The Watcher in the Shadows (19 page)

‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

The boy coughed.

‘Tired and hungry, that’s all.’

Irene tried to open the back door, but it appeared to be locked from the inside. She looked puzzled.

‘Mum? Dorian?’ she called. She took a few steps back and looked up at the windows on the first floor.

‘Let’s try the front,’ said Ismael.

She followed him round the house to the porch, where they found a carpet of broken glass. They both stood in shocked silence at the sight that met their eyes: the door destroyed and the windows smashed to smithereens. At first glance it looked as if there might have been a gas explosion, tearing the door off its hinges. Irene tried to stop the wave of nausea rising from the pit of her stomach. Terrified, she gave Ismael a look, then started walking towards the front door. He stopped her.

‘Madame Sauvelle?’ he called out from the porch.

The sound of his voice was lost inside the house. Cautiously, Ismael entered the building and examined the scene, Irene peering anxiously over his shoulder.

What greeted them was nothing short of devastation. Ismael had never seen the effects of a tornado, but he imagined they must be something like this.

‘My God . . .’

‘Mind the glass,’ Ismael warned Irene.

‘Mum!’

Her shout echoed through the house, like a spirit wandering from room to room. Without letting go of Irene’s hand, Ismael moved to the foot of the stairs.

‘We have to go up,’ she said.

They climbed the stairs, examining the trail that some invisible force had left behind. The first to notice that Simone’s room no longer had a door was Irene.

‘No!’

Ismael hurried over to the threshold and looked in. Nothing. One by one, they searched all the rooms on the first floor. All empty.

‘Where are they?’ asked Irene, her voice shaking.

‘There’s nobody here. Let’s go downstairs.’

From what they could see, the fight or whatever it was that had taken place there, had been brutal. Ismael made no comment, but a dark suspicion concerning the fate of Irene’s family crossed his mind. Irene wept quietly at the foot of the stairs, still in shock. Ismael’s mind was racing through their options, each more useless than the last, when they both heard someone knocking.

Irene looked up, tearful. Ismael nodded, lifting a finger to his lips. The knocks were repeated; dry with a metallic ring, they seemed to travel through the structure of the house. It took Ismael a few seconds to realise what the dull, muffled sounds were. Metal. Something or someone was banging against a piece of metal somewhere in the house. Ismael could feel the vibration beneath his feet and his eyes paused on a closed door in the passage that led to the kitchen.

‘Where does that door go?’

‘To the cellar,’ Irene replied.

Ismael put his ear on the wooden panel and listened carefully. The knocks were repeated again and again. He tried to open the door, but the handle wouldn’t turn.

‘Is someone in there?’ he shouted.

They could hear the sound of footsteps, coming up the stairs.

‘Be careful,’ whispered Irene.

Ismael moved away from the door. A faint voice could be heard on the other side. Irene hurled herself at the wooden panel.

‘Dorian?’

The voice muttered something.

Irene looked at Ismael.

‘It’s my brother . . .’

Ismael quickly realised that to break down a door was much more difficult than Hollywood films led you to believe. It was a good five minutes before the door finally yielded with the help of a metal bar they found in the larder. Covered in sweat, Ismael moved back and Irene gave the door a final pull. The lock – by now just a tangle of wooden splinters and rusty metal – fell to the floor.

A second later, a pale boy emerged from the darkness, his face rigid with fear. Dorian sheltered in his sister’s arms like a frightened animal. Irene glanced at Ismael. Whatever it was that Dorian had seen, it had left its mark on him. Irene knelt down and cleaned the dirt and tears off his face.

‘Are you all right, Dorian?’ she asked calmly, feeling his body for wounds or broken bones.

Dorian nodded.

‘Where is Mum?’

His eyes filled with anguish.

‘Dorian, this is important. Where is she?’

‘She . . . she was taken away,’ he babbled.

Ismael wondered how long Dorian had been trapped there, in the dark.

‘She was taken away . . .’ Dorian repeated, as if in a trance.

