Contents

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Walter Moers

Title Page

Once Upon a Time

A Surprise

Return to Lindworm Castle

The Bloody Book

The New City

Noting Without Notes

All in Gothic

Ovidios

Biblio-this, biblio-that

Book Wine from Bookholm

A Reunion with Kibitzer

Ugglian Mourning

Dried Laurel Leaves

The Magmass

The Theatre of Dreaming Puppets

Several Doubles

A Dream Within a Dream

The King of the Shadows

Puppetism for Beginners

Maestro Corodiak

Puppetism for Advanced Students

A Biblionaut in Three Acts

Puppetism of Absolute Perfection

Corodiak’s Web

Family Ties

The Invisible Theatre

The Labyrinth of Dreaming Books

Translator’s Postscript

Copyright

About the Book

Over two hundred years ago Bookholm, the City of Dreaming Books, was destroyed by a catastrophic firestorm. Optimus Yarnspinner, who witnessed this disaster, has since become Zamonia’s greatest writer and is resting on his laurels at Lindworm Castle. Spoilt by his monumental success and basking in adulation, he one day receives a disturbing message that finally reinvests his life with meaning: a cryptic missive that lures him back to Bookholm.

Rebuilt on a magnificent scale, the city is once more a vibrant literary metropolis and Mecca of the book trade teeming with book fanatics of all kinds. On the track of the mysterious letter that brought him there, Yarnspinner has scarcely set foot in the city before he falls prey to its spirit of adventure. He is reunited with old friends like Inazia Anazazi the Uggly and Ahmed ben Kibitzer the Nocturnomath, but he also encounters the city’s new marvels, which include the mysterious Biblionauts, the warring Puppetists, and the city’s latest craze, the Invisible Theatre.

Yarnspinner strays ever deeper into the Labyrinth of Dreaming Books, which seems to wield a strange power over Bookholm’s destinies. He is eventually drawn into an irresistible maelstrom of events far more sensational than any of the adventures he has previously embarked upon.

About the Author

Walter Moers was born in 1957 and is a writer, cartoonist, painter and sculptor. He is the creator of the comic strips The Little Asshole and Adolf and his novels include of the cult bestseller The 13 ½ Lives of Captain Bluebear, The City of Dreaming Books and The Alchemaster’s Apprentice. He lives in Hamburg.

ALSO BY WALTER MOERS

The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear

A Wild Ride through the Night

Rumo

The City of Dreaming Books

The Alchemaster’s Apprentice

Once Upon a Time

THE DARKMAN ONCE in olden days

did set fair Bookholm town ablaze.

The crackling flames to heaven rose

unquenchable by any hose.

Book after book to fire fell prey

until the town in ruins lay.

And yet, as year succeeded year,

Bookholm began to reappear.

Bookholmian Nursery Rhyme

A Surprise

HERE THE STORY continues. It tells how I returned to Bookholm and descended for a second time into the catacombs beneath the City of Dreaming Books. It tells of old friends and new enemies, new comrades-in-arms and old adversaries. But above all, incredible as it may sound, it tells of the Shadow King.

And of books. Books of the most diverse kinds: good and bad, live and dead, dreaming and awake, worthless and precious, harmless and dangerous. Books, too, whose hidden contents cannot even be guessed at. Books which, when you read them, can spring a surprise on you at any moment – especially when you’re least expecting it.

Books like the one you are holding in your hands right now, gentle reader. For I must, alas, inform you that this is a toxic book. Its poison began to penetrate your fingertips the instant you opened it – tiny, microscopically small particles of venom compared to which the pores in your skin are as big as barn doors that permit unrestricted access to your bloodstream. Already on their way into your arteries, these harbingers of death are heading straight for your heart.

Listen to yourself! Do you hear your accelerated heartbeat? Do you feel your fingers tingling slightly? Do you detect the chill creeping slowly up the veins in your arms? The tightening of your chest? The breathlessness? No? Not yet? Be patient, it will soon begin. Very soon.

What will this poison do to you when it reaches your heart? To be blunt, it will kill you – end your life here and now. The merciless toxin will paralyse your cardiac valves and check the flow of your blood once and for all. The medical term for this is infarction, but I find cardiac buffoonery more amusing. You will, perhaps, have time to clutch your chest in a histrionic manner and utter a bewildered cry before collapsing, but that’s all. Please don’t take this personally, though. You aren’t the carefully selected victim of a conspiracy. No, your murder by poisoning fulfils no purpose; it’s just as pointless as your imminent death. There’s no motive, either. You simply picked up the wrong book. Fate, chance, bad luck – call it what you will. You’re going to die, that’s all, so resign yourself!

Unless …

Yes, there’s still a chance – if you follow my instructions without hesitation. This poison is a very rare contact poison whose effect is lethal only if a certain amount of it is absorbed. It all depends on how long you hold the book in your hands. The dose has been so precisely calculated that it will kill you only if you read on to the next paragraph! So lay this book aside at once if you consider it important to go on living! You’ll experience an accelerated heartbeat for only a while. Cold sweat will break out on your brow, your slight feeling of faintness will soon subside and then you can continue your barren, miserable existence for as many hours as fate still has in store for you. Goodbye for ever!

