The City of Dreaming Books (54 page)

A puff of wind caressed my cheek and extinguished a nearby candle. As if to order, Shadowhall’s weird music had started up again.

‘At last he learnt to write and was able to unload all that ballast,’ the Shadow King went on. ‘It flowed out of him like the ink from his pen, which covered square miles of paper. He simply couldn’t stop writing, nor had he any wish to, because that was what made him feel best of all: putting stories down on paper.’

The Shadow King paused for a moment. ‘Is this a story that might interest you?’ he asked. ‘Or am I boring you?’

So it was to be a story about a writer. Without meaning to be unkind, dear readers, I’d had something more exciting in mind. His promise of a weird story had summoned up visions of Spinxxxxes and Harpyrs, Bookhunters and masses of gore. I certainly hadn’t been expecting a story about a writer. Stories about writers were about as exciting as a peek at the dusty shelves in the Booklings’ Chamber of Marvels. Nonetheless, I shook my head.

‘In that case,’ the Shadow King said with a laugh, ‘I suppose I shall have to make a bigger effort to bore you. My friend had had little experience of life when he wrote his earliest stories, so they were pretty nonsensical. On the other hand, he was knowledgeable in a strange, dark, primordial way. He knew things that could only have happened in alien, far-off worlds or other dimensions. He described creatures that existed in the voids between the stars, and he knew their strange thoughts, dreams and desires. He described a place on the bed of an ocean composed of gas and inhabited by venomous creatures that fought, loved and killed each other in its depths. Nobody knew where he got all these preposterous ideas, and some people thought he wasn’t quite right in the head.’

The Shadow King’s breathing sounded like paper bags being slowly inflated and deflated.

‘My friend couldn’t watch clouds scudding past without visualising an epic tale about a race of Cloud Folk. To him, no rushing stream was without its colony of water sprites, no meadow without its army of blades of grass on the march. Insects flitting round his head recounted their little life stories. Ants from rival nests waged war so that he could chronicle their sanguinary battles.

‘Because his parents and playmates poked fun at his stories, he felt misunderstood and started to write for a readership of disembodied spirits. For them he devised, constructed, moulded, polished and portrayed a world in which every word and emotion, every creature and event, every letter and incident was in its proper place. Once that world was complete - once it had been fully committed to paper and purged of spelling mistakes and errors of style - he felt sure that his readers would come and live in it with him. It would be a world of the mind constructed by his own mind and inhabited by many others.

‘So he erected it word by word, sentence by sentence, chapter by chapter. He carefully superimposed syllable on syllable, linked words together, piled paragraph on paragraph. They were curious edifices, the tales he invented, many woven entirely out of dreams and others built of fears and premonitions.

‘He constructed an abode for those who had frozen to death, a palace of snow and ice, and peopled it with snow crystals that floated along its frozen passages and filled them with their tinkling song.

‘He created a lake for victims of drowning, one on which drowned children could drift peacefully aboard waterlily leaves and make friends with frogs and lotus blossoms.

‘He kindled a blaze for those who had been burnt to death - an immense conflagration that roared like a forest fire and billowed like a storm-tossed sea - in which their ghosts could dance for ever in the form of leaping flames, oblivious of their terrible agony.

‘He built a home for those who had done away with themselves, the
Teardrop Hotel
, with walls of eternal rain.

‘Last of all, he built a refuge for those who had died insane. The biggest and most magnificent edifice of all, it was painted in iridescent colours that did not exist in reality. It also conformed to laws of its own: you could walk on its ceilings and time went backwards.

‘One day, while studying his reflection in a mirror, my friend saw how perfectly it reproduced his grimaces and facial contortions. “I want to become like this being in the mirror,” he thought. “I want to be able to imitate life just as perfectly. I want to be just as lonely.” ’

There was a brief pause.

‘It sounds as if your friend was losing his mind,’ I blurted out. ‘As if he needed to consult a psychiatrist.’

The Shadow King gave a terrible laugh.

‘Yes, that’s what he himself thought at times. But his illness never attained the merciful degree of severity that would have entitled him to a spell in a lunatic asylum and absolved him from further work. It wasn’t quite severe enough for a lunatic; only for a writer.’

