Dials than the wealthiest establishment in Mayfair.

  She spoke in a pained, rasping voice. “You see a lot, young man. There you have me at a disadvantage.”

  She removed her dark glasses. She had white, dead-fish eyes.

  Another attempt to speak ended in a hacking cough that echoed around the empty showroom. She must have known the masked man would move towards her, because she waved him back with a flap of a hand. Another flap caused one of the other guards to lower his gun, although the man’s grip remained tight around the weapon.

  The woman came closer. Shrivelled hands reached for Wild Boy’s face. “May I?”

  Wild Boy forced himself to stay still as she slid rough hands over his forehead, cheeks and chin. She felt hair where other people had skin, but she didn’t flinch.

  “You know who I am,” he said.

  The lady – Oberstein – stepped back. “Of course. You are the Wild Boy of London, world famous villain. You and Miss Everett were seen entering this building. You were not expected to be seen again. You are lucky to be alive.”

  “It ain’t luck,” Clarissa said. “We beat your stupid traps. Now we’re taking that black diamond.”

  “I am afraid not, Miss Everett. That stone belongs to another.”

  “Yeah? Who’s that?”

  “You would not believe me if I told you.”

  “I wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t wanna know.”

  “Nevertheless, I urge you to accept my offer. In that bag are enough jewels to place you among the ten wealthiest individuals in the world. I suggest that you take them with my congratulations, and leave. We will also release your friend, Mr Gideon.”

  “And if we don’t?” Clarissa said.

  Oberstein’s wrinkles eased, as if she had suddenly become comfortable in her own body. “Then you will still leave,” she said. “In several bags.”

  Wild Boy and Clarissa moved closer, fingers touching at their sides.

  “However,” Oberstein continued, “I am curious. May I ask why my black diamond interests you?”

  “Our friend is sick,” Wild Boy said. “Been given some sort of poison that’s gonna kill him. Whoever done it has a cure. Only, he’s after black diamonds, and yours is—”

  “No!” Oberstein cried.

  The old woman gripped her chest as if she’d been shot in the heart.

  This time the masked man wouldn’t be ordered back. Taking Oberstein’s shoulders, he helped her to a chair beside the fire. He crouched beside her and held her frail arms until the worst of her pain passed.

  “Did you hear, Spencer?” Oberstein wheezed. “Did you hear what the boy said?”

  Clarissa made a dash for the stone. But the guard raised his firearm and she stepped back.

  “I applaud your efforts, Miss Everett,” Oberstein said, recovering enough to sit up. “But I am afraid they are in vain. Your friend cannot be cured.”

  “Shut your head,” Clarissa said. “Why would you say that?”

  “Because he has not been poisoned.”

  “What’s happened to him then?”

  “He has been cursed.”

  The woman was crazy, Wild Boy decided. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t help them. “Whatever’s going on, you know about it, don’t you?” he said.

  “I do. More, perhaps, than any other person alive.”

  “Then here…”

  He kicked the bag towards her, scattering a rainbow of jewels across the showroom floor. “You gave them to us, so now we’re giving them back. That’s what we’ll pay you to tell us everything you know, anything that might help us save our friend.”

  “Ah,” Oberstein
said, “now we have an understanding. Then I suggest you make yourselves comfortable while an old lady tells you a story. Then you will understand the true nature of your enemy and, I am afraid, how futile your attempts are to save your friend.”

  19

  “The story begins with a man named Geoffrey Dahlquist, the eleventh Earl of Cravenhill,” said Oberstein. “Have you heard of this man? I do not suppose you would say if you have. But you would certainly remember him. Lord Dahlquist was a bear of a man, as strong even as my bodyguard, Spencer here. Spencer? Take my hand. Ah, that’s it. Now, where was I?”

  “Dahlquist. You were talking about some bloke named Dahlquist.”

  “Yes, Wild Boy, Lord Dahlquist. Dahlquist was, to many people, a fine individual. A family man, devoted to his wife and young son. A pioneering doctor who financed two hospitals. He was a philanthropist, a Master Mason and a skilled angler. Then, around sixteen years ago, Lord Dahlquist left England with his family and purchased a diamond mine in the south-west of India, near the village of Kollur. Do any of you know of Kollur?”

  “None of us know nothing you’re talking about. What’s this history lesson got to do with what happened to Marcus?”

  “Keep listening, Miss Everett, and you shall find out. That mine at Kollur was rich in diamonds. There were enough stones in those hills to make Dahlquist the wealthiest man on the planet. But he had no interest in wealth, of which he had enough through his family line to satisfy several lifetimes. Nor did he care for ordinary diamonds. All Lord Dahlquist wanted was a black diamond, and that mine at Kollur was one of the few in the world that yielded those rarest of stones.”

  “Why’d he want a black diamond so bad?”

  “It was not for himself that he sought this stone. It was for his master.”

  “Master?”

  “The Devil, Miss Everett. Or at least his devil. You see, this fine philanthropist and father was also a devil worshipper. Around that time, I recall, it was quite fashionable among the aristocracy: séances, occultism and the like. Only, for Dahlquist it became an obsession. In a cave in those mines, he conducted rituals to a demon god named Malphas.”