The City of Dreaming Books

by Moers, Walter

  It was The Fire Demons of Nether Florinth, a thriller set in the Graveyard Marshes and featuring at least one large-scale conflagration in every chapter, so the blurb bombastically confided. Nothing could have interested me less than the literary glamorisation of the abnormal proclivities of the dwarfish Fire Demons, a tribe of disreputable arsonists. What interested me far more was the age of the book. It was a pyromanic excitation novel, a peculiarly nasty offshoot of Zamonian light fiction designed to appeal to readers who got their kicks from descriptions of huge, all-consuming fires. This literary genre had existed for only a century. I replaced the book, took out another, opened it and read the first few words aloud: ‘The world is a jagged, rusty can of worms - if you ask me, not that anyone ever does.’ ‘Is that your philosophy of life?’ asked Homuncolossus.

  ‘No, it’s from Glumphrey Murk, the superpessimist,’ I replied. ‘This is another book that can be found in every modern Zamonian bookstore. We really must be quite close to the surface.’

  ‘I told you so,’ Homuncolossus retorted.

  ‘Have you worked out a way of getting to Smyke’s library?’ I asked.

  ‘Not really. I only know where the labyrinth surrounding it begins.’

  ‘How will you recognise the entrance?’

  ‘Oh, you can’t miss it. It’s signposted. There’s a corpse sitting outside.’

  ‘A corpse?’

  ‘A mummified body. It looks a bit like . . . But you’ll see what I mean when we get there.’

  ‘Are mysterious allusions a legitimate literary device?’ I demanded slyly.

  ‘No. Only second-rate authors make use of them to hold their readers’ attention. Why do you ask?’

  The White Sheep of the Smyke Family

  Walking around so close to the surface of Bookholm was almost more claustrophobic than being somewhere deep down in the catacombs. I now knew why Homuncolossus had ended by burying himself as far away as possible. You could not only hear the life of the city but feel it. The incessant rumbles and bangs overhead made the books tremble on their shelves. Once I even thought I heard the voices of children. To hear and feel all this while imprisoned below ground was far more intolerable than being exiled to distant Shadowhall Castle.

  In spite of the city’s proximity I would probably have failed to get out unaided. The catacombs here were just as confusing, if not more so, as those further down, not least because they were so cramped. The passages were low-ceilinged and narrow, with countless forks and intersections, small rocky chambers and flights of steps, and there were piles of books everywhere. Books! At this juncture, nothing could have interested me less. I had got to know every type of book at first hand, whether ‘Dreaming’ or ‘Hazardous’ or ‘Animatomic’, and if I ever did get out my first act would be to make straight for some uncivilised wilderness where no one could read or write at all.

  ‘Don’t be scared!’ Homuncolossus said suddenly. He had been striding resolutely ahead all the time. ‘The mummy is in a cave round the next corner. It looks quite lifelike at first glance, perhaps because of the skeletons in its vicinity. They’re probably the remains of people with weak nerves who died of heart failure at the sight of it.’

  Thus forewarned, I peered cautiously round the corner - and jumped back despite myself. A familiar figure was sitting there.

  ‘Smyke!’ I gasped.

  ‘Yes, he does look a bit like Smyke, doesn’t he?’ Homuncolossus whispered behind me. He had stepped aside to let me go first.

  ‘No, not like Pfistomel Smyke,’ I said. ‘Like Hagob Salbandian Smyke.’

  We entered the little cave together and examined the mummy. Yes, it really was Hagob Salbandian Smyke, Pfistomel’s great-uncle. He looked exactly as he had in the oil painting I’d seen - well, almost exactly, because his corpse was completely desiccated. He had resembled a corpse in his lifetime, however, so this made little difference.

  He was seated on the floor of the cave with his back against an overflowing bookcase, his dead eyes staring into space. In addition to books the cave contained two skeletons - their bones were strewn all over the floor - and suspended from the roof was a jellyfish lamp whose half-dead occupant emitted only a feeble, irregularly pulsating orange glow. The strangest aspect of the scene was that the uppermost pair of the mummy’s fourteen hands was raised and that one skeletal hand seemed to be pointing to the other. It was a mystery to me how Hagob had managed to die in such a pose.

