The City of Dreaming Books (38 page)
Read The City of Dreaming Books Online
Authors: Walter Moers
I took it from him, opened the lid and saw a letter lying there - just one handwritten sheet of paper. I removed it and replaced the box in the niche.
‘I remember how this letter came to us,’ Al said. ‘It caused quite a stir. We found it lying just outside one of the entrances to the Leather Grotto. Really alarming, that was. It meant that someone down here - someone who wasn’t a Bookling - knew about our greatest secret. We were all very worried for a long time.’
A feeling of excitement surged through me as I examined the letter more closely. It really was in my authorial godfather’s handwriting! Dancelot had written this letter, no doubt about it! I read:
My dear young Friend,
Thank you for sending me your manuscript. I can say without a word of exaggeration that I consider it to be the most immaculate piece of prose that has ever come into my hands. It genuinely moved me to the core. I hope you will forgive the following platitude, but I know of no other way to express myself. Your manuscript has changed my life. After reading it, I have resolved to give up writing and confine myself in the future to teaching your principles of literary craftsmanship to others - in particular, to my young authorial godchild, Optimus Yarnspinner.
I experienced another thrill of excitement at the mention of my name. What strange kind of bond - one that transcended time, space and death - was this letter forging between me and Dancelot? Tears sprang to my eyes.
Where you yourself are concerned, however, there is nothing I can teach you. You already know all there is to know, and doubtless far more than that. Though still young in years, you are already a consummate writer more brilliant than any of the classical authors I have ever read. The little I was privileged to assimilate while reading your manuscript reduced the entirety of Zamonian literature to the dimensions of a schoolboy’s essay. There is more talent in your little finger than in the whole of Lindworm Castle. The only piece of advice I can give you is this: Go to Bookholm! May, hurry there as fast as you can! You have only to show all you have so far written to a competent publisher and your future will be assured. You are a genius. You are the greatest writer of all time. This is where your story begins.
In profound veneration, Dancelot Wordwright
It hit me like a blow in the face, dear readers. The last few sentences banished any remaining doubt that this was the letter Dancelot had written to the author I was trying to find - the one that had sent him off to Bookholm. It had passed from Dancelot’s possession into that of the mysterious author, and now I was holding it in my paws. A new bond was being forged, this time between Dancelot, the author and my humble self. I had followed my unknown quarry’s trail and lost it. Now, in the depths of the catacombs, I had picked it up again. My head was spinning, my knees started to give way.
‘Oh!’ I groaned, searching for some means of support.
Al grabbed my arm. ‘Are you feeling ill?’ he asked.
‘No, no,’ I gasped, ‘I’ll be all right.’
‘You look as if you’d seen a ghost.’
‘I just did,’ I replied.
‘Our archives contain many ghosts from the past. Would you like to see some more of them?’ Al asked.
‘No thanks,’ I replied. ‘This one will do to be going on with.’
The Invisible Gateway
O
utside the Chamber of Marvels we bumped into Wami and Dancelot, who had come to assist Al in showing me round the Booklings’ territory.
utside the Chamber of Marvels we bumped into Wami and Dancelot, who had come to assist Al in showing me round the Booklings’ territory.
‘We’re now going to show you those parts of the catacombs that aren’t illuminated by candles,’ Al told me. ‘There aren’t any phosphorescent jellyfish either, but Wami and Dancelot are the best flame-throwers we’ve got.’
Grinning, Dancelot and Wami held up their pitch-pine torches, which were still unlit.
‘We’ll show you our forests and flower gardens,’ said Wami. ‘The whole of our untamed natural surroundings.’
Hadn’t Al just lamented the fact that he would never sit on a grassy bank? Where could forests and flowers grow down here, and what on earth did ‘flame-throwers’ mean?
‘It’s time someone acquainted you with the pleasanter features of the catacombs. Till now you’ve only seen their sinister, bewildering and unattractive aspects. We’ll show you what makes life worth living down here: a part of our gloomy world still untouched by decay and Bookhunters.’
‘Does it exist?’ I asked. ‘And how do we get there?’
