The City of Dreaming Books (50 page)

This time, however, the doorway had staged a bewildering reappearance and so had the glow from the lava! I hurried back into the entrance hall - only to discover, to my horror, that it wasn’t the entrance hall but a far larger chamber with twice as many passages leading off it. Nor was it lit by lava, but by torches burning in rusty iron sconces that jutted from the walls like gnarled branches.

I tottered round the empty chamber for a while, bemused and utterly at a loss. How could one whole chamber vanish and be replaced by another? Had I headed in the wrong direction? There was only one thing for it, I would have to go back. But the thought of setting foot in one of those passages filled me with dread. Would it lead me still further astray? Eventually I screwed up my courage and set off down a long corridor lit by candles standing at intervals on the floor. I walked on until I suddenly noticed something alarming out of the corner of my eye. Were the walls closing in on me? Horrified, I came to a halt. No, it was just an optical illusion. For all that, I got the impression that the passage had become somewhat narrower. I hurried on, only to be overcome once more by a claustrophobic sensation that the walls were closing in on me. If I halted the sensation disappeared; if I walked on the walls seemed to converge. One thing was certain, however: the passage was steadily narrowing. The walls had been considerably further apart at first. My claustrophobia intensified at every step. And then, at last, the mystery solved itself: the walls eventually met and the passage came to an end. Anyone walking along it fast had the illusion that the walls were closing in. It was the most deceptive dead end I had ever encountered.

So Shadowhall Castle was a maze. A maze inside a labyrinth. Despite all the care I’d taken, I was in an even worse predicament than before. Even the walls were conspiring against me now. All I needed was for the ceiling of the passage to descend and crush me. But it never came to that: the floor descended instead.

I thought at first that the ceiling had risen, but that too was an optical illusion. I could tell from the faint vibrations beneath my feet that the floor was sinking - all along the passage, as far as I could tell. Then, when the ceiling was some thirty feet above my head, the vibration ceased. Dozens of dark doorways yawned in the walls on either side of me.

Feeling dizzy, I sat down on the ground. Shadowhall Castle was not only a maze. It was a maze capable of changing shape, with floors that sank and walls that appeared out of nowhere. Those who had built the castle might be long dead, but their handiwork was only too alive.

O
n recovering from this latest shock I struggled to my feet, groaning as if I’d been beaten black and blue, and tottered along the passage on trembling legs. Seemingly endless, it zigzagged to and fro and was flanked by countless dark doorways. The candles were few and far between.

The claustrophobic nature of my architectural surroundings was now compounded by noises: I could hear the creak of distant hinges and a disembodied humming that might have been caused by a current of air. The interior of the castle was agreeably cool compared to the almost tropical heat of the magma cave - that much, at least, could be said in its favour. Sometimes I even thought I heard water dripping, which kindled my hopes of finding something to drink somewhere.

But it was odd: I had an instinctive dread of entering one of those dark apertures. The gloom beyond them had a menacing quality, as if one step could send me hurtling into an abyss, so I preferred to stick to my ill-lit route.

All at once I caught sight of another scrap of paper on the ground. I must have presented a ridiculous spectacle, a big, strong Lindworm wincing at the sight of a tiny snippet of paper like an elephant shying at a mouse, but it was simply too much of a surprise. I had no need to pick it up to satisfy myself that it was one of the ones that had guided me to the castle. A whole trail of them had been laid along the passage and ended in front of one of the doorways leading off it.

I stared into the adjoining darkness until it almost rang in my ears, so dense and alive did it seem, but I eventually overcame my fear and walked through the dark opening. I didn’t step into a void or plunge into an abyss, I merely found myself in a pitch-black chamber. What happened then was something I’d experienced before, but in reverse order. I refer to the moment when something entered Hunk Hoggno’s abode and extinguished the candle. This time it was as if something had left the room and
lit
a candle instead of extinguishing it. The match and wick flared up so quickly that their light briefly dazzled me and made me blink. I heard a rustle of paper. Then I thought I saw a shadow - a colossal shadow! - flit through the doorway and disappear from view.

My limbs were still tingling from the shock when I saw something that had a reassuring effect on me: books. The octagonal chamber’s walls were lined with shelves full of books. Not fossilised books misused as bricks, but a regular library of them. It wasn’t one of those huge, outsize libraries to which I’d become almost accustomed down here, but a modest private collection of a few hundred volumes at most. In the middle of the chamber was a leather armchair, and beside it a small iron table bearing a glass, a jug of water and a bowl of desiccated bookworms. Food and drink! I subsided into the armchair, poured myself a glass of water, gulped it down and tossed a handful of bookworms into my mouth. Mm, delicious, they were even salted! I chewed them as I looked round the room, feeling thoroughly restored. A drink of water and a handful of smoked maggots had sufficed to turn a despairing wreck into a cheerful optimist. It isn’t the brain that governs our state of mind, it’s the stomach.

I got up and went over to the shelves, removed a book and opened it. The script was Old Zamonian, the title
Screams from a Sarcophagus
by Bamuel Courgette. I gave an involuntary sob.

