by Mervyn Peake
Fighting down his fear that were he to move his eyes from them, even for a second, he would fall in a peculiar way into some trap, he swung himself about and in a moment had seen a great axe dangling a dozen feet above him, and the complex network of cords and strings which, like a spider’s web in the darkness of the upper air, held in position the cold and grizzly weight of the steel head.
With a backward leap the young man was through the doorway. Without a pause he slammed the door and before he had turned the key in the lock he had heard the thud as the head of the axe buried itself in that part of the floor where he had been standing.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Steerpike’s return to the castle’s heart was rapid and purposeful. A pale sun like a ball of pollen was hung aloft an empty and faded sky, and as he sped below it his shadow sped with him, rippling over the cobbles of great squares, or cruising alongside, upright, where at his elbow the lit and attenuate walls threw back the pallid light. For all that within its boundaries, this shadow held nothing but the uniform blankness of its tone, yet it seemed every whit as predatory and meaningful as the body that cast it – the body, that with so many aids to expressiveness within the moving outline, from the pallor of the young man and the dark red colour of his eyes, to the indefinable expressions of lip and eye, was drawing nearer at every step to a tryst of his own making.
The sun was blocked away. For a few minutes the shadow disappeared like the evil dream of some sleeper who on waking finds the substance of his nightmare standing beside his bed – for Steerpike was there, turning the corners, threading the mazes, gliding down slopes of stone or flights of rotten wood. And yet it was strange that with all the vibrancy that lay packed within the margins of his frame, yet his shadow when it reappeared reaffirmed its self-sufficiency and richness as a scabbard for malignity. Why should this be – why with certain slender proportions and certain tricks of movement should a sense of darkness be evoked? Shadows more terrible and grotesque than Steerpike’s gave no such feeling. They moved across their walls bloated or spidery with a comparative innocence. It was as though a shadow had a heart – a heart where blood was drawn from the margins of a world of less substance than air. A world of darkness whose very existence depended upon its enemy, the light.
And there it was; there it slid, this particular shadow – from wall to wall, from floor to floor, the shoulders a little high, but not unduly, the head cocked, not to one or other side, but forward. In an open space it paled as it moved over dried earth, for the sun weakened – and then it fainted away altogether as the fringe of a cloud half the size of the sky moved over the sun.
Almost at once the rain began to fall, and the air yet further darkened. Nor was this darkening enough, for beneath the expanse of the cloud that moved inexorably to the north, dragging behind it miles and miles of what looked like filthy linen, beneath this expanse, yet another, of similar hugeness, but swifter, began to overtake it from beneath, and when this lower continent of cloud began to pass over that part of the sky where the sun had lately been shining, then something very strange made itself felt at once.
A darkness almost unprecedented had closed down over Gormenghast. Steerpike glancing left and right could see the lights begin to burn in scores of windows. It was too dark to see what was happening above, but judging from a still deepening of the pall, yet further clouds, thick and rain-charged, must have slid across the sky to form the lowest of three viewless and enormous layers.
By now the rain was loud on the roofs, was flooding along the gutterings, gurgling in crannies and brimming the thousand irregular cavities that the centuries had formed among the crumbling stones. The advance of these weltering clouds had been so rapid that Steerpike had not entirely escaped the downpour, but it was not for more than a few moments that the rain beat on his head and shoulders, for, running through the unnatural darkness to the nearest of the lighted windows, he found himself in a part of the castle that he remembered. From here he could make the rest of the journey under cover.
The premature darkness was peculiarly oppressive. As Steerpike made his way through the lighted corridors he noticed how at the main windows there were groups gathered, and how the faces that peered out into the false night wore expressions of perplexity and apprehension. It was a freak of nature, and no more, that the world had been swathed away from the westering sun as though with bandages, layer upon layer, until the air was stifled. Yet it seemed as though the sense of oppression which the darkness had ushered in had more than a material explanation.
As though to fight back against the circumscribing darkness the hierophants had lighted every available lantern, burner, candle and lamp, and had even improvised an extraordinary variety of reflectors, of tin and glass, and even trays of gold and plates of burnished copper. Long before any message could have been couriered across the body of Gormenghast, there was not a limb, not a digit that had not responded to the universal sense of suffocation, not the merest finger joint of stone that had not set itself alight.
Countless candles dribbled with hot wax, and their flames, like little flags, fluttered in the uncharted currents of air. Thousands of lamps, naked, or shuttered behind coloured glass, burned with their glows of purple, amber, grass-green, blue, blood red and every grey. The walls of Gormenghast were like the walls of paradise or the walls of an inferno. The colours were devilish or angelical according to the colour of the mind that watched them. They swam, those walls, with the hues of hell, with the tints of Zion. The breasts of the plum-aged seraphim; the scales of Satan.