Al, Wami and Dancelot gathered round, opened their eyes as wide as they would go and fixed me with a piercing stare. Then they began to hum.
The next thing I knew, I was standing in a stalactite cave on the shores of a lake whose pale-blue waters were as clear as glass. Wami and Dancelot had lit their torches, Al was gazing across the lake with a rapt expression.
I felt dazed.
‘My, oh my,’ I said. ‘Was that another example of teleportation?’ My head was ringing like a Bookholm fire alarm.
‘Exactly!’ said Wami. ‘Teleportation, tee-hee!’
‘It’s much easier than walking,’ Dancelot said with a grin.
So why did I feel as if I’d been plodding along for hours? My legs were as heavy as lead.
‘We teleported you so you’ll never be able to betray the route to our treasures,’ said Al. ‘We did it for your own good.’
‘Where are we?’ I asked.
‘This is the
Invisible Gateway.
Beyond it lies the
Crystal Forest.
I know it isn’t a particularly original name for such a place, but we’re no authors. Perhaps you can think of a better one.’
Invisible Gateway.
Beyond it lies the
Crystal Forest.
I know it isn’t a particularly original name for such a place, but we’re no authors. Perhaps you can think of a better one.’
Nothing occurred to me on the spur of the moment. My brain felt like an empty sponge. Well, well, the Crystal Forest. I couldn’t see any forest or any crystal, nor could I see an Invisible Gateway - but then, it was invisible by definition.
‘Just follow us,’ said Al, and the three little Cyclopses strode on ahead - into the blue lake. I followed them reluctantly.
The water was cold, but it only came up to my knees. Inquisitive silvery eels were swimming round us. I worried that I would catch my death and that the eels might give me an electric shock.
We were wading towards a black rock. I was afraid the Booklings would blunder straight into it when I noticed a yawning hole in its midst that was even blacker than the rock itself. The Invisible Gateway was an illusion. It looked like solid rock from a distance, but I now saw that it was a tunnel.
‘Ingenious, isn’t it?’ said Dancelot. ‘Nature erected this gateway: a hole disguised as a rock, a rock that’s really a gateway. Down here one could be forgiven for believing that rocks can think. We didn’t find it for a long time.’
After we had gone perhaps a hundred yards along the narrow, pitch-black tunnel it opened out into a large cavern.
‘This is where the Crystal Forest begins,’ Al said solemnly, and Wami and Dancelot, as though in response to a word of command, hurled their torches high into the air. On reaching their apogee they rotated several times, hissing loudly, and illuminated a roof of gleaming blue lapis lazuli. Beyond the stretch of shallow water in which we were standing lay what looked like a verdant meadow filmed with sunlit, sparkling dew. Then the torches descended, and Wami and Dancelot deftly caught them before they could land in the water and extinguish themselves. For one glorious moment I felt I was back in the open air again.
‘I wouldn’t advise anyone who values his feet to walk across that lovely-looking meadow,’ said Al. ‘The blades of grass are really razor-sharp slivers of green crystal.’
We set off along some stony paths that skirted the deceptive crystal meadow, in which red fire-opals glowed at many points like poppies, almost as if nature were imitating its Overworldly beauties in another medium.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Al said, ‘but our countryside possesses a beauty all its own. It has no need to imitate the scenery up there. It can even surpass it in splendour.’
He wasn’t exaggerating. We traversed an expanse of rock from which projected hundreds of jagged yellow crystals the height of a Lindworm. Partially coated with orange rust, they glowed so brightly in the dark that we could have dispensed with Wami’s and Dancelot’s torches altogether. Luminous stone trees . . . I had never seen anything as impressive in any forest on the surface.
‘They’re just condensed sulphuric gas, that’s all,’ Al explained.
‘Show-off,’ said Wami. ‘No need to act the schoolmaster just because you’ve learnt a few geology books by heart.’
‘You youngsters would do well to take a little more interest in the sciences,’ Al retorted. ‘Genuine creative writing is founded on a wide and varied education. For instance, if you’d memorised the entire works of Ergor Banco, the so-called Doctor Mirabilis, as I have—’
‘No, no!’ Wami and Dancelot cried in horror. ‘Not him again, we beg you!’
