by Mervyn Peake
To feel the lips go dry; the tongue like a leather in the mouth; to feel the knees weaken.
To feel the heart struggling as though to be allowed its freedom, hammering at the walls of his small ribs, hammering for release.
Why had he scrambled through that midnight gap, where his hands had felt and found nothing and then nothing and then again nothing as he edged his way into the gloom? Why had he descended that flight of rusty iron to the deserted corridor and seen how it stretched into how strange a murk of weeds? Why had he not turned back, before it was too late? Turned back and climbed those iron stairs again and waited behind the giant torso for the last echo to disappear from the corridor of carvings. The Headmaster had been on his side – had told lies for him. Had he been ungrateful to steal away? And now he was lost for ever; for ever, and evermore.
Clenching his hands he cried aloud in the hollow wilderness for help. Immediately a score of voices answered him, from the four quarters. ‘Help, help,’ they cried, again and again, a clamour of voices that were all his own and the last faint echo of his cry, thin, wan, frightened and infinitely far, languished and died and the thick silence crowded back from every side and he was drowned again.
There was nowhere to go and there was everywhere to go. His sense of direction, of where he had come from, had been wiped away by what seemed an age of vacillation.
The silence filled his ears until they ached. He tried to remember what he had read about explorers, but he could recall no story of heroes lost in such a tract as this.
He brought his clenched fist to his mouth and bit his knuckles. For a moment the pain seemed to help him. It gave him a sense of his own reality, and as the pain weakened he bit again; and, in the vain hope of gaining help from yet another scrutiny of the surrounding vistas and avenues of masonry, for he was at a juncture of many ways, he braced himself. His muscles tautened; his head was thrust forward; he peered along the dwindling perspectives. But nothing helped him. Nothing that he saw suggested a course of action, a clue for freedom. There was no ray of light to indicate that there was any outer world. What luminosity there was was uniform, a kind of dusk that had nothing to do with daylight. A self-contained thing, bred in the halls and corridors, something that seeped forth from the walls and floors and ceilings.
Titus moved his dry tongue across his lips and sat down on the flagged floor, but a sense of terror jerked him to his feet again. It seemed that he had begun to be absorbed into the stone. He must be on his feet. He must keep moving. He tip-toed to a wall like the wall of a wharf. For a moment he leaned his small sweating cheek against the mortarless stone. ‘I must think … think … think …’ He formed the words with his dry tongue. ‘Have lost my way. My way? What does that mean?’ He began to whisper the words so that he could hear them, but not the castle. There was no echo to this little husky sound. ‘It means I don’t know where to go. What do I know then? I know that there is a north, south, east and west. But I don’t know which is which. Aren’t there any other directions?’
His heart gave a leap ‘Yes!’ he cried and a hundred affirmatives shouted from throats of stone. He stiffened at the leaping cries, his eyes flickering to left and right, his head motionless. Surely so great a clamour must blast from their retreats the dire ghosts of the place. The centre of his thin chest was sick and bruised with his heart beats.
But nothing appeared and the silence thickened again. What was it he had discovered, that it should have caught him unawares? Another direction? Something that was neither north, south, east or west. What was it? It was skywards. It was roofwards.
It was the direction that led to the air. It was a mere spark, this hope that had ignited. He mouthed his words again. ‘There must be stairways,’ he said. ‘And floor above floor, until I reach the roof. If I climb long enough I must reach the roof, and then I can see where I am.’
The relief which he felt at having an idea to grip was convulsive, and the tears poured down his face. Then he began to walk, as steadily as he could, along the widest of the grey stone channels. For a considerable distance, it continued in a straight line and then began to take slow curves. The walls on either side were featureless, the ceiling also. Not so much as a cobweb gave interest to the barren surfaces. All at once, after a sharper curve than usual the passage sub-divided into five narrow fingers, and all the child’s terrors returned. Was he to return to the hollow silences from which he had come? He could not turn back. He could not.
