The City of Dreaming Books

by Moers, Walter

  I was travelling parallel to a stretch of track coated with phosphorescent blue rust and gazing in wonderment at the dead straight rails atop their spindly piers, which were reinforced by a spider’s web of wire mesh, when the rails abruptly ended: the piers had collapsed and the wire mesh hung in shreds. Although the track continued on its way after fifty feet or so, a black chasm yawned where the missing section should have been.

  The Rusty Gnomes’ Bookway was a ruin - I’d been suppressing that thought all the time. My ‘toboggan’ was traversing a structure hundreds of years old and long deprived of maintenance. It was inevitable that there would be a gap somewhere on my own route and that a chasm would suddenly open up in front of me.

  My mobile bookshelf now seemed like a flying carpet that might lose its magical powers at any moment.

  I debated whether to get off and proceed on foot. That would have been quite possible, now that I was moving so slowly, but the cross-ties were over a yard apart, and one false step . . . No, I preferred not to think of it. I could only hope that I was travelling along an exceptionally well-preserved section of the Bookway and would soon reach my destination.

  Unfortunately, what I now saw was hardly calculated to reinforce my confidence. I kept passing breached stretches of track, snapped rails and buckled piers. The Bookway’s skeleton was being eroded not only by time but by living rust. In another hundred years there would probably be nothing left but gigantic colonies of shimmermould proliferating on the floor of the cave like a luminous sea of every conceivable colour.

  So on I went, staring apprehensively in the direction I was going - not that I could see very far in the dim light. I kept fancying that I’d sighted a gap in the rails not far ahead, but they always proved to be intact when I got there.

  And then, quite suddenly, a mountain loomed up in front of me. No, mountain would be an exaggeration: a grey, conical monolith some eight or ten feet high, right in the middle of the track and only a stone’s throw ahead. Where had it come from? Perhaps it was a stalactite that had snapped off the roof of the cave. But why, if it was as massive as it looked, hadn’t it smashed the flimsy rails?

  I gauged my speed. The bookshelf was now travelling so slowly that it would probably collide with the rock quite gently and come to a stop. There was no need for me to jump off, but I shuddered to think how hard it would be to clear the track. I clung on tight for safety’s sake, so as not to be pitched off by the impact. By now, only a few yards separated me from the obstacle.

  Which suddenly stirred.

  Puckered up.

  Stretched, expanded, changed shape.

  Emitted a peculiar gurgling sound.

  And finally, only inches from a collision, dived off the track into space.

  The bookshelf trundled on. Dumbfounded, I turned to stare after the apparition but could see nothing, hear nothing. I rubbed my eyes and peered into the depths as the scene of this strange encounter steadily receded.

  All at once I heard another unpleasant gurgle below me! There followed a fluttering sound like a vast flock of pigeons taking wing. And then the thing came soaring back out of the darkness. It had turned into a birdlike creature, unfurled two huge wings and was vigorously propelling itself upwards.

  The head was narrow, almost spindle-shaped, with a beak like a pair of pincers, the skin grey and leathery. The ears were remarkably big and upstanding, the feet and wing joints tipped with sharp talons, but the most salient feature of this life form was that it had no eyes, just two deep, dark cavities that made its head look like a skull. Neither a bird nor a bat, it was a very special creature to be found only in the catacombs of Bookholm. I even knew its name. It was a Harpyr!

  The Song of the Harpyrs

  Colophonius Regenschein had written that there is only one kind of creature capable of inflicting a fate worse than death: the Harpyr, whose screams can drive its prey insane.

  Resident only in the catacombs of Bookholm, this cross between a harpy and a vampire can utter screams of a frequency that induces dementia in anyone exposed to its frightful song for a certain length of time by disrupting the rhythm of the brainwaves. Not until its prey has been rendered absolutely helpless does the Harpyr pounce on it and drink its blood.

  The thing that had dived off the track was one of these legendary creatures. I had roused it from its slumbers and now it was clearly eager to pay me back. Like most eyeless life forms, the Harpyr relies for guidance mainly on its sense of hearing. While soaring upwards on its powerful wings, the creature abruptly turned its head in all directions and swivelled its ears until, with a sudden click, it homed in and pointed the tip of its beak straight at me. It must have detected the faint rattle of the bookshelf’s wheels, or even, perhaps, my heartbeat.

