That’s what Forbes did… at the abattoir.
Forbes did that?
Just with meat, not leaves. Hooked things out.
What does that mean? It can’t be a coincidence.
No… it’s a pattern. I’m beginning to see them.
Patterns?
Yes. Lots of them. Like, it’s also what the Dragon Hunters did with their toothpicks. Forbes and the Grinder. Hunters and Dragons. Kobolds and the… the Leafgobble! That’s its name!
You remember?
Yes!
And sure enough, right then The One Who Carries The Buckets Too Slowly spread his arms importantly: this was the Leafgobble 5000, one of a kind, an upgrade from the Leafnibble 300, which had only managed six cubic metres of leaf a minute, as opposed to the…
He trailed off as Max walked straight past him.
By now he’d seen the mural.
Another pattern!
It was on the back wall of the cavern, behind the Grinder, a slapdash mess of gaudy colour. There was a spaceship circling a moon. A town bustling with shoppers. A farmyard of mooing cows. A pyramid and a sphinx. A Great Wall of China stretching across a mountainside. A Niagara Falls sending up a white spume and a rainbow. A Stonehenge in a misty dawn. A tribesman in a jungle squatting by a river. A factory churning out cars. A classroom where children sat in examination rows. A fairground where they bought candyfloss. A beach where tourists basked on their backs. And many more.
“It’s the World,” Boris murmured. “Who painted this?”
“The One Who Cleans The Teeth The Best,” said the One Who Carries The Buckets Too Slowly.
Max nodded. “I wasn’t painting the World, though,” he said, pointing. “I was painting them.”
They were in every part of the mural—ten times, a hundred times. Playing hook-a-duck at the fairground. Sunbathing on the beach. Wandering around Stonehenge. Peering through the classroom window. Driving off in one of the new cars…
His Forever Parents.
His Forever Father with his glinting spectacles.
His Forever Mother with her auburn hair.
He’d found them at last. And still—they were nothing more than paintings on a wall.
“How could he have known about the World?” Boris asked. “Did the Dragon Hunters tell him?”
“Partly,” said the Kobold. “But mostly it’s from what the Light shows us. We can look around the World whenever we—” He stopped and stared at Boris. “Actually,” he said slowly. “I’m not sure we’re allowed to talk about that with guests. We’ve never had any visitors before.”
The Light, Max. That must be it. What the Dragon Hunter wanted you to see.
“The Light—it’s further down in the Warrens, isn’t it?” Max asked. Then, a sudden flash of understanding: “It’s where you keep the Storybooks.”
The One Who Carries The Buckets Too Slowly leant in close and whispered.
“That’s a secret place. Only Kobolds and the Chief Dragon Hunter are allowed in there.”
“I’m a Kobold. You can show me.”
“Well, of course you can see it. You’ve seen it a million times already. Not him, though,” the Kobold nodded at Boris. “He’s not allowed.”
“You go, I’ll wait here,” Boris said. He moved again towards the mural. “There may be clues in these paintings about how you went from working at a Grinder in the Woods… to Appearing on a bookshelf in the World.”
So Max went on with the Kobold, deeper into the earth. He felt hypnotized. It was all so familiar. Every step of the way.
The tunnel ended abruptly at a final door.
He watched as the Kobold pushed the door open. Light swelled out, blinding him, and he edged forwards, shielding his eyes.
It took him a moment to get used to it.
Ooooh. It’s… a library for ever!
The cavern widened around them like the yawn of a giant, and continued to widen as they moved away from the door, craning their necks.
Books.
Billions.
Terraces of rickety shelves zigzagged in higgledy-piggledy rows up to the cavern roof hundreds of feet above. Kobolds clambered about on these shelves like bees on a honeycomb, slotting Storybooks into the gaps. Here and there sections of shelves collapsed in a tumbling shower, sending Kobolds screaming to the ground—but they only leapt up, gathered the Storybooks and began rebuilding. More shelves were under construction, and the cavern rang with the noise of banging and sawing. Everywhere sat stacks of Storybooks, backlogs in the operation, thousands of stories waiting to be added to the vast collection.