In desperation he leaned against the wall and closed his eyes and it was then that he heard the first sound – that was not of his own making. The first sound since he had slid into the darkness behind the remote statue. He did not jerk at the shock of it but became rigid so that he was unobserved by the raven when it appeared from the darkness of one of the narrow passageways. It walked with a sedate and self-absorbed air to within a few feet of Titus, when it lowered its big head and let fall from its beak a silver bracelet. But only for a moment, for directly it had pecked at the feathers of its breast it lifted up the bracelet and continued for a few paces before hopping, rather clumsily, upon an outcrop of the wall and thence to a larger shelf. Very gradually Titus altered the direction of his head so that he could observe it, this living thing. But at the first movement of his head, tentative as it had been, the bird, with a loud and throaty cry and a rattle of black wings, was, all in a moment, in the air, and a fraction of a second later had disappeared down the dark and narrow corridor from which it had so recently paced forth.
Titus at once decided to follow it: not because he wished to see more of the raven, but because the bird was to him a sign of the outer world. There was more than a chance that in returning to this inhospitable corridor, the raven was returning, indirectly, to the open air, and the woods and the wide sky.
As Titus followed, the darkness grew more profound with every step and he began to realize that he was moving under the earth, for the roots of trees grew through the roof and the loam of the walls, and the smell of decay was thick in the air.
Had his fear and horror of the silent halls from which he had so recently escaped been less real he would even now have turned about in the constricted space and made his way back to the hollow nightmare from which he had come. For there seemed no end to this black and stifling tunnel.
At first he had been able to walk upright, but that was long ago. He was now forced, for long periods at a time, to crawl, the smell of the bad earth thick in his face. But for equally long stretches of time the tunnel would widen, and he was able to stumble forwards, his body comparatively upright, until the roof would lower itself again and he would be filled with the fear of suffocation.
There was no light at all. He had all but lost hope that he would ever come out of this horrible experience alive. Had it not been that to keep moving was less frightening than to remain crouched in the darkness Titus would have been tempted to cease forcing his tired body onwards hour after hour, for he had little strength and spirit left.
But at long last when he had no longer the vitality to feel any excitement or relief, so sick he was with fear and exhaustion, he saw ahead of him, as in a dream, a dim, rough-margined opening of light, darkly fringed with coarse weeds and grasses, and he knew, in a flat and colourless way that he would not die in the dark tunnel; that the hollow halls were a nightmare of the past and that the most he had to fear was the punishment he would receive on returning to the castle.
When he had dragged himself from the tunnel’s weedy mouth and had climbed the bank in which the opening gaped, he saw far away to the north and to the west the tower’d outline of his ancient home.
TWENTY-SEVEN
If the success of a hostess is in any way dependent upon the lavishness of her preparation for the soirée she proposes; upon her outlook, on the almost insane attention which she gives to detail and upon a wealth of forethought, then, theoretically at least, Irma Prunesquallor could look ahead to something that would correspond to those glimpses that came
to her in the darkness, when she lay half asleep and saw herself surrounded by a riotous throng of males battling for her hand, which she, the cynosure, swayed coquettishly upon her silk-swaddled pelvis.
If the microscopic overhaul to which she was subjecting her person, her skin, her hair, her dresses and her jewellery gave ground for the belief that so much passionate industry must necessarily wake and rescue a kind of beauty from where it had for so long been immured in her; wake it by a kind of surprise attack; a bombardment of her tall angular day – then, there was no need for Irma to have any fears upon the score of her attraction. She would be ravishing. She would set a new kind of standard in magnetism. After all she had worked for it.
Having tried on seventeen necklaces and decided upon no necklace at all, so that the full length of her white throat might dip, bridle and sway like a swan’s in an absolute freedom of movement, she crossed to the door of her dressing room and, hearing a footstep in the hall below, she could not resist crying out ‘Alfred! Alfred! Only three days more, my dear. Only three days more! Alfred! Are you there?’
