The Labyrinth of Dreaming Books (17 page)

Tears of emotion sprang to my eyes. If an artist who had never seen any Booklings himself could portray them in such a natural, lifelike fashion with the aid of my descriptions alone, those descriptions couldn’t be too bad. Well, yes, but at that time the Orm had still been pervading the convolutions of my brain with some intensity! I was reminded of the reason for my trip: I had received a letter from the catacombs – more specifically, from the Leather Grotto, the Booklings’ subterranean home! This was now only a few miles away, directly beneath my feet but separated from me by the dark world known as the
Labyrinth of Dreaming Books
.

This realisation made me feel suddenly sentimental, although my extremely fragile condition may also have been responsible. I tottered on in tears, thinking of the little one-eyed friends I hadn’t seen for so long. I sobbed to myself until I heard the strains of an old-fashioned hurdy-gurdy such as Bookholmian street musicians often play. This dispelled my tearful mood and I looked up. Standing here and there in the entrances to various buildings were small groups of loudly chatting, laughing people – usually a sign that there are places
of
liquid refreshment nearby. Excellent! My maudlin state of mind abruptly left me. Having instinctively headed in the right direction, all I needed to do now was settle on a suitable establishment. One particularly numerous group was being entertained by a busker playing an ancient Aerophone – he was no virtuoso – and warbling in a reedy falsetto:

‘Traveller, if you go to Bookholm
,

don’t forget to bring a book home
,

bring a book home!

Traveller, if you go to Bookholm
,

don’t forget to drink some Bookwine
,

drink some Bookwine
.

But be warned that those who do

will themselves become books too.’

That was meant metaphorically, of course, but it sounded inviting. It also presaged something to drink. At last! I elbowed my way into a taproom chock-full of carousing customers – tourists, as I could tell from their multilingual babble of voices. I heard the low moans of Gloomberg Dwarfs, the froglike croaking of Moss Trolls, the mercurial syllabic sing-song of Camomills and the eerie yodelling of Devil’s Gulchers. When a chair chanced to become vacant I promptly flopped down on it and beckoned to a waiter, a squat little Wood Goblin with shaggy hair and a mournful expression. Far from saying good evening, let alone taking my order, he simply plunked a glass and a brimming pitcher of wine on the table in front of me.

‘One Bookwine!’ he yelled without looking at me and walked off. That was absolutely fine with me. I preferred this uncomplicated mode of service to an arrogant wine waiter. Before I could pour myself a glass, I noticed that the table was strewn with slips of paper. At first I took them for beer mats, but then I saw that something was printed on them. I picked one up and read it.

I couldn’t help laughing. Great! I’d ended up in a tourist trap! It was only now that I spotted the hunchbacked glass engraver in the corner of the tavern adorning cheap glasses with customers’ names to order, likewise the trashy oil paintings on the walls from which gilt-edged greats of classical Zamonian literature, from Aleisha Wimpersleake to Bethelzia B. Binngrow, looked down self-importantly at the customers. The wine here was bound to cost three times as much as elsewhere and
was
probably – what was the betting? – the lousiest plonk to be found anywhere in Bookholm. However, I’d sat down, been served and was tormented by thirst. So I poured myself a glass. The first thing that struck me was the wine’s truly exceptional colour. It was green, by the Orm! I held my glass up to the candlelight. It was as vivid a green as woodruff lemonade and slightly luminous. Or was that another after-effect of my Fumoir fix? Everything within me baulked at
drinking
the stuff. Then I thought, what the hell, I’ve got to drink
something
, so down the hatch and get it over! Just one glass, then pay and find a quieter, more congenial establishment that serves decent local wine without any alchemical additives. So I gulped the green brew down.

That wine, my friends, was downright sick-making! By that I really mean it was an absolute emetic. It was only with the utmost self-control that I managed to suppress an urge to throw up on the taproom floor. The taste might have been that of an ancient tome simmered for days in cheap grape juice and then cooled to cellar temperature. Either that or a bucket of dishwater with an old blackboard sponge squeezed out in it. It certainly didn’t belong in a wine glass!

Pulling myself together, I resisted the impulse to slam down some money on the table, storm out and relieve myself in the open air. I simply remained seated and gave my innards a chance to settle down. My nausea gave way first to a vague sense of foreboding, then to a warmth that suffused my stomach. I was feeling better! I’d been completely parched and in need of some fluid inside me, but that I could have obtained free of charge and more palatably from any municipal fountain. Now I had to get out of there! Wanting to summon the waiter and pay, I looked around and noticed that some of the customers were sitting there as if totally transfixed and entranced, with their eyes shut and empty wine glasses in their hands. I had no idea what uncivilised province they hailed from – perhaps it was the first glass of wine they’d ever drunk in their life. Then again, perhaps they’d drunk a few glasses too many.

Suddenly, everything went black.

For one terrible moment I feared I’d lost consciousness. No wonder, considering all the unpredictable toxic substances I’d involuntarily absorbed in the Fumoir! But then it occurred to me that you can’t be worried if you’ve really lost consciousness.

My next thought was that I might have gone blind from one moment to the next. Such a thing could happen, I’d read. Almost simultaneously, however, my eyesight returned in a puzzling manner: it was as if I were a worm wriggling out into daylight through loose soil. Above me was a dazzlingly blue sky with white clouds sailing across it. But if I was neither unconscious nor blind, surely I must at least have lost my mind? A moment ago I’d been sitting in a noisy tavern full of people and now I was suddenly all on my own. Yes, but where? In a wood, obviously, because I was surrounded by young trees. More than that, I myself was clearly a tree! Or what else grows out of the ground in the middle of a wood and puts out little green tentacles? If this didn’t indicate that I’d just been afflicted with some mental illness, what was it?

