by Walter Moers
Tears welled up in my eyes. I too began to weep, strangely moved by this ineffably sad and fantastic scene - until another wave of thoughts and images surged through me quite as suddenly and surprisingly as in the dining room. One of the shadowy creatures, which had entered behind my back, had simply passed straight through me. It now glided down the steps to join its own kind on the stage. This was too much. I turned and fled back through the gateway.
I continued to weep outside in the passage, why and for how long I’ve no idea, but my tears had a soothing and reassuring effect. When they finally ceased to flow I felt strong enough to return to the amphitheatre - even, perhaps, to mingle with the dancing shadows and fathom this latest addition to the castle’s mysteries.
When I turned round, however, the gateway was shut - bricked up by a wall of fossilised books that had silently erected itself behind me. The music, too, had fallen silent as though walled up inside. I strained my ears but could hear nothing, not a sound. The foregoing episode might never have occurred. And to be honest, dear readers, I wished it hadn’t, because my poor brain was now beset by a host of unanswered questions.
There was a sudden rustle behind me. I spun round, and this time I really did see something: a dark, rectangular object disappearing into one of the passages that led off my own. Being now in the right frame of mind to wrest every last secret from this accursed place, I boldly dashed in pursuit.
The passage was only dimly lit by a few isolated candles, so I was never able to get a really clear view of the little object zigzagging ahead of me from one pool of shadow to the next.
We rounded numerous corners, turned left and right, raced up one flight of stairs and down another, but I remained hot on the diminutive creature’s heels. We sped up a spiral staircase that stopped short at a rusty iron grating. The shadowy little thing slipped through it with ease; I could only stand there cursing.
I was about to turn back when the grating creaked open and I continued to climb. The staircase spiralled upwards for a couple more turns and came out in a large room.
It reminded me of the Hair-Raiser library: the same octagonal shape, the walls lined with bookcases, the armchair, the central table with the candlestick on it - for a moment I thought I’d found my way back there.
But there was something different about the place. Perhaps I missed the hallucinogenic perfume, or perhaps the books were differently arranged. This certainly wasn’t the same library and I couldn’t see the little creature anywhere.
The books were real enough, though, and I thought they might assist me in some way. I went over to one of the shelves, took out an ancient leather-bound tome and opened it.
And froze.
In the central margin between the pages was a single, blinking eye. The book was staring at me in alarm, just like the Animatome Al had shown me in the Leather Grotto. My reaction was just as horrified as it had been then: I dropped it.
It hit the floor with a crash and rustled indignantly. Then half a dozen little legs sprouted from the fore-edge and bore it away. It scuttled off and made straight for the opposite wall, where it crawled up the shelves and disappeared into a crack between two big leather-bound volumes.
I turned on the spot. There were rustles all round me, and the backs of one or two books began to move almost imperceptibly. No, these were no Hair-Raisers, even if their behaviour was enough to make a person’s hair stand on end. This whole library was alive! All those little rectangular shadows were books, of course. Live books, Animatomes!
Of leather and of paper built, worm-eaten through and through . . .
Were Animatomes something in the nature of rats? Were they Shadowhall Castle’s vermin? Had they originated in the Bookemists’ laboratories and found their way here via the rubbish dump of Unholm? Had they actually bred here? A fascinating notion: books capable of reproducing themselves and banding together into a library on their own initiative. I wondered what the little creatures found to eat within these barren walls, but then, I had probably explored only a small proportion of the castle.
I scanned the room again. If all these books were really Animatomes, the collection must be worth a fortune. I took another volume from a shelf and opened it. The interior resembled a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth. I was still staring at the book in amazement when it emitted a menacing snarl and bit my paw. I uttered a yell - ‘Ouch! That hurts!’ - but the confounded thing wouldn’t let go. Still snarling, it sank its teeth yet deeper in my bleeding paw. I yelled again, this time with rage, and pounded the cover with my other fist. At last it relaxed its grip and fell to the floor. It sprouted eight little legs and scuttled off into a corner, whence it growled at me viciously.
