Free The Watcher in the Shadows by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

said. That was the first time he was locked up.
    ‘One afternoon, a year later, Jean told me about it. I was filled with horror. I wanted to help the boy, to comfort him and try to alleviate some of the misery of his life. The only thing I could think of doing was to take the coins I’d been saving for months in my money box and go down to Monsieur Giradot’s toy shop. My budget didn’t stretch very far. All I managed to buy was a puppet, a cardboard angel with strings you pulled to make it move. I wrapped it up in shiny paper and, the following day, I waited for Anne Neville to go out shopping. Then I knocked on Jean’s door and gave him the parcel. It was a gift, I said. Then I left.
    ‘I didn’t see him again for three weeks. I hoped he was enjoying my present, since I wouldn’t have any savings to enjoy for a long time. Later, I found out that the cardboard angel survived only a day because his mother found it and burned it. When she asked him who had given it to him, Jean didn’t want to implicate me, so, he said he’d made it himself.
    ‘Then, one day, things went from bad to worse. His mother went berserk and took her son down to the basement again. She locked him in and warned him that this time the shadow was sure to appear to him in the dark and spirit him away for ever.
    ‘Jean Neville spent an entire week down there. His mother had got into a fight in the market at Les Halles and the police had locked her up, with a number of others, in a communal cell. When they let her out, she had wandered around the streets for days.
    ‘On her return, she found the flat empty and the basement door jammed shut. Some neighbours helped her to force it open. There was no sign of Jean anywhere . . .’
    Lazarus paused. Simone was silent, waiting for the toymaker to finish his story.
    ‘Nobody ever saw Jean Neville in that district again. Most people imagined that he must have escaped from the basement through a trapdoor and got as far away from his mother as he could. I suppose that is what happened, although if you asked his mother, who was in floods of tears for weeks, even months, over his disappearance, I’m sure she’d have told you that the shadow from his dreams had taken him. As I said earlier, I was probably Jean Neville’s only friend. Perhaps it would be fairer to say it was the other way round – he was my only friend. Years later, I promised myself I’d do everything in my power not to let any child be deprived of having a toy ever again. Even now I wonder where Jean is, whether he’s still alive. I suppose you must think this a strange explanation . . .’
    ‘Not at all,’ Simone replied, her face hidden in the dark.
    ‘It’s getting late,’ said the toymaker. ‘I must go and see my wife.’
    Simone nodded.
    ‘Thanks for the company, Madame Sauvelle,’ he added as he quietly left the room.
    Simone watched him go, then sighed. Loneliness created strange labyrinths in the mind.
    The sun had begun its descent and its light was refracted into flashes of amber and scarlet in the lenses of the lighthouse. The breeze was now fresher and the pale-blue sky was streaked with a few solitary clouds drifting along. Irene’s head rested lightly on Ismael’s shoulder.
    Slowly, Ismael put an arm around her. She looked up. Her lips were half open and she trembled imperceptibly. Ismael felt a fluttering in his stomach. Gradually, timidly, their lips moved closer. Irene closed her eyes. Inside Ismael, a voice seemed to whisper, ‘It’s now or never.’ He decided on now. The following ten seconds seemed to last ten years.
    Later, when the boundary between them seemed to have dissolved entirely, when every look and every gesture was in a language only they could understand, Irene and Ismael continued to lie there, embracing each other. If they’d had a say in it, they would have remained there, on the lighthouse balcony, until the end of time.
    ‘Where would you like to be in ten years’ time?’ asked