Al lapsed into silence and strode on ahead.
‘That’s the trouble with Al’s plays,’ Wami whispered to me. ‘He’s forever dragging in little bits of arcane knowledge. Don’t get him started on Ergor Banco, you’ll never hear the end of it.’
Blossoming on every side were minerals of every shape, colour and size: violet amethyst, pale-pink rose quartz, needle-sharp, milk-white crystals bristling like sea urchins, green bloodstone threaded with red streaks that looked like genuine bloodstains - I, with my modest knowledge of geology, could classify only a few of them.
‘They’re all growing,’ Al said. ‘See the bush that looks like rusty metal? It was only half as big on my last visit.’
Many of the crystals, which really did resemble plants, formed sinuous tendrils, feathery foliage and prickly stalks. They sprouted from fissures in the grey rock like blossoming flowers, luxuriant weeds or wild vegetables. I saw a lump of quartz that could have been mistaken for one of Dancelot’s beloved blue cauliflowers, had it not been ten times the size.
‘Thus, the cauliflower is a flower that has come to grief on its own obesity,’ Dancelot quoted, ‘or, to be more precise, a multiplicity of unsuccessful flowers, a degenerate panicled umbel.’
‘The few buds that have proved durable turn blue and swell up, then flower and produce seeds,’ I chimed in.
‘Honest and true to nature, these gallant little survivors are the saviours of the cauliflower fraternity,’ Dancelot wound up.
We sighed in unison. I was sure my authorial godfather would have been mightily pleased with this subterranean garden.
Wami and Dancelot were truly outstanding flame-throwers. They hurled their torches into the air again and again, and everything the whirling flames carved out of the gloom was breathtaking in its beauty. Flowers of multicoloured glass grew upside down on the roof of the cave, which consisted of transparent crystal, sparkling red manganese oxide or metallically glinting iron pyrites. Long spears of black crystal jutted from the smooth, rounded slabs of milky quartz beneath our feet. It was like walking across the snow-mantled remains of a forest fire.
‘All the minerals in Zamonia have congregated in the Crystal Forest so as to display the full spectrum of their beauty in a single spot,’ said Al. ‘One could almost credit them with artistic aspirations.’
We walked along a narrow passage suffused with a fitful red glow. The air had become so warm, we might have been passing close to a huge furnace. I could hear a sinister bubbling, gurgling sound.
‘We’re now entering the
Devil’s Kitchen
,’ Al announced. ‘Watch your step. If you trip and fall into that boiling soup, no one can save you.’
Devil’s Kitchen
,’ Al announced. ‘Watch your step. If you trip and fall into that boiling soup, no one can save you.’
Although the Devil’s Kitchen wasn’t an especially large cave, its contents were all the more impressive. The volcanic crater in the centre, which was the size of a village pond, continuously spewed forth red-hot skeins of molten lava that almost hit the roof.
We paused on the lip of this miniature subterranean volcano. Dozens of heavily perspiring Booklings were seated all round the crater, gasping and grunting in the heat as they feasted their eyes on this natural spectacle.
‘Why do they do it?’ I asked in amusement. ‘Why do they sit so close to the lava?’
‘We come here to unwind,’ said Al. ‘The heat relaxes your body and staring at the lava for a while transforms your brain into a porridgy mass - you cease to think of anything at all. We find it helps us to recuperate from our mental exertions.’
‘Not that
you
need to stare at the lava,’ Wami muttered behind his hand, so quietly that Al couldn’t catch what he said. ‘
Your
brain has always been a porridgy—’
you
need to stare at the lava,’ Wami muttered behind his hand, so quietly that Al couldn’t catch what he said. ‘
Your
brain has always been a porridgy—’
‘What was that?’ Al demanded.
‘Nothing,’ Wami said quickly.
We left the Devil’s Kitchen by another route, one that took us across a lake of solid amber. Preserved in its depths were thousands of primeval insects, many of them larger than me and so horrific in appearance that even a Spinxxxx would have turned tail at the sight of them. I felt a trifle uneasy for the first time.
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