  ‘You knew him?’ asked Homuncolossus.

  ‘Not personally, but I know who he is: a member of the Smyke family.’

  ‘He looks pretty thin for a Smyke.’

  ‘Yes, Hagob was a bit of a one-off. He was Pfistomel’s great-uncle. He left him all he owned and then disappeared. They say he was insane.’

  ‘He certainly looks it. What’s he doing down here?’

  ‘He probably lost his way and died of thirst and starvation, then shrivelled up into a mummy.’

  ‘What about his hands? Why is he holding them in such a funny way?’

  ‘He’s pointing to something,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, his own fingers.’

  ‘He really was insane.’

  ‘No, wait,’ said Homuncolossus. ‘He isn’t pointing to his fingers, he’s pointing to something in them.’

  ‘You mean he’s holding something?’ I said. ‘I can’t see anything.’

  ‘Yes. There’s a hair between his finger and thumb.’

  I looked more closely. ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘It’s an eyelash.’

  Just then I remembered how Smyke had discoursed about his great-uncle while we were standing in front his portrait: ‘Hagob was an artist. He produced sculptures. My home is full of them.’

  ‘Really?’ I had interposed. ‘I haven’t seen a single sculpture on your premises.’

  ‘No wonder. They’re invisible to the naked eye. Hagob made microsculptures.’

  ‘Microsculptures?’

  ‘Yes. He began with cherry stones and grains of rice, but his works steadily diminished in size. He ended by carving them out of the tip of a single hair. I’ll show you some of them under the microscope when we get back. He carved the whole of the Battle of Nurn Forest on an eyelash.’

  ‘It’s a microsculpture,’ I said.

  ‘You mean this hair has been worked on in some way?’

  ‘Possibly. Smyke claimed that Hagob could produce the tiniest sculptures imaginable. But that doesn’t get us anywhere. We’d need a microscope to see it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ said Homuncolossus. ‘I could see it unaided.’

  ‘You could?’

  ‘I already told you: I’ve no idea what Smyke implanted in me instead of eyes, but I can see as well as a Gloomberg eagle looking through a telescope. Or a microscope, whichever.’

  ‘Really? Then take a look! Perhaps this eyelash bears a clue of some kind.’ Homuncolossus carefully plucked the hair from between Hagob Salbandian’s bony finger and thumb, then held it close to his cavernous eye sockets for several seconds. I seemed to hear a series of faint clicks and whirrs.

  ‘You’ll never believe this!’ he said.

  ‘What won’t I believe?’ I exclaimed impatiently. ‘I’ll believe anything you tell me!’

  Homuncolossus looked at me.

  ‘Really? A bit sudden, isn’t it?’

  ‘Tell me what you can see!’

  ‘You’ll never believe it.’

  ‘Please!’

  Homuncolossus concentrated on the eyelash again.

  ‘It’s a will,’ he said. ‘Engraved on this hair.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘You see? You don’t believe me.’

  ‘You’re driving me crazy! Read it out! Read . . . it . . . to . . . me!’

  ‘Will,’ said Homuncolossus.

  ‘Yes, yes, I know!’ I croaked. ‘It’s a will, you already said that.’

  ‘No, that’s what it says here: “Will”. It’s the heading. Shall I read the rest or not?’


  ‘Please!’ If any word could sound as if it were down on its knees, it was that ‘Please!’ of mine.

  Homuncolossus cleared his throat. ‘Will,’ he read,

  ‘I sincerely hope that the first person to read this does not bear the name Pfistomel Smyke. If that should be the case, however, be advised, Pfistomel, you confounded rogue, that I hereby curse you! I curse you to the end of time and I shall anoint your grave with my ghostly piss until our planet collides with the sun!

  ‘But, should you not bear the name Pfistomel Smyke, unknown stranger, listen to the following sad story. Pfistomel is, alas, my misbegotten grand-nephew and a scion of my equally degenerate family. When he knocked on my door one day - probably on the run from creditors or guardians of the law - I hadn’t the slightest notion of the depths of villainy to which he could sink. Like many other people before me, I succumbed to his innate charm. I opened the door and bade him welcome, and it was not long before I was treating him like my own son. I shared everything with him, my home, my food - everything with one exception: the secret of our family library, which had been handed down for centuries from generation to generation. I was the first of the Smykes to break the chain. Instead of misusing that monstrous possession for my personal aggrandisement, I decided simply to ignore it altogether.