  I would have given anything for my conveyance to have picked up speed again, but it continued to trundle along as leisurely as before. I waited for the Harpyr to pounce on me, but for some unaccountable reason it hovered on the spot, uttering more strangled screams. Although piercing and far from pleasant, they did not strike me as loud enough to drive a person insane and were evidently just another aid to orientation. Their echoes reverberated round the cave, filling the air with the sound waves the Harpyr needed to navigate by. Surprisingly, however, the echoes rebounding off the walls grew steadily louder, not fainter. Surely that was a total impossibility?

  I had little time to ponder the problem because it resolved itself a moment later. The echoes weren’t echoes at all; they were the cries of other Harpyrs that now came fluttering out of the darkness: one, two, four, seven - a full dozen of them converged from from all sides. The first creature’s screams had been intended to summon others of its kind. Harpyrs hunted in packs, it seemed. Why hadn’t Regenschein mentioned that in his book?

  The aerial monsters assembled above the track, fluttering and screeching at one another, while my laggardly bookshelf continued to dawdle along at a snail’s pace. Then the heads of the twelve Harpyrs clicked to and fro until all their beaks were pointing in my direction. Having jointly decided on their route through the air, they pricked their ears and emitted a collective screech. The hunt was on: vigorously flapping their wings, they headed straight for me.

  Just then my conveyance plunged into space. Or so I thought at first, because the motion was so abrupt and unexpected, I felt convinced that the rails had come to a sudden end. In fact, the track had merely resumed its descent and renewed the bookshelf’s momentum. The Rusty Gnomes had evidently gauged the physics and dynamics of their Bookway with the utmost accuracy.

  I was lucky not to fall off the shelf because I wasn’t holding on to anything at that moment, being too preoccupied with the sight of the swiftly approaching Harpyrs. Although I fell over backwards, I just managed to hang on as the downward plunge began. The sparks were flying again at last!

  The Harpyrs detected the rattle of the wheels and dived in pursuit, screeching loudly. A self-propelled bookshelf scattering sparks as it sped down a ghostly, glowing green track like a meteor plunging into a pitch-black void, and perched on it a desperate inhabitant of Lindworm Castle, his purple cloak streaming out behind, pursued by a dozen eyeless Harpyrs screeching with bloodlust . . . It was a pity there were no witnesses to be duly awestruck by such a unique spectacle.

  Little by little the Harpyrs’ strangled cries changed pitch, giving way to a mixture of screams and croaks, but I felt, even now, that they couldn’t rob me of my sanity. The bookshelf was travelling even faster than before. Swift as an arrow, it rounded precipitous bends, veered left and right, swooped and soared. I slithered and rolled around but hung on doggedly by my claws.

  I was now speeding into a truly gigantic cave. It might once have been the Bookway’s central station, because it was criss-crossed by vast numbers of tracks mounted on piers. Many of the latter had collapsed, snapping the rails and cross-ties. Here and there huge stalactites projected from the gloom overhead, but I saw as I drew nearer that they were really towering bookcases f
illed with books and thickly coated with dust: the ruined remnants of an ancient library system. Monstrous cogwheels coated with orange rust loomed out of the darkness, and I saw no fewer than three book machines mounted on tall iron frames like the one in the Leather Grotto. Linked by stretches of track, they were all out of commission, draped in cobwebs and thick with dust. This was the defunct nerve centre of a mechanical system by means of which the Rusty Gnomes had conveyed their store of knowledge from place to place: the Bookway’s inanimate brain.

  What impressed me most of all, however, were the fauna that populated this central station. I had read accounts of them in Regenschein’s book but come to the conclusion that they were merely figments of his imagination, an elaborate joke indulged in at his readers’ expense, because the creatures he described were too bizarre and improbable even for the catacombs. Now I knew better: everything, down to the most unlikely-seeming detail, accorded with reality.

