The City of Dreaming Books (27 page)

I sprinted down the passage in the opposite direction, but I didn’t get far. The avalanche overtook me and swept me along in a churning mass of books that battered my head and body and eventually robbed me of sight. I was tossed around, yelling at the top of my voice. Then, all at once, I was falling. As if in the grip of a waterfall, I plummeted into an abyss with the avalanche of books. All I could hear was the air rushing past. I finally came to rest with a sudden, frightful jolt and a hailstorm of books descended on my back. Thousands of them must have piled up on top of me. Total silence and utter darkness engulfed me. I couldn’t move, I could scarcely breathe. I had been buried alive in books.

I
f you still harboured any doubts that books can be dangerous, dear readers, they must surely have been dispelled by now. Those books had hurled themselves on top of me in a concerted attempt to squeeze the life out of me. I couldn’t see a thing, was unable to move my arms or legs and could breathe only with the utmost difficulty. It was a book that had landed me in this predicament. A Hazardous Book.

Now I understood: it was an example of Bookhunter’s humour. I had fallen into a trap that wasn’t even meant for me. Goldenbeard had laid it for one of his competitors and I, in my new-found faith in printed matter, had blindly stumbled into it. Regenschein had stated that Bookhunters were capable of transforming whole passages and sectors of the catacombs into lethal traps. It seemed that I always remembered the most important things when it was too late.

I was lying spreadeagled beneath a mountain of paper like a botanical specimen pressed between the pages of a book. I tried to move my arms, flex my legs and turn my head, but I could scarcely budge a claw. I was inhaling more book dust than air, so I found it harder and harder to breathe. It would be only a matter of time before I suffocated.

Suffocated by books . . . The songs Dancelot had crooned over my cradle never predicted that I would meet such an end. If destiny really did possess the gift of irony, this was a generous sample of it.

I didn’t even know whether I was merely wedged or completely paralysed. Perhaps that headlong fall had broken every bone in my body - it might have, judging by the pain I was in. But that was immaterial now. I was on the verge of bidding this cruel world farewell, and believe me, dear readers, that struck me as a merciful dispensation under the circumstances. Anything would have been preferable to this torment, even death. I prayed that the Grim Reaper would hurry, but my life continued to ebb away agonisingly slowly.

Then something stirred beneath me. I could feel I was being lifted, once, twice, three times, together with the entire mountain of paper on top of me. This hurt even more because it intensified the pressure to which my body was being subjected. Whatever was moving beneath me, it must have been the size of a gigantic whale. It effortlessly lifted me and my burden, my ribcage creaked, and I could hear the mass of books above me start to shift. There was a rumbling sound and the downward pressure lessened perceptibly. Many of the books must have slid off, because I could move at last. It seemed that I hadn’t broken every bone in my body after all. The pain was terrible, but I could now move my arms and legs, shovel books sideways and kick them away behind me. I continued to shovel and kick with wild abandon. As the rubble of books loosened, so I could at last breathe more easily. Then I saw light! Dim, multicoloured chinks of light were filtering through some narrow cracks quite near me. I stretched out my paw to them. It went right through and into space! Shoving and kicking like a mad thing, I emerged from the ocean of books in which I’d almost drowned.

I burrowed my way out, panting and coughing, gasping and sneezing, hawking and spitting, vomiting up great gobbets of dust-laden mucus. I sucked in greedy gulps of air again and again. Then I tried to look around, but everything was still too shrouded in dust - all I could see were those multicoloured specks of light. It took me a considerable effort to extricate myself completely from the debris of torn and shredded paper, whole and dismembered books, hard covers and loose pages. I crawled along, then rose to my feet. You couldn’t really stand on such an unstable mound of debris - one foot or the other kept sinking into it - but with practice I soon managed to wipe the dirt from my eyes and look about me without falling headlong.

I was in a semicircular cave at least half a mile in diameter. The arching roof high above me was porous, perforated by countless holes of various sizes, and it must have been through one of these that I and the books had fallen. Adhering to the rock between these apertures was the source of the pulsating light: whole colonies of phosphorescent jellyfish of every conceivable size and colour. They must have belonged to a variety of the species in the jellyfish lamps - one that could survive when not immersed in nutrient fluid. Considerably larger and more luminous, they had probably evolved from the inmates of the lamps. I was reminded of the two jellyfish I’d seen clinging to each other in their death throes. Perhaps they’d been engaging in the sex act, not dying at all.

Flocks of snow-white bats flitted around just below the roof, circling endlessly and filling the cave with their shrill squeaks. With a sudden rumbling sound, one of the holes vomited a torrent of dust and paper that showered down on the sea of books, fortunately at a safe distance from me.

All those tattered, mouldering, worm-eaten books - all that torn paper, splintered wood and other debris - really did resemble the surface of a sea in that multicoloured light, the more so because every part of it was ceaselessly stirring, heaving and subsiding. I preferred not to speculate on the nature of the creatures that were causing these upheavals - probably hosts of maggots and rats, worms and beetles busily engaged on the final destruction of literature. Wasn’t there a poem on decay by Perla la Gadeon entitled ‘The Conqueror Worm’?

