Wild Boy by Rob Lloyd Jones

Author:Rob Lloyd Jones [Jones, Rob Lloyd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7636-6769-6
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Published: 2013-11-09T05:00:00+00:00

The 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.

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