The Midnight Palace - Carlos Ruiz Zafon [11]
Thomas Carter poured himself another cup of tea and sat in his armchair gazing out at the city. He had grown up in a place similar to the home he now managed, in Liverpool. Within the walls of that institution he had learned three things that would always serve him well: not to overvalue material comforts, to appreciate the classics and, last but not least, to recognise a liar from a mile away.
He took a leisurely sip of his tea and, in view of the fact that Calcutta could still surprise him, decided to start celebrating his fiftieth birthday. He walked over to a glass cabinet and took out the box of cigars he reserved for special occasions. Striking a match, he lit the valuable item with due calm and ceremony. Then, putting the flame to good use, he pulled Aryami Bose’s letter out of the drawer and set fire to it. While the parchment turned to ashes on a small tray with St Patrick’s initials engraved on it, Carter savoured the cigar and, in honour of Benjamin Franklin, one of his childhood heroes, decided that their new tenant would be called Ben, and that he personally would put all his energy into making sure the orphanage provided the boy with the family fate had stolen from him.
BEFORE I CONTINUE WITH MY STORY AND START describing the events that took place sixteen years later, I must take a brief moment to introduce some of its protagonists. Of course, while all of this was taking place in the streets of Calcutta, some of us had not yet been born and others were only a few days old. Yet we had one thing in common, a circumstance that would bring us together under the roof of St Patrick’s: none of us had a family or a home.
We learned to survive without either of those things. Better still, we invented our own family and created our home. It was a family and a home we had chosen freely, and neither lies nor chance had any place there. The only father the seven of us ever knew was Mr Thomas Carter, with his speeches about the wisdom to be found in the pages of Dante and Virgil; and our only mother was the city of Calcutta, whose mysteries were concealed in the streets that lay beneath the stars of the Bengali Peninsula.
The club we invented had a colourful name, the true origin of which was known only to Ben. He had christened the club at whim, although some of us had a sneaking suspicion that he’d borrowed the word from the old mail-order catalogue of some Bombay importer. Be that as it may, the Chowbar Society was set up at some point in our lives, after which the orphanage games seemed dull in comparison. By then we were cunning enough to slip out of the building in the small hours of the night, long after the venerable Vendela’s curfew, and make straight for our society’s headquarters – the top secret and supposedly haunted house which for decades had stood abandoned on the corner of Cotton Street and Brabourne Road, in the middle of the Black Town, just a few streets away from the Hooghly River.
I have to admit that the ramshackle house we proudly called the Midnight Palace (in consideration of the hour when we held our meetings) was never really haunted. The rumours about its supernatural powers arose because of our subterfuge. One of our founding members, Siraj, a full-time asthmatic and learned expert on Calcutta’s tales of ghosts, apparitions and curses, hatched a convincingly sinister legend about an alleged former resident. This helped keep our secret hideaway free of intruders.
The story, in short, was about an old tradesman who floated through the house wrapped in a white cloak. He had blazing red eyes and long wolfish fangs that rested over his lips, and he hungered after unsuspecting curious souls. The bit about the eyes