Yes, my faithful readers, I had clearly gone down another level and descended even deeper into the bowels of the cave system. I even knew what this place was called: it couldn’t be anywhere but Unholm, the rubbish dump of the catacombs. Colophonius Regenschein had visited this ill-famed cave and devoted a whole chapter of his book to it and its environs. He called it the dirtiest and seediest part of the labyrinth. This was where its inhabitants had dumped all their literary rubbish over the centuries. But not that alone. Many of the inhabited caves on the upper levels had shafts leading to the holes in the roof of Unholm and into these were thrown everything of no further value. Book pirates used them to dispose of their murdered victims, decadent book tycoons of their everyday rubbish and excrement, Bookemists of their toxic trash and failed experiments. Regenschein had claimed that some of the shafts led to the surface of the city and came out inside the ancient buildings in Darkman Street.

Centuries of rubbish had accumulated down here, forming a compost conducive to the growth of all kinds of fearsome fauna and flora. Here existed insects and parasites, plants and animals to be found nowhere else in the catacombs. Even Bookhunters gave this place a wide berth because it had nothing to offer but frightful diseases. Unholm was the morbid underside of Bookholm, the putrid, stinking entrails of the catacombs and their merciless digestive system. No one ruled here, neither the Bookhunters nor the Shadow King: decay alone prevailed. Anyone who had made it through the catacombs to Unholm would sooner or later decompose and become part of the restlessly stirring sea of books on which I now stood with legs atremble.

I surveyed the cave. I was roughly in the middle, or half a mile from the edge. Not too far, but picking my way across that heaving mass of paper would not be without its dangers. There were numerous exits on the periphery of the cave, probably gateways through which the inhabitants of the catacombs used to cart their rubbish in ancient times. It didn’t matter which exit I chose - they were all potentially hazardous - so I simply made for one at random.

I kept sinking in, sometimes ankle- or knee-deep and sometimes up to my waist, but never so far that I was unable to extricate myself. There were scuttlings and rustlings wherever I trod, and I carefully avoided looking down to see what creatures I’d disturbed.

I was white as a ghost with book dust from head to foot, every muscle in my body ached from my fall and subsequent contusions, and tears of despair were streaming down my cheeks. Nonetheless, dear readers, although this ordeal undoubtedly represented the nadir of my existence to date, I trudged defiantly on. I had survived a book trap and a long fall, I had been buried alive and risen from the grave - never would I have believed myself cut from such hard-wearing cloth. I wasn’t destined to die down here, oh no! I had made Dancelot a vow on his deathbed that I would become Zamonia’s greatest writer, and I intended to keep that promise despite all the Smykes, Bookhunters and other vermin in the catacombs. I would extricate myself from this living hell even if I had to burrow my way to the surface with tooth and claw.

Hundreds of ideas went whirling through my head - ideas for novels, poems, essays, short stories and stage plays. Born of my rage and defiance, the foundations of a whole oeuvre, a whole shelf filled with Yarnspinners, took shape at this moment - now, when I had absolutely no chance of making any notes. I strove to memorise my ideas, to nail them to the walls of my brain, but they eluded me like slippery eels. I had never been in a more creative state of mind - and I had nothing to write with! It was both tragic and comical. I laughed and cursed by turns, and even the oaths I uttered were of breathtaking originality.

I had completed about half of my laborious trek when the ocean of books emitted a rumbling sound. No, it wasn’t just small creatures going about their work in the usual manner. Something more dramatic was in progress - something far bigger was stirring. Not far away the rubbish was heaving and subsiding in a way that reminded me of the movements I’d felt while buried in books. Yes, something was stirring beneath the surface. I could tell from the waves the thing created that it was circling me ever more closely. A roar arose from the depths, a sound so irate and menacing that it not only extinguished my rage and defiance but banished all the ideas that had been running through my mind. My heart and brain turned to ice. This was what it must feel like to be circled by a primeval shark in the sea or a werewolf in a forest at night. Where was the monster now? Immediately beneath me with its jaws gaping?

And then it surfaced. Hundreds of books flew in all directions, paper dust billowed into the air, pages fluttered, startled insects buzzed - and from their midst emerged the biggest creature I’d ever seen.

The Conqueror Worm
!

Yes, it might have been a worm, Unholm’s biggest bookworm, but it might also have been a serpent or an entirely new life form - at that moment the monster’s genealogy was a matter of supreme indifference to me. Its visible portion, which jutted above the sea of books, was as wide and high as a bell tower, its skin was pale yellow and sprinkled with brown warts. Protruding from its whitish belly were hundreds of waving antennae or atrophied arms or legs - I couldn’t tell which. The yawning maw at its upper extremity was surrounded by long, curved fangs as sharp, pointed and lethal as scimitars. The huge creature froze for a moment and all I could hear was its whistling intake of breath. It reared up still higher, emitted an earsplitting roar and threw itself flat on the sea of paper with a crash that sounded like a whole forest of trees being felled simultaneously. The megaworm was completely obscured by the dense clouds of grey dust that went whirling into the air. Then they subsided and I saw its huge form heading straight for me.

Those who have never had to make their way across a mass of decaying books can have no idea how difficult this is. I don’t know how often I tripped, fell head over heels and tumbled down hillsides of yellowing paper, how often I scrambled to my feet or proceeded on all fours. Again and again I trod on books that fell to dust or disintegrated into colonies of mealworms, on paper that cracked like the thinnest of ice.