‘Who has taken her, Dorian?’ Irene asked. ‘Who has taken our mother?’

Dorian smiled in a strange way, as if the question was absurd.

‘The shadow,’ he replied. ‘The shadow took her.’

Irene took a deep breath and put her hands on her brother’s shoulders.

‘Dorian, I’m going to ask you to do something very important. Do you understand?’

Her brother nodded.

‘I want you to get to the village as fast as you can. Go to the police station, and tell the superintendent there’s been a terrible accident in Cravenmoore. Tell him Mum is there and she’s been hurt. Tell the police to come immediately. Do you understand?’

Dorian looked bewildered.

‘Don’t mention the shadow. Just tell the superintendent what I said. It’s very important . . . If you talk about the shadow, nobody will believe you. You must just say there’s been an accident.’

Ismael nodded in agreement.

‘I need you to do this for me, and for Mum. Will you do it?’

Dorian looked at Ismael, then at his sister.

‘Our mother’s had an accident at Cravenmoore. She needs help urgently,’ the boy repeated mechanically. ‘But she’s all right . . . isn’t she?’

Irene smiled and hugged him.

‘I love you,’ she whispered.

Dorian kissed his sister on the cheek and went off in search of his bicycle. He found it leaning against the wooden rail on the porch. Lazarus’s gift was now just a mangled heap of cables and twisted metal. Dorian was still staring at the wreckage of his bicycle when Ismael and Irene appeared from the house.

‘Who would do something like this?’ asked Dorian.

‘You’d better hurry,’ Irene reminded him.

He set off at a run. As soon as he’d disappeared, Irene and Ismael walked back onto the porch. The sun was setting over the bay, a dark orb bleeding through the clouds. Their eyes met. They knew what awaited them in the heart of darkness beyond the forest.

‘There has never been a more beautiful bride standing at the altar,’ said the mask. ‘Never. I know most men will say that, but few truly believe it. I did and I do.

‘The happiness Alexandra brought into my life blotted out all the memories and misery that had filled my childhood. Such is the blessing of true love to those very few who experience it. It makes everything else irrelevant. God is cruel, for most of his creatures go through their empty lives without even being able to imagine what that is. True love also changes who we are. I stopped being that wretched boy from the poorest district of Paris. I forgot the long imprisonments in the dark and consigned the memory of my mother to the past. All of it I left behind me. And do you know why? Because Alexandra Alma Maltisse, my saviour, taught me that, contrary to what my mother had told me over and over again, I was not a bad person. That I deserved to be loved. Do you understand, Simone? I wasn’t evil. I was just like everyone else. I was innocent.’

Lazarus paused for a moment. Simone pictured the tears behind the mask.

‘Together, we explored Cravenmoore. A lot of people think that the marvels contained in this house are all my own creation. However only a small selection of them originate from my hands. The rest, all those endless galleries of amazing machines that even I don’t understand, were already here when I first moved in. I’ll never know how long they were here before I came. There was a time when I thought that others had occupied my place before me. Sometimes, if I stop to listen in the dead of night, I think I can hear the echoes of other voices, other footsteps, filling the corridors. Sometimes I think that perhaps time has stood still in every room, in every empty passageway, and that the creatures who inhabit this mansion were once human beings, just like me.

‘I stopped worrying about such matters long ago, however, even though I was still discovering new rooms I’d never been in before after I’d lived in Cravenmoore for years. New corridors that led to wings I’d never seen . . . I think that some places – ancient dwellings that can be counted on the fingers of one hand – are so much more than a building; they’re alive. They have their own soul and their own way of communicating with us. Cravenmoore is one of those places. Nobody knows when it was built. Nor who built it, nor why. But when this house speaks to me, I listen . . .