And Steerpike, moving rapidly through these varying flushes, could hear the loudening of the rain. He had come to something very like an isthmus – a corridor with circular windows on either side that gave upon the outer darkness. This arcade, or cover-way – this isthmus that joined together one great mass of sprawling masonry to another, was illumined along its considerable length at three more or less regular intervals by firstly a great age-green oil lamp with an enormous wick as wide as a sheep’s tongue. The glass globe that fitted over it was appallingly ugly; a fluted thing, a piece missing from its lower lip. But its colour was something apart – or rather the colour of the glass when lit from behind, as it now was. To say it was indigo gives no idea of its depth and richness, nor of the underwater or cavernous glow that filled that part of the arcade with its aura.
In their different ways the other two lamps, with their globe of sullen crimson and iceberg green, made within the orbits of their influence, arenas no less theatrical. The glazed and circular windows, dark as jet, were yet not featureless. Across the blind blackness of those flanking eyes the strands of rain which appeared not to move but to be stretched across the inky portholes like harp strings – these strands, these strings of water burned blue, beyond the glass, burned crimson, burned green, for the lamplight stained them. And in the stain was something serpentine – something poisonous, exotic, feverish and merciless; the colours were the colours of the sea-snake, and beyond the windows on either hand, was the long-drawn hiss of the reptilian rain.
And while Steerpike sped along this covered-way, the shadow that he cast changed colour. Sometimes it was before him as though eager to arrive at some rendezvous before the body of its caster; and sometimes it followed him, sliding at his heels, dogging him, changing its dark colour as it flowed.
With the isthmus behind him, and a continent of stone once more about him, a continent into whose fastnesses he moved the deeper with every step and with every breath he took, Steerpike banished from his mind every thought of the Twins and of their behaviour. His mind had been largely taken up with conjecture as to the cause of their insurrection, and with tentative plans for their disposal.
But there were matters more pressing and one matter in particular. With enviable ease he emptied his mind of their ladyships and filled it with Barquentine.
His shadow moved upon his right hand. It was climbing a staircase. It crossed a landing. It descended three steps. It followed for a
short while at its maker’s heels and then overtook him. It was at his elbow when it suddenly deepened its tone and grew up the side of the wall until the shadow-head twelve feet above the ground, pursued its lofty way, the profile undulating from time to time, when it was forced to float across the murky webs that choked the junction of wall and ceiling.
And then the giant shade began to shrivel, and as it descended it moved a little forward of its caster, until finally it was a thick and stunted thing – a malformation, intangible, terrible, that led the way towards those rooms where its immediate journey could, for a little while, be ended.
THIRTY-NINE
Barquentine in his room sat with his withered leg drawn up to his chin. His hair, dirty as a fly-blown web, hung about his face, dry and lifeless. His skin, equally filthy, with its silted fissures, its cheese-like cracks and discolorations, was dry also – an arid terrain, dead it seemed, and waterless as the moon, and yet, at its centre those malignant lakes, his vile and brimming eyes.
Outside the broken window at the far end of the room lay stretched the stagnant waters of the moat.
He had been sitting there, his only leg drawn up to his face, his crutch leaning against the back of his chair, his hands clasped about his knee, a hank of his beard between his teeth – he had been sitting there, for over an hour. On the table before him at least a dozen books lay spread; books of ritual and precedence, books of cross-reference, ciphers and secret papers. But his eyes were not on them. No less ruthless for being out of focus and gleaming wetly in their dry sockets, they could not see that a shadow had entered the room – that intangible as air, yet graphic to a degree, it had reared itself against high tiers of books – books of all shapes and in every stage of dilapidation, that glimmered in the bad light save where this shadow lay athwart them, black as a shade from hell.
And while he sat there, what was he thinking of, this wrinkled and filthy dwarf?
He was thinking of how a change had come over the workings of Gormenghast – over the workings of its heart and the temper of its brain. Something so subtle that he could in no way fix upon it. Something that was not to be located in the normal way of his thinking yet something which, nevertheless, was filling his nostrils with its odour. He knew it to be evil, and what was evil in the eyes of Barquentine was anything that smelt of insurrection, anything that challenged, or worked to undo the ancient procedures.
Gormenghast was not what it was. He knew it. There was devilry somewhere among these cold stones. And yet he could not put his finger upon the spot. He could not say what it was that was now so different. It was not that he was an old man. He was not sentimental about the days of his youth. They had been dark and loveless. But he had no pity for himself. He had only this blind, passionate and cruel love for the dead letter of the castle’s law. He loved it with a love as hot as his hate. For the members of the Groan line itself he had less regard than for the meanest and drearest of the rituals that it was their destiny to perform. Only in so far as they were symbols did he bow his ragged head. He had no love for Titus – only for his significance as the last of the links in the great chain. There was something about the way the boy moved … a restlessness, an independence, that galled him. It was almost as though this heir to a world of towers had learned of other climes, of warm, clandestine lands, and that the febrile and erratic movements of the child’s limbs were the reflection of what lived and throve in his imagination. It was as though his brain, in regions remote and seductive, was sending its unsettling messages to the small bones, to the tissues of the boy, so that there was, in his movements, something remote and ominous.
