The Watcher in the Shadows (Niebla 3)

Lazarus pulled the trigger. Ismael stared in bewilderment. Then the toymaker gave a weak smile and the revolver fell from his hands. A dark stain was spreading over his chest. Blood.

The shadow’s cry shook the entire mansion. It was a cry of terror.

‘No, no . . .’ Irene wailed.

Ismael ran over to help the toymaker, but Lazarus raised a hand.

‘No. Leave me here with her. And get out of this place,’ he whispered, a trickle of blood running from the corner of his mouth.

Ismael took Lazarus in his arms and moved him closer to the bed. As he did so, he was struck by the heart-rending sight of a sad, pale face. Ismael was gazing at Alma Maltisse. Her tearful eyes stared straight back at him, lost in a slumber from which she would never awake.

She was a machine.

All these years, Lazarus had lived with an automaton he had created to preserve the memory of his wife, the memory that the shadow had taken from him.

Thunderstruck, Ismael took a step back. Lazarus looked at him with pleading eyes.

‘Leave me alone with her . . . please.’

‘But . . . it’s only . . .’ Ismael began.

‘She’s all I’ve got.’

Ismael then realised why the body of the woman who had drowned off the island had never been found. Lazarus had pulled her out of the sea and brought her back to life – not a real existence, but life as a machine. Unable to face the loneliness and the loss of his wife, he’d created a phantom using her body, a sad reflection with which he had lived for twenty years. As he looked into Lazarus’s dying eyes, Ismael also knew that, somehow, in the toymaker’s heart, Alexandra Alma Maltisse was still alive.

The toymaker gave him one last look, full of pain. The boy nodded his head slowly and returned to Irene’s side.

‘What . . . ?’

‘Let’s get out of here. Quick,’ Ismael urged her.

‘But . . .’

‘I said let’s get out of here!’

Together, they dragged Simone into the corridor. The door slammed shut behind them, sealing Lazarus inside the room. Irene and Ismael then hurried down the corridor as fast as they could, heading for the main staircase and trying to ignore the unearthly howls coming from the other side of the door.

Staggering to his feet, Lazarus Jann confronted the shadow. The spectre threw him a desperate look. The tiny hole made by the bullet was getting larger and consuming the shadow second by second. Trying to hide, it leaped towards the portrait again, but this time Lazarus took a blazing log and set fire to the painting.

The fire spread over the canvas like waves on a pond. The shadow howled. In the darkness of the library, the pages of the black book also began to smoulder until they too went up in flames.

Lazarus crawled back towards the bed, but the shadow pursued him, now devoured by the flames and leaving a trail of fire behind it. The curtains of the four-poster bed caught fire and the flames spread over the ceiling and the floor, angrily consuming everything in their path. In a matter of seconds the room was an inferno.

The flames burst through one of the windows, scorching the few remaining bits of glass and sucking in the night air. The door of the room collapsed, blazing, into the corridor. Then, slowly but relentlessly, the fire took possession of the entire house.

Walking through the flames, Lazarus pulled out the glass bottle that had held the shadow for so many years and raised it in his hands. With a cry of despair, the shadow entered the bottle. A spider web of frost spread across its glass sides. Then Lazarus sealed the bottle and, gazing at it one last time, he cast it into the fire. The flask burst into a thousand pieces; like the dying breath of a curse the shadow was extinguished for ever. And with it, the toymaker felt his own life slowly slipping away.

When Irene and Ismael emerged through the front door, carrying the unconscious Simone, the flames were already blazing through the second-floor windows. In just a few seconds the windowpanes burst, one after another, ejecting a storm of molten glass over the garden. They hurried to the entrance of the wood and only when they reached the shelter of the trees did they stop to look back.

Cravenmoore was burning.

13

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SEPTEMBER LIGHTS

One by one, the wonderful creatures that had populated Lazarus Jann’s universe were destroyed by the flames that night in 1937. Speaking clocks saw their hands melt into red-hot filaments. Ballerinas and orchestras, magicians, witches and chess players, wonders that would never again see the light of day . . . there was no mercy for any of them. Floor by floor, room by room, all the contents of that magical and terrible place were destroyed, leaving only a trail of ashes behind.