Wild Boy and the Black Terror Read Free Page B

inside of the chimney, so it ain’t been used, and soot marks in a half-circle on the carpet from where it swings.”
    “Well, that ain’t a door then, that’s a hatch.”
    “All right, so three and a half doors.”
    “Three and a
hatch
. Anyhow, which did the Gentlemen go down?”
    “They took the fourth door. Another one of these wall panels opens. Can’t see no scratch marks on it, so it probably swings. Only, I ain’t sure how.”
    Wild Boy continued around the room, his big eyes searching for that last clue. He stopped at the grand piano, his eyes drawn to something on the keys. He wasn’t certain what he’d seen yet; sometimes his instinct worked like that. He just knew that something was strange here. Brushing hair from around his eyes, he leaned closer.
    There
.
    All of the piano keys were coated with dust, apart from one.
    “So which other wall panel opens?” Clarissa said.
    Wild Boy looked up and grinned. “The one you’re leaning on.”
    He hit the piano key. There was a loud
dong
. The panel swung open and Clarissa tumbled through.
    She jumped up on the other side, brushing dust from her coat. “I knew that,” she said.
    Tingling with excitement, Wild Boy followed her along a narrow passage, towards murmuring voices. Clarissa glanced back, her expression asking if it was safe to continue.
    All that time Wild Boy had spent spying on people at fairgrounds had trained his ears as well as his eyes. He could distinguish the rattles of particular carriage wheels, the barks of different dogs, the smallest sprinkle of an accent in a distant voice. Right then he knew that the voices ahead were muffled by another door, at least half a foot thick. They were safe to continue.
    The passage led to a windowless chamber.
    “A laboratory,” Clarissa said.
    Chemicals fizzed in racks of test tubes. A rat cowered in a cage. On another table, a selection of headgear had been modified into weapons: a soldier’s bearskin rigged with dynamite, a coal-scuttle bonnet concealing a brace of pistols, and a stovepipe hat fixed with tubes to release gas from its crown. They were lethal weapons, designed to kill. But Wild Boy couldn’t help smiling. There was nothing he loved better than snooping and spying with Clarissa.
    Light leaked into the laboratory around the frame of a larger, six-panelled door on the opposite wall. Wild Boy crouched by it and peered through a gap. Several Gentlemen were gathered around a table, studying the contents of the crate – a wooden box with a glass lens jutting from the side and metal plates rising from the top.
    The men smoked cigars and sipped from crystal glasses. They seemed to be one group, but Wild Boy knew that wasn’t quite the case. There were the two sides to the Gentlemen: military men and scientists. Outdoors, the military men wore black hats and the scientists wore grey, but even indoors it wasn’t hard to tell which was which. Those who had been in the army – the Black Hats – were exceedingly proud of their bushy side-whiskers. Most of the Grey Hat scientists kept their whiskers trimmed in case of accidents during experiments, and their skin was pasty and pale from long days cooped up in laboratories.
    None of the fifty or so Gentlemen lived at the palace. Most just came here to work, experimenting with technologies, spying on other governments and whatever other shady activities went on in these secret chambers.
    One of the Grey Hats pulled a lamp closer to the device on the table. “We stole this technology from the French,” he said. “An inventor named Daguerre. This box captures images – real images. They’re called daguerreotypes, or photographs.”
    “Impossible,” said one of the Black Hats.
    “No, it’s quite extraordinary. The device uses iodine crystals to form a light sensitive copper—”
    “It is an interesting trick,” interrupted another Black Hat.
    The man who stepped through the cigar smoke looked like an antique. His skin was the colour of