Carlos Zafon - The Midnight Palace

After a minute she stood up again and looked around the station. The evening light was fading fast and soon night would be upon her. A single thought took hold of her: she didn’t want to wait for that moment inside Jheeter’s Gate. She started to walk nervously towards the exit and only then did she spy a ghostly silhouette advancing towards her through the mist. The figure raised a hand, and Isobel saw its fingers burst into flames to light up its path. By then she had realised that she wouldn’t be able to get out of that place as easily as she had entered.

Through the collapsed roof of the Midnight Palace shone a starry sky. Evening had taken with it some of the sweltering heat that had been pounding the city since dawn, but the breeze that blew timidly through the streets of the Black Town seemed little more than a warm moist sigh from the Hooghly River.

While they waited for the remaining members of the Chowbar Society to arrive, Ian, Ben and Sheere were listlessly killing time among the ruins of the old mansion, each lost in their own thoughts.

Ben had opted to clamber up to his favourite corner, a naked beam that ran across the front pediment of the Palace. Sitting exactly in the middle, his legs dangling, Ben would often perch on his solitary lookout post to gaze out at the city lights and the silhouettes of the palaces and cemeteries that bordered the sinuous course of the Hooghly through Calcutta. He could spend hours up there without speaking, not even bothering to look down at solid ground.

From the Palace courtyard Ian kept an eye on his friend and decided to let him enjoy one of his last spiritual retreats; meanwhile, he returned to the task with which he had been occupied the last hour: trying to explain to Sheere the rudiments of chess, using a board which the Chowbar Society kept in its headquarters. The chess pieces were reserved for the annual championships that took place in December – something Isobel invariably won with a superiority that bordered on insult.

‘There are two theories regarding the strategy of chess,’ Ian explained. ‘In fact there are dozens, but only a couple really count. The first is that the key to the game lies in the second row: king, knight, castle, queen, etc. According to this theory, the pawns are just pieces to be sacrificed while you develop your tactics. The second theory, on the other hand, supports the idea that pawns can and should be the most lethal pieces you use in your attack, and it is an intelligent strategy to treat them as such. To be frank, neither of these theories has worked for me, but Isobel is a passionate defender of the second one.’

In mentioning his friend’s name, Ian was reminded of how worried he was about her. Sheere noticed his distant expression and rescued him with a new question about the game.

‘What is the difference between tactics and strategy?’ she asked. ‘Is it purely technical?’

Ian weighed up Sheere’s question although he doubted there was an answer to it.

‘It’s a linguistic difference, not a real one,’ came Ben’s voice from on high. ‘Tactics are the collection of small steps you take to reach a position; strategy, the steps you take when there’s nowhere left to go.’

Sheere looked up and smiled at Ben.

‘Do you play chess?’ she asked.

Ben didn’t reply.

‘Ben deplores chess,’ Ian explained. ‘According to him, it’s the second most useless way of wasting your intelligence.’

‘And what is the first?’

‘Philosophy,’ answered Ben from his lookout post.

‘Ben dixit ,’ Ian proclaimed. ‘Why don’t you come down? The others should be arriving soon.’

‘I’ll wait,’ Ben replied, returning to his place in the clouds.

In fact he didn’t come down until half an hour later. Ian was engrossed in an explanation of the knight’s ability to jump over other pieces when Roshan and Siraj appeared at the entrance to the Midnight Palace. After a while Seth and Michael also returned, and they all gathered round a small bonfire that Ian had built with the remaining bits of dry wood, which they kept in a part of the building to the rear of the Palace that was protected from the rain. The faces of the seven friends were tinted copper by the glow of the fire as they drank from the bottle of water Ben passed round. It wasn’t cold, but at least it wasn’t potentially deadly.

‘Shouldn’t we wait for Isobel?’ asked Siraj, visibly anxious about his unrequited love.

‘She might not come,’ said Ian.

They all looked at him in bewilderment. Ian told them briefly about his conversation with Isobel that afternoon, his friends’ expressions becoming markedly gloomy. When he’d finished, he reminded them that she had wanted them to share their discoveries with or without her being present, and he offered the first turn to whoever wished to take it.

‘All right,’ said Siraj nervously. ‘I’ll tell you what we found out, but then I’m going straight in search of Isobel. Only someone as stubborn as her would have decided to go off on an expedition tonight, alone and without telling us where she was going. How could you let her do that, Ian?’

Roshan came to Ian’s rescue, placing his hand on Siraj’s shoulder.

‘You can’t argue with Isobel,’ he reminded Siraj. ‘You can only listen. Tell them about the hieroglyphics and then we’ll both go and look for her.’

‘Hieroglyphics?’ asked Sheere.

Roshan nodded.

‘We found the house, Sheere,’ Siraj explained. ‘Or rather, we know where it is.’

Sheere’s face suddenly lit up, her heart racing. The boys drew closer to the fire and Siraj pulled out a sheet of paper with a few lines of a poem copied out in his unmistakable handwriting.

‘What’s this?’ asked Seth.

‘A poem,’ Siraj replied.

‘Read it aloud,’ said Roshan.

‘ The city I love is a dark, deep

house of misery, a home to evil spirits

in which no one will open a door, nor a heart .

The city I love lives in the twilight ,

shadow of wickedness and forgotten glories ,

of fortunes sold and souls in torment .

The city I love loves no one, it never rests; it is a

tower erected to the uncertain hell of our destiny ,

of the enchantment of a curse that was written in blood ,

the dance of deceit and infamy ,

bazar of my sadness … ’

The friends remained silent after Siraj had finished reading the poem, and for a moment there was only the whisper of the fire and the distant voice of the city whistling in the wind.

‘I know those lines,’ Sheere murmured. ‘They come from one of my father’s books. They’re at the end of my favourite story, the tale of Shiva’s tears.’

‘Exactly,’ Siraj agreed. ‘We’ve spent the whole afternoon in the Bengali Institute of Industry. It’s an incredible building, almost completely run-down, with floor after floor of archives and rooms buried in dust and rubbish. There were rats, and I bet that if we went there at night we’d find something lurking-’

‘Let’s stick to the point, Siraj,’ Ben cut in. ‘Please.’

‘All right,’ said Siraj, setting aside his enthusiasm for the mysterious building. ‘The point is that, after hours of research – which I’m not going to go into, don’t worry – we came across a file with documents that belonged to your father. It has been in the safekeeping of the Institute since 1916, the year of the accident at Jheeter’s Gate. Among the papers is a book signed by him, and although we weren’t allowed to take it away, we were able to examine it. And we were lucky.’

‘I don’t imagine how,’ Ben objected.

‘You should be the first to see it. Next to the poem someone, I suppose Sheere’s father, did an ink drawing of a house,’ Siraj explained, smiling mysteriously as he handed Ben the sheet of paper.