The City of Dreaming Books (61 page)

I
hardly need emphasise, dear readers, that I didn’t sleep a wink that night. First I spent hours practising writing with my left paw - something that seemed a near impossibility to a person who had written with his right paw for upwards of seventy years.

Next, I tossed and turned on the hard floor for a considerable time, vainly trying to sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about my recent tutorial. What had I let myself in for? I had been told to learn to write from scratch like a youngster in nursery school and subjected to a load of drivel about the Orm, the Alphabet of the Stars, and literary fish and sandstorms on distant planets. Was that how to become the finest writer of all time? I would probably have received better tuition in the high security wing of a Zamonian lunatic asylum.

Then there were the Animatomes. I now felt certain that they had divined my evil designs on them in the dining hall and were taking their revenge by special permission of the Shadow King. They continued to whisper for hours after the candles had burnt down. Every time I was drifting off into merciful oblivion, something tugged at my cloak, which I had draped over myself, or I would hear the rustling wings of an airborne Animatome circling overhead. Or, worse still, an arachnoid Animatome would scuttle over my face like a spider.

The next day, as I was tottering wearily through the castle, wondering what bizarre place would be the venue for my next tutorial and what form it would take, I heard some Weeping Shadows sobbing.

I was walking along a gloomy passage when several of them, half a dozen or so, came towards me. I turned on my heel, anxious to rid myself of their depressing presence, but more of them were advancing on me from the opposite direction. I hurried off down a side passage, only to find that it, too, was teeming with the creatures. Turning round once more, I went back to the original passage, but it was now jam-packed with shadows in both directions. I ought to have walked straight through them, but the thought of doing so gave me the creeps.

Just then the floor gave way beneath my feet, conveying me and the shadows into the depths. Down and down we went, until the walls on either side of us receded and opened out. We were descending into the great ballroom, the amphitheatre in which I had watched the Weeping Shadows dancing. We landed on the enormous dance floor and came to rest.

The floor was thronged with hundreds more shadows. They advanced on me, sobbing. The melancholy music of Shadowhall Castle struck up and the grey silhouettes began to circle me slowly.

I caught sight of Homuncolossus’s motionless figure seated in one of the upper tiers. He was watching the strange scene intently, and I realised that his presence was not fortuitous: this was another tutorial. For whatever reason, he meant me to dance with the shadows.

They now proceeded to pass through me one by one. Images, words, voices, landscapes and sensations raced through my brain. I trembled as I strove to capture those impressions, but they glided through me too swiftly. Again and again the shadows traversed me. For brief instants they flooded my mind with billowing images and soaring choirs of voices, then they were gone. It was like being repeatedly dunked in a tub of ice-cold water filled with sights and sounds.

The dance became wilder still. I spun round and round as more and more shadows glided through me at one and the same time. I felt ever colder - felt that the onset of so many outlandish thoughts was driving me out of my mind.

Then, all at once, it was over: the shadows had disappeared. I collapsed in a heap, surprised that I didn’t disintegrate into a thousand little slivers of ice when I hit the ground.

I lay there for a while, panting and shivering. Then I saw that Homuncolossus was bending over me.

‘What was all that about?’ I asked, still completely drained of energy. ‘Wouldn’t you prefer to kill me and get it over?’

‘You’ve just read the whole of the Weeping Shadows’ library,’ he said. ‘It was a dancing lesson of a very special kind.’

‘But what was the point?’ I demanded, sitting up with a groan. ‘I nearly went mad, I didn’t understand any of it, and I’ve as good as forgotten it all again.’

‘It’s always the same with demanding literature,’ Homuncolossus replied as he helped me to my feet.

O
ne’s memory functions like a spider’s web. Unimportant things - the wind, for example - a web lets through, whereas captured flies become lodged in it and are stored there until the spider needs and devours them.

I’ve read and long forgotten many books in my life, but their important features have lodged in my mental net, ready to be rediscovered years or decades later. The incorporeal books of the Weeping Shadows were another matter. They had passed through me like water trickling through a sieve. I thought I’d forgotten them within seconds, but I noticed the next day that some of them had lodged in my mind after all.

I suddenly knew words I’d never heard or read before. I knew, for example, that
plumose
was an archaic synonym for
feathered.
Although this knowledge may at first sight seem useless, whenever I visualise a young chick the word
plumose
strikes me as far more appropriate, somehow, than the humdrum word
feathered.
To my amusement, whole hosts of cute and exceedingly plumose chicks had suddenly begun to strut and cheep in my mind’s eye.

What had happened? How did I suddenly know what
spinking
meant? Everyone is familiar with the penetrating mouth odour given off by a garlic eater, but few people know that there used to be a word,
spinking
, that combined the notions of speaking and stinking. Read the words ‘ “
Oh, those lamb cutlets were absolutely delicious!” he spinked’
and you instantly know - without the word ‘garlic’ having been mentioned even once - that the character in question will leave an olfactory trail behind him throughout the novel in question.

