by Mervyn Peake
And now began the threading of a maze so labyrinthine as to suggest that the builders of these sunless walls had been ordered to construct a maze for no other purpose than to torture the mind and freeze the memory. It was no wonder that Flay had never done more in those past days, than stumble blindly through so tortuous a region. And yet, in spite of the confusion, and the necessity for his concentrating upon keeping Steerpike in view, his instincts were working upon their own and they told him that they were returning by devious and contradictory roads to the proximity of the cold brick corridor from which they had started. Steerpike had slowed his pace. His head hung forward on his chest, not dejectedly but with an air of abstraction. His feet moved even slower, until he was virtually loitering. When he came to flights of shallow stairs he descended with a kind of loose-jointed and collapsing motion of the legs – as though his body had forgotten its own existence. He wandered round corners with a dream-like motion, his body at so strange an angle of relaxation as to be almost dangerous.
When at last he came to a certain door he straightened himself with a jerk – stretched out his fingers and became on the instant all awareness. He made a sound between his teeth and the monkey scrambled from the folds of his cape and sat upon his shoulder, the feather in its hat nodding to and fro. For a moment as the monkey turned his head, and its black eyes peered from that small and wrinkled face, peered back along the way it had come, the Doctor thought he had been seen. But he did not draw back his head or make any movement and the creature with its naked face and its costume of coloured diamonds scratched itself and turned away at last. Only then did the Doctor and his companions withdraw themselves even more deeply into the shadows.
Meanwhile Steerpike sorted out a key from a bunch in his pocket and after pausing a moment or two turned it with difficulty in the lock. But he did not touch the handle of the door. He turned his back upon it and gazed along the way he had come, tapping his teeth with his thumb nail.
It was obvious that for some reason best known to himself he was chary of walking in. The monkey on his shoulder shifted its position and in doing so its long tail tapped lightly across Steerpike’s face. But that was seemingly enough to irritate its master, for the little beast was flung to the floor where it crouched and whimpered.
As Steerpike turned his eyes from his bruised plaything his attention was caught by sprawling heaps of rubbish, stones and broken timbers that lay a little way along the side passage. As he stared at them his anger drained from his face, and his features became set again and the corner of his lips lifted into a dead line.
For a moment or two the three watchers feared that they had lost him for he moved suddenly out of their range of vision. It was fortunate for them that the monkey remained where it was, outside the door where it nursed its bruised forearm. Had they followed Steerpike they would at once have met him face to face, for he returned within a minute with a long broken pole.
And now began an operation that completely baffled the hidden spectators. With extreme care Steerpike turned the handle and released the latch. The door was now free but was not yet opened by so much as a quarter of an inch. He stood back from it, and holding the broken pole like a battering ram, pushed gently at the black wooden panel of the mysterious door. It moved upon its hinges with no great difficulty and Steerpike was able to obtain a view of a section of the room beyond. For a little while he held the pole motionless as he stared along its length and through the narrow opening. It was obvious that what he saw concerned him deeply. He rose upon his toes. He cocked his head to one side. Then he withdrew the pole and laid it on the ground at his feet. It was now, at this same moment, as he took a scarf from his pocket and tied it about his face so that only his eyes were visible, that the Doctor, Flay and Titus became conscious of a sickly and musty odour. But the strange performance that was going on before their eyes, so riveted their attention that at first they hardly noticed it. Again Steerpike raised the pole and pushing at the panels with the utmost caution was able momentarily to see more and more of the room which he was evidently so anxious to inspect. When the door was sufficiently ajar to admit the entry of a man, he paused.
As he did so the monkey, whose feathered hat had fallen in the dust, began to make its inquisitive way to the open door. It was evident that its arm was hurting it. Once or twice, in spite of its eagerness to explore the room beyond the door, it glanced apprehensively over its shoulder at Steerpike, baring its teeth in a nervous grimace. But its resilient nature became dominant and springing off its back legs it clung to the door handle with its nervous little hands. Again Steerpike pressed upon the long pole, this time with more force, and as the door swung ajar the monkey, swinging with it, let go and dropped upon the great mouldering carpet that lay within. But it did not drop alone, for no sooner had its four feet touched the ground than with a sickening thud an axe-head fell from high above the door, severing the long tail of the monkey as it buried its murderous edge in the floor. The shrill and appallingly human scream of the little creature rang through the hollow district, echoing and re-echoing the agony of that moment, while, beside itself with pain, surprise and rage, it tore about the huge room that lay spread before it, leaping from chair to chair, from window-sill to mantelpiece, from cupboard to cupboard, scattering vases, lamps and small objects of all kinds to left and right in its wild circuits.
