Free The City of Dreaming Books by Walter Moers Page A

Regenschein was a crossbow duel after which, riddled with poisoned arrows, he just managed to reach the safety of the bookshop owned by Ahmed ben Kibitzer, who nursed him back to health. I’m sure, dear readers, that you can imagine how astonished I was, while reading Regenschein’s book, to come across the name of the crotchety little Nocturnomath who had tried to send me packing.
    But Bookhunters weren’t the only danger that lurked beneath Bookholm. No one had ever descended as far into the catacombs as Colophonius Regenschein, and no one had set eyes on as many of its marvels and monstrosities. He wrote of miles-deep caverns filled with millions of ancient volumes in the process of being devoured by phosphorescent worms and moths. He wrote of tunnels infested with blind and transparent insects that hunted anything within reach of their yards-long antennae; of frightful winged creatures - he called them Harpyrs - whose frightful screams had almost robbed him of his sanity on one occasion; of the Rusty Gnomes’ Bookway , an immense subterranean railroad system said to have been constructed thousands of years ago by a dwarfish race of very skilful craftsmen. He also told of Unholm , the catacombs’ gigantic rubbish dump, where millions of books lay mouldering away.
    Regenschein firmly believed in the existence of the Fearsome Booklings , a race of one-eyed creatures dwelling deep in the bowels of Bookholm and reputed to devour (alive) anything that came their way. He even entertained no doubts about the popular myth of a race of giants said to have lived in the deepest and biggest of all the subterranean caverns, where they stoked Zamonia’s volcanoes. He had seen so many incredible sights in the catacombs that he regarded nothing, absolutely nothing, as being beyond the bounds of possibility.
    Although his book had been accused of transgressing the frontier between truth and fiction, it did so in such a subtle way that I didn’t care which page I was on. Regenschein’s writing utterly enthralled me. I devoured chapter after chapter as Bookholm’s nightlife raged around me, pausing only occasionally to signal for another pot of coffee before avidly reading on. Alas, dear readers, I cannot possibly summarise all the details Regenschein disclosed about the world beneath my feet, there were simply too many of them.
    I will, however, make mention of one chapter, for it was in that one, the last of all, that Regenschein’s book really took off. It was devoted to the Shadow King.
    The story of the Shadow King was one of the more recent legends - only a few score years old - about the Bookholmian underworld. It told of the birth of a being said to have established a reign of terror in the catacombs far surpassing any of the Bookhunters’ atrocities. The legend went as follows:
    Many shadows exist in the gloom of the catacombs. Shadows of living creatures, of dead things, of vermin that creep, crawl and fly, of Bookhunters, of stalagmites and stalactites. A multifarious race of silhouettes dancing restlessly over the tunnel roofs and book-lined walls, they strike terror into many intruders or drive them insane. One day in the not too distant past, so legend had it, these incorporeal beings grew tired of their anarchic living conditions and elected a leader. They superimposed one shadow, one silhouette, one shade of darkness on another until all these became amalgamated into a demicreature. Half alive and half dead, half solid and half insubstantial, half visible and half invisible, he became their ruler and spiritual executor. In other words, the Shadow King.
    This was only the popular version of the legend, for there were several different theories about who or what the Shadow King really was. Bookhunters claimed he was the wrathful spirit of the Dreaming Books, their incarnate anger at having been forgotten and buried in the catacombs. They believed that this spirit had come to wreak revenge on all living creatures, and