Bolmigant
,
grandiferous
,
disconstutive . . .
Knowing those words gave me a feeling of
superiosity
- a hybrid term, now sadly obsolete, formed by the amalgamation of superiority and seriousness. I also knew the meaning of
mesomorphic
,
leptogamic
,
ectogilic
,
yogudromic
,
spheralic
and
indigabluntic
- all of them derogatory epithets with which one could insult a person to one’s total
contentification
(another word regrettably out of fashion).

It gradually dawned on me that the Weeping Shadows were in possession of a store of knowledge dating from a long forgotten epoch when language was considerably more precise and discriminating than it is today. When describing a person we are apt to content ourselves with such woolly adjectives as
pretty
or
ugly
, but my dance with the Shadows had taught me, for example, that a
nasodiscrepant
was a person with nostrils of markedly different sizes, a
puncheonist
someone with a figure like a barrel, and a
neplusultra
someone more than averagely good-looking. Those words were far more subtle.

The Weeping Shadows’ love of exactitude embraced every field. Instead of lumping noises together under such banal headings as
bang
,
rustle
or
clatter
, they assigned them onomatopoeic designations appropriate to their special characteristics. The gentle sound of a fluffy feather landing on the floor was a
bfft.
The noise that results when you involuntarily burst out laughing halfway through a glass of beer and squirt the liquid through your nose was known as a
splurph.
The appetising sound of a square of chocolate being broken off a candy bar was a
thnukk.
The terrible noise made by a stick of chalk grating on a blackboard was a
skreek.
As for the awe-inspiring sound of a volcanic eruption, that was aptly termed a
rumbumblion.

That day, instead of wandering around Shadowhall Castle, I quickly roamed the convolutions of my own brain in search of all the words the Weeping Shadows had so generously deposited there.

Ambivaliguous
described a problem you can’t make up your mind about.

An
ooff
was the moment when you go to pick something up and find it’s too heavy for you, a
whaaa
the sensation you get when you slip on a bar of soap.

The sensual pleasure you derive from squeezing an orange until it goes all soft and squidgy was
fructodism.

Someone with an obsession for arranging things in alphabetical order was an
abcedist
, whereas someone with an obsession for arranging them in reverse alphabetical order was a
zyxedist.

Humodont
,
gnadophile
,
moptobulism
,
cryptococcid
,
blintic
,
interbodal
,
phnerkish
,
insubordious
,
gnavesome
,
hoppification
,
contraptive
,
bibilogue
,
omnigorm
- there were hundreds and thousands of forgotten words. I snapped them up one by one and bore them off to the cerebral ventricle in which I kept my vocabulary. By the end of the day it had almost doubled in size.

I lingered in my vocabulary chamber for a long time, examining each of my new acquisitions with gratitude and loving pride like a pirate appraising the doubloons and diamonds in a captured treasure chest.

I
was making rapid strides where writing with my left paw was concerned. It really was my natural way of writing, I suppose, and I had suppressed it for decades. The words now flowed straight from my brain to the paper without drying up repeatedly, as they so often had in the old days. I realised that a writer’s writing arm can be likened to the sword arm of a fencer or the leading arm of a boxer. I really could write better with the correct paw. The rhythm of my thoughts now matched the physical movements necessary to transfer those thoughts to paper. There are times when a writer’s ideas start flowing and must continue to flow, and that is impossible unless he uses the correct arm.

The Shadow King’s tutorials bore little relation to what is customarily taught in the course of a normal artistic training such as I had already received from Dancelot. The curriculum was extremely unconventional - indeed, I might almost call it questionable - and comprised subjects which he alone may have been capable of mastering and transmitting.

‘Today I’d like to tell you something about gaseous verse,’ Homuncolossus would say. He would then lecture me for hours about poets on a distant planet who consisted of luminous, animate vapour and employed chemically complex methods of writing extremely volatile gaseous poems. According to him, he was in constant touch via the Orm with all the writers who had ever lived at any point in the universe, even those long dead, and exchanged ideas with them regarding their technique and subject matter.

This was nonsense, of course, but he lectured so brilliantly and plausibly that I could only marvel at his inexhaustible ingenuity. His unorthodox didactic method of imparting his monumental store of knowledge was a curious mixture of megalomania and modesty, because he claimed to have picked it up from others. The truth was, he had invented it all himself and never tired, day after day and lesson after lesson, of devising new absurdities that would fire my imagination.

Although lacking any discernible system or serious foundation, the Shadow King’s curriculum was singularly well suited to setting my thoughts and my writing arm in motion. It reminded me of the light fiction I’d read in my youth and my inability to stop thinking about a book after laying it aside. Incidentally, the Weeping Shadows had a fitting word for this form of easygoing literary theory - one that sounded far more cheerful and less scholarly, almost like a drinker’s toast:
theerio.