Well, my courageous friends, we’re on our own at last, for my blood is flowing in the veins of all whose hands are still holding this book. I, Optimus Yarnspinner, your true friend and companion, bid you welcome!

Yes, it was just a bluff. This book isn’t poisonous, of course. If I really want to kill my readers, I bore them to death with 260,000 pages of interminable dialogue about double-entry bookkeeping, as I did in my series of novels entitled The House of the Norselanders. I find that a subtler method.

First, however, I must sort the chaff from the wheat. Why? Because we can’t afford to take any ballast – any milksop readers who would tremble and lay the book aside at the very mention of danger – to the place we are bound for.

You’ve already guessed it, haven’t you, my intrepid brothers and sisters in spirit? Yes, it’s true, we’re going back to Bookholm. What’s that, you say? The City of Dreaming Books was burnt to the ground? Yes, it was indeed. It was devastated long ago by a pitiless inferno – of that, no one is more painfully aware than I. For I was there at the time. I saw with my own eyes how Homuncolossus, the Shadow King, set fire to himself and ignited the biggest conflagration Bookholm has ever undergone. I saw him descend into the catacombs like a living torch, there to unleash a firestorm that not only burnt down the buildings on the surface but ate deep into the bowels of the city. I heard the tocsins ring and saw the Dreaming Books reduced to sparks that danced among the stars. That was two hundred years ago.

Bookholm has been rebuilt since then. More splendidly than before, so it’s said, and furnished with even richer antiquarian treasures. These are reputed to have come from areas of the cata combs inaccessible until the fire opened them up. The city is now a vibrant metropolis dedicated to Zamonian booklore, a magnetically attractive place of pilgrimage frequented by literati, publishers and printers, and one compared to which the old Bookholm would seem like a second-rate, second-hand bookshop compared to a national library. Nowadays, as if it were a completely different place, the inhabitants self-confidently refer to the city as ‘Greater Bookholm’. How many fanatical bibliophiles would not be tempted to see for themselves the true grandeur and splendour of the new City of Dreaming Books that has arisen from the ashes?

But I myself am motivated by something considerably more compelling than mere touristic or bibliophilic curiosity. And you, my inquisitive and dauntless friends, would like to know what that is, wouldn’t you? Rightly so, for from now on we shall be sharing everything: joys and sorrows, perils and secrets, adventures and vicissitudes. We’re an exclusive band of brothers and sisters, you and I. Very well, I’ll tell you my reason, but I’d better admit right away that what sent me off on my life’s greatest adventure was nothing particularly original: merely a mysterious letter. Yes, just like before, on my first trip to Bookholm, it was a handwritten missive that started the ball rolling.

Return to Lindworm Castle

YOU’RE WELCOME TO pronounce me a megalomaniac for claiming that, at the time this story began, I had already become Zamonia’s greatest writer. What else can one call an author whose books were being trundled into bookshops by the cartload? Who was the youngest Zamonian artist ever to have been awarded the Order of the Golden Quill? Who had had a fire-gilt cast-iron statue of himself erected outside the Grailsundian Academy of Zamonian Literature?

There was a street named after me in every sizeable Zamonian town. There were bookshops that stocked my works exclusively – plus all the reference books devoted to them. My fans had founded associations whose members addressed one another by the names of characters in my novels. ‘Doing a Yarnspinner’ was a vernacular expression for triumphing in some artistic discipline. I couldn’t walk down a busy street without attracting a crowd, enter a bookshop without causing female members of the staff to swoon, or write a book that wasn’t promptly declared a classic.

In short, I had become a conceited popinjay pampered with literary prizes and public esteem. One who had lost all capacity for self-criticism and almost all his natural artistic instincts – one who quoted only himself and copied his own works without realising it. Like an insidious mental disease of which the patient himself is unaware, success had overtaken and infected me completely. I was so busy wallowing in my own fame, I didn’t even notice that the Orm had long since ceased to suffuse me.

Did I write anything of importance during this period? I don’t know when I could have done so. I wasted most of my time reading from my own works in a self-infatuated sing-song, whether in bookshops and theatres or at literary seminars, after which I would get drunk on applause, condescendingly chat with admirers and sign copies of my books for hours. Alas, my faithful friends, what I then considered the zenith of my career was really its absolute nadir. Long gone were the days when I could anonymously roam a town and undertake research without being pestered. I was instantly surrounded by crowds of admirers begging for autographs, professional advice, or simply my blessing. Even on country roads I was dogged by hordes of fanatical readers eager to be there when the Orm overcame me. This happened more and more rarely at first and then not at all – and I didn’t even notice because, to be honest, I could hardly distinguish between the Orm’s trancelike state and a wine-induced stupor.

It was to escape my monstrous accretion of popularity, my bizarre success and my demented admirers, that I decided, after many years of restless wandering and sundry adventures, to return for a while to Lindworm Castle and rest on my laurels there. I moved back into the small house bequeathed me by my godfather, Dancelot Wordwright. I did this also – let us look the facts in the face, dear friends – in order to pretend to the public and my peers at the castle that I was returning to my roots. ‘At the zenith of his career, the prodigal son returns home to augment his titanic oeuvre, humbly and unpretentiously, in the cramped little cottage that had once belonged to his beloved godfather.’

