The City of Dreaming Books (51 page)

Unnerved, the reader lowers the book and chews his fingernails. Wouldn’t it be better to lay it aside? Bury it? Burn it? Wall it up? But it was so exciting! There! A distant chime like a death knell tolled by the black-clad Grim Reaper, who has come to . . . No, it was just your empty wineglass, which you jogged with your elbow. Ice-cold sweat beads your brow, your hair stands on end, your pulses race - and then there’s a rustling sound: the Hair-Raiser on your lap has just turned a page by itself, a startling and unexpected phenomenon that almost gives you a heart attack . . .

I myself, dear readers, would have preferred to believe that such effects were achieved by literary skill alone, but it wasn’t so, of course. The astonishing truth did not come out until decades later, when one of the authors who had attended the conference at Ignis Fatuus Castle made a deathbed confession.

For it wasn’t the authors of the Hair-Raisers who had invested them with such suggestive power; it was the Bookemists. They had exchanged their professional secrets, especially where the manufacture of hypnotic perfumes was concerned. They had created an elixir with which book paper could be scented, thereby producing all the symptoms of fear described above, from goose pimples to heart failure. The horror stories the books contained were not one whit better or more effective than their predecessors - in fact, it didn’t matter if they were worse. All the authors had to do was ensure that they embodied as many instances as possible of words such as
clammy
,
bony
,
eerie
,
gloomy
,
chilly
,
scary
,
spooky
,
deathly
,
gleerie
,
speathly
and
clooky.
This had sufficed to convince reviewers that literary magic was at work.

It was not only common or garden alchemy but illegal into the bargain, so Hair-Raisers were eventually banned. However, they enjoyed great popularity with collectors and continued to be read beneath the bedclothes, particularly by the young. I myself must have read Bamuel Courgette’s
Screams from a Sarcophagus
at least twenty times, shuddering with undiminished pleasure as I inhaled its fear-inducing aroma again and again.

But none of this would be any reason to laugh, would it, dear readers? Nor was it grounds for hilarity that my mysterious host had lured me into a room full of volumes which the Zamonian public health authorities had classified as Hazardous Books, and which were bound, even now, to be exuding their hypnotic perfume.

Nor, above all, was it funny that the Hair-Raisers’ dangerous aroma was already having an effect on me. I could hear the creak of coffin lids slowly opening, the demented laughter of Marsh Mummies, the sobbing of poor souls walled up alive. I could see severed hands scuttling across the library ceiling and the shadows of horned creatures flitting across the backs of the books. No, it wasn’t funny.

The funny thing was, I found these things profoundly reassuring.

The funny thing was that, even in a library entirely devoted to horror stories - even in the midst of a nightmare come true: a subterranean castle with no exit - I didn’t get the creeps and was imbued with a feeling of security by the very sight of some books I could actually read. That, dear readers, was why I couldn’t help laughing long and loud.

Then I pulled myself together, partly because there’s something rather pathetic about a person laughing to himself in solitary state. I took out a couple of Hair-Raisers, sat down in the armchair, drank the rest of the water, nibbled some bookworms and browsed for a while. And then, just as the Booklings’ murmured recitations had lulled me to sleep, so I was swiftly but gently wafted into the arms of Morpheus by the wailing of Zombies, the giggling of Hazelwitches and the screams of ghostly Sirens. Hairy hands scampered across the floor and transparent bats fluttered round my head, but I couldn’t have cared less. The last thing that went through my head was a quotation from Regenschein’s poem, which I now understood somewhat better:

B
y now it no longer worried me unduly that the walls moved and the floor rose and fell wherever I went. The whole of Shadowhall Castle seemed to be a gigantic mechanism in constant motion, not that I could discover any purpose behind it all. However, the purpose of the Rusty Gnomes’ book machine in the Leather Grotto had also escaped me at first. Perhaps this castle was another of their megalomaniac structures.

I awoke in the Hair-Raiser library feeling rested and refreshed. No matter what appalling nightmares had made me toss and turn, I must have slept for hours on end. So I set off once more along the endless passages. Although I was still beset by spectral, transparent bats fluttering round my head, severed white hands crawling about on my cloak, shrill voices urging me to drown myself in the moat and other such phenomena, the hallucinogenic effects of the Bookemistic perfume wore off after a while and my head eventually cleared.

I was a guest at Shadowhall Castle, that much was certain. I had been provided with board and lodging. Meagre board and strange lodging, it was true, but all the same: someone not only tolerated my presence but might even be appreciating it. Although the fact that he had chosen Hair-Raisers, of all things, to be my goodnight reading matter might be symptomatic of an eccentric nature or a peculiar sense of humour, it did not necessarily imply evil intent. But what was I really, guest or prisoner? How long was my stay to be? Why was my mysterious host putting me up? I decided to construe the latest developments as an improvement in my general situation. Better to be put up by a phantom than pursued by Harpyrs, Spinxxxxes or Bookhunters.