But most astonishing of all was the Light.
All of the Storybooks were lit up from within like lanterns. The Light filled them and flowed around them. Something was going on in that Light too, some kind of process. It wasn’t a lazy sunbeam sort of Light. It was flickering excitedly, flaring out now and again from some Storybooks, dimming in others, but always changing.
The Kobold was watching Max closely. “You don’t remember this, do you?” he asked.
Max shook his head. He didn’t remember. But he knew that somewhere inside his mind he did know, only he couldn’t retrieve the memory. It was like those fairground machines with the lowering claw that never quite managed to grasp the stuffed toy.
“Tell me what you meant,” he said, “about looking around the World.”
“Oh, that’s tremendous fun!” the Kobold replied. “I’ll show you.”
They walked across the cavern floor to the shelves, where the Storybooks were immersed in the Light.
“Just hold your hand near the Books,” said the Kobold. “Let the Light come near.”
Max tentatively reached out and placed his hand on the spine of a Storybook. The Light flickered towards his hand and enveloped it in a glowing nimbus.
And then he saw it.
The World.
Just as though he was dreaming, images flowed through his mind, clear as photographs. A man sitting at a desk in an empty room, chewing on the end of a pencil. A girl hanging upside down from a climbing frame, her face soft with a thought. An old woman creeping through a No Zone with a bucket of paint. A couple wandering through a park, hand in hand, not talking. A boy peering through a telescope at the moon.
Thousands upon thousands of people, all lost in thought as something entered their minds—a dream, an idea, a notion, a fear, a hope, an unexplained emotion, the soulful pulse of something deep within them.
Still dreaming, despite all the efforts of the Censorship to stop them.
Max slowly withdrew his hand and looked up at all the millions of Storybooks on all the thousands of shelves.
So that was the World?
Yes.
What were all those people doing?
They were dreaming… This is where dreams come from. From the Storybooks. The Light puts the dreams into the World.
Show me again!
We should probably go. I need to speak to Boris.
Just a bit more? I’ve never seen the World. It’s the only chance I’ll get!
So Max reached his hand into the Light once more, and let the World fill his mind.
THE YULE LOG
And then the World was gone—Max was yanked back from the shelves, the contact with the Light broken. The One Who Carries The Buckets Too Slowly had spun him round.
“What have you done?” he demanded, his dark eyes glinting. “Who did you bring?”
Two more Kobolds were with him. They looked alarmed. Scared.
Max shook himself free. “What are you talking about? I haven’t brought anyone.”
“There are OTHERS.”
“I know. They’re my friends.”
“Your friends have New Light!” snarled one of the other Kobolds. “They’re invading the Warrens!”
“What?”
Max looked at the door just in time to see a Kobold come tumbling in backwards, followed by a red-faced man carrying a cudgel and a bright yellow, rubberi
zed flashlight—the extra-powerful sort used by deep-sea divers and emergency workers.
I know him! That’s Farmer Wilberforce!
He’s from Gilead?
Yes!
What’s he doing here?
HOW SHOULD I KNOW?
But the man wasn’t alone. Right after him came the Wasp Witch. Followed by Kaspar. Followed by more Forest Folk with more flashlights. Followed by Professor Courtz, his injured arm heavily bandaged and strapped to his chest.
Max ducked behind a stack of Storybooks.
“Well, well!” he heard the Witch say. “Just like the Archives! Exactly as you described.”
Moving it slowly and carefully, Max pulled one of the Storybooks from the stack and peered through the gap.
The Witch also had one of the flashlights, but she was holding it carefully away from her body like a kettle of boiling water. Kaspar was tightly clutching a small wooden box, and gazing round in wide-eyed wonderment. Courtz seemed smaller than before. His face had lost its robust strength and sagged ashen grey.