Nothing could have been further from the truth. At this period, no one in the whole of Zamonia was less root-bound than I, and no one led a more decadent, aimless existence without a care for his cultural mission and artistic discipline. Lindworm Castle was quite simply the only place that offered me perfect protection from my own popularity. Lindworms were still the sole life form permitted to dwell there. Only there could I be an artist among artists, and only Lindworms observed the perfect etiquette that guaranteed each individual his privacy. Solitude was accounted a precious commodity at Lindworm Castle. All were so busy with their own literary work that no one noticed how inexcusably I neglected mine.

All that worried me, apart from the usual attacks of hypochondria, was my weight. Thanks to a leisurely lifestyle, chronic lack of exercise and hearty Lindworm fare, I had soon put on several pounds around the hips. This sometimes depressed me, but never so much that my spirits couldn’t be restored by a few jam omelettes or a haunch of roast Marsh Hog. I might perhaps have ended as Lindworm Castle’s fattest and loneliest writer had I not been jolted out of my lethargy by a mysterious letter.

It was on an otherwise unexceptional summer morning that my life received this jolt. As on any other day, I was sitting over an inordinately protracted breakfast in the little kitchen of my inherited house, engaged in my customary hours-long perusal of the latest fan mail, munching chocolate-encased coffee beans and a dozen croissants filled with apricot purée. Now and again I would reach into one of the mailbags delivered every few days by the sullen postman, take out a letter, open it and impatiently scan it for the most flattering passages. I was faintly disappointed as a rule, because I always imagined such letters would be a trifle more laudatory than they already were. And so, while reading them, I would mentally replace their ‘excellents’ with ‘historic’ or ‘sublime’ or ‘unsurpassable’, then clasp them to my bosom and, with a sigh, toss them into the fire. Although I burnt my fan mail with a heavy heart, its sheer bulk would soon have driven me from house and home had I not disposed of it at regular intervals. Thus the ashes of Yarnspinner panegyrics belched from my chimney all morning, enriching Lindworm Castle’s air with the perfume of my success. After breakfast I often devoted an hour or so to my new amateur hobby, playing the Clavichorgan.¹ I had recently taken to tinkling my own modest renditions of works by Evubeth van Goldwine, Crederif Pincho, Odion la Vivanti and other great exponents of Zamonian music. That, however, was the full extent of artistic activity in my normal daily round.

One brief moment, sometimes no longer than the bat of an eyelash, can often determine one’s destiny. In my case it was the time required to read a sentence of eight syllables. My claws plucked an envelope at random from the bulging mailbag while my other paw dunked a croissant in hot chocolate and whipped cream. Ah, little letter, I thought, you’ll hold no surprises for me either! I know precisely what you contain. What’s the betting? An ardent declaration of love for my poetry or a servile obeisance to my audacious prose style? An enthusiastic encomium on one of my stage plays or a genuflection to the Yarnspinner oeuvre as a whole. Yes, yes … On the one hand, this never-ending torrent of adulation bored me stiff; on the other, I’d become addicted to it, perhaps as a substitute for the Orm that had deserted me for so long.

I effortlessly succeeded in tearing open the envelope with my left-hand claws, removing the letter and unfolding it while simultaneously dunking another croissant in hot chocolate, for I had often tried this. Submitting the letter to my blasé gaze, I unhinged my lower jaw and tossed the croissant into my mouth without raising my elbow from the table. This I did with the intention of reading the first few flattering lines of my admirer’s missive and simultaneously gorging myself on delicious flaky pastry. That’s how low I had sunk!

‘This’, I read as the croissant disappeared between my jaws, ‘is where the story begins.’

I suppose I must have stopped swallowing at the same time as I gasped in surprise. The only certainty is that the croissant had not been sufficiently moistened, so it lodged in my gullet. The latter tightened convulsively, squeezing the hot chocolate and cream out of the pastry and pumping them upwards. My windpipe became so flooded with them, I made noises like a frog being strangled underwater. Crumpling up the letter in one paw, I waved the other futilely in the air.

Unable either to swallow or to breathe, I abruptly leapt to my feet in the hope that an erect posture would remedy the situation. It didn’t, though. I merely gargled with cream.

‘Aaarghle,’ I went.

The blood shot into my head and my eyes bulged from their sockets. I dashed to the open window in the vain expectation of getting more air there, but I only succeeded in making more gurgling noises as I leant out. Two Lindworms who were just then strolling down the street glanced over at me.

‘Aaargh!’ I went, waving frantically and staring at them with bulging, bloodshot eyes. They must have assumed that this was a jocular form of salutation, because they reciprocated it by imitating my gurgling noises.

‘Aaargh!’ they called gaily, opening their eyes wide and waving back. ‘And a very good aaargh to you, Master Optimus!’

And then they laughed.

I had become such a darling of the gods that my fellow Lindworms had taken to imitating my quirks for fear of missing out on some up-to-the-minute trend I was in the process of setting. Gurgling and laughing, they walked off down the street without paying me any further heed. The new Yarnspinnerish greeting would be bound to catch on.