  ‘For I am, as you will perhaps see from my stature, rather different from the rest of my corpulent family. There is good and evil in all the Smykes, but it must unfortunately be stated, in view of our family history, that reprehensible characteristics predominate.

  ‘In contrast to most Smykes I tend towards asceticism, have artistic leanings and abominate power in any form. It must truly be said, therefore, that the Smykean bequest went astray when it came into my hands. On inheriting the library I resolved that it should not, while I lived, be used for any nefarious purpose - indeed, for any purpose at all. On one occasion I even briefly considered setting fire to it, but could not bring myself to do so. It was only rarely that I visited the place to read a book there.

  ‘Many people may think it insane of someone endowed with such a potential abundance of power to spend his life producing works of art which no one can see. Well, my own ideas of morality prescribe that only a lunatic would aspire to subordinate the fate of others to his own wishes. I leave it to a higher authority to decide which view is the right one.

  ‘Pfistomel must have grasped the truth one day. I now feel sure that he had discovered the secret of the library by keeping my movements under constant surveillance. That was my death warrant. He drugged me with a poisoned book and consigned me to the catacombs. I fear I am only the first in a succession of luckless individuals who do not accord with his diabolical dreams of absolute power.

  ‘My strength is failing fast. I have been repeatedly foiled by the cunning mechanism that cuts off the library from this side of the catacombs, nor have I succeeded in finding another exit. All I can still do is to formally disinherit Pfistomel Smyke and unmask him as my murderer. The library of the Smykes shall belong to whomsoever finds this document and makes it public. It only remains for me to hope that he is a person of integrity.

  ‘Hagob Salbandian, the white sheep of the Smyke family.’

  ‘This is fantastic!’ I cried, when Homuncolossus had finished reading. ‘We can destroy Smyke with this - quite legally! If we make it public he’s finished! He’ll be branded a murderer, a liar, an embezzler. This is a document whose veracity no one can doubt. No one could have forged it. Hagob was the only person who had mastered this art.’

  Homuncolossus was still staring at the eyelash.

  ‘You can inherit the library, being the first to read Hagob’s will!’ I went on. ‘I’m your witness! They’ll strip Smyke of all his official positions. Everyone will turn against him. He can count himself lucky if they banish him to the crystal mines or Demon’s Gulch or the labour camps of Ironville.’

  ‘You think that’s an adequate punishment for what he has done?’ asked Homuncolossus. ‘And for what he’s planning to do?’

  ‘No punishment could be adequate,’ I said, ‘but that would do for a start.’

  ‘Whom do you propose to show the will to? Whom can you trust in Bookholm? Whom do you know that isn’t on Smyke’s payroll?’

  That pricked my bubble of enthusiasm. We gave each other a long look.

  ‘Perhaps you could try us?’ said a piping, quavering voice. ‘Even though your previous experience of us hasn’t been of the best.’

  We spun round and stared.

  Standing in the mouth of the cave were Ahmed ben Kibitzer the Nocturnomath and Inazia Anazazi the Uggly, the Bookholm antiquarians who had told me to get lost.

  They stood there at a respectful distance, trembling like deer poised to flee. I could almost smell the fear that gripped them at the sight of the Shadow King.

  ‘You lose, Kibitzer,’ the Uggly said in a tremulous voice.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Kibitzer, his voice sounding even feebler than hers. ‘I would never have believed that an Ugglian prophecy could prove so accurate.’

  Then they clung to one another and fainted.

  The Renegades

  I told Homuncolossus to remain in the cave with Hagob’s mummy, or the pair of them might fall into another swoon as soon as they recovered consciousness. They quickly came round after I’d propped them up against the wall and fanned them for a while.

  ‘Good heavens,’ Kibitzer gasped, ‘that’s never happened to me before. I pictured him quite differently.’

