The Labyrinth of Dreaming Books (11 page)

He hadn’t yet noticed me, so I lingered behind a column and hesitated. Should I speak to him? I felt guilty somehow. He had seen me that time in the
Graveyard of Forgotten Writers
. We had exchanged a glance and he must have been quite aware that I’d abandoned him in his wretchedness for unworthy reasons. What else could I have done, though? I was almost penniless myself at that time and I’d gained the impression that he wasn’t too anxious to be accosted in his embarrassing position by another of his kind. Many years had gone by since then and I was terribly curious to discover how he had been faring. I pulled myself together and went over to his table. At least I could make a belated apology.

‘Is anyone sitting here?’ My voice was shaking, I noticed. ‘I apologise for disturbing you, but … I also come from Lindworm Castle.’

Two diminutive gnomes seated facing each other across the next table were sharing a pipe at which they puffed in turn. Their tobacco smelt pungently of forest herbs. They paid me no attention.

Ovidios gave me a long look. Then, very slowly and in the standoffish tone of someone who often gets pestered, he said: ‘Anyone who goes around muffled up like you could say as much.’

‘I’m, er … travelling incognito,’ I replied, abashed. Leaning towards him, I folded back my cowl far enough for him, but no one else in the room, to see my face.

‘Ye … Yu … Yarnsp …’ he stammered, utterly taken aback, but I raised my paw in entreaty and he promptly fell silent.

‘May I join you?’ I asked.

‘But of course, certainly! I insist!’ Ovidios replied. He stood up and sat down several times. ‘Heavens alive … what a … surprise.’ Nervously, he brushed a few tobacco crumbs off the table.

The two little gnomes were giggling stupidly, but not on our account. Obviously wrapped up in themselves, they were whispering together in Gnomian, which no one but they understood.

‘I’m afraid I have to wear this wretched cowl,’ I said apologetically, sitting down opposite Ovidios. ‘It makes me feel like one of those silly Dumbdruids, but without it I’d never have a quiet moment in this city.’

‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Everyone here knows you. Your likeness is reproduced on all your book jackets. Many antique shops and bookshops adorn their windows with your portrait. There’s even a statue of you in the municipal park, but on that you still have green scales all over. Are you moulting at present?’

Strangely enough, a Lindworm always finds it somewhat embarrassing to be questioned about his moults, even by another Lindworm. My reply was correspondingly curt.

‘Yes,’ was all I said.

‘Heavens alive,’ Ovidios sighed. ‘When did we see each other last? It must have been … it was …’

‘In the
Graveyard of Forgotten Writers
,’ I blurted out and instantly regretted it.

But he only roared with laughter. ‘Hahaha! Yes, that’s right! In that goddamned graveyard!’ He didn’t seem to resent being reminded of it at all. ‘You even describe our encounter in your book,’ he said.

‘You’ve read it?’ I asked.

‘But of course! Are you joking?
Everyone
in Bookholm has read it. What brings you here again? The last I heard, you’d gone back to Lindworm Castle. Back to your roots and so on.’ Ovidios was treating me like a long-lost friend, which quickly made me relax. I thought for a moment. Should I show him the letter? Lay my cards on the table right away? He was a Lindworm, so I had no doubts about his loyalty, but hadn’t I sworn to be far more cautious this time? On my first trip to Bookholm, most of my difficulties had arisen because I’d blithely stuck the manuscript that had occasioned my visit under the noses of friend and foe alike. This time I wanted to proceed less hastily and naively.

‘Ah, yes, Lindworm Castle …’ I said. ‘You know how it is. For anyone in search of peace and quiet, plenty of sleep and hearty Lindworm fare, it’s the best place in Zamonia. I needed a break from the rat race – needed to instil some order into my life. Or so I thought, at least. In the end, though, the healthy air up there started to make my ears buzz. I developed an urge to knock the stupid helmet off some Lindworm’s head after encountering him in the street for the twelfth time in a day. Know what I mean? I could hear my toenails growing in the night.’

‘I get the picture,’ Ovidios said with a grin. ‘Lindwormitis! Is the
Fossilised Brachiosaurus
still the only restaurant in the place?’

‘You bet your life it is! And the main course is
Pebbles in their Jackets
every damned night.’

