The Midnight Palace - Carlos Ruiz Zafon [26]
He sat up, pulled back his sheets and walked slowly towards the window. From there he could hear the tinkling of the darkened lanterns in the branches of the trees and the distant echo of what sounded like children’s voices, laughing and talking in unison, hundreds of them. Leaning his forehead against the windowpane and peering through the condensation made by his own breath, he thought he could make out the silhouette of a slender figure standing in the middle of the courtyard, wrapped in a black cloak. The figure was staring straight at him. He jumped back in alarm, and before his very eyes the windowpane slowly cracked, starting with a small fissure in the centre that spread like a spider’s web gouged out by hundreds of invisible claws. The hairs on the back of Ben’s neck stood on end and his breathing quickened.
He looked around him. All his friends were fast asleep. Ben heard the children’s voices again and noticed that a thick mist was filtering through the cracks in the glass. He moved closer again and looked down into the courtyard. The figure was still standing there, but this time it stretched out an arm and pointed at him. Suddenly its long sharp fingers burst into flame. Ben stood there for a few seconds, gripped by the vision. Then the figure turned and began to walk away into the darkness. Ben rushed out of the dormitory.
The corridor was deserted, the only light coming from an ancient gas lamp that had survived renovation works at the orphanage a few years before. He hurtled down the stairs, across the dining halls, and emerged through the kitchen side door just in time to see the figure disappearing into the dark alleyway that led round the back of the building. The narrow alley was filled with a thick mist that seemed to rise from the sewer gratings.
Ben immersed himself in the tunnel of cold swirling fog, running for about a hundred metres until he came to a large open space to the north of St Patrick’s – a wasteland that housed both a scrap-metal dump and a citadel of empty shacks once belonging to the most deprived inhabitants of North Calcutta. Dodging the muddy puddles that covered the path through the twisting maze of burnt-out adobe huts, he advanced into the place Thomas Carter had always warned them against. The children’s voices came from somewhere deep inside that desolate swamp of poverty and filth.
Ben headed through a narrow gap between two derelict shacks, then suddenly stopped when he realised he’d found what he was looking for. Before him stretched an endless deserted plain filled with the remains of old huts enveloped by a blue mist wafting out of the darkness. The sound of the children seemed to be coming from the same spot, only this time it wasn’t laughter or nursery rhymes that Ben heard, but the terrible panicked shrieks of hundreds of trapped children. A cold gust of wind hurled him against the wall of one of the shacks, as out of the mist came the furious roar of a huge steel machine that made the earth tremble beneath his feet.
He blinked then looked again, thinking he must be hallucinating. A train was emerging from the fog, its metal armour red hot and enveloped in flames. He could see the agony on the faces of dozens of children who were trapped inside it as burning fragments rained down in all directions in a cascade of sparks. The engine itself, a majestic steel sculpture, seemed to be melting. In the driver’s cab, standing motionless amid the flames, was the same figure he had seen in the courtyard. The creature was watching Ben, with arms open wide as if to welcome him.
Ben could feel the heat of the fire on his face and he covered his ears to stifle the excruciating howls of the children. The