The very fact that I could read the script was enough to prompt that involuntary display of emotion. The gulf between me and the civilised world had been bridged once more. I could not only decipher the script, I even knew what the book was about! I had read it in my youth, and it had given me the most terrible nightmares. It was a so-called
Hair-Raiser
, a subsection of Zamonian horror literature.

I took another book from the shelf. Entitled
Clammy Hands
, it was by Nector Nemu and was another Hair-Raiser. Nemu had been one of the most eminent writers of horror stories. I put my head on one side and ran my eyes over the titles. They included:
and so on and so forth. The authors’ pseudonyms alone left me in no doubt that these books were Hair-Raisers, one and all. I went from shelf to shelf, checking one title after another, and ended by being convinced that this was a choice collection of Hair-Raisers, probably the most comprehensive and valuable I’d ever set eyes on.

I couldn’t help laughing suddenly.

Because some of you, dear readers, may not be too familiar with the Hair-Raiser genre of Zamonian horror literature, permit me to indulge in a brief digression. It really won’t take long and will help you to understand my amusement.

There was a time when people believed that Zamonian horror literature had reached the end of the line. Authors had used up every goose-flesh- and nightmare-inducing character and plot in existence, from headless phantoms to roaming Marsh Zombies to foot-eating Polterkins resident under cellar stairs. They continued to populate their books with the same old Semimummies, Gulch Ghosts and Hazelwitches until even schoolchildren ceased to be frightened of them. Sales slumped dramatically. In desperation, the publishers of Zamonian horror literature invited all the authors of the genre and one or two celebrated Bookemists to attend a conference at which measures designed to tackle the crisis would be discussed and implemented.

The conference took place behind the yards-thick walls of Ignis Fatuus Castle in Demon’s Gulch. No members of the public were admitted, so secrecy long surrounded the measures discussed there and eventually put into effect. It is a fact, however, that the first of the so-called Hair-Raisers came on the market only six months later, and that they ended the crisis affecting Zamonian horror literature at a stroke.

These books were so effective, so gruesome and terrifying, that their readers’ only recourse was to fling them into a corner halfway through and hide behind the nearest piece of furniture. Many fans of Hair-Raiser literature were said to have been driven mad with fear by over-indulging in it. Subsequently locked up in mental institutions, they went into paroxysms of hysteria at the very sight of a book in the distance, be it only a cookbook.

Even respected literary critics and scholars believed that the powerful impact of Hair-Raisers was based on some subtle new form of literary technique. They surmised that the foremost exponents of Zamonian horror literature had mutually disclosed their most closely guarded writer’s tricks during the conference at Ignis Fatuus Castle. All these literary devices had then been skilfully combined to produce a new, more potent and considerably more effective type of horror literature - one that was even capable of generating supernatural phenomena which assailed its readers while reading and turned even the most hardened of them into whimpering bundles of nerves. This, incidentally, was also the beginning of the Gruesome Period, during which the Hair-Raiser genre and Octavius Shrooti’s ‘gruesic’ scored their greatest triumphs.

It was said that Hair-Raiser books could be heard whispering and sobbing in the dark. Their covers creaked open like the rusty doors of long-forgotten dungeons in which unspeakable horrors were lurking. Turn their pages and one would often hear a ghostly cry or a peal of horrific laughter. They could emit chill exhalations, whispering breezes like those that fill the faded curtains in ancient enchanted castles reputed to be haunted by the restless presence of souls in torment.

These books could dissolve into thin air while being read, only to reappear, giggling, elsewhere in the room. A severed, hairy, ten-fingered hand could leap from the page and scuttle up the reader’s arm, then hurl itself into the fire and scream until it was burnt to death.

The language in which Hair-Raisers were written consisted almost entirely of words that conjured up highly unpleasant images - words like
clammy
,
bony
,
eerie
,
gloomy
,
chilly
,
scary
,
spooky
and
deathly.
Hair-Raiser literature also introduced a vogue for neologisms in which those words were combined for greater effect, for instance
speathly, gleerie
or
clooky.
Even one of them could make a reader’s hair stand on end, and it was this characteristic from which the new literary genre derived its name.

Reading a Hair-Raiser was like walking through a subterranean chamber discovered on the stroke of midnight behind a secret door in a deserted lunatic asylum haunted by the sleepless spirits of deceased mass murderers - a musty, cobwebby chamber which you explored with a guttering candle in your trembling fist while red-eyed rats snarled in the gloom and icy tentacles grabbed your ankles.

Every sentence, page and chapter of a Hair-Raiser could conceal some lurking horror in the shape of a gruesome phrase that made its readers’ blood run cold. Taut as a bowstring, their nerves would cause them to stop reading again and again. There! they would think. Is that a hand silhouetted against the window-pane? The hand of an unscrupulous body-snatcher, perhaps, who has run out of corpses from the outcasts’ graveyard from which he usually obtains his supplies for the demented Ugglian alchemists’ laboratory nearby - the one from which those terrible screams keep issuing at dead of night? No, it’s just a five-pointed leaf plastered against the pane by the wind - but a leaf that bears a chilling resemblance to the hand of the imbecilic village idiot who, when the moon is full, peers through lighted windows in search of new specimens for his collection of severed heads. Eek! Are those his fingers closing round your throat? No, it’s just the shawl you’ve put on to ward off the autumnal chill creeping into your living room.