The Labyrinth of Dreaming Books (45 page)

Corodiak’s Web

ENTERING THE PUPPETOCIRCUS
Maximus by way of the rear exit rather than through the front entrance was quite a different experience. You almost forgot it was the same building. It was like approaching some wonderfully painted scenery from behind and seeing only the nailed-together battens and the dirty side of the canvas. Overflowing dustbins, mountains of sacks of rubbish and bulky wooden crates stood everywhere. There wasn’t just one back door into the vast building, there were at least a dozen, so I was completely disorientated at first as I stood among all the crates and sacks, chests and handcarts, pieces of scenery and scurrying stagehands, tenors practising their scales and puppeteers warming up.

I accosted a dwarf hurrying past with an armful of puppets. ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘Where do I find … er … Maestro Corodiak?’

The diminutive puppeteer laughed derisively without stopping. ‘In your dreams!’ he called and disappeared down a passage.

‘But I’ve got … an audience …’ I added half-heartedly. I stood there for a moment, flummoxed, then simply trailed after him through the doorway that had swallowed him up. Unlike the spacious foyer at the front of the theatre, the backstage areas were dark, cramped and bewildering. Narrow passages and low ceilings instead of a big lobby, storerooms, meagre lighting provided by oil lamps, locked doors, junk and disorder wherever I looked. And unfriendly people who treated me like a caterpillar that had strayed into an anthill.

‘Out of the way, Fatso!’ they called.

‘Don’t just stand there, move it!’

‘Get lost!’

‘Stand aside, you idiot!’

‘Wake up, you dozy fool!’

‘Gangway, Hoody!’

‘Goddamned tourists!’ I was treated to those and other similarly encouraging remarks before I was jostled and elbowed aside or a piece of scenery came crashing down on my head. At last I discovered a flight of stairs with three signs above it. One read
Costumes and Scenery
, the others
Workshops
and
Management
. This at least might be the way to Corodiak. Afraid of being summarily ejected, I didn’t dare ask any more stupid questions of those rude fellows and simply set off up the stairs.

Why was I so nervous? I didn’t even know who Maestro Corodiak really was. Was he a gnome? A giant? A frail old puppeteer? An overworked theatre manager? An antipathetic type? A charmer? A tartar? I had no idea. All I wanted was to ask him a few harmless questions for my research. It wasn’t a job interview or a police interrogation and I had no other kind of unpleasantness to fear, so why couldn’t I rid myself of the feeling that I was on my way to a trial at which I would be the accused? In recent weeks I had too often heard the name Corodiak uttered in low voices trembling with awe not to feel uncomfortable about meeting the person who bore that name, but was that reason enough to make my knees tremble as I climbed the creaking wooden stairs? If our conversation followed a satisfactory course, I had decided to reveal my identity and congratulate him on his successful adaptation of my book, but that was no good reason for my heart to be pounding this way!

I came to an upper floor on which the rooms were considerably more spacious. For whatever reason, there was no one else to be seen. I wandered through a huge room in which hundreds if not thousands of puppets’ costumes were stored. They were suspended from floor to ceiling on metal rails that could be lowered on ropes. The place smelt of mothballs and lavender. No staff were around because a
performance
was in progress, so I was at liberty to reconnoitre the adjacent room, which was also used for storage purposes. This was where painted scenery was kept. Whole landscapes and townscapes were propped or stacked against the walls. I strolled past sand dunes, arctic wastes and a seashore at sunset, past temples with golden roofs, jungles and mountains, grey castle walls and dark, stormy skies, until I came to the next room.

This had to be one of those referred to by the sign as ‘Workshops’. Everything there was made of pale wood: the walls and the creaking parquet floor, the six quadrangular columns supporting the lofty ceiling and also the crossbeams below it. The place distantly resembled a country barn; all that was missing was some hay and a donkey. Like the rest of the Puppetocircus Maximus, it had no natural lighting but was brightly lit by oil lamps standing on the shelves. This room harboured no secrets; anyone who entered it was meant to take it in at a glance and find whatever he was looking for. Hanging on the walls were hammers, pliers and hand drills, screwdrivers and planes, knives and chisels, angle irons and rules, folding bones and pestles, stencils of numerous shapes, ropes and tackle, leather straps and wire nooses. Complete vices hung from strong hooks, axes and two-handed saws dangled from the ceiling. Tubs were neatly stacked, one inside another, hempen ropes were coiled as meticulously and exemplarily as on any sailing ship in the Zamonian navy. Stored in wooden cabinets were screws, nuts, rivets and nails of every size, likewise bolts, eyelets, hooks and even cogwheels, all clearly visible through little glass windows in the drawers and doors, and neatly labelled. Buckets of paint, oil in wicker-covered bottles, pitchers of turpentine, barrels of horsehair. Even the smells in this room – linseed oil, turpentine, varnish, petroleum, dubbin, glue – created the impression that they, too, had been neatly arranged and stacked on top of each other. They gave me a bad conscience, because I always felt ashamed when I came into contact with sound craftsmanship. This, of course, is partly because I
myself
have two left paws and am all thumbs, being quite incapable of driving a nail in straight. But the room inspired me with respect for another reason as well. I realised that it was far from being just a storeroom and workshop; it was a Puppetist museum, a precious collection of important artefacts. That tool there wasn’t just a common-or-garden hammer. It was a hammer belonging to the Puppetocircus Maximus – one that Maestro Corodiak himself might have wielded! He might have used it to drive nails into the scenery for
The City of Dreaming Books
! As for that thing there, it wasn’t just any old tackle-block, oh no! It might be
the
tackle-block used for punctually lowering the Bloxxberg backdrop in countless performances of Fontheweg’s
Weisenstein
. And those scissors there! They might be the historic scissors used for tailoring King Carbuncle’s costume in
King Carbuncle and the Drowning of Thursday
. Yes, every tool in this room, every nail and eyelet, had a story – even if that story had still to be written. I slunk across the hallowed hall feeling more and more overawed, and was highly relieved when I reached the other side and entered a passage.