  ‘Me too,’ croaked Inazia. ‘I’ve never seen anything more frightful.’

  I secretly wondered when the Uggly had last looked at herself in a mirror.

  ‘He doesn’t seem half as frightful once you’ve become accustomed to his unusual appearance,’ I whispered, although I knew perfectly well that Homuncolossus was listening, and that his phenomenal hearing would enable him to pick up every word we uttered, however softly. ‘Looked at in the right way, he’s really quite handsome.’

  ‘We didn’t mean to offend him,’ said Kibitzer.

  ‘No,’ the Uggly put in, ‘far from it. As a matter of fact, we came to do the exact opposite.’

  ‘So why are you here?’ I asked.

  ‘I’d like to recapitulate a little,’ Kibitzer replied, ‘if I may.’

  ‘The thing is,’ said the Uggly, ‘we’re sure we can shed light on certain matters you still find inexplicable.’

  ‘That would certainly be of interest to me,’ I said.

  ‘To enable you to understand what an awkward position we’re in,’ said Kibitzer, ‘I must go back to a time before you arrived in—’

  ‘Will this take long?’ the Shadow King demanded darkly from the cave next door.

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ I called back and he heaved a sigh.

  ‘I’ll be as brief as I can,’ said the Nocturnomath. ‘It all really started when Pfistomel Smyke attained a certain popularity in Bookholm. The city had previously been dominated by a form of - well, creative chaos, let’s say. Nothing worked properly, but it did work after a fashion and no one was particularly dissatisfied with that state of affairs. Bookholm attracted the kind of people who didn’t hanker after strong leadership, if I may put it that way. A touch of anarchy had always been more to their taste than a well-swept pavement. Then, in recent times, an alarming change occurred.

  ‘When he first turned up in Bookholm, Pfistomel Smyke made an extremely favourable impression on us all. By “us” I mean the literary fraternity, the inner circle, the handful of antiquaries and publishers, booksellers and artists who provided the city with its intellectual cohesion. From the first, Smyke cut a good figure at our various social functions in spite of his incredible obesity. He could waddle into a room - a literary salon, for instance - and ten minutes later all present would have formed a circle round him. He was witty, humorous, a gifted literary scholar and an antiquarian bookseller with a highly specialised stock of choice volumes, yet he behaved modes
tly. He lived in a tiny listed building, maintained it with loving care and presented Bookholm’s leading citizens with honey from his own beehive. He seemed to have no ambitions outside our circle. In short, he was a person of private means whom anyone in Bookholm with any self-respect would gladly have numbered among his circle of friends.’

  ‘Anyone!’ croaked Inazia. ‘Even us Ugglian booksellers, who don’t have any circle of friends.’

  ‘He was a public benefactor, too,’ said Kibitzer. ‘In every respect. He was always donating valuable books from his stock to help finance some project or other; for instance, the renovation of the municipal library or the restoration of the oldest houses in Darkman Street. Even a single one of those books was sufficient to preserve an urban district from dilapidation. Above all, though, he was a patron of the arts.’

  The Uggly gave a venomous laugh.

  ‘One day,’ Kibitzer went on, ‘he founded the Friends of Murkholmian Trombophone Music. That, I think, was when conditions in Bookholm started to undergo a gradual change - not that anyone noticed it at first. The trombophone concerts became an absolute must where Bookholm’s intellectual and literary élite were concerned. Everyone wanted to attend them, but only the most important citizens were invited.’

  ‘You went to one of those concerts yourself,’ the Uggly reminded me, ‘so you know what they can do to a person. Please bear that in mind before you condemn us for what follows!’

  I nodded. I still had a vivid recollection of that trombophone music.

  ‘We didn’t notice what was happening to us,’ said Kibitzer. ‘I was a little more resistant because of my three brains, but they too went soft in the end. Smyke’s psychological hold over us grew stronger with each successive concert. The music’s hypnotic power wore off after a certain length of time, but for several days we went around like remote-controlled machines and carried out the posthypnotic commands Smyke had instilled in the music. We did the most idiotic things without questioning them subsequently. I was there when we desecrated the Ugglies’ cemetery.’