The Midnight Palace (Niebla 2)

‘Is that a suggestion or an order?’ Isobel asked.

‘You know that my suggestions are always orders,’ declared Bankim, pointing to the building. ‘In.’

‘Tyrant,’ whispered Siraj to himself. ‘Enjoy your last few days.’

‘The ones who re-enlist are always the worst,’ added Roshan.

Bankim nodded happily as he watched the six boys and the girl file past him, ignoring their mumbled protests. Ben was the last one through the door and he exchanged a look with Bankim.

‘However much they complain,’ he said, ‘they’ll miss you in five days’ time.’

‘So will you, Ben,’ laughed Bankim.

‘I already do,’ he murmured to himself as he started up the staircase to the first-floor dormitories, aware that in less than a week he would no longer be counting the twenty-four steps he knew so well.

AT SOME POINT IN the early hours Ben woke up and thought he could feel a gust of icy air on his face. A beam of pale light flickered through the narrow pointed window. Ben reached out a hand towards his bedside table and turned the face of

his watch to catch the moonlight. The hands were crossing the equator towards dawn: three o’clock in the morning.

He sighed, suspecting that sleep had deserted him, evaporating like dew in the morning sun. Perhaps the spectre of Ian’s insomnia was haunting him for a change. He closed his eyes again, conjuring up images of the party that had ended a few hours earlier, trusting they would soothe him to sleep. Just then he heard a strange sound that seemed to be whistling through the leaves of the courtyard garden.

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 blazing train tore across the deserted plain and Ben realised with horror that it was racing straight towards St Patrick’s like a guided missile. He ran after it, dodging the shower of sparks and molten iron, but was not able to keep up with the train as it accelerated towards the orphanage, tinting the sky scarlet as it flew by. Gasping for breath, he screamed with all his might to alert those who were sleeping peacefully in the building, unaware of the tragedy that was about to befall them. He watched in despair as the train homed in on St Patrick’s. Any moment now the engine would pulverise the orphanage and fling its inhabitants into the air. He fell to his knees and screamed one last time as he watched the train enter the rear courtyard and rush uncontrollably towards the large wall that formed the back of the building.

Ben prepared himself for the worst but could never have imagined what he would witness a fraction of a second later.

As the crazed locomotive, cloaked in a tornado of flames, crashed into the wall, it changed into an apparition of eerie lights, the entire train sinking into the red-brick wall like a shadowy serpent, disintegrating in the air and taking with it the dreadful howls of the children and the deafening roar of the engine.

Two seconds later total darkness returned, and the silhouette of the orphanage stood out, unscathed, against the distant lights of the White Town and the Maidan to the south. The last of the mist vanished into the cracks in the wall and soon there was no evidence of the phenomenon he had just witnessed. Slowly Ben walked up to the back of the building and placed his palm on the undamaged surface. An electric shock ran up his arm, throwing him to the ground. On the wall the imprint of his hand was black and smoking.

When he stood up his heart was racing and his hands shook. Breathing deeply, he dried the tears provoked by the fire. When he’d calmed down, at least partially, he walked round the building to the kitchen door. Using a trick Roshan had taught him for lifting the inside latch, Ben opened the door cautiously, then crossed the kitchen and the downstairs corridor until he reached the staircase. The orphanage was still sunk in the deepest of silences and Ben realised that nobody but he had heard the roar of the train.

He went back to the dormitory. His friends were still asleep and there was no sign of a cracked windowpane. He walked through the room and lay down on his bed, breathing heavily. Again he picked up his watch from the bedside table and checked the time. He could have sworn that he’d been out of the building for at least twenty minutes, but the watch showed the same time as when he’d woken earlier. He held it to his ear and heard the regular ticking of the mechanism. He set the watch back in its place, then tried to put some order to his thoughts. He was beginning to doubt what he had witnessed, or what he thought he’d seen. Perhaps he hadn’t left the room and he’d dreamed the whole episode. The regular breathing around him and the unharmed windowpane seemed to confirm that explanation. Or perhaps he was a victim of his own imagination. Feeling confused, he closed his eyes and tried to doze off, hoping he might fool his body by pretending to sleep.

At daybreak, just as the sun was reaching the Grey Town – the Muslim sector in the east of Calcutta – he jumped out of bed and ran out to the rear courtyard to examine the back wall once more. There were still no traces of the train. Ben was about to conclude that it had indeed all been a dream, an unusually intense one but still a dream, when out of the corner of his eye he noticed a dark stain on the wall. He drew closer and recognised the shape of his palm clearly imprinted on the bricks. He gave a deep sigh and hurried back to the dormitory to wake Ian, who for the first time in weeks had managed to fall into the arms of Morpheus, free for once of his persistent insomnia.

IN THE DAYLIGHT THE Midnight Palace lost some of its magical aura and became just a sprawling old ruin of a house that had seen better times. Viewing their favourite setting without the embellishment and mystery of the Calcutta nights could have had a stark effect on the members of the Chowbar Society, but fortunately Ben’s words softened the impact. They all listened to him in respectful silence, their expressions going from amazement to disbelief.

‘And it vanished into the wall, as if it were air?’ Seth asked.

Ben nodded.

‘That’s the strangest story you’ve told this month, Ben,’ Isobel stated.

‘It’s not a story. It’s what I saw.’

‘Nobody is doubting you, Ben,’ said Ian, ‘but we were all asleep and didn’t hear a thing. Not even me.’