by Mervyn Peake
Cheeta, whose hand had been raised in a signal, now dropped it again and the shouting died away.
‘They want to see you,’ said Cheeta. ‘They are excited.’
‘Me?’ queried Titus. ‘Why me?’
‘Are you not Titus, the Seventy-Seventh Lord of Gormenghast?’
‘Am I? By heaven I don’t feel like it; not with you about.’
‘He must be tired to be so very rude,’ said a treacly voice.
‘He doesn’t know what he’s doing,’ said another.
‘Gormenghast indeed!’ said a third, with a titter. ‘The whole thing’s improbable you know.’
Cheeta’s high heel came down like a hammer on the instep of the last speaker. ‘My dear,’ she said, as though to distract attention from his cry, ‘those who have waited so long for the Party are drawing together. Everything is drawing together. And you will be our focus. A lord! A veritable lord!’
‘Hell gripe all bleeding lords. Give me my home!’ he cried.
The crowds were closing in, for there was something in the air; a chill; a menace; a horrible darkness that seemed to sweat itself out of the walls and the floor of the place. In the shuffling that followed the comparative silence, there was an undertone, almost of apprehension, unformulated as yet in their conscious minds, yet real in the prickle of their nerves. The banqueteers forsook their scented alcoves, and men of all stations withdrew from the outlying sectors, and drawn by an invisible agent, they drew ever closer to the roofless centre of the Black House.
It was not only these who were on the move. Cheeta had ordered a cluster of her personal friends to follow her (excluding her father, for he was in the forgotten room, where sat the star performers, biting their nails).
The band, with an imposing array of instruments swayed forward through the gloom, while Titus was borne forward on a human wave, struggling as he went.
It was a part of Cheeta’s plan that Titus should suffer acute alarm, not to say fear, and her delicate mouth (pursed like a tiny vermilion bud) registered a certain satisfaction as to the way things were going. For she was bent on his discomfiture and shame, and even more. Now was the time for Titus to climb the three steps to the throne … and he stumbled as he climbed. Now was the time for him to turn about; and now, for his wrists to be freed, and for the scarf to be plucked from his eyes and for Cheeta to cry … ‘Now!’
And now it was, for her voice, like a voice in a dungeon, awoke a string of echoes. Everything happened in the same split second. The scarves were whipped from Titus’ wrists and eyes. The band crashed into dreadful martial music. Titus sat down upon a throne. He could see nothing except the vague blur of the juniper fire. The crowds surged forward as lamps blazed out of the surrounding tree-tops. Everything took on another colour … another radiance. A clock struck midnight. The moon came out and so did the first of the apparitions.
ONE HUNDRED AND TWO
Under a light to strangle infants by, the great and horrible flower opened its bulbous petals one by one: a flower whose roots drew sustenance from the grey slime of the pit, and whose vile scent obscured the delicacy of the juniper. This flower was evil, and its bloom satanic, and though it was invisible its manifestations were on every side.
It was not the intrinsic and permanent mood of the Black House, although this alone was frightening enough, with the fungi like plates on the walls, and the sweat of the stones; it was not only this, but was this combined with the sense of a great conspiracy: a conspiracy of darkness, and decay: and yet of a diabolical ingenuity also; a setting against which the characters played out their parts in floodlight, as when predestined creatures are caught in a concentration of light so that they cannot move.
Then came Cheeta’s voice again, and this time it seemed to Titus that there was an edge to it he had never heard before.
‘Flood in the heliotrope.’ At this obscure demand the whole scene shuddered into another world of light; a weird and purplish suffusion, and for the first time, Titus, sitting bolt upright on his throne, felt a kind of palpable fear he had never experienced before.
Titus who had killed Steerpike in a war in deep ivy … Titus who had been lost in the underground tunnels of Gormenghast now trembled in the face of the unknown. He turned his head, but he could see no sign of Cheeta. Only a great throng of heliotrope heads … a world of watchers who stood as though waiting for him to stand and speak.
