The Watcher in the Shadows by Carlos Ruiz Zafón Read Free Book Online Page A

later on. Armand, her late husband, always started his day by going through the bills . . . Until he was no longer able to.
    That morning, Simone went into the study as usual and detected a smell of tobacco in the air. She assumed that Lazarus had stayed up late the night before. She was placing the documents on the desk when she noticed that there was something smouldering in the fireplace among the dying coals. Intrigued, she moved closer and prodded the embers with the poker, trying to make out what the object was. At first glance it looked like a wad of paper tied together, but then she noticed Hoffmann’s unmistakable wax seal. Letters. Lazarus had thrown Daniel Hoffmann’s letters in the fire. Whatever his motive, Simone told herself, it was none of her business. She put down the poker and walked out of the study, resolved never to pry into her employer’s personal affairs.
    The sound of rain pattering against the windowpanes woke Hannah up. It was midnight. The room was shrouded in a blue darkness with occasional flashes from a distant storm that cast eerie shadows all around her. She could hear the ticking of one of Lazarus’s talking clocks on the wall, the eyes on its smiling face swivelling endlessly from side to side. Hannah sighed. She loathed spending the night at Cravenmoore. It was Friday and she normally spent it with her family, but this week she had agreed to stay at the house.
    In daylight, Lazarus Jann’s home seemed like a never-ending museum full of wonders and marvels. At night, however, the countless automata, masks and strange creatures seemed to change into a ghostly horde that never slept but remained watching in the shadows, always smiling, their gaze always empty.
    Lazarus slept in a room in the west wing, next to his wife’s. Apart from them and from Hannah herself, the only other inhabitants of the house were the toymaker’s numerous creations, lurking in every corridor and in every room. In the stillness of the night, Hannah thought she could hear their mechanical hearts beating, imagined their eyes shining in the dark . . .
    She’d only just closed her eyes when she heard another noise – a regular thud, muffled by the rain. Hannah got up and walked over to the window. Peering out she scanned Cravenmoore’s tangle of towers, arches and roofs. The gargoyles’ wolfish muzzles spewed rivers of black water out into the void.
    The sound reached her again. Hannah now focused on a row of windows on the second floor of the west wing. The wind seemed to have opened one of them; the curtains fluttered in the rain and the shutters were banging repeatedly against the wall. Hannah cursed her bad luck. The very thought of having to go out into the corridor and through the house to the west wing made her blood curdle.
    Before fear could prevent her from doing her duty, she put on her dressing gown and slippers. There was no electricity, so she took a candelabra and lit the candles. Their coppery glow formed a spectral halo around her. Hannah placed her hand on the cold doorknob and swallowed. Far away, the shutters were still banging, over and over again. Waiting for her.
    She closed the bedroom door behind her and looked down the endless passage that ran away into the shadows. Holding the candlestick up high, she set off on her journey, flanked on either side by the dangling shapes of Lazarus’s lethargic toys. Hannah looked straight ahead and quickened her pace. The second floor housed many of Lazarus’s older automata, mechanical creatures that moved awkwardly and whose features were often grotesque, even threatening. Almost all of them were shut away in glass cabinets, but sometimes they would suddenly come alive, without warning, commanded at random by some internal device to awake from their mechanical slumber.
    Hannah walked past Madame Sarou, the wooden fortune-teller who would shuffle tarot cards with her wrinkled hands, choose one and show it to the spectator. Although she tried hard