Free The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafón Page A

a ghostly creature who had bewitched the streets of the Raval quarter ever since. Before the ink had dried on that first edition I had already started work on the second novel of the series. By my reckoning, based on thirty uninterrupted days’ work a month, Ignatius B. Samson had to produce an average of
6.66
pages a day to comply with the terms of the agreement, which was crazy but had the advantage of not giving me much time to think about it.
    I hardly noticed that, as the days went by, I was beginning to consume more coffee and cigarettes than oxygen. As I gradually poisoned my brain, I had the feeling that it was turning into a steam engine that never cooled down. But Ignatius B. Samson was young and resilient. He worked all night and collapsed from exhaustion at dawn, possessed by strange dreams in which the letters on the page trapped in the typewriter would come unstuck and, like spiders made of ink, would crawl up his hands and face, working their way through his skin and nesting in his veins until his heart was covered in black and his pupils were clouded in pools of darkness. I would barely leave the old, rambling house for weeks on end and would forget what day of the week it was or what month of the year. I paid no attention to the recurring headaches that would sometimes plague me, arriving all of a sudden, as if a metal awl were boring a hole through my skull, burning my eyes with a flash of white light. I had grown accustomed to living with a constant ringing in my ears that only the murmur of wind or rain could mask. Sometimes,when a cold sweat covered my face and I felt my hands shaking on the Underwood keyboard, I told myself that the following day I would go to the doctor. But then there was always another scene, and another story to tell.
    To celebrate the first year of Ignatius B. Samson’s life, though, I decided to take the day off and reacquaint myself with the sun, the breeze, and the streets of a city I had stopped walking through and now only imagined. I shaved, tidied myself up, and dressed in my best suit. I left the windows open in the study and in the gallery to air the house and let the thick fog that had become its scent be scattered to the four winds. When I went out into the street, I found a large envelope at the bottom of the letter box. Inside was a sheet of parchment, sealed with the angel motif and written on in that exquisite writing. It said:
    Dear David:
    I wanted to be the first to congratulate you on this new stage of your career. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading the first installments of
City of the Damned.
I hope you will like this small gift.
    I would like to reiterate my admiration for you and my hope that one day our paths may cross. Trusting that this will come about, please accept the most affectionate greetings from your friend and reader
,
    ANDREAS CORELLI
    The gift was the copy of
Great Expectations
that Señor Sempere had given me when I was a child, the same copy I had returned to him before my father could find it and the same copy that, years later, when I had wanted to recover it at any price, had disappeared only hours before in the hands of a stranger. I stared at the bundle of paper that to me, in a not so distant past, had seemed to contain all the magic and light of the world. The cover still bore my bloodstained fingerprints.
    “Thank you,” I whispered.

9
    S eñor Sempere put on his reading spectacles to examine the book closely. He placed it on a cloth he had spread out on his desk in the back room and pulled down the reading lamp so that its beam focused on the volume. His examination lasted a few minutes, during which I maintained a reverential silence. I watched him turn the pages, smell them, stroke the paper and the spine, weigh the book with one hand and then the other, and finally close the cover and examine with a magnifying glass the bloodstained fingerprints left by me many years earlier.
    “Incredible,” he mused, removing his spectacles.