Carlos Ruiz Zafón - The Angels Game

Fifteen long years have passed since the night I fled the city of the damned. For a long time mine has been an existence filled with absences, with no other name or presence than that of a travelling stranger. Ive had a hundred names and a hundred trades, none of them my own.

I have disappeared into huge cities and villages so small that nobody had a past or a future. In no place did I linger more than was necessary. Sooner rather than later I would flee again, without warning, leaving behind me only a couple of old books and second-hand clothes in sombre rooms where time showed no pity and memory burned. Uncertainty has been my only recollection. The years have taught me to live in the body of a stranger who does not know whether he committed those crimes he can still smell on his hands, or whether he has indeed lost his mind and is condemned to roam a world in flames which he dreamed up in exchange for a few coins and the promise of evading a death that now seems to him like the sweetest of rewards. I have often asked myself whether the bullet that Inspector Grandes fired at my heart went right through the pages of the book, whether I was the one who died in the cabin suspended in the sky.

During my years of pilgrimage Ive seen how the inferno promised in the pages I wrote for the boss has taken on a life of its own. I have fled from my own shadow a thousand times, always looking over my shoulder, always expecting to find it round a corner, on the other side of the street or at the foot of my bed in the endless hours that precede dawn. Ive never allowed anyone to know me long enough to ask why I never grow old, why no lines appear on my face, why my reflection is the same as the night I left Isabella in the port of Barcelona, and not a minute older.

There came a time when I believed I had exhausted all the hiding places of the world. I was so tired of being afraid, of living and dying from my memories, that I stopped where the land ended and an ocean began - an ocean which, like me, looks the same every morning - and, worn out, I collapsed.

It is a year to the day since I came to this place and recovered my name and my trade. I bought this old hut on the beach, just a shed that I share with the books left behind by the previous owner and a typewriter which I like to think might be the same one on which I wrote hundreds of pages that perhaps nobody remembers - I will never know. From my window I see a small wooden jetty that stretches out into the sea and, moored at the end, the boat that came with the house, a simple rowing boat in which I sometimes go out as far as the reef, at which point the coast almost disappears from view.

I had not written again until I got here. The first time I slipped a page into the typewriter and placed my hands on the keyboard, I was afraid Id be unable to write a single line. I began writing this story during my first night in the hut. I wrote until dawn, just as I did years ago, without yet knowing who I was writing it for. During the day I walked along the beach or sat on the jetty opposite the hut - a gangway between sky and sea - reading through the piles of old newspapers I found in one of the cupboards. Their pages brought me stories of the war, of the world in flames that I had dreamed up for the boss.

It was while I was reading those chronicles about the war in Spain, and then in Europe and the world, that I decided I no longer had anything to lose; all I wanted to know was whether Isabella was all right and if perhaps she still remembered me. Or maybe I only wanted to know whether she was still alive. I wrote that letter, addressed to the old Sempere & Sons bookshop in Calle Santa Ana in Barcelona, which would take weeks or months to arrive at its destination, if it ever did arrive. For the senders name I wrote Mr Rochester, knowing that if the letter did reach her hands, Isabella would know who it was from. If she wished, she could leave it unopened and forget me forever.

For months I continued writing this story. I saw my fathers face again, and I walked through the offices of The Voice of Industry, dreaming that I might be able, one day, to emulate the great Pedro Vidal. Once more, I saw Cristina Sagnier for the first time, and I went into the tower house to dive into the madness that had consumed Diego Marlasca. I wrote from midnight until dawn without resting, feeling alive for the first time since I had fled from the city.

The letter arrived one day in June. The postman had slipped the envelope under my door while I slept. It was addressed to Mr Rochester and the return address read simply: Sempere & Sons Bookshop, Barcelona. For a few minutes I walked in circles round the hut, not daring to open it. Finally I went out and sat by the edge of the sea. In the letter I found a single page and a second, smaller, envelope. The second envelope, which looked worn, just had my name on it, David, in a handwriting I had not forgotten despite all the years that had flowed by since I last saw it.

In the letter, Semperes son told me that after a few years of tempestuous and intermittent courting, he and Isabella had married on 18 January 1935 in the church of Santa Ana. The ceremony, against all odds, had been conducted by the ninety-year-old priest who had delivered the eulogy at Seor Semperes funeral and who, contrary to the bishops eagerness to see the back of him, refused to die and went on doing things his own way. A year later, only days before the Civil War broke out, Isabella had given birth to a boy whose name would be Daniel Sempere. The terrible years of the war brought with them all manner of hardships, and shortly after the end of the conflict Isabella contracted cholera and died in her husbands arms, in the apartment they shared above the bookshop. She was buried in Montjuc on Daniels fourth birthday, during rain that lasted two days and two nights, and when the little boy had asked him if heaven was crying, his father couldnt bring himself to reply.

The envelope with my name on it contained a letter that Isabella had written to me during her final days, which shed made her husband swear he would send to me if he ever discovered my whereabouts.