The shelves around me were stirring. Leather squeaked against leather, paper rustled and crackled, little piping voices could be heard. The Animatomes were waking up, roused by their colleague’s growls or the scent of my blood. For after that vicious bite, dear readers, I felt certain that these were not only Animatomes but Hazardous Books as well - a savage, bloodthirsty subspecies of the domesticated Animatomes in the Leather Grotto. And I could guess what they fed on. It was time to get out of there fast!
I took a couple of swift steps towards the head of the stairs that had brought me to the library, but there was nothing there, just a wall.
I looked around, trying to estimate my chances. How many books were there? A few hundred? All right, they weren’t Spinxxxxes or Harpyrs, they were vermin, nothing more. Vermin are cowardly. If I disposed of a few of them quickly enough the rest would come to heel. I was a dinosaur, after all. I possessed claws and teeth. Having survived Unholm’s rubbish dump and a ride on the Rusty Gnomes’ Bookway, I should be able to deal with a few shelves of mutated books.
I heard a rumble beneath me and the floor began to vibrate. Then it descended, taking me with it. Well, that was fine with me. Perhaps this unexpected development would put some distance between me and the Animatomes.
But all that happened was that the walls grew. The further the floor descended, the more books it revealed, all of them in the process of waking up. When it finally came to rest the bookcases were at least four times higher than before. I would now have to contend with thousands of vermin, not hundreds.
The first of them were already descending on me. It surprised me that they came from the topmost shelves, but I realised why when they opened their covers in free fall and proceeded to flap their pages: they were flying Animatomes - the bat variety. A whole flock of them swooped down and soared round my head, screeching savagely. Where normal books were cut off flush at the head, these possessed little mouths armed with tiny teeth that gnashed at me avidly.
Other Animatomes behaved like snakes. They emerged from the bookcases very slowly, their leathery bodies stretching and contracting in an elastic, rhythmical manner, and they hissed like venomous Midgard cobras.
The most unpleasant specimens walked on eight legs, spider fashion. More agile and aggressive than the snakelike variety, they struck me as being capable of committing the worst atrocities. I couldn’t tell which way up they were. They could change direction at lightning speed, confronting me with their leather backs and rustling pages alternately, and they kept rotating on the spot. I had no idea what they would use to bite or sting me with, but doubtless I would find out soon enough.
So the Animatomes hemmed me in on all sides. The circle round me drew ever tighter as more and more of them came creeping, crawling or fluttering out of the bookcases. If I didn’t very soon shake off the paralysis that had gripped me, they would bury me beneath them and tear me to pieces.
I’m rather embarrassed to admit this, dear readers, but I was suddenly, to my shame, reminded of a maxim in The Way of the Bookhunter, Rongkong Koma’s awful, shoddily written autobiography. To be precise, I was reminded of his Rule No. 3:
Anything alive can be killed.
Yes, a book that was alive and moving could be killed - that sounded logical, didn’t it? This merciless underwor
ld had taught me a lesson or two and the time had come at last to put them into effect.
I dealt one of the flying books a swingeing blow with my paw in mid air. The pages went flying everywhere, whole swaths of them, before its remains tumbled to the floor, where I crushed them underfoot. Its innards gurgled and blood as black as printer’s ink went spurting in all directions. I took advantage of the universal consternation this caused to stamp on two snakelike specimens in my immediate vicinity. They emitted a startled hiss and lay still.
Another two swipes of the paw, and the airborne books I’d hit disintegrated into a blizzard of fluttering pages. The rest of the squadron went into a steep climb that took them out of range.