  To pass through the Bookway’s central station was like being immersed in an aerial sea, a world where the ocean’s natural laws prevailed in the absence of water. All the denizens of this vast cavern resembled marine creatures. I saw flying fish with dragonfly’s wings that glowed in the dark. Shoals of them wound endlessly in and out of the Bookway’s buckled girders, possibly in search of insects, and they all underwent a simultaneous change of colour every time they altered course. White jellyfish the size of captive balloons floated up and down, their transparent bodies throbbing gracefully. The pinpoints of light that twinkled inside some of these jellyfish danced like coloured snowflakes. Black octopuses with luminous violet suckers clung tightly to the track supports and book machines, discharging dark clouds of vapour that dispersed in the air like ink in water. Translucent manta rays with the wingspan of Harpyrs and long, luminous, hectically pulsating tails glided gracefully around. Colourless sea spiders scuttled over the ruins of the Bookway and cocooned them in gossamer threads.

  Regenschein surmised that this colossal cave had once, in very ancient times, been completely filled with water and connected to the Zamonian Ocean, which would have accounted for the genesis and development of its unique fauna.

  I felt sure that gigantic crabs were even now crawling across the floor of the cave, and that the pearls in the oysters lying there were the size of houses. One day, when the ocean returned and repossessed the cave, it would find its inhabitants ready to turn back into the marine creatures their ancestors had been so long ago.

  But, dear readers, these amazing sights had almost made me forget what a predicament I was in! Screaming incessantly, the Harpyrs threaded their way skilfully through the glowing ruins and the creatures hovering around them. However, every time they got almost to within arm’s length and were greedily snapping at me with their sharp beaks, the track went into a nosedive or banked, almost as if the Rusty Gnomes had constructed it solely for my benefit many centuries ago.

  I was becoming drunk with speed. A feeling of elation and power overcame me. I felt invincible - beyond the Harpyrs’ ability to catch me. Was I starting to go mad? No, I was still unaffected by the monsters’ screams. It was simply that extreme danger had filled me with a kind of exuberance, a mental defence against the paralysis of fear. I no longer gave any thought to the risks, to the possibility of gaps in the track and the uncertain outcome of this chase. It was the moment that counted, the little triumphs I scored over my pursuers, the abrupt twists and turns and dives that kept foiling them and made them more and more furious. I was a hare zigzagging in flight from a pack of hounds, a swallow evading a flock of eagles.

  And then the Harpyrs really gave tongue. They proceeded to emit a new, third kind of sound, and I realised only now why I hadn’t heard their true song before. The gurgles and screeches had been only an overture, a mere rehearsal for the demented chorus to follow. At the very moment when I had ceased to expect it, the Harpyrs broke into their hunting song.

  It was a mixture of trills and hisses that swelled and faded, rose to a shrill coloratura and sank to a menacing snarl - just the right musical accompaniment for the crazy route the Bookway now followed. Ascents alternated at almost one-second intervals with descents, rises with falls, lefthand with right-hand bends, but the Harpyrs remained hot on my heels like greyhounds steadfastly matching their quarry’s every twist and turn. Their cries made my eyeballs boil and my tongue smoulder. I felt the convolutions of my brain become contorted, felt my vital fluids come frothing up to poison it. I was gripped by an ever more irresistible urge to end it all by leaping into space before the Harpyrs finally triumphed. One jump and it would all be over. One jump, then peace for evermore.

  ‘Yoo-hoo!’ said a voice in my head.

  Of course, that’s how madness usually starts, isn’t it, dear readers? You hear voices in your head. All the same, I couldn’t help feeling offended by the fact that this particular voice had hailed me with an exclamation as banal as ‘Yoo-hoo!’

  ‘Yoo-hoo!’ it called again. It sounded familiar somehow.

  ‘Hello?’ I called back in my head.

  ‘Hello there, my boy! How goes it?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m a cupboard full of dirty spectacles,’ the voice replied.

  ‘Dancelot?’

  ‘Are you acquainted with another cupboard full of dirty spectacles?’

  The insane often heard the voices of the dear departed, didn’t they?

  ‘I only wanted to say that the mentally deranged condition into which you’re now lapsing is common enough. A large stone hit me on the head during one of the sieges of Lindworm Castle and from then on—’

  ‘I know, Dancelot.’ Conversing with a disembodied voice while in mortal danger? Of course I was losing my mind!