But where were the heads he knew? Apart from Cheeta, where was her father, the nondescript man with no hair?
It seemed they formed a kind of foreign terrain, as though of all that multitude there was not one who did not know him, yet for Titus there was not one to recognize.
About him, beyond the crowd, the walls were draped with flags. The flags that he half remembered. Torn flags; flags out of limbo. What was he doing here? What, O dearest God, was he doing? What were these shadows? What were these echoes? Where was a friend to grip him by the shoulder? Where was Muzzlehatch? Where was his friend? What was that sound like the purring of the tide? What was it that was purring if not cats?
The voice of Cheeta rose again. It was harsher with every order. The light changed and yet another mood more sinister than ever settled down upon the place, changing the quality of everything down to the least minutiae: down to the smallest frond in acid green.
Titus, his hands trembling, turned his face from the crowd, meaning to rise from the insufferable throne directly his dizziness passed by. Not only did he turn his face but his body also, for the faked green world before him was revolting to the soul.
Having turned he saw what he might never have seen, for perched along the back of the throne were seven owls, and at the same moment that he saw them there came a long-drawn hoot. It came from beyond the throne both near and far away, but as for the birds themselves they were filled with straw. Beyond the owls the darkness was lit and intersected by a filigree of webs as green as flame.
Titus, who was about to have risen to his feet, remained immobile as he stared at the brilliant mesh, and as he stared another wave of fear took hold of him.
Something, somehow, when he saw the owls, began cutting at his heart. At first there had been a quickening of excitement; he knew not why … a kind of thrill … of remembrance or of re-discovery. Was he returning to a realm he could understand? Had he travelled through time or space or both to reach this recrudescence of times gone by? Was he dreaming?
But this did not last long, this quickening of hope. He had not been asleep. He had not dreamed.
The only time he had dreamed was in his fever. It was then that he gave himself unwittingly to Cheeta’s mercy.
Powerless to find satisfaction, though brilliant in her power to organize, Cheeta began to issue orders to a small group of the élite. These gentlemen turned at once to their work, which was to clear a passage from the throne, to where, in a dark hall, there lurked the Twelve.
And then, all at once she was beside him, her inscrutable little head staring up at him. Her perfect mouth quivering as though she wished to be kissed.
‘You have been so quiet and so patient,’ she said. ‘It is almost as though you were alive. I have brought your toys, you see. I haven’t forgotten anything. Look, Titus… look at the floor. It is covered with rusty chains. Look at the coloured roots … and see … O Titus, see the foliage of the trees. Was Gormenghast forest ever so green as these bright branches?’
Titus tried to rise to his feet, but a sickness lay over his heart like a weight.
She lifted her head again as a creature might do as it harkened. But the voice was no longer merely husky; it was grit …
‘Let in the night,’ she cried, in this new voice.
And so the viridian died and the moon came into its own, and a hundred forest creatures crept up to the walls of the Black House, forgetting the horrible colours that had so recently appalled them.
And yet there was a quality about this lunar scene which was more terrible than ever. They were no longe
r figures in a play. There was no longer any artifice. The stage had vanished. They were no longer actors in a drama of strange light. They were themselves.
‘This is what we planned for you darling! The light no man can alter. Sit still. Why is your face so drawn? Why is it melting? After all, you’ve got your surprise to come. The secret’s on its way. What’s that?’
‘A message, madam, from the look-out tree.’
‘What does he want? Speak up at once!’
‘A great beggar with a group behind him.’
‘What of it?’
‘We thought …’
‘Leave me!’
The break in Cheeta’s monologue had brought Titus to his feet. What had she said to him, that his fear should be redoubled? That terror; not of Cheeta herself nor of any human being, but of doubt. The doubt of his own existence; for where was he? Alone. That’s where he was. Alone with nothing to touch. Even the flint from the tall tower was lost. What was there left to guide him? What did Cheeta mean when she said, ‘It is almost as though you were alive’? What did she mean when she said, ‘I have brought you toys to play with’? What was it that was breaking through the walls of his mind? She had said he was melting. What of the owls? And the purring of the cats? The white cats.