Meanwhile, I readdressed myself to the Animatomes’ ground forces. I stamped on another book snake, strode over its remains to one of the bookcases and wrenched at it. The heavy piece of furniture toppled over and crashed to the floor, burying dozens of spiderlike specimens beneath it. A cloud of dust went up as it disintegrated into countless splinters and fragments of wood. Having selected the longest and sharpest of these, I went hunting the Animatomes, which fled in all directions. They crawled up the walls and bookcases, and the flying specimens hovered as near the ceiling as possible. The crawling specimens came off worst, being too slow. I transfixed them with my makeshift spear, one after another. When I’d skewered at least a dozen I brandished the weapon triumphantly, threw back my head and gave a bestial roar like the one I’d uttered in the Rusty Gnomes’ railroad station. All the bookcases shook, together with the Animatomes still on the shelves.
Then absolute silence fell.
The surviving Animatomes had fled to the upper reaches of the library and were keeping as still as mice. I hurled my shish kebab of kicking, writhing books into the dust and surveyed the battlefield, breathing heavily. Isolated pages were floating through the air and the floor was awash with inky, black blood. I had conformed to the barbarous ways of the catacombs.
I had become a Bookhunter.
Homuncolossus
The Animatomes lingered a while in the upper reaches of the library, apparently conferring in whispers. Then I noticed that their numbers were steadily diminishing. I could hear them rustling and scuttling around behind the bookcases, so I overturned each bookcase in turn until I exposed a big hole in the wall, their secret exit and entrance. Squeezing through this, I made my way along the passage beyond it but failed to encounter a single Animatome. After roaming unfamiliar parts of the castle for another few hours, I simply stretched out on the ground and fell into a deep, exhausted sleep.
I had a wonderful dream in which I could fly. Without any effort on my part, my body rose from the cold floor and floated along the castle’s interminable passages, light as thistledown carried on the breeze. I floated up and down long flights of stairs, through lofty chambers in which big wood fires were burning, and across rooms lit by hundreds of candles.
I awoke at last to find that I really was in a different part of the castle. Had I been sleepwalking? Had Shadowhall’s mysterious mechanisms transported me there, or had someone carried me there in my swoonlike slumbers?
Then I smelt smoke. A fire? A conflagration? Alarmed, I got up and set off in the direction from which the smoke was coming. Before long I could hear the hiss and crackle of burning wood. Ahead of me was a tall, narrow doorway that emitted a flickering glow. Cautiously, I drew nearer and, after a moment’s hesitation, peered in.
And there he was, the Shadow King himself! Believe me, dear readers, I have never seen a lovelier, wilder, more awe-inspiring sight than the monarch of the shadows dancing amid the fires burning round him. Nor had I ever seen a sadder sight, for his dance was an antidote to loneliness. The leaping flames multiplied his shadow many times, projecting it this way and that, so that it looked as if he was in the best of company.
At the same time I felt frightened. He was big and strong, at least twice my height, and he vaulted the flames with a series of prodigious leaps. All that I could see of him, even now, was his dark figure silhouetted against them, but I recognised his beauty, the beauty of a wild, untamed beast. He had to be the most remarkable creature in the catacombs of Bookholm.
And then he laughed. Pausing with his back to me, he lowered his arms and gave a full-throated laugh. Now I really did feel frightened, because his voice had a rustling, rattling quality that made it sound as if it came from another world, a world of darkness and death.
‘Come with me!’ he said.
I flinched at the words, which hit me like a whiplash, just as the Harpyr had flinched at the sound of his sigh. He had spotted me long ago. I now saw that his silhouette looked curiously angular, as if he were wearing a bizarre suit of armour and a many-pointed crown. He threaded his way between the fires and disappeared through a dark doorway. I followed him obediently.
The adjacent chamber was a throne room, the throne room of the loneliest king on earth. It contained only one piece of furniture, the throne itself, a massive winged armchair constructed of fossilised books. He was already seated in it by the time I entered.
I still couldn’t see him clearly because the room was only sparsely lit by a few candles and the Shadow King had withdrawn into the throne’s recesses.
