The Midnight Palace Read online

  ‘This isn’t some invention of that friend of yours?’ he asked. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Ben doesn’t know anything about this, Mr de Rozio,’ Seth reassured him. ‘We haven’t seen him for months.’

  ‘Just as well,’ de Rozio declared. ‘Follow me.’

  WITH TREPIDATION ISOBEL STEPPED inside the station, allowing her eyes to adapt to the darkness. Tens of metres above her was the main dome, with its great arches of steel and glass. Most of the panes had melted in the flames or had simply burst, shattering into red-hot fragments that had rained down over the entire station. Dusky light filtered through cracks in the darkened metal. The platforms faded into the shadows, forming a gentle curve beneath the huge vaulted ceiling, their surface covered with the remains of burnt benches and collapsed beams.

  The large station clock, which once had presided over the central platform, was now just a sombre mute sentry standing by. As she walked under its dial, Isobel noticed that the hands had dropped down towards the ground like tongues of melted wax.

  Nothing seemed to have changed in that place, were it not for the traces left by years of dirt and the impact of the rainwater torrential monsoons had swept through ventilation shafts and gaps in the roof.

  Isobel stopped in the centre of the grand station and gazed around her.

  A fresh gust of hot humid air blew through the building, ruffling her hair and scattering specks of dust over the platforms. Isobel shivered as she scanned the black mouths of the tunnels that went underground at the far end of each platform. She wished the other members of the Chowbar Society were with her, now that the situation was beginning to look far too similar to the stories Ben liked to invent for his evenings at the Midnight Palace. Isobel felt in her pocket and pulled out the drawing Michael had made of the Chowbar Society members standing by a pond in which their faces were reflected. She smiled when she saw the picture Michael had drawn of her and wondered if this was really how he saw her. She missed her friends.

  Then she heard it for the first time, far away and muffled by the murmur of the breezes that blew through those tunnels. It was the sound of distant voices, rather like the rumble of the crowds she remembered hearing years ago after she dived into the Hooghly River, the day Ben taught her how to swim underwater, only this time Isobel was sure that these were not the voices of pilgrims approaching from the depths of the tunnels. What she heard were the voices of children, hundreds of them. And they were howling in terror.

  DE ROZIO METICULOUSLY STROKED the three rolls of his regal chin and once again examined the pile of documents, cuttings and papers he had collected during various expeditions to the digestive tract of the Indian Museum’s labyrinthine library. Seth and Michael watched him with a mixture of impatience and hope.

  ‘Well,’ the librarian began. ‘This matter is rather more complicated than it seems. There’s quite a bit of information about this Lahawaj Chandra Chatterghee. Most of the documentation I’ve seen is not that significant, but I’d need at least a week to get the papers on this person into some sort of order.’

  ‘What have you found, sir?’ asked Seth.

  ‘A bit of everything, really,’ de Rozio explained. ‘Mr Chandra was a brilliant engineer, ahead of his time, an idealist obsessed with the idea of leaving this country with a legacy that would somehow compensate the poor for the suffering he attributed to British rule. Not very original, frankly. In short, he had all the requirements for becoming a miserable wretch. Even so, it seems he was able to navigate a sea of jealousy, conspiracy and subterfuge and even managed to convince the government to finance his golden dream: the building of a railway network that would link the main cities of the nation with the rest of the continent.

  ‘Chandra believed that this would mark the end of the commercial and political monopoly that had begun in the days of Lord Clive and the Company, when trade was limited to using river and maritime transport. It would allow the people of India slowly to regain control over their country’s wealth. But you didn’t have to be an engineer to realise that things would never turn out that way.’

  ‘Is there anything about a character called Jawahal?’ asked Seth. ‘He was a childhood friend of the engineer. He went on trial a few times. I think the cases were quite notorious.’

  ‘There must be something somewhere, but there’s a mountain of documents to sort through. Why don’t you come back in a couple of weeks? By then I’ll have had a chance to put this mess into some kind of order.’

  ‘We can’t wait two weeks, sir,’ said Michael.

  De Rozio stared at them severely.

  ‘Wasn’t your friend supposed to be a mute?’

  Michael stepped forward, his expression dead serious and worth at least a thousand words.

  ‘This is a matter of life and death, sir,’ said Michael. ‘The lives of two people are in danger.’