Cream was trickling from my nostrils. Leaving the window and tottering back into the kitchen, I tripped over a stool, fell headlong and pulled myself up by the edge of the table. All I could now make were the sort of sounds emitted by blocked drains or trombophones. In search of assistance, my tear-filled eyes lighted upon an ancient portrait in oils of my godfather Dancelot. It stared down at me uncomprehendingly. During his lifetime Dancelot had enjoined me to eat steamed vegetables and warned me never to bolt my food. Now I was only moments from following him into the world hereafter – far too soon for my taste. My eyes bulged still further from their sockets and my senses were bemused by an irrepressible feeling of exhaustion. A strange, contradictory mixture of panic and total indifference overcame me: I wanted to live and die at the same time.

It was in this of all situations, dear friends, when I was no longer capable of rational thought, that a fundamental realisation dawned on me: my success, my meteoric career, my life and ambitions, my existing oeuvre, my literary prizes and multitudinous editions – all were outweighed in importance by a breakfast croissant. For me, the arbiter between life and death was a cheap confection of flaky pastry, a mixture of common flour, sugar, yeast and butter.

And that, despite my dramatic predicament, made me laugh. Mine wasn’t a joyous, optimistic laugh, as you can imagine, merely a short, embittered ‘Hah!’. It did, however, suffice to remedy the disastrous situation in my oesophagus.

For, thanks to my laughter, the croissant leapt in my throat, as it were, and headed for my stomach with renewed momentum. This time it slid down with ease and disappeared into my alimentary tract in the regulation manner. The cream flowed after it, almost clearing my airways. Having coughed and trumpeted the remainder through my nostrils, I was able to breathe once more.

‘Bwaaah!’ I gasped like a drowning man who has just made it to the surface. Oxygen! The best things in life are free! At once exhausted and relieved, I flopped down on a kitchen chair and clutched my chest. My heart was beating like a corps of drums. Heavens alive, I had escaped a totally ridiculous demise by a hair’s breadth! That confounded croissant had very nearly ruined my biography:

‘Yarnspinner chokes to death on a croissant!’

‘Zamonia’s greatest writer carried off by puff pastry!’

‘Obese Golden Quill Prizewinner found dead in a pool of cream!’

‘Heavyweight among Zamonian writers succumbs to a featherweight specimen of the baker’s art.’

I could picture the headlines as easily as I could the critic Laptantidel Laptuda’s spiteful obituary in the Grailsundian Gazette. They would have engraved a croissant on my tombstone!

It wasn’t until I went to mop my perspiring brow that I realised I was still clutching the letter in my paw, claws buried deep in the paper. Curse the thing! Into the fire with it! I got up to hurl it into the fire, then stopped short. Just a moment! What were the words that had disconcerted me so? Sheer agitation had driven them from my mind. I took another look.

This is where the story begins.

I had to sit down again. I knew that sentence and so, my faithful friends and companions, do you! You also know what it meant to me, my life and my work to date. Who had written this letter? No, I couldn’t afford simply to burn it, even though it had nearly killed me. I read on.

I read the letter from beginning to end, every last word of its ten closely written pages. What was in it apart from that riveting opening sentence? Well, my friends, that can easily be summarised in two words: almost nothing. Those ten pages contained almost nothing significant, important or profound.

Almost nothing, mark you.

For there was one other short sentence of note: the one that formed a postscript to the whole rigmarole. Only four words, but they were destined to turn my life completely upside down.

First things first, though. The letter dealt with a writer confronted by a blank sheet of paper and suffering from horror vacui. An unknown author paralysed by writer’s block? What a cliché! How many letters on this subject had I received? Too many, for sure, but I had never read one that handled the basic idea with such a lack of originality and inspiration or was so plaintive and self-pitying, depressing and disconsolate. Even bleak pieces of writing can attain artistic greatness, but this one resembled the twaddle talked by a self-centred patient who happens to sit next to you in a doctor’s waiting room and bores you with his trivial aches and pains. The writer’s remarks revolved exclusively around himself and his physical and mental condition, his absurd problems and stupid phobias. As if they were incurable and terminal diseases, he complained of matters such as raw gums, of cutting his finger on a piece of paper, of hiccups, callouses and feelings of repletion. He railed against critical reviews of his writings, even when well-intentioned, and whinged about the weather and migraines. The letter contained not a single sentence of value, just banalities unworthy of being committed to paper. While reading it I grunted and groaned like someone toiling up a steep mountain path on a sultry midsummer’s day with a rucksack full of paving stones on his back. I had never before burdened myself with – or felt so annoyed by – such reading matter. It was as if the author were clinging to my leg and being dragged across a barren, lifeless, stony desert. Words like desiccated cacti, sentences like dried-up ponds. This writer wasn’t suffering from writer’s block! On the contrary, he couldn’t hold his pen in check although he truly had nothing whatever to say. In short, it was the worst piece of writing I’d ever read.

And then something struck me like a kick from a skittish horse: I had written this myself! I smote my brow. Of course! These were my style and my choice of words. These long, convoluted, tapewormlike sentences were mine. No one other than myself had written like this since I’d scaled the pinnacle of success. Here, a sentence containing seventeen commas: my syntactical trademark! There, a self-indulgent Yarnspinnerish digression on ‘The Perfect Breaded Escalope of Veal’! Here, a vituperative attack on literary critics in general and their doyen, Laptantidel Laptuda, in particular! There it was, the unmistakable song of my noble pen. At that moment I realised that it was years since I’d read my texts after writing them down. Indeed, I often gave them to the printer with the ink still wet, so uninhibited was I by self-criticism. It was a long time since I’d tolerated any editing beyond underlines beneath particular sentences and marginal notes such as ‘Brilliant!’ or ‘Inimitable!’.