I couldn’t help laughing myself. It seemed that the Shadow King possessed something akin to a sense of humour, albeit of a rather black kind.

‘My friend saw that things couldn’t go on this way, or he would wind up in a straitjacket. He realised that he must address himself more to earthly matters, so he quit his illusory edifice, left it to crumble into wonderful ruins which he seldom revisited, and concentrated on his surroundings.’

The Shadow King inserted another brief pause, breathing heavily as if all this talking were something of a strain. I seized the opportunity to survey my own surroundings. I’m sure they were not so unlike the conditions that may have prevailed inside the mysterious writer’s castles in the air. Ghostly music came wafting across the throne room and the Animatomes, which had formed a circle round the Shadow King at a respectful distance, seemed to be listening to him attentively. Then again, perhaps they were only listening to the strange modulations in his voice.

‘My friend the writer now described the simplest things he could find,’ he went on, ‘and discovered that it was the hardest thing in the world. It was easy enough to describe a palace built of ice and snow but incredibly difficult to write about a single hair. Or a spoon. Or a nail. Or a grain of salt. Or a splinter. Or a candle flame. Or a drop of water. He became a chronicler of the most mundane, everyday events and jotted down the most trivial conversations in his vicinity with such perseverance and self-discipline that he turned into a walking notebook that automatically converted all he saw and heard into literature. And, as before, he realised just in time that this was leading him down a blind alley.’

‘If he hadn’t,’ I ventured to remark, ‘he would probably have become a clerk or a stenographer in some government office in Atlantis.’

‘Precisely,’ said the Shadow King. ‘My friend was close to despair. The more he wrote the less his words seemed to convey. He ended by being unable to write at all. For days, weeks and months he sat in front of a blank sheet of paper and failed to produce a single sentence. He was already toying with the idea of checking into the Teardrop Hotel and hanging himself with an imaginary rope. And then, out of the blue, he underwent what was probably the most crucial and gratifying experience of a lifetime.’

‘He found a publisher?’ I interjected.

The Shadow King remained silent long enough for me to feel thoroughly ashamed of my inane remark.

‘He was pervaded by the Orm,’ he said at length. ‘So suddenly and intensely, he thought at first that he wouldn’t survive.’

Did the Shadow King really believe in the Orm? No matter how deeply one delved into this continent, it seemed impossible to find a place where no one believed in that hoary old myth. However, I refrained from making another flippant remark.

‘The Orm flowed through him quite suddenly. It liberated his spirit and sent it soaring up to a place in the universe where all the artistic ideas in existence intersected and merged. It was a planet devoid of substance and life, devoid of a single atom of matter, but endowed with such concentrated creativity that it made the stars around it dance. There one could plunge into pure imagination and become charged with more energy than most people are granted in a lifetime. One brief second in that field of force sufficed to give birth to a novel. It was a preposterous place where all the laws of nature seemed to be in abeyance, where dimensions lay in untidy stacks like rejected manuscripts, where death was merely a stupid joke and eternity a bat of an eyelid. My friend returned from there filled to bursting with words, sentences and ideas, all so thoroughly polished and prefabricated that he had only to write them down. He was half delighted, half dismayed by the excellence of what flowed from his pen and by how little he himself had contributed to it.’

No wonder so many would-be authors fantasised about the Orm, I thought. The Shadow King had just defined the dream of every lazy writer: simply pick up a pen and the whole thing will write itself. Some hope!

‘It was only now, after my friend had written this story under the influence of the Orm and read it again and again, that he truly felt like a writer. He eventually summoned up the courage to send it to Lindworm Castle with a covering letter.’

‘Lindworm Castle?’ I said, dumbfounded. The sudden mention of my home had hit me like a punch in the solar plexus.

‘Well, that’s what young Zamonian writers do when they think they’ve written something worth submitting. They send it to one of their idols in Lindworm Castle.’

True, the castle was positively inundated with manuscripts from youthful writers.

‘In my friend’s case the idol’s name was Dancelot Wordwright,’ said the Shadow King.

