The Midnight Palace Page 15

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ hissed Ben, guiding Sheere frantically towards the staircase that led to the ground floor. ‘Now!’

  They had only taken a few steps when they saw a circle of fire boring a hole through the door of the room where Sheere had been sleeping. In an instant the flames had consumed the wood, like a red-hot coal passing through a sheet of paper. Ben’s feet were rooted to the floor as he watched blazing footsteps coming towards them from the doorway.

  ‘Run!’ he shouted, pushing his sister towards the staircase. ‘Go on!’

  Sheere hurled herself down the stairs while Ben remained glued to the spot, right in the path of the fiery footsteps. He felt a breath of hot air impregnated with the stench of burnt paraffin against his face as a footstep fell only centimetres from his feet. Two red pupils glowed in the dark like red-hot irons, and Ben felt a fiery claw clamping his right arm. In an instant it had burnt right through his shirt-sleeve and scorched his skin.

  ‘It is not yet time for us to meet,’ whispered a piercing cavernous voice. ‘Get out of my way.’

  Before Ben could react, the iron grip had shoved him aside and sent him sprawling to the floor. Ben touched his wounded arm then looked up to see an incandescent vision descending the spiral staircase, destroying it as it went.

  Sheere’s screams of terror gave Ben the strength to get back on his feet again. He ran towards the staircase, which was now scarcely more than a skeleton of metal bars cloaked in flames. Realising that the steps had disappeared, Ben threw himself through the gap. His body struck the mosaic on the ground floor and a wave of pain raced up his burnt arm.

  ‘Ben!’ shouted Sheere. ‘Help me!’

  Ben looked up and saw Sheere being dragged across the floor of shining stars, cocooned in fire, like the chrysalis of some infernal butterfly. He jumped up and ran after her, following her abductor’s trail towards the rear of the house and trying to dodge the furious impact of hundreds of books that were cascading off the shelves of the circular library. Suddenly he felt a blow to the head and fell flat on his face.

  His sight began to cloud over but he could see the fiery visitor stop and turn to look at him. Sheere’s face was distorted by panic, though her screams were no longer audible. Ben tried to claw his way along the floor, which was now covered in glowing coals, fighting against the drowsiness that was urging him to give up. A cruel wolfish smile appeared before him, and through his blurred vision he recognised the man he had seen in the ghostly train that travelled through the night. Jawahal.

  ‘When you’re ready, come and find me,’ the fiery spirit whispered. ‘You know where I am …’

  A second later Jawahal grabbed Sheere again, pulling her through the wall of the house as if it were merely a curtain of smoke. Before he passed out, Ben heard the echo of the train as it rode away into the distance.

  ‘HE’S COMING ROUND,’ murmured a voice hundreds of miles away.

  Ben tried to make out the fuzzy shapes moving in front of him and soon recognised some familiar faces. Hands made him comfortable and placed a soft object under his head. Ben blinked repeatedly. Ian’s eyes were red and despairing – he was watching his friend anxiously. Next to him were Seth and Roshan.

  ‘Ben, can you hear us?’ asked Seth. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in a week.

  Ben suddenly remembered and abruptly tried to sit up. The three boys made him lie down again.

  ‘Where’s Sheere?’

  Ian, Seth and Roshan looked at one another.

  ‘She’s not here, Ben,’ Ian replied at last.

  Ben felt the sky falling on top of him and closed his eyes.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked after a moment.

  ‘I woke up before you two,’ Ian explained, ‘so I decided to go out and find something to eat. On the way I met Seth, who was coming over to the house. When we returned we saw that all the windows were closed and there was smoke coming from inside. We found you unconscious. Sheere wasn’t here.’

  ‘Jawahal has taken her.’

  Ian and Seth exchanged a look.

  ‘What’s the matter? What have you found out?’

  Seth ran both hands through his thick shock of hair, pushing it away from his forehead.

  ‘I’m not sure that this Jawahal exists, Ben,’ he declared. ‘I think Aryami lied to us.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Why would she lie to us?’