And yet … This wasn’t my handwriting. I’d never actually written anything of the kind, I felt sure. Puzzled, I read on. No, dear friends, this letter certainly wasn’t my handiwork, but it could well have been, stylistically speaking. It clearly exemplified all my weaknesses. It even embodied the characteristic flights of hypochondriacal fancy in which I imagined myself to be suffering from diseases I alone could have devised: cerebral whooping cough and pulmonary migraine, fistulisation of the liver and cyrrhosis of the middle ear, et cetera. By the Orm, its authenticity extended even to meticulous records of body temperature and pulse rate! If it was intended to be a parody of my style, I had to concede that it was embarrassingly successful. The letter maintained its mixture of megalomania and petulance to the very end, where it abruptly broke off as if the writer had simply lost interest. And indeed, in recent times I myself had more and more often taken to ending my works in this slipshod manner.

I looked up from the letter with a groan. As a reader I felt betrayed and robbed of precious time; as a victim of parody, thoroughly seen through and humiliated. Reading the missive had taken me perhaps fifteen minutes, but it felt like a week. Did I really write such frightful, Ormless stuff? When I finally saw the signature at the end I felt like someone who, after years of imprisonment, looks in a mirror for the first time and sees his face disfigured by old age. It read:

Optimus Yarnspinner

Even my signature had been perfectly forged. I had to check several times to convince myself how well it had been imitated down to the last detail, the last flourish.

I was shocked. Could I have I written the letter after all, in a disguised hand but with a genuine signature, and sent it to myself in a fit of mental derangement? Had my authorial self detached itself and become autonomous? Had I become a victim of schizophrenia, a psychosis triggered by inordinate creativity? The possible side effects of the Orm had never been researched. Perla la Gadeon, whom the Orm had inspired more often than any other writer, had died in a delirium. Dölerich Hirnfiedler, too, was carried off by dementia and expired in his ivory tower. Eiderich Fischnertz was said to have conversed with a horse shortly before dying insane.

Was that the tribute I had to pay to my fame? Had I not shown symptoms of a split personality in my youth? I’d written a whole volume of letters entitled To Myself, but I’d never gone so far as to actually send them off. Heavens, my hypochondriacal fantasies were running away with me again! I definitely needed to calm down. To distract myself, I cast a final glance at the letter. Only then did I catch sight of a postscript written in microscopically small letters at the foot of the last page. It read:

PS The Shadow King has returned.

I stared at the words as if they were a ghostly apparition.

PS The Shadow King has returned.

Cold sweat beaded my brow and the letter in my paw started to tremble. Five words, twenty-four tiny characters on paper, were enough to disconcert me utterly.

PS The Shadow King has returned.

Was it a practical joke? What cruel prankster had sent me this rubbish? One of my innumerable envious rivals? A resentful colleague? One of the many spurned publishers who bombarded me with offers? A demented admirer? With trembling claws I reached for the envelope so as to read the sender’s name and address. I raised the torn paper cover, turned it over, and spelt out the words like a schoolchild:

Optimus Yarnspinner
The Leather Grotto
Central Catacombs
Bookholm, Zamonia

Then I burst into sobs, and those tears at last brought me the solace my agitated mind so badly needed.

1 Clavichorgan: primitive keyboard instrument manufactured exclusively for the inhabitants of Lindworm Castle. The clavichorgan’s keyboard has only twenty-four keys. Unusually wide and robust, the latter were specially designed for the Lindworm’s three-fingered paw. Music of true refinement cannot be played on the clavichorgan. (Tr.)

The Bloody Book

AT DAWN THE next morning I stole out of Lindworm Castle like a thief. I saw no one, supplied no explanations, provoked no farewell scenes – among Lindworms that was considered a courtesy, not an act of cowardice. If I say that I thoroughly appreciate sentimental scenes in literature but firmly reject them in reality, that applies to all my kind. It may be because we Lindworms can for the most part express our emotions through our literary work. In society and in interpersonal relations we’re exceptionally cool, composed and courteous – indeed, almost formal. Saying goodbye, especially for a considerable period, is one of the least pleasant things a Lindworm can conceive of. I feel sure, therefore, that my friends and relations were subsequently grateful to me for sparing them the embarrassment of a farewell scene.

I walked unaccosted along the deserted, dew-damp main street that spirals down from the castle’s summit to its base, passing shuttered shops in which unsuspecting Lindworms lay peacefully snoring. Having composed a brief, hexametrical letter of farewell during the night, I addressed it to the entire community by tossing it into the gutter. In so doing I was observing an ancient custom whereby departures from Lindworm Castle are poetically governed. The risk that the wind might blow my verses over the battlements of my place of birth unread, or that the ink might be obliterated by a shower of rain, was one aspect of this custom. We Lindworms may be an emotionally crippled species, but we don’t lack a sense of the dramatic.

It was getting light although the sun had not yet risen. When had I last seen a sunrise? No idea! I had slept away real life for far too long already. I felt almost as I had the first time I set off for Bookholm: overweight, worn out, world-weary, and in the worst mental and physical condition imaginable, but almost childishly excited about the events and adventures ahead. Isn’t that the definition of a fresh start?