But there was no reply.
The step she had heard was Steerpike’s, who, knowing that the doctor was attending a case in the south kitchen where a rôtier had slipped on a piece of lard and splintered his shoulder-blade, had taken the opportunity which he had for some time been waiting for and climbed through the Doctor’s dispensary window, filled a bottle with poison, and, having stowed it away in a deep pocket, decided to leave by the front door with an assortment of explanations in his hand from which to choose were he to be discovered in the hall. Why had there been no answer to his knocking? he would say. Why did they leave the front door open? Where was Dr Prunesquallor? and so on.
But he met no one and took no notice of Irma’s cry.
When he got back to his room he poured the poison into a beautiful little cut-glass vessel, placed it against the light of the window where it shone. Then he stood back from it with his head on one side, stepped forward again to move it a little to the left, in the interest of symmetry, and then returning to the centre of the room ran his tongue along his thin lips as he peered with his eyebrows at the little flask of death. Suddenly he stretched his arms out on either side, the fingers splayed like starfish as though he were wakening them to a kind of hypersentience of tingling life.
Then, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, he lowered his hands to the ground, threw up his slender legs and began to perambulate the room on the palms of his hands with the peculiarly stilted, rolling and predatory gait of a starling.
TWENTY-EIGHT
It was on the following afternoon that Mrs Slagg died. She was found lying upon her bed, towards evening, like a little grubby doll. The black dress was awry as though she had struggled. Her hands were clasped at her shrunken breast. It was hard to imagine that the broken thing had once been new; that those withered, waxen cheeks had been fresh and tinted. That her eyes had long ago glinted with laughter. For she had been sprightly once. A vivacious pert little creature. Bright as a bird.
And here she lay. It was as though the doll-sized body had been thrown aside as too old and decrepit to be of any further use.
Fuchsia, directly she had been told, rushed to the small room that she knew so well.
But the doll on the bed was no longer her nurse. It was not Nannie Slagg, that little motionless bundle. It was something else. Fuchsia closed her eyes and the poignantly familiar image of her old nurse who had been the nearest thing to a mother that Fuchsia had ever known, swam through her mind in a gush of memory.
It was in her to turn again to the bed and to take the beloved relic in her arms in a passion of love, but she could not. She could not. And she did not cry. Something, for all the vividness of her memory, had gone dead in her. She stared again at the shell of all that had nursed her, adored her, smacked her and maddened her.
In her ears, the peevish voice kept crying – ‘Oh my weak heart, how could they? How could they? Anyone would think I didn’t know my place.’
Turning suddenly from the bed Fuchsia saw for the first time that she had not been alone in the room. Dr Prunesquallor was standing by the door. Involuntarily she turned to him, raising her eyes to his odd yet strangely compassionate features.
He took a step towards her. ‘Fuchsia, my dearest child,’ he said. ‘Let us go together.’
‘O doctor,’ she said. ‘I don’t feel anything. Am I wicked, Doctor Prune? I don’t understand.’
The door was suddenly filled by the figure of the Countess who, although she stared at her daughter and at the doctor, did not appear to realize who they were, for no expression appeared on her big pale face. She was carrying over her arm a shawl of rare lace. She moved forward treading heavily on the bare boards. When she reached the bed she gazed for a moment as though transfixed, at the pathetic sight below her, and then, spreading the beautiful black shawl over the body, she turned and left the room.
Prunesquallor, taking Fuchsia’s hands, led her through the door which he closed behind them.
‘Fuchsia dear,’ he said as they began to move together down the corridor, ‘have you heard anything of Titus?’
She stopped dead and let go the doctor’s hand. ‘No,’ she said, ‘and if nobody finds him I will kill myself.’
‘Tut, tut, tut, my little threatener,’ said Prunesquallor. ‘What a tedious thing to say. And you such an original girl. As though Titus won’t reappear like a jack-in-the-box, by all that’s typical so he will!’