‘Yes,’ said Ovidios, ‘those sound like the reasons why I myself fled from Lindworm Castle. There came a day when the fresh air merely gave me nausea and I got vertigo whenever I looked over the battlements.’

I smiled. ‘I hope you won’t take it amiss if I ask you something. Why didn’t you simply go back to the castle when you were in such a bad way? I’ve often wondered that since. I mean, it would have been preferable to the
Graveyard of Forgotten Writers
.’

‘Depends on your point of view,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Youngsters are stubborn. I was too proud, too stupid. I’d rather have died than return to that old dragon’s rock. I see it in a somewhat different light today, but then … I was a completely different Lindworm and my life would have taken an entirely different turn had I not ended up in the
Graveyard of Forgotten Writers
. More boring, certainly, and ultimately not as, er … agreeable.’

He clinked mugs.

I grinned. ‘You’re doing well for yourself now, that’s obvious. What happened?’

Ovidios gave me a lingering look.

‘The Orm,’ he said gravely. ‘The Orm happened to me.’

‘The … Orm?’ I whispered.

‘Hm, yes … It was a while after we saw each other. To be honest, our brief encounter made a pretty deep impression on me.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes indeed. I became far more depressed after that.’ He stared at me sombrely.

I broke out in a sweat. ‘Oh …’ was all I said. The conversation was taking an unpleasant turn after all.

‘The look in your eyes that time, Optimus – I shall never forget it. Never! It conveyed sheer terror, naked fear. I saw the full horror of my situation reflected in it – in the eyes of one of my own kind, you understand? I’ve never felt lonelier or more humiliated in my life!’ Were his eyes filled with tears of sorrow, or was it just the smoke?

I sank deeper into my chair. How idiotic of me to have sat down here! Now I was belatedly paying for my past sins.

‘But what am I saying!’ he sighed. ‘How much lower can you sink when you’re already at the bottom of a grave? Hm? I even stopped attending to my basic needs. I gave up washing and eating, and drank only rainwater. I composed no more poems for those confounded tourists. I didn’t even trouble to pick up the small change they tossed into my hole out of pity. I wanted to die.’

So did I! Die and sink, complete with chair, through the floor of this accursed Fumoir, which I should
never
have set foot in. Why couldn’t that stupid, interfering Wolperting have simply allowed me to smoke my harmless last pipe in peace? Why did people always have to make things so complicated for each other? And why couldn’t I have a heart attack when I really needed one?

But Ovidios implacably continued his shaming story. ‘I simply lay curled up in my grave. For days. Weeks. I didn’t know, nor did I care. My will to live had been extinguished. I wanted to decay, to dissolve into the mud.’

He fell silent, leaving the last words to linger in the air. The most embarrassing conversational hiatus in my life ensued.

‘And then,’ he said at last, ‘I heard the bells.’

‘The, er … death knell?’ I asked stupidly.

‘No, the tocsin.’

‘The tocsin?’

‘The fire alarm! Bookholm’s Great Conflagration! The one started by the Shadow King. The last chapter in your book was the first in my new existence.’

‘What?’ I sat up again. Had I detected a reconciliatory note in his voice? I was feeling quite different, anyway. Different in a strange but agreeable manner. Was it the peppermint tea?’

‘So I was lying down there in my pit, wanting to die, d’you see?’ Ovidios went on. ‘It had rained heavily the day before the Great Conflagration and most of our holes in the ground were knee-deep in water in spite of the tarpaulins we’d suspended over them. I was floating more than lying. I could hear the tolling of the tocsin, the panic-stricken cries of the townsfolk and the crackle of the flames, but I couldn’t have cared less because I was done with life. I would burn to death, but so what?’

Ovidios lit a match and studied the flame.

‘And then came the heat. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced a gigantic wall of heat fuelled by millions of burning books, but I can tell
you
this: nothing in life prepares you for it! I dived below the surface of the muddy brew in which I was lying and it instantly began to simmer! I now know how someone must feel who’s being boiled to death.’

I leant across the table. He was a pretty good storyteller. ‘How?’ I asked in a low voice.

‘He wants to
live
, damn it!’ cried Ovidios. ‘He develops an instinct for survival more intense than he could ever have dreamt! Every fibre of his body feels more alive than ever before! And then …’

‘Yes?’ I said breathlessly.