Having left Lindworm Castle behind me, I traversed the barren, stony desert that surrounds it on all sides. I made my way through dense swaths of mist that looked like rain clouds fallen to earth. The sun had risen now, but it didn’t warm me. Again and again I had to resist the cowardly impulse to retrace my steps and return to the safety of my native mountain, which radiated an agreeable warmth because of its volcanic innards, even in winter, and exerted the same attraction on a Lindworm as a warm stove does on a cat.

Why on earth was I going to Bookholm? The city had almost killed me once already. I was a trifle overweight, true, but I could have remedied that by dieting. I was no longer a young, twenty-seven-yearold Lindworm capable of overcoming all his existential fears with juvenile optimism. I was far too sensible for such a venture. Or should I have said, far too old? Over two hundred years had elapsed since my first visit to Bookholm. Two whole centuries! The very thought made me shiver even more violently.

Is there a word for the kind of mixed feelings that overcome you when you’re on the verge of a long expedition but could still abandon it? Your mind seems to be split into two halves: a daring, youthful, inquisitive half, eager to break out of its wonted environment; and a mature, comfortable, risk-averse half, anxious to cling timidly to its accustomed surroundings. Shortly after I had resolved to christen this cross between excitement and loss of itchy feet excitrepidation, it evaporated into the fresh air with every step I took, almost like a mild headache. Had the spell of Lindworm Castle lost its hold over me at last?

But … Had I brought the indispensable earplugs without which I couldn’t get to sleep, least of all in a strange environment pervaded by unfamiliar noises? My tablets against the acidity that assailed me whenever I drank too much coffee? Enough money? A notebook? A map, a thermometer, an address book, some throat pastilles? My monocle, some pencils, a clasp-knife, eye drops, attar of roses, burn ointment, dental floss, flavoured whiting powder for oral hygiene? When I rummaged in the numerous pockets of my cloak and my travelling bag, I found some matches, three candles, a pipe and tobacco, migraine powder, needle and thread, a tin of skin cream, some bicarbonate of soda and charcoal tablets. Ah, there were my earplugs! I also unearthed Ringdudler’s Miniature Encyclopaedia of Ancient Zamonian Literature, some powdered ink, claw clippers, sealing wax, two erasers, postage stamps, cough drops, valerian pills, corn plasters and bandages, a pair of tweezers … Heavens, why would I need a pair of tweezers on a trip to Bookholm? Oh yes, at the last minute I’d fantasised about being afflicted with tiny splinters or bee stings that only a precision instrument could remove before they caused fatal blood poisoning. While rummaging I also came across a ball of crumpled paper: the letter that had prompted me to undertake this journey.

At last I came to a halt and endeavoured to calm my nerves. Yes, there was a reason for this journey: this letter, whose pages I smoothed out before refolding it. Had it come from the catacombs of Bookholm? Did it really hail from the Leather Grotto, the home of the Booklings, and did I really want to learn the truth? Nonsense! Not for anything in the world would I ever again set foot in that subterranean world. There were dozens of more compelling reasons for my journey! World-weariness, itchy feet, boredom, altitude sickness, obesity. Besides, I didn’t have a single reason to return to Lindworm Castle apart from love of comfort. This wasn’t a youngster’s headlong flight into the unknown, as it had been once upon a time. By the Orm, I was Optimus Yarnspinner, an established author with a solid career, and I’d thoroughly reconnoitred my destination once before. What could go wrong? I had taken far greater risks under considerably less favourable circum stances. This was just a walk in the park, a biographical footnote. A voyage of exploration. A minor research trip. A change of air. A piece of fun. And this time I would substitute experience and maturity for youthful high spirits, not blunder into any old trap like the green horn of two hundred years ago. And what traps would await me, pray? Nobody knew I was coming and, as long as I kept the cowl of my cloak over my head, even Zamonia’s most popular author could roam the City of Dreaming Books incognito and undisturbed for as long as he pleased.

Perceptibly reassured by these considerations, I stuffed the letter back in my cloak, tidied the contents of my pockets and suddenly came across The Bloody Book. Yes, in obedience to a sudden impulse I had packed that too. Why? Well, in the first place I wanted to take it back to the city where it really belonged. Although the terrible tome had been in my possession for two centuries, I’d never felt that it truly belonged to me. I had plucked it from the flames and saved it from certain destruction, but did that act make The Bloody Book my property? I had no more claim to it than a looter who pillages someone else’s house during a disaster. I hadn’t even read the book, I simply couldn’t! Every time I ventured to open it, the most I could do was to read one sentence – I’d read three in all – before shutting it again in horror and leaving it untouched for years.

I wanted to get rid of the accursed thing at last, but I naturally couldn’t just throw it away. Immensely valuable, it came high up on the Golden List, Bookholm’s hierarchy of precious antiquarian volumes – indeed, it was one of the most coveted antiquarian books in existence. Perhaps I would find a buyer for it in the City of Dreaming Books. If not, I would donate it to Bookholm’s municipal library. Yes, that’s what I would do: I would add a good deed to the other reasons for my journey. Feeling suddenly relieved, I stowed the terrible tome away once more.