Whoomph! A second punch in the solar plexus. I was sitting down, fortunately, or my knees would have given way.

‘Dancelot Wordwright?’ I repeated in a daze.

‘Yes. Do you know him?’

‘He’s . . . he was my authorial godfather.’

‘Well, well, what a coincidence.’ The Shadow King cleared his throat.

‘Just a minute,’ I said. ‘Your friend wrote Dancelot a letter? Sent him a manuscript? Sought his opinion and advice?’

‘Yes, but you’re welcome to finish the story yourself if you like.
You’re
the author here, after all.’

‘So sorry,’ I said.

‘Very well. To cut a long story short, Dancelot was delighted with my friend’s story. He advised him to go to Bookholm at once and look for a publisher there, which he did. My friend spent the first few days roaming the streets. Then, one day, he was accosted by a literary agent on the lookout for talented young writers and showed him a few of his literary efforts. The agent’s name was Claudio Harpstick.’

‘Harpstick?!’ I almost shouted the name.

‘You know him too?’

‘Yes,’ I said dully.

‘Another coincidence, eh?’ said the Shadow King. ‘Life is full of surprises, isn’t it? Well, Harpstick could make precious little of my friend’s writings, but he stood him a bee-bread and gave him the address of a literary expert named—’

‘Pfistomel Smyke!’

‘Exactly, Pfistomel Smyke. The kindly benefactor who consigned you to the catacombs. My friend called on Smyke and showed him some of his stuff. Poems, short stories, a copy of the story he’d sent to Lindworm Castle and so on. Smyke asked for twenty-four hours in which to assess his work. When my friend returned the next day, Smyke was completely beside himself with enthusiasm. He predicted that my friend had a great future and described him as the greatest talent he’d ever discovered. Smyke had already worked out a sophisticated strategy for launching my friend’s literary career and drawn up some complicated contracts - he’d even chosen the typeface that would suit his work best, or so he said. Before all these things could be put into effect, however, Smyke said he wanted to show my friend something important: a passage in a book.’

‘No!’ I cried, almost as if I could still prevent an accomplished fact.

‘No?’ the Shadow King repeated indignantly. ‘You want me to stop?’

I shook my head.

‘Forgive me,’ I said.

‘Smyke got out a book adorned with the symbol of the Triadic Circle. At his bidding, my friend leafed through it until he came to page 333. Then he lost consciousness, because the book was a so-called Hazardous Book impregnated with a poison that anaesthetised him on contact.’

There was another long pause.

‘And this,’ the Shadow King said at length, ‘
- this is where my story really begins.
’

That was too much. I flung up my arms to stop him in his tracks. If I didn’t blurt out my suspicion now, I would explode.

‘Please,’ I exclaimed, ‘- please answer me one question: are . . . are you the writer who sent that manuscript to Dancelot? Are you yourself the friend you keep talking about? You simply must tell me!’

The Shadow King uttered an even more terrible, embittered laugh than before.

‘Do I look like it?’ he demanded. ‘Do I look like a
human being
?’

No, he really didn’t, I had to admit. Or at least, what I had so far seen of him did not. From the little I knew of the human species, he was almost twice the height of an average man. I was stumped for a reply that wouldn’t offend him.

‘Tell me,’ he repeated in a cold, peremptory tone. ‘Do I look like a human being?’

‘No,’ I replied meekly.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘In that case, perhaps I may be permitted to finish my story. I propose to do so without any further interruptions - unless I myself consider it appropriate to insert a pause for dramatic effect. Are we agreed?’

‘Yes,’ I muttered.

The Shadow King drew several deep, soothing breaths.

‘When my friend regained consciousness,’ he went on quietly, ‘he thought he was under water. But the fluid surrounding him had curious properties that ordinary water doesn’t possess. It was warm and slimy, and he could breathe it! Through the glass side of the aquarium in which he was imprisoned he could see Smyke tinkering with some alchemistic laboratory equipment. The fluid was not only around him, it was everywhere: it filled his throat, his respiratory tracts, his auditory canals, his lungs. Still paralysed and unable to lift a finger, he was floating in an upright position. His body neither rose nor fell.