Whatever may have happened to his world one thing was sure: mixed with his homesickness was something else: the beginning beneath his ribs of a conflagration. Whether or not his home was true or false, existent or nonexistent, there was no time for metaphysics. ‘Let them tell me later,’ he thought to himself, ‘whether I am dead or not; sane or not; now is the time for action.’ Action. Yes, but what form should it take? He could jump from his throne, but what good would that be? There she was below him, but he no longer wished to see her. It seemed she had some power when he looked at her; some power to weaken and confuse him.
Yet he must not forget that this party was in his honour. Were the symbols that cluttered the floor of the Black House supposed to be a happy reminder of his home, or were the owls and throne and the tin crown there to taunt him?
Here he stood like a dummy while his limbs ached for action. He was no longer dizzy. He waited for the moment to advance into the heart of it all, and to do something, good or bad. As long as it was something.
But the expression in her eyes was no longer glazed with a deceptive love. The veil had been lifted or drawn aside, and malice, unequivocal and naked, had taken its place. For she hated him so; and hated him all the more when she realized that he was not so easily made to suffer. Yet superficially all had gone well for her. The young man was obviously in a state of grievous bewilderment, for all the affectation of his stance and the contemptuous tilt of his head. He was thus through fear. But the fear was not great enough yet to break him. Nor was it meant to. That was to come, and in assurance of this, she all but lost herself for the moment in a deadly orgy of anticipation. For it was soon to happen: and all Cheeta could do was to clench her tiny hands together at her breast.
A spasm caught hold of her face and for an instant she was no longer Cheeta, the invincible, the impeccable; the exquisite midget, but something foul. The twitch or spasm, short as had been its duration, had fixed itself so fiercely that long after her face had returned to normal it was there … that beastly image … as vivid as ever. What had taken a split moment now spread itself so that it seemed to Titus that her face had been there forever; with that extraordinary contortion of her facial muscles which turned a gelid beauty into something fiendish. Something almost ludicrous.
But what no one expected, least of all Titus or Cheeta herself, was that it should be on the ludicrous and not the terrifying that Titus should fix his attention.
Added to this there was another element that tipped the balance in favour of all that can become uncontrolled; for the spectacle of the sprite with her face turned up to his awoke the image of a dog sitting back on its haunches, waiting to be fed.
The icy Cheeta and the face that she unwittingly let loose were so at variance as to be comic. Horribly, inappropriately comic.
Such a sensation can become too powerful for the human body. It is as easy to control as a sliding avalanche. It takes a sacrosanct convention and snaps it in half as though it were a stick. It lifts up some holy relic and throws it at the sun. It is laughter. Laughter when it stamps its feet; when it sets the bells jangling in the next town. Laughter with the pips of Eden in it.
Out of his fear and apprehension something green and incredibly young took hold of Titus and sidled across his entrails. It shot up to the breast-bone: it radiated into separate turnings: it converged again, and, capsizing through him in an icy heat, cartwheeled through his loins, only to climb again, leaving no inch of his weakening body unaffected. Titus was half away. But his face was rigid and he made no sound: not a catch of the breath or a tilt of the lip. There was no penultimate stage of choking, or a visible fight for composure. It came with extraordinary suddenness, the release of pressure: and he made no effort once he had started to laugh, to check himself. He heard his voice soar clean out of register. He followed it. He yelled to and fro to himself as though he were two people calling to one another across a valley. In another moment, in a seismic access, he tore the stuffed owls from their perch. He dropped them to the ground. He could hold them no longer. He gripped his sides with his hands and staggered back into the throne.
Opening one eye as his body ached with a fresh gale of uncontrollable laughter he saw her face before him, and on that instant he was no longer the great belly-roarer: the cracker of goblets, the eye-streaming, arm-dangling, cataleptic wreck of a thing half over the throne, and all but crazed with the delirium of another world: he was suddenly turned to stone, for in her face he read pure evil.
