The City of Dreaming Books (47 page)

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 filled 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 Dancelot’s advice regardless of its source - the hereafter, a sick mind or common sense - and proceeded to shout.

I
f 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.

So that was it, the end of the line - my own end too, in all probability. But, dear readers, at that moment I feared nothing, not even death. I allowed my shout to fade away and prepared to fall, to plunge into the darkness and smash myself to smithereens on the floor of the cave. The Rusty Gnomes’ railroad station was a grandiose place in which to die, a colossal monument to the futility of all endeavour. Here in the heart of the catacombs my bones would bleach and decay amid those iron skeletons. Death could have chosen no better moment, no better place, to make an end of me.

But then came a surprise. No, that’s an understatement: several surprises at once. Six of them, to be precise.

Surprise No. 1: When I got to the end of the track it didn’t end after all. Instead of plunging into space I continued my descent. No fall, no downward plunge - no, there were still rails beneath my wheels and showers of sparks trailing behind me. I was still bowling along at high speed.

Surprise No. 2: I heard a series of splattering sounds. Around a dozen of them, and they sounded like chunks of meat being hurled at a brick wall.

Surprise No. 3: The song of the Harpyrs ceased abruptly.

Surprise No. 4: My brain unknotted itself.

Surprise No. 5: The sounds around me took on an entirely different quality from one moment to the next. All at once they sounded dull and muffled, devoid of spatial depth and resonance.

Surprise No. 6: The Harpyrs, together with the entire station and its fauna, had suddenly vanished.

It took me a few startled seconds to grasp what had happened: the track had simply dived into a narrow tunnel.

My infernal bellowing had disrupted the Harpyrs’ guidance system to such an extent that their acoustic coordination had failed. Unable to detect the massive rock face ahead of them, they had flown towards it as fast as their powerful wings would carry them. While I was entering the tunnel, all twelve had run smack into the rock. It was probably safe to assume that none of them had survived the impact.

If the gradient hadn’t been so steep I might now have been able to relax a little. After all, I had escaped the Harpyrs, avoided going insane and remained on the track - a threefold triumph.

Cramped surroundings add greatly to the sensation of speed. Here in the tunnel the wheels rattled and screeched more loudly and the sparks rebounded off the walls like ricochets. And then my blood ran cold: something had gripped my ankle like a vice.