  Seth summarised the discoveries they’d made at the museum and explained that there was no mention of Jawahal in any of the documents relating to the trial, except for that one letter addressed to the engineer and signed by Colonel Llewelyn, who had covered up the matter for some reason. Ben listened to their revelations in amazement.

  ‘That doesn’t prove a thing,’ he objected. ‘Jawahal was sentenced and imprisoned. He escaped sixteen years ago and that was when his crimes began.’

  Seth sighed, shaking his head.

  ‘I went to the Curzon Fort prison, Ben,’ he said glumly. ‘There was no escape and no fire sixteen years ago. The jail burnt down in 1857. Jawahal could never have escaped from a prison that had ceased to exist for decades before his trial took place. A trial in which he isn’t even mentioned. It just doesn’t add up.’

  Ben stared at him open-mouthed.

  ‘She lied to us, Ben,’ said Seth. ‘Your grandmother lied to us.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘Michael is out looking for her,’ Ian explained. ‘When he finds her he’ll bring her here.’

  ‘And where are the others?’

  Roshan looked hesitantly at Ian. Ian nodded gravely.

  ‘Tell him,’ he said.

  MICHAEL STOPPED TO WATCH the evening haze spread over the eastern bank of the Hooghly. Dozens of human figures, partly covered in white threadbare robes, were dipping into the river, the sum of their voices lost in the murmur of the current. The sound of doves flapping their wings, rising above the jungle of palaces and faded domes along the luminous river, made him think of a shadowy Venice.

  ‘Are you looking for me?’ said the old woman. She was sitting a few metres away, her face hidden by a veil.

  Michael looked at her and she lifted the veil. Aryami Bose’s deep eyes were pale in the evening light.

  ‘We don’t have much time,’ said Michael. ‘Not any more.’

  Aryami nodded and slowly rose to her feet. Michael offered her his arm and the two set off under cover of dusk towards the house of Chandra Chatterghee.

  THE FIVE FRIENDS GATHERED around Aryami Bose. Patiently, they waited for the old lady to get comfortable and to honour the debt she owed them by offering up the truth. Nobody dared speak before she did. The dreadful urgency that was gnawing at their insides became a momentary calm as they began to worry that the secret Aryami had hidden from them so carefully might prove to be insurmountable.

  Aryami looked at the faces of the youngsters with deep sadness and gave them a faint smile. She cast her eyes down and sighed, examining the palms of her small nervous hands as she began to speak. This time her voice seemed to lack the authority and determination they had learned to expect from her. At the end of her journey fear had undermined her resilience; she was now just an old woman, frail and frightened, a girl who had lived too long.

  ‘BEFORE I BEGIN, LET me tell you that if I have lied, and I have been obliged to do so on numerous occasions, it has always been in order to protect someone. And if I lied to you, it was because I was certain that in doing so I would protect you, Ben, and your sister Sheere from something that might hurt you even more than the actions of a maddened criminal. Nobody can know how much I’ve suffered, having to carry this burden on my own from the day you were born. Listen carefully and rest assured that whatever I say will be the truth, as far as I know it, although there is nothing as terrible and difficult to believe as the stark reality of facts.

  ‘It feels like years have passed since I told you the story of my daughter Kylian. I told you about her, about her extraordinary radiance a
nd how, among all her suitors, the one she chose to be her husband was a man of humble origins and great talent, a young engineer with a promising future. But I also told you that since childhood this man had borne a heavy load on his shoulders, a secret that would lead to his death and to the death of many others. Although this may seem contradictory, let me start this tale at the end, not the beginning, in response to the findings you have so cleverly disentangled.

  ‘Chandra Chatterghee was always a dreamer, a man possessed by a vision of a better and fairer future for his people, whom he could see dying in poverty in the streets. Meanwhile, behind the walls of their sumptuous homes, those whom he considered to be invaders, exploiters of our people’s natural legacy, were living a life of luxury at the expense of the millions of wretched souls inhabiting the great roofless orphanage that is India.