The floor was strewn with books. As I hesitantly approached, many of them rose on their little legs and scuttled off or crawled out of my way. My reputation had evidently preceded me.
‘Are you a Bookhunter?’ asked the Shadow King. His hoarse, unearthly voice pierced me to the marrow. I came to an involuntary halt.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘I merely defended myself. My interest in books is of another kind. I’m a writer.’
‘Really?’ said the Shadow King. ‘What books have you written?’
I broke out in a sweat. ‘None as yet,’ I replied. ‘I mean, none that have been published.’
‘So you still can’t write books,’ the Shadow King said, ‘but you can already kill them. Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to be a literary critic?’
Unable to think of a witty reply, I said nothing.
‘What is your name?’
‘Optimus Yarnspinner.’
A long silence.
‘You come from Lindworm Castle?’
‘Yes. That’s obvious, I’m afraid.’
‘What are you doing in the catacombs of Bookholm?’
‘I was brought here against my will,’ I replied. ‘A literary scholar and antiquarian named Pfistomel Smyke drugged me with a poisoned book and hauled me off to the catacombs. I’ve been roaming around here ever since.’
An even longer silence.
‘And who are you?’ I ventured to ask, if only to relieve the tension a little. ‘If I may make so bold.’
An even longer and more awkward silence ensued.
‘I have many names,’ he murmured at length. ‘Mephistas. Soter. Eevel. Existion. Tetragrammaton. The Demidwarfs in the upper caves call me Keron Kenken. The Dark Folk in the lower labyrinths refer to me as Ningo Spora Doodung Mgo Gyuli Thorchugg - I can hardly remember it all myself.’
‘Are you . . . the Shadow King?’ I asked.
‘That’s the silliest name of all,’ he said. ‘It’s what they call me on the surface, isn’t it? Yes, if you like, I’m the Shadow King too, but the name I like best is the one I was given by my direst foe. He christened me Homuncolossus. It’s the most appropriate name of all.’
‘Was it you that killed Hunk Hoggno?’
‘No. Hoggno killed himself with his own axe. I merely guided his hand,’
I nodded. ‘Then you also laid the trail?’
‘I did.’
‘But why? Why don’t you kill me? Why are you helping me?’
Homuncolossus sighed and sank back even deeper into the throne’s shadowy recesses. ‘I could tell you a story,’ he said. ‘Would you like to hear it?’
‘I like stories,’ I replied.
‘It’s a rather weird story, mark you.’
I shooed away a
few Animatomes that had ventured nearer again and sat down on the floor.
‘Weird stories are the best,’ I said.
The Shadow King’s Story
I had been hoping that the Shadow King would show me his face at last, but he preferred to conceal his true exterior in the dim recesses of his throne.
‘To some degree,’ he began, ‘this is the story of someone I used to know - an old friend whom I remember sometimes gladly and sometimes far less so, because the recollection saddens me so much. Isn’t it absurd that tears should spring to your eyes far more readily at the memory of good times than bad?’
He didn’t seem to expect an answer to this question, because he went on at once. ‘This friend was a man, a member of the human species, one of the few that still dared to go on living in Zamonia and hadn’t yet emigrated to other continents. He lived with his parents in one of the small human colonies in the Midgard Range, where a few survivors are said to be hiding to this day.
‘This friend was a writer when he came into the world. I don’t mean that he could write at birth - no, he learnt to do so later on, like everyone else - but he was already brimming with ideas and stories when he first saw the light of day. His little head was filled to bursting with them, and they frightened him, especially at night, when it was dark. His one desire was to get rid of these stories, but he didn’t know how. Talking wasn’t his forte and he hadn’t yet learnt to write, so new ideas kept flowing into his brain from all quarters. They weighed it down to such an extent that he spent his entire childhood going around with his head bowed.’
A puff of wind caressed my cheek and extinguished a nearby candle. As if to order, Shadowhall’s weird music had started up again.