Aeolian music came drifting along the passages. The longer and more attentively I listened, the less I could believe that it was generated by random currents of air. As in the case of the symbol-adorned caves leading to Shadowhall Castle, I detected certain recurrent patterns and themes. Given that these were far too strange be described as melodies or harmonies, a contradictory term -
melodious dissonances
- was the most apt description I could find for them. Sometimes I thought I heard voices or familiar musical instruments, but no life form known to me was capable of producing such ghostly, otherworldly sounds. No violin ever built could have brought forth those thin, crystalline notes and no brass instrument on earth those infinitely deep bass notes. If Shadowhall Castle was a gigantic machine, why shouldn’t it also be a gigantic musical instrument? Why shouldn’t its constantly shifting walls and rising and falling floors be simply a means of channelling currents of air like the complex pneumatic system of a trombophone? Just as the symbols outside had seemed to me to be the writing of some extraterrestrial race, so Shadowhall Castle’s music seemed to have been composed on an alien planet.

Now and then I heard something rustle in the shadowy, more dimly lit reaches of the castle. The sound came sometimes from the floor, sometimes from the ceiling, and I occasionally thought I saw flitting shadows roughly the size of a cat. The disconcerting thing was, I could detect nothing animal or even insectile about their shape. If my eyes didn’t deceive me in the subdued light, they appeared to be
rectangular.
I sometimes sensed that several of the things were in my vicinity, because the rustling sounds came from several dark corners at once and created a claustrophobic sensation of encirclement. As soon as I came to a lighter part of the castle I would hear the patter of many feet and glimpse those angular shadows disappearing into crevices in the walls. Once, in a particularly dark spot, I heard and felt something whoosh over my head like a bat with a hundred wings.

I explored lofty halls with fireplaces of monstrous size, chambers containing long refectory tables and petrified chairs. There were also benches, smaller tables and huge thrones, but all the furniture consisted of fossilised books. One gained the impression that the builders of Shadowhall Castle had subscribed to the architectural principle that everything must remain in its accustomed place, even if a tidal wave surged through the building.

Once, when I entered a small, square chamber, it was as if my weight had activated a mechanism of some kind, because the walls to left and right of me sank into the floor, disclosing other walls beyond them. These, too, sank into the floor, disclosing still other walls - and so on until the small, square room had transmuted itself into a long corridor whose extremities were lost in darkness.

On another occasion the contrary happened. I entered a long corridor from whose floor a series of walls suddenly rose until I was cooped up in a small room whose floor suddenly descended, taking me down a level. It was as if Shadowhall Castle were thoroughly capricious and permanently dissatisfied with my location, which was why it restlessly conveyed me from place to place. At other times nothing moved for hours on end and I was able to roam its subterranean chambers in peace.

I must have been wandering around for an entire day when I suddenly came across another paper trail on the floor of a passage. It led to a large dining room furnished with long stone tables and benches. Awaiting me on one of the tables, which had a throne built of books at one end, was a jug of water and a bowl of roots.

Dinner time! I accepted my mysterious host’s invitation with a courteous bow to thin air and sat down on the fossilised throne. The water was fresh and ice-cold. The roots tasted, well, like roots, but they took the edge off my hunger. While eating I tried to imagine who had dined at these tables in ancient times, but my giant ant fantasy took over again. In my mind’s eye I was surrounded by fellow diners with faceted eyes and scissorlike mandibles who cracked millipedes open and sucked out their guts with relish, simultaneously conversing in an insect language composed of clicks. Banishing this unpleasant vision, I finished off my frugal repast.

I got up from the table refreshed and reinvigorated, and I’m still glad in retrospect that what happened shortly afterwards did not overtake me at a moment when I was feeling weary and depressed. My sensitive authorial heart might not have withstood the shock.

I heard someone coming. Yes, I could distinctly hear someone approaching the dining room. I heard no footsteps, just the regular, stertorous breathing of some creature approaching the door. Was it my phantom host at last? Was the Shadow King on his way? I stood rooted to the spot, almost unable to move a muscle, as the asthmatic breathing drew steadily nearer.

The something entered the room. I say ‘something’ because I know of no word adequate to describe that indefinable apparition. It frightened me more, dear readers, than anything I’d so far encountered on my travels, which had abounded in frightening creatures. It was just a shadow, a transparent, faceless, indistinct, two-dimensional figure - just a grey silhouette. If anything approximated to my own idea of a disembodied spirit, it was this panting shadow that glided slowly across the room towards me. All I saw was a grey mist forever changing shape like a cloud of smoke being blown in my direction by the wind. Hundreds of voices seemed to whisper inside it, together with that hoarse, laboured breathing which moved me so strangely and made me feel so infinitely sad.

And then the shadow enveloped me too, from head to foot, and I felt it
pass right through me.
For one brief, crazy moment our two forms merged and a tidal wave of strange ideas, images, landscapes and creatures surged suddenly through my brain. Then it was over. The shadow had gone past, had flowed through me like water through a sieve. I turned, shivering, to stare after it. It simply glided on across the room as if it hadn’t even noticed me. I now saw that it was leaving a trail, a thin trail of moisture such as snails leave behind them, and I bent to touch it before it evaporated. Everything I did at that moment was unconscious and instinctive. My brain was uninvolved, for under reasonably normal circumstances I would never have acted as I did. Never! I touched the damp trail, put my paw to my lips and licked it.

The moisture was tears.

I realised only then that the shadow wasn’t panting; it was sobbing. Having reached the end of the room, it melted into the darkness of the passage beyond.