  ‘His dream was to provide the nation with an instrument for progress and the creation of wealth, as he believed this would eventually break the oppressive yoke of the Crown. It would be an instrument that would open up new routes between cities, new enclaves, ensuring a future for Indian families. He dreamed of an invention made of iron and fire: the railway. For Chandra, railway tracks were the arteries that would carry the new blood of progress throughout the land, and he conceived a heart from which all this energy would flow: his masterpiece, Jheeter’s Gate Station.

  ‘But the line separating dreams from nightmares is as fine as a needle, and very soon the shadows of the past returned. A high-ranking officer in the British army, Colonel Arthur Llewelyn, had enjoyed a meteoric career built on his exploits and the slaughter of innocent people – old and young, unarmed men and terrified women – in towns and villages throughout the whole Bengali Peninsula. Wherever the message of peace and a united India arrived, so too did his rifles and bayonets. A very gifted man with a promising future, as his superiors claimed with pride, but also a murderer hiding behind the Crown’s flag and the power of its army.

  ‘It didn’t take long for Llewelyn to notice Chandra’s talent and, without too many problems, he managed to draw a black ring around him, blocking his projects. A few weeks later not a single door in Calcutta, indeed in the entire province, was open to him. Except, of course, Llewelyn’s. He proposed a series of jobs for the army – bridges, railway lines … Every offer he made was rejected by your father; he preferred to support himself with the paltry sums he received from Bombay publishers in exchange for his manuscripts. In time, Llewelyn’s noose slackened and Chandra began to work once more on his grand plan.

  ‘After some years had gone by, Llewelyn’s anger was rekindled. His own career was floundering and he urgently needed some dramatic incident, a new bloodbath, with which to recapture the attention of the London authorities and restore his reputation as the panther of Bengal. His solution was clear: to put pressure on Chandra but this time using different weapons.

  ‘For years Llewelyn had been investigating the engineer, and finally his henchmen sniffed out the series of crimes linked to Jawahal. Llewelyn almost let the case come to light. Then, just at the point when your father was more enmeshed than ever in his Jheeter’s Gate project, he intervened, closing down the case but threatening to reveal the truth unless your father created a new weapon for him, a deadly instrument of repression that would put an end to the riots that the pacifists and pro-independence campaigners kept strewing in Llewelyn’s path. Chandra had to comply, therefore the Firebird was born, a machine that could turn a city or a village into an ocean of flames in a matter of seconds.

  ‘Chandra developed the railway and the Firebird side by side, under constant pressure from Llewelyn, whose greed, together with the suspicions he was starting to arouse among his superiors, threatened to expose him. A man who until then had been considered calm, even-tempered and dutiful was now showing himself to be an obsessive maniac whose desire for success and recognition blocked his own chances of survival.

  ‘Chandra realised that Llewelyn’s downfall was only a matter of time, so he played along with him and made him believe that he would hand over the finished project sooner than planned. This only increased Llewelyn’s mania and tore apart what little sanity he had left.

  ‘In 1915, a year before the opening of Jheeter’s Gate and the railway line extending from it, Llewelyn ordered the slaughter of a defenceless crowd, with no possible justification, and was thrown out of the British army in a scandal that even reached the House of Commons. His star would never shine again.

  ‘His madness now took on new dimensions. Llewelyn gathered a group of officers who were loyal to him – like Llewelyn, they had been stripped of their rank and instructed to give up their weapons. With this horde of butchers he set up a sinister paramilitary squad that operated in secret. They sported their old uniforms and medals in a grotesque parody, congregating in Llewelyn’s former residence so that they could maintain the fiction that they were a secret elite unit and that it would not be long before they would force out the very men who had signed their expulsion orders. Needless to say, Llewelyn never admitted that he’d been downgraded and disciplined. According to him and his collaborators, they had all resigned in order to found a new military order.

  ‘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 cohor
t 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.