But Barquentine, knowing that the seventy-seventh earl had never moved as far as a day’s journey from his birthplace, spat, as it were, these reflections from his puzzled brain. And yet the taste lingered. The taste of something acid; something rebellious. The young earl was too much himself. It was as though the child imagined he had a life of his own apart from the life of Gormenghast.
And he was not the only one. There was this Steerpike youth. A quick, useful disciple no doubt, but a danger, for that very reason. What was to be done about him? He had learned too much. He had opened books that were not for him to open and found his way about too rapidly. There was something about him that set him apart from the life of the place – something subtly foreign – something ulterior.
Barquentine shifted his body on the chair, growling with irritation both at the twinge which the altering of his position gave to his withered leg, and at the frustration of being unable to do more than gnaw at the fringe of his suspicions. He longed, as master of the Groan law, to take action, to stamp out, if necessary, a score of malcontents, but there was nothing clear – no tangible target – nothing definable upon which he could direct his fire. He only knew that were he to discover that Steerpike had in the smallest degree abused the grudging trust he had placed in him, then, bringing all his authority to bear, he would have the pallid snipe from the Tower of Flints – he would strike with the merciless venom of the fanatic for whom the world holds no gradations – only the blind extremes of black and white. To sin was to sin against Gormenghast. Evil and doubt were one. To doubt the sacred stones was to profane the godhead. And there was this evil somewhere – close but invisible. His sense caught a whiff of it – but as soon as he turned his brain as it were over the shoulder of his mind – it was gone – and there was nothing palpable – nothing but the hierophants – moving here and there, upon this business or that, and seemingly absorbed.
Was there no way for him either to snare this wandering evil and turn its face to the light or to quell his suspicions? For they were harmful, keeping him awake through the long night hours, nagging at him, as though the castle’s illness were his own.
‘By the blood of hell,’ he whispered, and his whisper was like grit – ‘I will search it out, though it hide like a bat in the vaults or a rat in the southern lofts.’
He scratched himself disgustingly, rumps and crutch, and again he shifted himself on the high chair.
It was then that the shadow that lay across the bookshelves moved a little. The shoulders appeared to rise as the whole silhouette shifted itself further from the door and the impalpable body of the thing rippled across a hundred leather spines.
Barquentine’s eyes took focus for a moment or two as they strayed over the documents on the table before him, and, unsolicited at the moment, the recollection of having once been married returned to him. What had happened to his wife he could not remember. He assumed that she had died.
He had no recollection of her face, but could remember – and perhaps it was the sight of the papers before him that had brought back the unwelcome memory – how, as she wept, she would, hardly knowing that she was doing so, make paper boats, which, wet with her tears and grimed from her cracked hands, she sailed across the harbour of her lap or left stranded about the floor or on the rope matting of her bed, in throngs like fallen leaves, wet, grimed and delicate, in scattered squadrons, a navy of grief and madness.
And then, with a start he remembered that she had borne him a son. Or was it she? It was over forty years since he had spoken to his child. He would be hard to find; but found he must be. All he remembered was that a birthmark took up most of the face and that the eyes were crossed.
With his mind cast back to earlier days, a number of pictures floated hesitantly before his eyes, and in all of them he saw himself as someone with his head perpetually raised – as someone on a level with men’s knees – as a target for jibes and scorn. He could see in the mind’s eye the growth of hatred; he could feel again his crutch being kicked from beneath him, and of the urchins hooting in his wake, ‘Rotten leg! rotten spine!’ ‘Ya! Ya! Barquentine!’
All that was over. He was feared now. Feared and hated.
With his back to the door and to the bookshelves he could not see that the shadow had moved again. He lifted his head and spat.
Picking up a piece of paper he began to mak
e a boat but he did not know what he was doing.
‘It has gone on long enough,’ he said to himself, – ‘too long, by the blood of hags. He must go. He is finished. Dead. Over. Done with. I must be alone, or the cock of the great Ape, I’ll jeopardize the Inner Secrets. He’ll have the keys off me with his bloody efficiency.’
And while he muttered in his own throat the shadow of the youth of whom he was speaking slid inexorably over the spines, and came to a stop a dozen feet from Barquentine, but the body of Steerpike was at the same moment immediately behind the cripple’s chair.
It had not been easy for the young man to decide in what way he would kill his master. He had many means at his disposal. His nocturnal visits to the Doctor’s dispensary had furnished him with a sinister array of poisons. His swordstick was almost too obviously efficacious. His catapult was no toy, but something lethal as a gun and silent as a sword. He knew of ways to break the neck with the edge of the palm, and he knew how to send a pen knife through the air with extraordinary precision. He had not, for nothing, spent an allotted number of minutes every morning and for several years in throwing his knife at the dummy in his bedroom.
But he was not interested merely in dispatching the old man.
He had to kill him in some way which left no trace: to dispose of the body and at the same time to mix pleasure and business in such a compound that neither was the weaker for the union. He had old scores to pay off. He had been spat upon and reviled by the withered cripple. To merely stop his life in the quickest way would be an empty climax – something to be ashamed of.
But what really happened and how Barquentine really died in Steerpike’s presence bore no relation to the plan which the young man had made.