They must have got Mrs Jeffers and the others.
Not Boris. They won’t have got Boris.
But then came a second group of Forest Folk. They had the Dark Man prisoner. His arms were pinned behind his back by two burly villagers. His face was beaten and bleeding.
Oh no…
Don’t move. You can’t help him right now.
I’ve got to do something!
Just wait. The Kobolds will stop them.
Kobolds were already swarming down off the shelves and advancing on the intruders, their dark eyes glinting. One rushed towards Courtz and the Witch, waving them backwards and shaking his head.
“You can’t come in here! It’s forbidden! You must leave, at once, at once I—”
click
Light lanced out.
The Kobold vanished in a puff of ash.
The other Kobolds stopped dead.
Did she just? Is he—!
Oh my God.
Don’t look! I don’t want to see!
click
Another Kobold exploded in smoke.
Martha screamed. The Kobolds edged backwards.
The Witch cocked her torch, letting the New Light dance across the ground in front of them.
“Who’s next? You? Or you? Well… what’s the difference?”
Cackling, she flicked the torch at the Kobolds—they leapt away from the deadly disc of light. The other Forest Folk marched forwards, driving the Kobolds back. Soon a large area was cleared.
Courtz came further into the cavern, looking up at the terraces of shelves.
“You see, old friend?” he said, turning to Boris. “The heart of the Beginning Woods! Isn’t it beautiful? It operates on the same principle as the Archives. There the Coven write the Patents, and put them in the Light, and they become part of the Woods. Here the Dragon Hunters take their stories, put them in the Light, and they become part of the World. Dreams and ideas, floating about, ready to be sucked up by fantasists too feeble to confront reality. But not for much longer. Shut this place down, and nobody will even know what stories are. That space in their minds where stories enter will lie empty. It will be blank. Cleaned out. Tabula rasa.”
He’s coming! Get down!
Max got down as low as possible. Courtz was wandering over. He stopped just on the other side of the stack of Storybooks.
“If you destroy this library,” Max heard Boris say, “you destroy the World as it is.”
“But I do not value the World as it is,” Courtz replied. “We live in a World where any idea is possible, in which any feeling, or fancy, or dream, can invade the mind. We are divided into believers in one idea, fanatics of another. You must admit this is hard to manage and creates certain problems. Wouldn’t it be better if there was one external source of fact we could rely on and refer to? A single idea?”
“You mean science, I suppose?” Boris asked.
“Of course.”
Boris began to laugh.
“You find it amusing?” Courtz asked. “You know, my friend, I respect you and would like to be in agreement with you. But you must offer more than laughter.”
“Then I will offer you a story.”
“We have no time for stories.”
“This will be the last story ever told. Even you cannot resist such a delicacy.”
“I can.”
“And you wish to stop the Vanishings. I know you do.”
“That is true.”
“My story will explain why your solution will not work. Why science cannot stop the Vanishings.”
There was a short pause. “Very well,” Courtz said. “Let us hear it.”
He leant back onto the stack of Storybooks, and there was a scuffle as Boris was released. Max listened breathlessly, trying to identify every sound.
Max…
Not now!
How did Courtz know about—
But before she could finish the thought, Boris started talking.
“When I was a boy, my parents travelled from place to place, telling stories. You know this, Eric.”
“Yes, I know it.”
“They could not afford to give me my own bedroom, so I would sleep in the living rooms of rented apartments. Early each morning my Mother would enter to build the fire. I would pretend to be asleep, so I could watch her as she worked. First she placed the kindling. Then the strips of bark. Soon I would hear the crackling of flames. Finally she would send a shovel of coals sliding into the grate. The coals would make a pleasant sound as they slid off the shovel. That was how I woke each morning: to see my Mother build a fire so warmth would come.”
“Lazy wretch,” muttered the Witch. “Letting your Mother slave like a dog!”