  ‘Yes, my boy, for a while I was mentally deranged - completely cracked, in fact. I genuinely believed myself to be—’

  ‘A cupboard full of dirty spectacles - I’m aware of that, Dancelot. Listen: I’m tearing along on a ghost train pursued by a flock of ravening Harpyrs bent on sucking my blood, and I’m in the process of losing my mind. Would you please tell me, briefly and concisely, what you want?’

  ‘I thought you’d be happy to hear from me.’ Dancelot sounded half sad, half piqued.

  ‘I am happy - or as happy as can be expected under the circumstances. It’s just that I’m rather . . . stressed at the moment, Dancelot.’

  ‘I understand. I only want to give you some advice, then I’ll go.’

  ‘Some advice?’

  ‘I regained my sanity, as you know. Have you ever wondered how I managed it?’

  I’d never thought about it, to be honest.

  ‘It was like this. One day I heard the voice of my great-grandfather, Hilarius Wordwright, who also suffered from strange hallucinations - there’s a very long history of mental illness in our family, and—’

  ‘Dancelot! Would you kindly come to the point!’

  ‘Yes, well, Hilarius advised me to climb to the very top of Lindworm Castle hill and shout as loudly as I could.’

  ‘Shout?’

  ‘Exactly. I did as he had said: I climbed up there and shouted, and that shout expelled my dementia. It disappeared into thin air like an exorcised demon. I’m not joking! That shout changed my life at least as much as the manuscript which you—’

  ‘What do you mean, Dancelot? You want me to shout? Now, this instant?’

  No answer.

  ‘Dancelot?’

  The voice had gone.

  Well, there were precisely three explanations for that incident, dear readers. The first and least likely was that the voice really had belonged to my late authorial godfather. The second and somewhat more likely: it was a symptom of madness induced in me by the Harpyrs’ strident song. The third: it was simply a manifestation of fear, and it was my own psyche that had borrowed Dancelot’s voice in order to convince me how frightened I was. Or it could have been a combination of all three - I shall probably never know. All I do know is that I took Dancel
ot’s advice regardless of its source - the hereafter, a sick mind or common sense - and proceeded to shout.

  A Shout and a Sigh

  If there were such a thing as a Golden List for vocal feats, it would inevitably be headed by the shout I uttered in the Rusty Gnomes’ railroad station.

  Simply imagine all the sounds in the world you associate with extreme danger, dear readers: the muttering of a volcano on the verge of an eruption; the growl of a werewolf about to pounce; the rumble that precedes a major earthquake; the roar of an approaching tsunami; the hiss and crackle of a forest fire; the howl of a hurricane; peals of thunder in the Gloomberg Mountains. You will then have the basic ingredients of my shout to end all shouts.

  Now add sorrow at the loss of my authorial godfather, despair at my steadily worsening lot and the dire effects of incipient dementia. Mix all these together with the primeval forces that still slumber in my savage, dinosaurian blood, and then imagine the roar that emerged from my throat. But be careful! Stop up your ears before you do, because the mere idea of such a sound is capable of bursting a person’s eardrums and eyeballs!

  I let it out, that shout which effortlessly drowned the Harpyrs’ shrill chorus and filled the huge cave with an ear-splitting din. The flying fish fled in shoals, feverishly changing colour, an immense jellyfish shot upwards, pulsating in panic, and took refuge amid the girders of a book machine, sea spiders toppled off the ruined Bookway.

  I was aware that Lindworms possessed robust vocal cords, but I had no idea that my lungs were so powerful. I’m convinced that everyone in the catacombs must have heard that shout, that it carried to every corner of the labyrinth, to every Bookhunter’s ears and up to the surface of Bookholm - indeed, that it may be roaming the Chamber of Captive Echoes to this day and will do so for evermore. My dismay and apprehension left me, and for one long, wonderful moment I felt afraid of nothing at all, neither the Harpyrs nor insanity. Still shouting, I glanced in the direction I was going - and saw that the track ended not far off. The rails simply stopped short in mid air.