The last of the mist evaporated in the midday sun, whose rays were warming my face at last, and I strode on more confidently. Travelling is no different from writing. You have to get into your stride, but once you’ve overcome the first few obstacles, further progress is usually automatic. Not long after Lindworm Castle had disappeared from view, my mind was inundated with ideas for short stories and poems – even whole novels. This went on all day long and I kept having to stop to jot down the essentials in my notebook. It was as if literary brainwaves had been lurking beside the route from Lindworm Castle to Bookholm, ready to pounce on a burnt-out writer and inspire him. I was soon loudly declaiming verses I had composed extempore. Alas for the poor Zamonian countryside compelled to listen to them; I must have sounded like a fugitive from a madhouse! I didn’t care, though. I had made the right decision. A completely new phase of my existence was opening up ahead. Optimus Yarnspinner was rediscovering himself anew!

Even my scales were falling off! Indeed, the start of my journey had coincided with one of my periodic moulting seasons. Green hitherto, my coat of scales was bidding me farewell and being replaced by one of reddish hue. After the yellowish integument of my child hood and the greenish one of my youth and early adulthood, this was a colour appropriate to my present maturity: a positively majestic red. My new scales glittered nobly in the sunlight. When moulting was complete I would be able to dispense with skin cream for a considerable time; my new skin would gleam like polished armour. The old scales were trickling from under my clothes, only a few at first, but I knew from experience that they would soon fall off in veritable showers. Watching a Lindworm moult isn’t a particularly pleasant sight, but Lindworms themselves find it a thoroughly enjoyable process. It itches a little, but in an agreeable way. It’s like scratching the scab off a healed wound – all over one’s body. I took this as a favourable indication of my body’s consent to this journey. ‘A moulting Lindworm is a healthy Lindworm,’ as my godfather Dancelot used to say. In the immediate future I would be leaving a trail like a fir tree shedding its needles on the move.¹

I lay down to sleep in a cool birchwood. It was only with some difficulty that I managed to kindle a small campfire, although it had once been one of the easiest procedures undertaken by an experienced rambler like myself. This was the only precaution I took against wild animals. I had packed all manner of things, but no means of self-defence. The most dangerous weapon I had with me was a little clasp-knife. If some beast had emerged from the darkness, the most I could have done was menace it with a pair of tweezers or offer it some cough mixture.

Why wasn’t I afraid? I was probably just too tired to feel frightened as well. It was ages since I had taken so much healthy exercise in a single day. I rested my head on my rucksack and eyed the shadows dancing among the trees. My improvised pillow was a trifle hard because of the Bloody Book it contained, but I forbore to take it out.

Witches always lurk among birch trees.

That was one of the three mysterious sentences which I’d read in the baneful tome and which kept popping into my head at the most inappropriate moments.

The shadow you cast is not your own.

That was the second.

When you shut your eyes, the Others come.

Thus ran the third.

I had opened The Bloody Book on only three occasions and each of these three sentences had etched itself permanently into my memory, but strangely enough, here in these unfamiliar, unprotected and assuredly not undangerous surroundings, they failed to truly frighten me for the first time ever. My enforced companionship with The Bloody Book had always made me feel as if I were living with a vicious, dangerous beast that might at any moment pounce on me and tear me limb from limb.

But I was now, in a sense, returning it to the wild in order to release it. That was why it no longer frightened me. Taking a wholemeal biscuit from my rucksack, I consumed it with rapt concentration. I intended to watch my diet from now on and restrict it to what my body really needed. The memories of the croissant incident still chilled me to the marrow.

A cool breeze was blowing through the birchwood. A polyphonous whisper of fallen leaves arose and my campfire blazed up anew. The wind ruffled the treetops overhead like a child impatiently turning the pages of a big book with no pictures in it. I was reminded of the Shadow King’s rustling laughter and of the childish delight in his shining eyes as he went to his fiery death. Since then, there hadn’t been a day when I’d failed to think of him at least once, and while writing I’d often felt that he was guiding my paw.

PS The Shadow King has returned.

‘Impossible,’ I thought drowsily. ‘How can someone return who has never left?’

Then I fell asleep.

In the middle of the night I woke up. The fire had almost gone out. Its embers were casting only a faint glow over my sleeping place. I listened. What had woken me?

The leaves were still rustling. Strangely, though, the wind seemed to have dropped completely. I sat up in alarm. No, it wasn’t the rustle of the leaves, it was a voice! A whispering voice belonging to a living creature. I was thoroughly awake in an instant.

I peered into the darkness, trying to discern something in the dim light. My eyes accustomed themselves to the gloom agonisingly slowly. I made out some slender tree trunks, a tracery of branches and foliage – and then something that seemed to send ice water coursing through my veins. Standing between two birch trees was a figure.

Witches always lurk among birch trees, I thought.

No, that was no tree! It was a living, breathing being. Tall, thin, and almost imperceptibly swaying to and fro like the body of a huge serpent, it was whispering softly and unintelligibly.

Should I advertise my presence in a loud, self-confident voice, or keep quite still so as not to attract attention? Was it a wild beast or a rational being? A traveller like me? A werewolf? Something quite else? Was it aggressive, or even more frightened than I? Before I could think those questions over sufficiently, I found I could suddenly understand every word the faint voice was saying:

A place accurséd and forlorn

with walls of books piled high,

its windows stare like sightless eyes

and through them phantoms fly.