  De Rozio saw the intensity in Michael’s eyes and nodded, vaguely bewildered. Seth didn’t lose a second.

  ‘We’ll help you search through the material,’ he offered.

  ‘You two? I don’t know … When?’

  ‘Right now,’ replied Michael.

  ‘Do you know the codes for the library index cards?’ de Rozio asked.

  ‘Like the alphabet,’ lied Seth.

  THE SUN DIPPED BEHIND the broken glass panes on the western side of Jheeter’s Gate. A few seconds later Isobel watched, hypnotised, as hundreds of horizontal blades of light sliced through the shadows of the station. The howling voices grew in intensity and soon Isobel could hear them echoing round the dome. The ground began to shake under her feet and she noticed shards of glass falling from above. A sudden pain seared along her left forearm. When she touched the spot warm blood slid through her fingers. She ran towards one end of the station, covering her face with her hands.

  As she took shelter under a staircase that led to the upper levels she noticed a large waiting room in front of her. Burnt wooden benches were strewn across the floor and the walls were covered with strange crudely drawn pictures. They seemed to represent deformed human shapes, demonic figures with long wolfish claws and eyes that popped out of their heads. The shaking beneath her feet was now intense, and Isobel approached the mouth of one of the tunnels. A blast of burning air scorched her face and she rubbed her eyes, unable to believe what she was seeing.

  From the very depths of the tunnel emerged a glowing train covered in flames. Isobel flung herself to the ground as the train crossed the station with a deafening roar, metal grating against metal, accompanied by the yells of hundreds of children trapped in the flames. She lay there, her eyes closed, paralysed with terror, until the sound of the train died away.

  Isobel raised her head and looked around her. The station was empty except for a cloud of steam that slowly lifted, tinted dark red by the afterglow of the sun. In front of her, barely half a metre away, was a puddle of some dark sticky substance. For a moment Isobel thought she could see the reflection of a face on its surface, the luminous sad face of a woman enveloped in light who was calling to her. She stretched out a hand towards the image and found the tips of her fingers soaked in the thick warm fluid. Blood. Isobel jerked her hand away and wiped her fingers on her dress as the vision slowly vanished. Gasping for breath, she dragged herself as far as the wall and leaned against it to recover.

  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 pou
nding 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.

  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 firs
t word,’ said Siraj.

  ‘The house in the shadow of the tower of the bazaar,’ read Ben.

  ‘There are at least six bazaars in North Calcutta alone,’ Ian pointed out.

  ‘How many of them have a tower tall enough to project a shadow over the neighbouring houses?’ asked Siraj.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I do,’ said Siraj. ‘Two: the Shyambazar and the Machuabazar, to the north of the Black Town.’

  ‘Even so, the shadow a tower can cast during the day would spread across a minimum range of a hundred and eighty degrees, changing every minute,’ said Ben. ‘That house could be anywhere in North Calcutta, which is like saying anywhere in India.’

  ‘Just a moment,’ Sheere interrupted them. ‘The poem speaks of the twilight. It says, “the city I love lives in the twilight”.’

  ‘Have you checked that?’ asked Ben.

  ‘Of course we have,’ replied Roshan. ‘Siraj went to the Shyambazar and I went to the Machuabazar just a few minutes before sunset.’

  ‘And?’ they all pressed him.

  ‘The shadow of the tower at the Machuabazar falls on an abandoned warehouse,’ Siraj explained.

  ‘Roshan?’ asked Ian.

  Roshan smiled. He plucked a half-burnt stick from the fire and drew the shape of a tower on the ashes.

  ‘Like the hand of a clock, the shadow of Shyambazar’s tower points to some gates flanked by tall iron railings. Behind them there’s a courtyard full of palm trees and weeds. And above the palm trees I could just make out a house with a watchtower.’

  ‘That’s fantastic!’ cried Sheere.

  But Ben couldn’t help noticing the anxious look on Roshan’s face.

  ‘What’s the problem, Roshan?’ he asked.

  Roshan slowly shook his head.

  ‘I don’t know. There was something about the house I didn’t like.’

  ‘Did you see anything?’ asked Seth.

  Roshan shook his head again. Ian and Ben exchanged glances, but didn’t say a word.

  ‘Has it occurred to anyone that this might all be a trap?’ asked Roshan.