“Do not interrupt him,” warned Courtz. “Let him finish his story. There will be no other after it.”
“When my Mother was a girl,” Boris went on, “building a fire was another matter altogether. She grew up in the forests of Siberia, where to be warm you had to go into the woods and chop down a tree. There was no other way. Her Father—my grandfather—made hundreds of such trips, and my Mother joined him. It took great effort to fell a pine, to strip it of branches and cut it into logs, all in the middle of a vast, untamed wilderness. Hard work, you say? Hard work that made them strong! Knowing they’d done it themselves, with their own hands and tools, well, they knew why they put food in their mouths—they had no doubt why!
“Each year on New Year’s Day her Father went into the forest alone to search for a log to be burnt the following Christmas. This search was a great mystery to my Mother. She would wait outside the house listening for the sound of returning horses. The log her Father brought back was so large it took them both to carry it into the woodshed, where it lived in a basket, wrapped in a blanket. For a whole year my Mother would go out in the early morning to fetch wood for the fire, and each time she would lift the blanket, and peer at the log, thrilling to see it lie there, hard and drying. She would watch the life scuttling round it—the spiders that covered it with their cobwebs, the roaches that laid eggs in the cracks beneath the bark. And when Christmas came they would bore holes in it and fill the holes with scented oils, before burning it in their hearth. What did this Yule Log mean to her, at the time of her childhood, and for years afterwards, throughout her life? It cannot be described in words. Unless, of course, you are describing it scientifically. In which case, it was a piece of wood in a hut.
“That was long ago now.
“But let us go further back. Deeper in the past, life was even harder and more mysterious. Our ancestors gathered round fires in the open air, or in the mouths of caves. Those fires burnt for many days, and were not allowed to go out. They hadn’t been brought to life by matches or tinderboxes. They hadn’t been struck from flint and steel. They’d been torn from the sky! In those ancient times fire had to be hunted like an animal and brought back to the tribe. This bringing of fire was so momentous, whenever a man
arrived with a flame in his hand it was as though he’d stolen it from the gods themselves!
“But nowadays, nobody appears before their tribe like a god. Nobody wonders at the Yule Log. No boy lies awake as his Mother builds a fire. Those moments of wonderment have been removed from life. And now… we Vanish. We Vanish because we do not live. We simply consume, and operate, and press buttons, and turn dials. We want to eat, but we don’t want to hunt. We want to be warm, but we don’t want to build fires. We don’t realize that being warm isn’t important—it is the struggle to be warm that matters most. It’s the building of fires that gives life its purpose, not the enjoyment of them. Yet all the energy of science is directed towards making things easier, towards eradicating the very thing that life comes from: struggle. The proper use of our bodies and minds. All your science has given us, Eric, is absolutely nothing to do. Under these circumstances, what difference does it make if people Vanish? And is it any wonder that they do?”
Max heard Boris moving closer to Courtz, until he stopped directly in front of him.
“You believe in science, Eric. You believe in a new Era. You glory in your ingenuity, when it is this very ingenuity that has destroyed our greatest treasure: the sensation of Life. Take away that sensation of Life, as you have done, and no number of hospitals or schools, no technological advancement, no increase in ease or comfort, no mountain of gold and food can replace it. Your Era will be one of emptiness and laziness, one of listlessness and apathy. The children of our time ask why Life has no meaning, not realizing it is their lives, not Life, which is to blame. That is your gift to them. Emptiness. Meaninglessness. Is it any wonder that the rise of those horrors has been simultaneous with your ascendancy?”
For a long time Courtz did not speak. The silence became almost unbearable. Everyone was waiting for the scientist to react.
When he finally spoke, his voice was flat and implacable.
“Take him to the Grinder.”
“The Grinder?” one of the Forest Folk repeated.
“I was hoping we might be able to change his mind. I see now this is impossible. If he loves stories so much—let him join them!”
The Beginning Woods Page 33