02 Gormenghast - Peake

       All day long the darkness sat there, muffling the boles of the trees, a terrible day-time dusk, as thick as night.

       But all the while the uppermost branches of these same trees and the topmost layers of leaf shone in the cloudless sunlight.

       When evening came and the sun was hanging over the western skyline the drowned glade began to lighten. The level beams streamed from the west; the glade shuddered, and then, silent and motionless as a picture of itself, it gave up all its secrets.

       Of the trees that grew from this sunken circle of ground there was one which claimed immediate attention. Its girth was such that the trees that surrounded it, though tall and powerful, were made to look like saplings. It was the king. Yet it alone was dead.

       And yet its very deadness had given it a life. A life that had no need for the April sap. Its tower-like bulk of a bole mounted into the arboured gloom, and as the light from the west struck it, it shone with the hard, smooth quality of marble, or ivory for it was the colour of a tusk.

       It rose out of a sward, sepia in colour, a treacherous basin. This sick and rotting ground was dappled with gold where it was struck by the direct rays, the lozenges of light elongating as the sun sank.

       Sixty feet from the ground the trunk of the dead giant was pocked with cavities. They were like entrances, it seemed, or like the portholes of a ship, their raised rims smooth as silk and hard as bone.

       And it was here, in these mouths of the great tree, sixty feet above the ground where the girth of the bole was still as ponderous as its sward-lapped base - it was here that the life of the dead tree was centred.

       There was no cavern of that high and silky cliff but had its occupant. Save for the bees whose porthole dripped with sweetness, and the birds, there were few of the denizens of this dead-tree-settlement that could get any kind of grip upon the surface of the bole. But there were branches, which swept from the surrounding trees to within leaping range for the wild cat, the flying squirrel, the opossum and for that creature, not always to be found in the moss-lined darkness of its ivory couch, who, separated by a mere membrane of honey-soaked wood from the multitudinous murmur of a hive, was asleep as the evening light stole through the small round opening so high above the ground. As the light quickened the creature moved in its sleep. The eyes opened. They were as clear and green as sea stones and were set in a face that was coloured and freckled like a robin's egg.

       The creature slid from its retreat, and paused for a moment as it crouched at the lip of its dizzy cave, and then leaping outwards into space it swung itself from branch to branch like something without weight or substance, while the foliage of the evening forest closed about it, and the far away sound of a bell rang faintly from the distant castle.

TWENTY-SIX

Like a child lost in the chasmic mazes of a darkening forest, so was Titus lost in the uncharted wilderness of a region long forgotten. As a child might stare in wonder and apprehension along an avenue of dusk and silence, and then, turning his head along another, and another, each as empty and breathless, so Titus stared in apprehension and with a hammering heart along the rides and avenues of stone.

       But here, unlike the child lost in the forest, Titus was surrounded by a fastness without sentience. There was no growth, and no movement. There was no sense here that a sluggish sap was sleeping somewhere; was waiting in the stony tracts for an adamantine April. There was no presence here that shared the moment with him, the exquisitely frightening long-drawn, terroredged moment of his apprehension. Would nothing stir? Was there no pulse in all these mocking tracts? Nothing that breathed? Nothing among the adumbrate vistas and perspectives of stone that struggled to survive? Empty, silent, forbidding as a lunar landscape, and as uncharted, a tract of Gormenghast lay all about him.

       There was no sound, no call of a bird or screech of an insect to break the silence of the stone. No rivulet slid lisping across the flagstones of Great Halls.

       He was quite lost. All the sounds of the Castle's life - the clanging of bells; the footsteps striking on the hollow stones; the voices and the echoes of voices; all were gone.

       Was this what it was to be an explorer? An adventurer? To gulp this sleeping silence. To be so unutterably alone with it, to wade in it, to find it rising like a tide from the floors, lowering itself from the mouldering caverns of high domes, filling the corridors as though with something palpable?

       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 tiptoed 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 clay - 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.