Into this room, now spattered with the monkey’s blood, Steerpike advanced at once. There was no longer any caution in his bearing. He gave the careering creature not so much as a single glance. Had he done so he might have noticed that on seeing him the monkey halted its flight and was crouched quivering upon the back of a chair. Its eyes were upon him and in them was a moist and lethal hatred, as though all the spleen and gall of the vile tropics was floating there beneath the small grey eyelids. Its pain and its humiliation were laid at the door of the man who had flung it from his shoulder. As it watched its master it bared its teeth and wrung its hands together. The blood dripped freely from the stump of its tail. What had happened to the monkey – what had caused its harrowing outcry was, of course, unknown to Titus, the Doctor and Mr Flay. But the urgency of that human cry lifted them out of their hiding places, and brought them to the door. They saw at once that Steerpike had left this first room and had presumably descended the three or four steps that led to a second apartment. But the monkey caught sight of them at once and ran towards them. When it reached Titus it rose to its back legs and began a series of grimaces, which in any other circumstances would have been amusing enough, but were at that moment almost heartbreaking. But they had no time for it. Too much was at stake. Their nerves were at full stretch. They were all but exhausted and above all they were still in the invidious position of following a man without any warrant or rational excuse. Nevertheless the last half-hour had intensified their suspicions to a high degree. They knew in their hearts that they had been right to follow him. They were now prepared for anything that might unfold.
Their apprehension had grown so dark, their speculation so fantastic that when they crept to the second door and peered into the apartment below, and when they saw in the centre of the great carpet that filled the room the two skeletons lying side by side in their fast decaying dresses of imperial purple, their pulses beat no faster. Their emotions had been over-strained and had gone limp. But their brains raced.
The Doctor, who had been holding his silk handkerchief across his face, had known for some while that there was death in the air. He was also the first to know that they were looking at all that was left of Cora and Clarice Groan. Titus had no idea that he was staring at his aunts. He was simply looking at skeletons. He had never seen skeletons before.
It was a moment or two before Mr Flay remembered the invariable purple of the Twins. That there had been foul play was immediately apparent to them all.
The remoteness of these rooms from the castle; the double-death; the windowless walls; the possession by Steerpike of a key and his familiarity with t
he corridors of approach – and more than all this, his present behaviour. For as they watched him the young man, never doubting the security of his solitude, began to behave in a way which could only be interpreted by those who watched him as a form of madness, or if not madness, something so eccentric as to tread its arbitrary borderland.
Steerpike was aware, directly he had entered the terrible room, that he was behaving strangely. He could have stopped himself at any moment. But to have stopped himself would have been to have stopped a valve – to have bottled up something which would have clamoured for release. For Steerpike was anything but inhibited. His control that had so seldom broken had never frustrated him. In one way that this new expression had need of an outlet he gave himself up to whatever his blood dictated. He was watching himself, but only so that he should miss nothing. He was the vehicle through which the gods were working. The dim primordial gods of power and blood.
There at his feet were the decomposing relics, the purple of their dresses hanging over the ribs in clotted folds, the skulls protruding horribly, their sockets staring at the ceiling. No less than had been their vanished faces, these skulls were identical save that across a single socket some spider, fastidious in his craftsmanship, had spun a delicate web. At its centre struggled a fly, so that in a way a kind of animation had come to either Cora or to Clarice.
In some kind of way the Doctor, though he could not understand, was able to gain an inkling as to what was happening in Steerpike’s mind, as the skewbald homicide began to strut like a cockerel about the bodies of the women he had imprisoned, humiliated and starved to death. The Doctor could see that Steerpike was by no means mad in any accepted sense for every now and then he would repeat a number of high stepping paces as though to perfect them. It was as though he were identifying himself with some archetypal warrior, or fiend. A fiend, which although it had no sense of humour, had a ghastly gaiety – a kind of lethal lightness that struck at the very heart of the humanities; struck at it, darted at it, played about it jabbing here and there, as though with a blade of speargrass.
When Flay and the Doctor, in their different ways, saw what was happening in the room they were both aware that Titus should not be with them. He was no child, but this was no scene for a boy. But there was nothing they could do. For them to separate would be criminally unwise. He could never in any event have found his way back alone. That as yet there had been no movement on their part to disturb the criminal was fortunate, but this deathly silence, in which the only sound was that of Steerpike’s footsteps, could not last for ever.
The Doctor was appalled, but at the same time, as a man of high intelligence and curiosity he was fascinated by what he saw. Not so Flay. An eccentric himself he despised and abhorred any form of eccentricity in others and what he was now witnessing had the effect of all but blinding him with a kind of bourgeois rage. Only in one thing was he happy – that the upstart had unmasked himself and that from now onwards the battle was joined in earnest.
His small eyes were fixed upon his enemy. His neck was thrust out like a turtle’s. His long beard trembled as it hung forward on his chest. His forest knife shook in his hand.
It was not the only weapon that was shaking. The short heavy poker in Titus’ clenched fist was far from steady. The young earl was quite frankly terrified by what he saw. An area of solid ground had given way beneath his feet and he had fallen into an underworld of which he had had no conception. A place where a man can pace like a cock about the ribs and skulls of his victims. A place where the air was rank with their corruption.
The Doctor was gripping his arm to steady him, and the grip tightened suddenly. Steerpike had stopped for a moment to re-tie his shoelace. When this was completed he rose from his knee and stood on tip-toe where he remained poised, his head thrown back. Then he dropped his heels and flexed his knees and at the same time turning his toes outwards, he raised his arms to his side, and with his elbows bent at right angles, he began to stamp, his fists clenched at the height of his shoulders. The sound of his feet was very loud and close.