‘Before that summer of 1916, when we were at our happiest, something happened. In fact, it had begun to happen a year before that, although I didn’t realise it. The day after our wedding, Alexandra got up at dawn and went into the large oval hall to look at the hundreds of presents we’d received. The gift that first caught her eye was a small hand-carved casket. A gem. Captivated, Alexandra opened it. It contained a note and a glass bottle. The note, which was addressed to her, said that this was a special gift. A surprise. It explained that the bottle contained my favourite perfume, the one my mother had used, and that she should wait until the day of our first anniversary before using it. This was to remain a secret between her and the person who had signed the note, an old friend from my childhood, Daniel Hoffmann . . .

‘Following his instructions to the letter, and convinced that by doing so she would make me happy, Alexandra kept the bottle for twelve months. On the agreed date, she took it out of the casket and opened it. Needless to say, the bottle didn’t contain perfume. It was the flask I’d thrown into the sea on the eve of our wedding. From the moment Alexandra opened it, our life turned into a nightmare . . .

‘Around the same time I began to receive letters from Daniel Hoffmann. He wrote to me from Berlin, where he said he was involved in a great task that would one day change the world. Millions of children were receiving his gifts. Millions of children who would, one day, form the greatest army ever known. I still don’t understand what he meant by those words.

‘In one of his early parcels, he sent me a book, a leather-bound volume that seemed older than the world itself. There was just one word on the cover: “Doppelgänger”. Have you ever heard of a doppelgänger? Of course you haven’t. Nowadays, nobody is interested in legends and magic. Doppelgänger was originally a Germanic term, meaning a shadow that becomes detached from its owner and turns against him. The book was basically a manual about shadows. A museum piece. And by the time I started reading it, it was too late. Something was already lurking in the darkness of this house; growing secretly, month after month, like a snake’s egg waiting to hatch.

‘By May 1916, the brightness of that first year with Alexandra was beginning to fade. Soon I realised that the shadow had come back. The first attacks were only minor incidents. Alexandra would find her clothes torn to shreds. Doors would slam shut as she approached them and invisible hands would push objects towards her. There were voices in the dark. That was just the beginning . . .

‘This house has a thousand dark corners where a shadow can hide. It struck me then that Cravenmoore was in fact the soul of its creator, of Daniel Hoffmann, and that the shadow would grow within that soul, getting stronger day by day, while I became weaker. All the strength I had once possessed would become the property of the shadow and slowly, as I moved back into the darkness of my childhood, I would end up becoming the shadow, and Hoffmann my master.

‘I decided to close the toy factory and concentrate on my former obsession: I wanted to bring Gabriel back to life, the guardian angel who had protected me in Paris. I felt that, if I managed to make the angel come alive, it would protect me and Alexandra from the shadow. That’s why I set about designing the most powerful automaton I had ever dreamed of. A steel colossus. An angel that would free me from my nightmare.

‘How naïve . . . The moment that monstrous construction was able to rise from the table in my workshop, any hint of obedience disappeared. It wasn’t me the angel listened to, but its master, the shadow. And its master could not exist without me, because I was the source of its power. Not only did the angel
not
rid me of my nightmare, it turned into the worst guardian imaginable. The guardian of the terrible secret that condemned me for eternity, a guardian that would rise without pity every time something or someone put that secret at risk.

‘The attacks on Alexandra intensified. The shadow was now more powerful and with every day the threat grew stronger. The shadow had decided to punish me through my wife’s suffering. I had given Alexandra a heart that did not belong to me and that mistake would be our undoing. I was close to losing my mind when I noticed that the shadow only acted if I was nearby. It couldn’t live without me. That is why I decided to abandon Cravenmoore and take refuge in the lighthouse. It wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone there, on the island. If someone was to pay the price of my betrayal, that someone had to be me. But I had underestimated Alexandra’s strength. Her love for me. Overcoming her terror and risking her own life, she came to my rescue on the night of the masked ball. As soon as the boat in which she was sailing approached the island, the shadow fell on her and dragged her to the bottom of the sea. I can still hear its laughter when it surfaced through the waves. The following day, it returned to the glass bottle. For more than twenty years I didn’t see it again . . .’