Very well, so I was a tree. A very small tree, though: just a sapling that had not long broken through the forest floor. But I grew, and I grew very fast. I rose higher and higher as night and day alternated at whirlwind speed overhead. The sun traversed the sky within seconds, rising and setting, rising and setting and giving way to the moon, which waxed and waned with breathtaking rapidity. Months went by in a few moments. I developed little branches, put out roots, grew leaves and proliferated in all directions until, in a trice, I was enclosed by a dense tracery of branches and foliage. I had become a majestic poplar in whose branches birds nested and squirrels clambered around. At times I was surrounded by dark forest floor, at others by brilliant green foliage, at still others by dazzling white snow. The seasons came and went as swiftly and regularly as the pendulum of a metronome. I had almost reconciled myself to my permanent, peaceful existence as a poplar when I suddenly toppled over.

Crash!

I had been felled.

I was carted off and dumped in a river, then drifted downstream with many other tree trunks, slowly at first, then faster and faster. Water eddied and foamed around me, and all at once I wasn’t a tree
trunk
in water any more, I was an idea! Or rather, a concatenation of ideas, a serpentine succession of words. In short, a whole sentence drifting down a mental river through the cerebral convolutions of an author engaged in writing an entire novel. Drifting in this river like people drowning were the novel’s principal characters, who were calling out printable sentences such as ‘
Ah, Hector, my love for you is as futile as a desire for warm glaciers!’
Yes, dear friends, I had clearly become insane.

Or had I? The next moment, foam engulfed me once more. I was again a tree trunk in a river and the stream was slowing. In company with all the other tree trunks I was drifting towards a massive building with tall chimneys, and issuing from it came the demented screech of circular saws. It was a paper mill! That spelled the end of my existence as a poplar, because I was swiftly sawn into ever smaller pieces. At first into thick slices, then into thin planks, then cut up into cubes, shredded into shavings and finally reduced to thin fibres. Having been once more steeped in water and stirred into a pulp, I was sieved by fine-meshed screens and finally air-dried. I had become
paper
!

But not for long, my friends, for scarcely had I been dried and stacked when everything went black again. All at once I was … an
anxiety
! Yes, a gnawing anxiety in the agonised mind of a publisher desperately wondering how to put his almost bankrupt firm back on its legs. He paced restlessly up and down his office, yelling at the furniture, kicking over piles of books, and cursing the public’s fickle and unpredictable taste in reading matter. And suddenly, from being a gnawing anxiety, I became a
flash of inspiration
! Yes, I became a glorious idea, which was to talk a successful author into writing a novel that, when equipped with the right title, could – nay, had to! – become a bestseller. The publisher promptly proceeded to write a letter. He reached for pen and paper, and … yes, I was paper once more! I was inserted in a press, smoothed with a printer’s bone and moistened. Then the platen descended on me, pressed me up against the ink-smeared forme and tattooed me with text. I felt what it’s like
to
be
printed
! When it became light again I was being clamped in a vice with lots of other sheets, like a sinner in an inquisitor’s torture chamber. We were pierced with fine needles, equipped with a thread binding, well glued and finally stuck into a handsome leather cover. I was now a
book
!

But hardly had I grown used to this idea when I became an anxiety once more. Not, this time, in the publisher’s mind but in that of the author who had written the book. And I was only one anxiety among many. He wondered how well his novel would sell; what friends and critics would think of it and write about it; whether the title (
A Desire for Warm Glaciers
) had been a good choice; whether the jacket should have been green rather than yellow; whether the multiplicity of parentheses in the text didn’t seem a bit overdone; whether he would ever follow up this masterpiece with anything equally perfect; and many other worries. Then the author got drunk and began to weep. Tears blurred his vision and – bingo! – I turned back into a book: a book in a bookshop picked up by a hand that paid at the cash desk, took me home and opened me. And then I once more found myself in a stream of ideas, of immaculate, perfectly copy-edited sentences that poured themselves out of the book and into the reader’s brain. I was being
read
!

But – hey presto! – it was suddenly light again. I was sitting in the taproom with an empty wine glass in my hand, instantaneously hemmed in by people and noise. I was neither comatose nor blind, nor had I gone mad. I had merely got drunk on Bookwine.

By the Orm!
That
was some alcoholic delirium! Not only had I imagined being a book in all the various phases of its existence, but I had written it myself and printed and published it. And, on top of everything else, I had experienced the unique sensation of
being read
! I now knew what it was like to be a book. Incredible!

How much time had elapsed? An hour, three hours, a year? No idea. It seemed highly probable that such a trance had lasted less than a minute, because nothing around me had changed. The same people
were
sitting in the same places and the house musician, a lutenist whose music filled the taproom, was still playing the same tune.

I promptly poured myself another glass and knocked it back. At once, exactly the same thing happened. The light went out and I became tree, paper, author, publisher and reader in turn. After this swift and fascinating metamorphosis, the light went on and it was over again. I repeated the process another three times until the pitcher was empty, but even on the penultimate occasion I experienced a certain satiety and even nausea, as if I’d spent too long on a merry-goround. So I left it at one pitcher, beckoned to the waiter, paid him and staggered outside.

I said ‘staggered’, dear friends, because this Bookwine appeared to pack a powerful punch, not only metamorphically but alcoholically as well. Or was it Fumoir poisoning? Both, of course. Besides, the fact that I’d eaten almost nothing all day was certainly no aid to stability. I simply had to get something solid inside me!