The Midnight Palace - Carlos Ruiz Zafon [47]
‘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.
Ben examined the lines of the poem and shrugged his shoulders.
‘All I can see is words.’
‘You’re losing your mental powers, Ben. It’s a pity Isobel isn’t here to see it,’ Siraj joked. ‘Read it again. Pay attention.’
Ben followed Siraj’s instructions and frowned.
‘I give up. The lines have no order or structure. It’s just prose, cut up any which way.’
‘Exactly,’ Siraj agreed. ‘But what is the rule guiding this division? In other words, why does he cut the line at the point he does when he could choose any other option?’
‘To separate the words?’ Sheere ventured.
‘Or to join them…’ murmured Ben.
‘Take the first word of each line and make a sentence with them,’ said Roshan.
Ben looked at the poem again and then at his friends.
‘Read only the first word,’ said Siraj.
‘The house in the shadow