‘He must! He must!’ cried Fuchsia, and then she began to weep uncontrollably while the Doctor held her against his side and dabbed her flushed cheeks with his immaculate handkerchief.
TWENTY-NINE
Nannie Slagg’s funeral was so simple as to appear almost off-hand; but this seemingly casual dispatch of the old lady’s relics bore no relation to the inherent pathos of the occasion. The gathering at the graveside was out of all proportion to the number of friends on whom, in her lifetime, she would ever have dared to count. For she had become, in her old age, a kind of legend. No one had troubled to see her. She had been deserted in her declining years. But it had been tacitly assumed that she would live for ever. That she would no more pass out of the castle’s life than that the Tower of Flints would pass from Gormenghast to leave a gap in the skyline, a gap never again to be filled.
And so, at her funeral, the majority of the mourners were gathered there, to pay their respects to the memory not so much of Mrs Slagg, as to the legend which the tiny creature had, all unwittingly, allowed to grow about her.
It had been impossible for the two bearers to carry the small coffin across their shoulders, for this necessitated so close a formation one behind the other, that they could not walk without tripping one another up. The little box was eventually carried in one hand by the leading mute, while his colleague, with a finger placed on the lid, to prevent it from swaying, walked to one side and a little to the rear.
The bearer, as he strode along, might have been carrying a bird-cage as he paced his way to the Retainers’ Graveyard. From time to time the man would turn his eyes with a childish, puzzled expression to the box he carried as though to reassure himself that he was doing what was expected of him. He could not help feeling that something was missing.
The mourners led by Barquentine came behind, followed by the Countess, at some distance. She made no effort to keep pace with the rapid, jerking progress of the cripple. She moved ponderously, her eyes on the ground. Fuchsia and Titus followed, Titus having been released from the Fort for the funeral.
With the nightmare memory of his recent adventure filling his mind he moved in a trance, waking from time to time to wonder at this new manifestation of life’s incalculable strangeness – the little box ahead of him, the sunshine playing over the head of Gormenghast Mountain, where it rose, with unbelievable solidity, ahead, like a challenge, on the skyline.
It crowned a region that had become a part of his imaginativ
e being, a region where an exile moved like a stick-insect, through a wilderness of trees, and where, phantom or human, he knew not which, something else was, at this moment, floating again, as he had seen it float before, like a leaf, in the shape of a girl. A girl. Suddenly he broke from his trance at Fuchsia’s side.
The word and the idea had fused into something fire-like. Suddenly the slight and floating enigma of the glade had taken on a sex, had become particularized, had woken in him a sensation of excitement that was new to him. Wide awake, all at once, he was at the same time plunged even deeper into a cloudland of symbols to which he had no key. And she was there – there, ahead of him. He could see, far away, the very forest roof that rustled above her.
The figures that moved ahead of him, Barquentine, his mother, and the men with the little box, were less real than the startling confusion of his heart.
He had come to a halt in a valley filled with mounds. Fuchsia was holding his hand. The crowd was all about him. A figure in a hood was scattering red dust into a little trench. A voice was intoning. The words meant nothing to him. He was adrift.
That same evening, Titus lay wide-eyed in the darkness and stared with unseeing eyes at the enormous shadows of two boys as they fought a mock battle of grotesque dimensions upon an oblong of light cast upon the dormitory wall. And while he gazed abstractedly at the cut and thrust of the shadow-monsters, his sister Fuchsia was crossing to the Doctor’s house.
‘Can I talk to you, Doctor?’ she asked as he opened the door to her. ‘I know it isn’t long since you had to bear with me, and …’ but Prunesquallor, putting his finger to his lips, silenced her and then drew her back into a shadow of the hall, for Irma was opening the door of the sitting-room.
‘Alfred,’ came the cry, ‘what is it, Alfred? I said what is it?’
‘The merest nothing, my love,’ trilled the Doctor. ‘I must get that hank of ivy torn up by its very roots in the morning.’