Yet listen to the sweetness of her voice. The words like leaves, are fluttering from the tree. The eyes can no longer pretend. Only the tongue. She fixed him with her black eyes.
‘Did you hear that?’ she said.
Titus never having seen such an expression of loathing on any woman’s face before, answered in a voice as flat as wasteland.
‘Did I hear what?’
‘Someone laughing,’ she said. ‘I would have thought it would have wakened you.’
‘I heard the laughter too,’ said another voice. ‘But he was asleep.’
‘Yes,’ said another. ‘Asleep in the throne.’
‘What? Titus Groan, Lord of the Tracts, and heir to Gormenghast?’
‘The same. A heavy sleeper!’
‘See how he stares at us!’
‘He is bewildered.’
‘He needs his mother!’
‘Of course, of course!’
‘How lucky he is!’
‘Why so?
‘Because she’s on her way.’
‘Red hair, white cats, ’n all?’
‘Exactly.’
Cheeta, furious, had had to change her plans. Just as she was about to bring on the phantoms, and by so doing, derange once and for all the boy’s bewildered mind.
And so, with a sweet smile to those at her side, she began again to create an atmosphere most conducive to madness.
It was at this moment that, without knowing what he was doing, he picked up the flimsy throne with both hands and dashed it to the ground. The silence was palpable.
At last there came a voice. It was not hers.
‘He came to us when he was lost, poor child. Lost, or so he thought. But he was no more lost than a homester on the wing. He searches for his home but he has never left it, for this is Gormenghast. It is all about him.’
‘No!’ cried Titus. ‘No!’
‘See how he cries. He is upset, poor thing. He does not realize how much we love him.’
A hundred voices, like an incantation, repeated the words … ‘how much we love him.’
‘He thinks that to move about is to change places. He does not realize that he is treading water.’
And the voices echoed … ‘treading water.’
>
Then Cheeta’s voice again.
‘Yet this is our farewell. A farewell from his old self to his new. How splendid! To tear one’s throne up by the roots, and fling it to the floor. What was it after all but a symbol? We have too many symbols. We wade in symbols. We are sick of them. It is a pity about your brain.’
Titus wheeled upon her. ‘My brain,’ he cried, ‘what’s wrong with my brain?’
‘It is on the turn,’ said Cheeta.
‘Yes, yes,’ came the chorus from the shadows. ‘That’s what has happened. His brain is on the turn!’
And then the authoritative voice rose again beyond the juniper fire.
‘His head is no longer anything but an emblem. His heart is a cypher. He is a mere token. But we love him, don’t we?’
‘Oh yes, we love him, don’t we?’ came the chorus.
‘But he’s so confused. He thinks he’s lost his home.’
‘… and his sister, Fuchsia.’
‘… and the Doctor.’
‘… and his mother.’
At this moment, hard upon the mention of his mother’s name, Titus, turning a deathly colour, sprang outward from the debris.
ONE HUNDRED AND THREE
It might have been Cheeta: but it was not. She had made a sign, and in making it she had moved back a little to obtain a clearer view of the entrance to the forgotten room. Who it was that suffered the agonizing jab in the region of the heart will never be known; but that ornate gentleman collapsed upon the pave-stones of the aisle receiving, as though he were a scapegoat, the fury which Titus, at that moment, would gladly have meted out to all.
Panting, the sweat glistening on his face he suddenly found himself gripped by the elbow. Two men, one on either side, held him. Struggling to free himself he saw, as though through the haze of his anger, that they were the same tall, smooth, ubiquitous helmeted figures who had trailed him for so long.
They backed him up the steps to where the throne once stood, when suddenly, as he struggled and tossed his head, he saw for an instant something in the corner of his eye that caused his heart to stop beating. The helmeted figures loosened their grip upon his arms.