I knew those verses. I even knew the place they referred to, for I had been there in person. Tears sprang to my eyes. I wanted to jump to my feet and run off, but I couldn’t move a muscle, I was so utterly paralysed. Through a veil of tears I dimly saw the figure leave the trees and slowly, silently glide towards me as if it needed no legs to propel it along.

Of leather and of paper built,

worm-eaten through and through,

the castle known as Shadowhall

brings every nightmare true.

The whisper was close beside my ear now and the fearsome shadow was obscuring my view so completely that all I could see was darkness. Out of this terrible, dark void came a smell at once familiar and long forgotten, a sudden smell of ancient books … It was as if I’d opened the door of an antiquarian bookshop and blown the detritus from millions of mouldering volumes straight into my face.

Only two things in my life hitherto had ever smelt like that: the unmistakable perfume of the City of Dreaming Books, the eternal aroma of Bookholm; and the terrifying exhalations of the Shadow King.

PS The Shadow King has returned.

I may not have screamed because of that alone, because it wouldn’t have changed a thing. It was because a wet, glutinous tongue was touching my face and roaming over my lips and nostrils. I woke up with a start.

Dawn was already breaking and the fire had gone out. Standing over me on its slender legs and licking the biscuit crumbs off my face was a snow-white deer. When I sat up it flinched away, gazed at me with wide, reproachful eyes and disappeared among the birch trees with a few graceful, zigzag bounds. I rose from my sleeping place with a groan and shook the drops of dew off my cloak. Dreams like that, dear friends, are due penance for using The Bloody Book as a pillow!

1 Scaly Lindworms: the species to which Optimus Yarnspinner belongs – moult up to seven times during their lifetime, growing scales of a different colour on each occasion. There exists a special branch of Zamonian literary criticism (dermatological Lindworm etymology), which divides the literary works of these denizens of Lindworm Castle into different periods according to the colour of their scales. If one adheres to this – not uncontroversial – form of categorisation, this marks the beginning of Yarnspinner’s Purple Period. See Exegidior Fammstrudel’s The Purple Journey; Yarnspinner’s Third Moult and Its Influence on His Biographical Work. (Tr.)

The New City

IT WASN’T UNTIL shortly afterwards, when I left the birchwood and emerged into the open, that I saw I’d been sleeping on a hillside overlooking a grassy plain. The clear air afforded a thrillingly panoramic view of a green sea composed of pointed blades of grass waving in the wind, and of the grey expanse of desert beyond it, which stretched away to the horizon. And in the far distance, just on the dividing line between the morning sky and the earth, I could discern the unnaturally multicoloured speck made up of the buildings of Bookholm.

I could already smell the city. Of course, that was the smell that had occasioned my nightmare! The incessant wind had carried it across the plain and up into the birchwood. I had even dreamed the words in which I’d described that unmistakable smell in my book: As if you’ve stirred up a cloud of unadulterated book dust and blown the detritus from millions of mouldering volumes straight into your face. Was there anything more alluring?

The city seemed not only near enough to smell but near enough to touch. However, I knew from my first visit to Bookholm that it would take me at least one more day’s march to get there.

I drank the rest of the water in my flask at a single gulp. Unwise though this may sound, it was meant to encourage me to stride along as fast as possible all day long, for there would be nothing more to drink until I reached my destination. I was a few years older this time; if I wanted to cover the distance in the same time as before, I needed to provide myself with an incentive.

I shall spare you a tedious description of this uneventful trek, dear readers. Suffice it to say that I reached the outskirts of Bookholm just as exhausted, footsore, hungry and parched as I had been on the previous occasion. However, the prospect of obtaining something to drink there had accelerated my pace, particularly in the last few hours, with the result that I reached my destination by late afternoon.

Even from a distance I was able to marvel at the way the city had grown. It had expanded in one or two places (like me) and had also gained height. Hours before I reached the outskirts I could detect a hum like that of a gigantic beehive. It grew louder and more heterogeneous with every step I took. I could make out the hammering and sawing from carpenters’ shops, the tolling of bells, the neighing of horses and the never-ending clatter of printing presses. And vibrating beneath it all was the unmistakable acoustic substratum, the hubbub characteristic of any major city, which is produced by thousands of intermingled voices and resembles the ceaseless murmur of an audience or a sluggish stream.

The buildings, of which there were two or even three times as many, were on a more generous vertical scale. Few had boasted more than two floors in the old days, whereas I could now see from afar that some had three, four, or even five storeys. Tall, slender minarets of sheet iron, chimneys as tall as trees, stone towers – none of these would have been tolerated in the Bookholm of old. No longer was this a romantic little place frequented by a surfeit of tourists, nor the antiquarian township of my nostalgic recollection, but an entirely new place with different inhabitants, visitors and destinies. I came to a crossroads where my route intersected with others. From there I proceeded down numerous little streets along which hundreds of people were streaming into the city. I now realised that, if I actually ventured into Bookholm, mine would be no sentimental journey into the past but a foray into an unforeseeable and unplanned phase of my existence. Involuntarily, I stopped short.

Was this another fit of excitrepidationcase