He was in the posture of some earthish dancer, but he soon tired of this strange display – this throw-back to some savage rite of the world’s infancy. He had given himself up to it for those few moments, in the way that an artist can be the ignorant agent of something far greater and deeper than his conscious mind could ever understand. But as he strutted, his knees bent, his feet turned outwards, his body and head erect, his elbows crooked, and his hands clenched, he had enjoyed the novelty of what he was doing. He was amused at this peculiar need of his body; that it wished to stamp, to strut, to rear on tip-toes, to sink upon the heels – and all because he was a murderer – all this intrigued him, titillating his brain, so that, now, as he ceased to stamp, and sank into a dusty chair, the muscles of his throat went through the contractions that form laughter – but no sound came.
He shut his eyes, and in the darkness, it seemed to him that he was in peril and he opened them again with a start and sat forward in his chair, glancing about the room. This time as his gaze returned to the skeletons he was revolted. Not with what he had done to bring them to this state – but that they should pollute this room; that they should show him their ugly skulls and hollow bones.
He rose from his chair in anger. But he knew in his heart that he was not angry with them. He was enraged with himself. For what had seemed amusing a few moments ago was now a source, almost of fear to him. In looking back and seeing himself strutting like a cock about their bodies, he realized that he had been close to lunacy. This was the first time that any such thought had entered his head, and to dismiss it he crowed like a cock. He was not afraid of strutting; he had known what he was doing; to prove it he would crow and crow again. Not that he wished to do so, but to prove that he could stop whenever he wanted, and start when he wished to, and be all the while in complete control of himself, for there was no madness in him.
What he did not realize was that the death of Barquentine, and the nightmare of the fire and the vile waters of the moat and the long fever that followed had made a difference to him. Whatever he now believed about himself was based on the assumption that he was the same Steerpike as his former self of a few years earlier. But he was no longer that youth. The fire had burned a part of him away. Something of him was drowned for ever in the waters of the moat. His daring was no longer a thing that fanned itself abroad; it had contracted into a fist of brimstone.
He was meaner, more irritable, more impatient for the ultimate power which could only be his through the elimination of all rivals; and if he had ever had any scruples, any love at all for even a monkey, a book, or a sword-hilt, all this, and even this, had been cauterized and drowned away.
As he had entered this second apartment, he had propped the broken pole against the wall on his left. He now felt himself gravitating towards it. He no longer stamped or strutted. He was himself again, or perhaps he had ceased to be himself. At any rate, the three watchers recognized again that familiar walk, with the shoulders hunched and the cat-like footsteps. When he reached the pole he ran his hand along its side. The scarf was still about his face. His dark red eyes were like small circular pits.
As his hand strayed over the surface of the pole, rather as a pianist will fondle a keyboard, his fingers came across a fissure in the wood, and as they played about it they found how easy it would be to tear from the beam a long and narrow splinter. Abstractedly, hardly knowing that he was doing it, a score of disquieting impressions had taken the place of the surety within him, he prised the splinter away, using, at the last, the whole strength of his arm as it arched, in its tension, from the pole. He did not look at it, and he was about to throw it away, for the tearing of it from the pole had been his only interest, when, his gaze having returned to the skeletons, he wandered towards them, and running the long resilient splinter along their ribs, as a child might run a stick along a railing, he heard the bone-notes of an instrument.
For a few minutes
he spent his time in this way, creating by a series of taps and runs, a kind of percussive rhythm in key with his mood.
But he was tiring of the place. He had returned in order to satisfy his eyes that the Twins were truly dead, and he had stayed longer than he had intended. Now he flung the splinter away and, kneeling, unclasped the strings of pearls that hung about the vertebrae. Rising, he dropped them into his pocket and made at once for the three steps that led to the upper room and as he did so Mr Flay stepped out from his hiding place.
The effect upon Steerpike was electric. He bounded backwards, with a leap like the leap of a dancer, his cloak swirling about him and his thin lips parted in a murderous snarl of amazement.
There was no longer any case of symbolism. The strutting and the stamping were nothing to the fierce reality of that leap which sent him, as though from a springboard, backwards through the air.
Quick as a reflex, even at the height of his elevation, he felt for his knife. Before he landed he knew that he was unmasked. That from now onwards, unless he slew the bearded figure, on the instant, he would be on the run. In a flash he saw the life of a fugitive spread out before him.
It was only as he landed that he realized at whom he was looking. He had not seen Flay for many years and had supposed him dead. The beard had altered him. But now he knew him, and this knowledge did nothing to stay his hand. Of all men, Flay would have the least sympathy for a rebel.
He had found his knife, had balanced it upon the palm of his hand and had drawn back his right arm when he saw the Doctor and Titus.
The boy was white. The poker shook in his hand but his teeth were gritted. A terrible sickness had hold of him. He was in a nightmare. The last sixty minutes had added more than an hour to his age.
The Doctor was pale also. His face had lost all trace of its habitual drollery. It was a face cut out of marble, strangely proportioned but refined and determined.