From there I could see a wooden archway leading to the next sizeable room. The curved beam surmounting the arch, as I saw when I hesitantly approached it, was covered with mezzo-relievo carvings of scenes from Zamonian literary works that had, as I knew from my research, been successfully adapted for the Puppetocircus Maximus:

The cannibal scene from Felino Deeda’s classic novel in which one of the two principal characters bears the name Wednesday, and beneath it an ornate
C
.

The tattooed harpoonist from Vermel Hellamin’s novel
Whalebone
, and behind it an ornamental
O
.

The sinister Ugglies’ Sabbath scene from Wimpersleake’s
Thambec
, followed by an
R
.

The shipwrecked sailors on their raft from Perla la Gadeon’s adventure novel, then another
O
.

Zimom and Trax, the two pranksters from Helmub Wischl’s immortal children’s story in verse, and behind it a
D
.

The young heroine falling down a rabbit hole in Arlis Worcell’s fairy tale, followed by an
I
.

The one-eyed ship’s cook from Trebor Sulio Vessenton’s pirate tale, then an
A
.

The terrifying tiger from Plairdy Kurding’s grand exotic fable, baring its teeth. And, last of all, a
K
.

I came to a halt. This, as the carved letters unmistakably indicated, was Maestro
Corodiak
’s sanctuary. Or his workshop, his office, or whatever else the legendary director of the Puppetocircus Maximus might choose to call his control centre. Although there was no door in the archway, I found it impossible to cross this magic threshold. Not even a foot-thick iron door could have constituted a greater barrier than my diffidence, so I lingered there irresolutely, at a loss. I couldn’t even knock! However, this was an undignified state of affairs in the long run, so I eventually summoned up all my courage and cautiously peered round the corner.

The room was unilluminated but not entirely in darkness. There were no candles or lamps, but the glow from the oil lamps in the passage was sufficient to dispel a little of the gloom. I could make out some massive wooden tables, several workbenches equipped with vices, wall cabinets and tools. Hanging on the bare brick walls were marionettes and stick puppets of all kinds. Many were lying or seated on the tables and one was wedged in a vice. Others had split open, lacked heads, or were still unfinished. One particularly large puppet resembling a gigantic worm was leaning upright against a bench. So this, beyond doubt, was Maestro Corodiak’s centre of activity.

I breathed a sigh of relief because the room was obviously unoccupied. This enabled me to relax somewhat. I had turned up for the appointment on time, so I could afford to wait here with a clear conscience until Corodiak put in a belated appearance. Meanwhile, I could nose around a little.

There was no
No Admittance!
sign or anything of the kind to be seen. I ventured inside.

And was immediately brought up short because my head had encountered some obstruction! What was it? A wire, a string, a rope? It was, in fact, a thin string tautly suspended across the archway at head height. Screwing up my eyes, I now perceived that the whole room seemed to be divided up into segments like an irregular mesh. Straining my eyes still more, I grasped that the workshop was crisscrossed by lengths of string and cord running this way and that. Somewhere, something gave a creak.

I had already seen some sensationally impressive rooms in my life, for instance Pfistomel Smyke’s book laboratory or his gigantic subterranean library, the Booklings’ Leather Grotto or the Shadow King’s throne room. At first sight this modest room could not, of course, hold a candle to them; even the meticulously arranged tool storeroom I’d been in moments ago had made a deeper impression on me. But what of this mesh of strings that filled the whole room like a three-dimensional spider’s web? The threads and strings attached to the walls, ceiling joists and drawer handles were alarmingly suggestive of an inexplicable ‘installation’ created by some mentally deranged artist. Or, in an even more disquieting way, of a cage. Who or what dwelt here? How could anyone mess up a room so nonsensically? I could not have taken another step without tripping over a string or having to duck, so I remained where I was, more at a loss than ever. Should I simply leave? Bewildered, I scanned my surroundings for some indication of what to do. And then, all at once, my scales stood on end!

Is there anything more frightening than a thing you think is inanimate but
suddenly comes to life
? This is exactly what happened in the case of the big puppet leaning against the workbench. At first it merely twitched and quivered a little, but then it detached itself entirely from the workbench and straightened up. Good heavens, it wasn’t a puppet at all but a living creature! It resembled a huge worm
or
a fat, monstrous snake with a blanket draped over it and a cap on its head. And it now turned,
very
slowly, in my direction.

My scales bristled in a way that was new in my experience. In that one moment I probably sloughed off more of my old scales than I had in all the last few weeks put together! Something equally horrible had happened to me only once. That was when, as a child, I found a supposedly dead grasshopper in a drawer and it suddenly leapt out in my face. That experience inflicted a lasting trauma and haunted my dreams for a long time. But I wasn’t a child any more and something supposedly dead that suddenly comes to life isn’t fundamentally sinister unless one believes in the supernatural, which I do not. So I strove to remain calm, at least outwardly. No easy task, for the creature moved like a spider bestirring itself when a victim has become lodged in its web. A thoroughly apt comparison, when one considers that I had just run into one of the threads in that curious entanglement. Those slow, positively majestic movements were infused with a leisurely arrogance peculiar only to a creature utterly confident of its physical superiority. My thoughts were in a whirl. Could it be a puppet after all – a puppet suspended from one of those countless strings? And could this whole mysterious room be a stage set into which I’d strayed? But the solution to this mystery, dear friends, surpassed my wildest imaginings, for it embraced three superlatives: