Carlos Zafon - The Midnight Palace

De Rozio smiled. ‘Sounds vaguely interesting,’ he murmured.

Suddenly a shadow crossed the librarian’s face. De Rozio leaned his considerable bulk towards the boys and pointed at them sternly.

‘This isn’t some invention of that friend of yours?’ he asked. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Ben doesn’t know anything about this, Mr de Rozio,’ Seth reassured him. ‘We haven’t seen him for months.’

‘Just as well,’ de Rozio declared. ‘Follow me.’

With Trepidation Isobel stepped inside the station, allowing her eyes to adapt to the darkness. Tens of metres above her was the main dome, with its great arches of steel and glass. Most of the panes had melted in the flames or had simply burst, shattering into red-hot fragments that had rained down over the entire station. Dusky light filtered through cracks in the darkened metal. The platforms faded into the shadows, forming a gentle curve beneath the huge vaulted ceiling, their surface covered with the remains of burnt benches and collapsed beams.

The large station clock, which once had presided over the central platform, was now just a sombre mute sentry standing by. As she walked under its dial, Isobel noticed that the hands had dropped down towards the ground like tongues of melted wax.

Nothing seemed to have changed in that place, were it not for the traces left by years of dirt and the impact of the rainwater torrential monsoons had swept through ventilation shafts and gaps in the roof.

Isobel stopped in the centre of the grand station and gazed around her.

A fresh gust of hot humid air blew through the building, ruffling her hair and scattering specks of dust over the platforms. Isobel shivered as she scanned the black mouths of the tunnels that went underground at the far end of each platform. She wished the other members of the Chowbar Society were with her, now that the situation was beginning to look far too similar to the stories Ben liked to invent for his evenings at the Midnight Palace. Isobel felt in her pocket and pulled out the drawing Michael had made of the Chowbar Society members standing by a pond in which their faces were reflected. She smiled when she saw the picture Michael had drawn of her and wondered if this was really how he saw her. She missed her friends.

Then she heard it for the first time, far away and muffled by the murmur of the breezes that blew through those tunnels. It was the sound of distant voices, rather like the rumble of the crowds she remembered hearing years ago after she dived into the Hooghly River, the day Ben taught her how to swim underwater, only this time Isobel was sure that these were not the voices of pilgrims approaching from the depths of the tunnels. What she heard were the voices of children, hundreds of them. And they were howling in terror.

De Rozio meticulously stroked the three rolls of his regal chin and once again examined the pile of documents, cuttings and papers he had collected during various expeditions to the digestive tract of the Indian Museum’s labyrinthine library. Seth and Michael watched him with a mixture of impatience and hope.

‘Well,’ the librarian began. ‘This matter is rather more complicated than it seems. There’s quite a bit of information about this Lahawaj Chandra Chatterghee. Most of the documentation I’ve seen is not that significant, but I’d need at least a week to get the papers on this person into some sort of order.’

‘What have you found, sir?’ asked Seth.

‘A bit of everything, really,’ de Rozio explained. ‘Mr Chandra was a brilliant engineer, ahead of his time, an idealist obsessed with the idea of leaving this country with a legacy that would somehow compensate the poor for the suffering he attributed to British rule. Not very original, frankly. In short, he had all the requirements for becoming a miserable wretch. Even so, it seems he was able to navigate a sea of jealousy, conspiracy and subterfuge and even managed to convince the government to finance his golden dream: the building of a railway network that would link the main cities of the nation with the rest of the continent.

‘Chandra believed that this would mark the end of the commercial and political monopoly that had begun in the days of Lord Clive and the Company, when trade was limited to using river and maritime transport. It would allow the people of India slowly to regain control over their country’s wealth. But you didn’t have to be an engineer to realise that things would never turn out that way.’

‘Is there anything about a character called Jawahal?’ asked Seth. ‘He was a childhood friend of the engineer. He went on trial a few times. I think the cases were quite notorious.’

‘There must be something somewhere, but there’s a mountain of documents to sort through. Why don’t you come back in a couple of weeks? By then I’ll have had a chance to put this mess into some kind of order.’

‘We can’t wait two weeks, sir,’ said Michael.

De Rozio stared at them severely.

‘Wasn’t your friend supposed to be a mute?’

Michael stepped forward, his expression dead serious and worth at least a thousand words.

‘This is a matter of life and death, sir,’ said Michael. ‘The lives of two people are in danger.’

De Rozio saw the intensity in Michael’s eyes and nodded, vaguely bewildered. Seth didn’t lose a second.

‘We’ll help you search through the material,’ he offered.

‘You two? I don’t know … When?’

‘Right now,’ replied Michael.

‘Do you know the codes for the library index cards?’ de Rozio asked.

‘Like the alphabet,’ lied Seth.

The sun dipped behind the broken glass panes on the western side of Jheeter’s Gate. A few seconds later Isobel watched, hypnotised, as hundreds of horizontal blades of light sliced through the shadows of the station. The howling voices grew in intensity and soon Isobel could hear them echoing round the dome. The ground began to shake under her feet and she noticed shards of glass falling from above. A sudden pain seared along her left forearm. When she touched the spot warm blood slid through her fingers. She ran towards one end of the station, covering her face with her hands.

As she took shelter under a staircase that led to the upper levels she noticed a large waiting room in front of her. Burnt wooden benches were strewn across the floor and the walls were covered with strange crudely drawn pictures. They seemed to represent deformed human shapes, demonic figures with long wolfish claws and eyes that popped out of their heads. The shaking beneath her feet was now intense, and Isobel approached the mouth of one of the tunnels. A blast of burning air scorched her face and she rubbed her eyes, unable to believe what she was seeing.

From the very depths of the tunnel emerged a glowing train covered in flames. Isobel flung herself to the ground as the train crossed the station with a deafening roar, metal grating against metal, accompanied by the yells of hundreds of children trapped in the flames. She lay there, her eyes closed, paralysed with terror, until the sound of the train died away.

Isobel raised her head and looked around her. The station was empty except for a cloud of steam that slowly lifted, tinted dark red by the afterglow of the sun. In front of her, barely half a metre away, was a puddle of some dark sticky substance. For a moment Isobel thought she could see the reflection of a face on its surface, the luminous sad face of a woman enveloped in light who was calling to her. She stretched out a hand towards the image and found the tips of her fingers soaked in the thick warm fluid. Blood. Isobel jerked her hand away and wiped her fingers on her dress as the vision slowly vanished. Gasping for breath, she dragged herself as far as the wall and leaned against it to recover.