‘Then he dies.’ Ovidios blew out the match.

I sat back again. I’d become so light-headed, I felt as if my head might at any moment detach itself from my body and float away like a balloon.

‘Mind you,’ he went on, ‘I said the water began to
simmer
, not
boil
. It could only have been a degree at most, a hair’s breadth on the thermometer, a single millilitre of mercury, that preserved me from what may well be the most terrible of all deaths! It became so hot, I thought my teeth would melt. Although I’d shut my eyes, the glare was so dazzling I could see the veins in my eyelids throb in time to my racing heartbeat. And I heard an ear-splitting roar, even underwater! In your book you used a very apt metaphor for the Great Conflagration:
The Dreaming Books had awakened!
Yes, that’s just how it was. It sounded as if a thousandfold herd of frenzied beasts were thundering overhead, but it was the merciless Fire Moloch devouring the oxygen above me!’

Ovidios drummed on the table with both claw-tipped paws to imitate the hoofbeats of a thousand animals, and one or two heads in the Fumoir turned in our direction. The two little gnomes were undisguisedly staring at us with glassy, red-rimmed eyes.

‘And then, quite suddenly, it was over,’ Ovidios went on in a low voice. ‘From one moment to the next. I couldn’t have held my breath a second longer. I rose from the simmering brew, steaming in the cooling aftermath of the wall of fire. I groaned and yelled and flailed
my
arms like a lunatic who has split his straitjacket. Aaarh! I was incapable of any form of civilised linguistic utterance. I had survived a conflagration of apocalyptic dimensions. Had been nearly boiled alive. Had almost died and resurrected myself. Not a bad outcome for an otherwise uneventful afternoon, my friend! But that was nothing. My real experience of that day was still to come.’

Ovidios sat back and grinned. His eyes had begun to sparkle and a brief sidelong glance told me that the gnomes at the next table were pricking up their long ears in an attempt to overhear the story.

‘I wiped the mud from my eyes and looked up. Framed by the elongated, rectangular mouth of my grave I saw the sky. It was dark, though whether with smoke or the advent of night I didn’t know, nor could I tell whether what twinkled in it were stars or the sparks from burning books. I only knew that I had never seen a sky like it. I was looking at the
Alphabet of the Stars
, a firmament filled with sparkling symbols, an illegible but wonderful luminous script as old as the universe itself.’

‘You saw it too?’ I said. ‘The Alphabet?’

Ovidios stared at me for a while. Had he lost his thread? Was he even aware of my presence? At length he went on.

‘And then I was struck by an invisible thunderbolt – a beam, a blow, a billow, an electric shock, whatever – coming straight from the cosmos. It nearly knocked me back into the mud – it cleft me down the middle like an axe splitting a block of wood. It didn’t hurt or frighten me. I almost laughed. It was as if I had been charged with an energy I’d never known before, a creative power that nearly burst my brain. Were flames coming from my nostrils? I didn’t know. I knew only this: that suddenly there were two of me standing down there in the pit. The old Ovidios in his tattered rags and the new Ovidios you see before you. I had only to decide which one I wanted to be from then on.’

Ovidios grinned and flung out his arms. His new clothes really suited him. He lowered his voice.

‘I know this sounds like the documentary record of a lunatic describing the onset of his dementia. I don’t tell this story to everyone, but I’m sure you’ve experienced something similar.
For at that moment I was overcome by the Orm
.’

His eyes filled more and more with tears until they were streaming down his face. Either he didn’t appear to notice or he didn’t care. Stretching out his arm, he pointed at the fog of tobacco smoke above my head.

‘I could see right into the future! I could see what would happen if I seized this moment and exploited it. I could begin all over again and change everything for the better, because symbols – sparkling characters from the Alphabet of the Stars – were trickling through my brain. Although disorganised and hard to interpret at first, they quickly sorted themselves out into groups, and here and there made glorious sense. Something unique and imperishable was taking shape in my head, an ingenious structure of words and sentences that not only materialised there like a strangely beautiful, extraterrestrial creature but spoke to me in immaculate verse! It was a poem. Quite unconnected with my own thought processes, it consisted of ideas from space: a gift from the stars!’

Ovidios looked at me with sudden severity. He leant over and gripped my arm so hard that it hurt.