Carlos Zafon - The Midnight Palace

‘Soon your father received death threats against himself and his pregnant wife if he did not deliver the Firebird. As the project was clandestine, Chandra had to handle it with great care. If he asked the army for help, his past would eventually come out. His only option was to make a pact with Llewelyn and his men.

‘Amid all that tension, two days before the projected opening of Jheeter’s Gate – and not afterwards, as I told you before – Kylian gave birth to twins. A boy and a girl. Your sister Sheere and you, Ben.

‘A symbolic journey had been planned for the inauguration of Jheeter’s Gate. The first train would transport three hundred and sixty-five orphaned children – one for each day of the year – from Calcutta to the orphanages of Bombay. What Chandra proposed to Llewelyn and his men was this: he would load the Firebird onto the train and, taking advantage of a technical stop that he would arrange about a hundred and fifty kilometres after departure, in the vicinity of Bishnupur, the soldiers would be able to unload the device and make off with it. Llewelyn accepted. Chandra was planning to disable the machine and get rid of Llewelyn and his men before the train had even sounded its whistle. But Llewelyn was secretly suspicious of the arrangement and ordered his men to get to the station early.

‘Your father had arranged to meet the soldiers inside Jheeter’s Gate, a labyrinth that only he knew, and under the pretext of showing them the Firebird, he led them into the tunnels. Llewelyn, however, had taken his own precautions, and before going to meet the engineer he had kidnapped your mother, and both of you with her. Just as Chandra was about to eliminate his blackmailers, Llewelyn revealed that he was holding you and your mother, and he threatened to kill all of you unless your father handed over the Firebird. Chandra was forced to surrender. But this wasn’t enough for Llewelyn. He ordered his men to chain your father to the engine, planning to cut him to pieces when the train began its journey, and then, right in front of your father, he cold-bloodedly plunged a knife into Kylian’s throat. He let her bleed to death slowly, hanging her from a noose in the central vault of the station. He told her he would leave you, Ben and Sheere, in the tunnels to be devoured by rats.

‘Leaving Chandra chained to the engine, Llewelyn ordered his men to start the train and take the Firebird with them. Meanwhile he was going to hide the babies in a tunnel where nobody would ever be able to find you. But things did not go according to plan. That idiot Llewelyn was overconfident and had supposed that Chandra Chatterghee would simply hand over a machine with the exterminating capability of the Firebird to an assassin like him. But Chandra had taken every precaution imaginable and had fitted the Firebird with a secret timer, known only to himself, that would release all the destructive power of the machine after a few seconds if anybody but him tried to use it.

‘As Llewelyn and his cohort of thugs boarded the train, the gang leader made a decision: as a parting gift and a prelude to the revenge he was planning to exact on the city once he had mastered the deadly invention, he would destroy the station, letting the fire raze Chandra’s work and the lives of all those who had gathered to witness its launch. However the moment Llewelyn ignited the Firebird, he also signed the death sentence of every single person on that train, including himself. Five minutes later an inferno was unleashed, taking with it the bodies and souls of both the innocent and the guilty.

‘You will be wondering why I lied to you about the prison where Jawahal was held or why his name was never mentioned in the records. Before I continue, and this is the most important thing, I want you to understand that, whatever you may hear, Chandra was a great man. A man who loved his wife and who would have loved his children if he’d had the opportunity to be a father to them. Now that I’ve said that, I will reveal the truth …

‘When your father was young and fell ill with fever, he did not end up in a shack by the river where a boy looked after him until he was better, as I told you. Your father was brought up in an institution called Grant House that still exists in South Calcutta. You’re too young to have heard the name, but there was a time when it was infamous. Your father arrived at Grant House after witnessing a terrible event when he was barely six years old. His mother, who was unwell and earned her living by selling her body for a pittance, set fire to herself in front of him, offering herself up as a sacrifice to the goddess Kali. Grant House, where Chandra grew up, was a home for the mentally ill – what you’d call a lunatic asylum.

‘For years he was confined to the corridors of that place, with no parents or friends other than people whose lives were defined by delirium and suffering. People who cried out that they were devils, gods or angels only to forget their own names the following day. By the time he was old enough to leave the institution, Chandra’s entire childhood had been coloured by the most profound horror and human misery Calcutta had ever witnessed.

‘I don’t need to tell you that there never was a sinister friend who committed those crimes. The only shadow in your father’s life was that of the parasite that had penetrated his mind. His own hands committed the crimes, and the guilt and shame of it pursued him like a curse.

‘Only Kylian’s kindness and her radiant nature cured him, giving him back the ability to shape his destiny. At her side he wrote the books you’ve heard about, he planned the works that would make him immortal and dispelled the ghost of his double life. But human greed denied him his chance, and what could have been a happy and prosperous life was plunged once more into darkness. This time for ever.

‘On the night Lahawaj Chandra Chatterghee watched his wife being murdered before his very eyes the years of childhood horror turned on him, catapulting him straight back into his own private hell. He had built a whole new life on a pedestal which was now toppling over, and as the flames devoured him, he became convinced that the only culprit in the tragedy was himself and that he deserved to be punished.

‘That is why, when Llewelyn ignited the Firebird and the flames engulfed the tunnels and the station, a dark shadow in Chandra’s soul swore he would return after his death. He would return as an angel of fire. An angel of destruction, the bringer of vengeance. An angel that would embody the darker side of his soul. It’s not a murderer who is after you. Or a man. It’s a ghost. A spirit. Or, if you prefer, a demon.

‘Your father always loved puzzles, right to the end. You told me about a drawing done by your friend Michael, the picture in which your faces are reflected in a pond. The image that appears on the water is inverted. It’s as if the prophecy guided Michael’s pencil. If you were to write the name that Chandra’s mother gave him when he was born, Lahawaj, on the drawing, the reflection on the pond would give you a different word: Jawahal.

‘Ever since that day, Jawahal’s tormented spirit has been tied to the infernal machine he created, a machine that, in death, gave him eternal life as a spectre of darkness. He and the Firebird are one and the same. That is his curse: a union between an angry spirit and a machine built for destruction. A fiery soul trapped inside the furnace of that blazing train. Now that soul is searching for a new home.

‘That is why Jawahal is looking for you, because the moment you reach adulthood, his spirit needs one of his children so that he can go on living: it needs to inhabit a body and thus extend its power to the world of the living. Only one of you can survive. The other, the one whose soul is not occupied by Jawahal’s spirit, must die. Sixteen years ago he swore he would look for you and make you his, and he has always kept his promises – in this life and the next. You must realise that Jawahal has already chosen which child will harbour his accursed soul. But only he knows which.