by Mervyn Peake
Irma’s mental sight was frighteningly clear. His voice had sharpened the edges of his image.
‘But I’m not very old, Mr Bellgrove, am I,’ said Irma, after a pause. To be sure she felt as young as a fledgeling.
‘What is age? What is time!’ said Bellgrove – and then answering himself in a darker voice. ‘They’re hell!’ he said. ‘I hate ’em.’
‘No, no. I won’t have it,’ said Irma. ‘I won’t, Mr Bellgrove. Age and time are what you make them. Let us not speak of them again.’
Bellgrove sat forward on his old buttocks. ‘Lady!’ he said suddenly, ‘I have thought of something that I think you will agree is more than comic.’
‘Have you, Mr Bellgrove?’
‘Pertaining to what you said about Age and Time. Are you listening, my dear?’
‘Yes, Mr Bellgrove … eagerly … eagerly!’
‘What I think would be rather droll would be to say, in a gathering, when the moment became opportune – perhaps during some conversation about clocks – one could work round to it – to say, quite airily … “Time is what you make it.”’
He turned his head to her in the darkness. He waited.
There was no response from Irma. She was thinking feverishly. She began to panic. Her face was prickling with anxiety. She could make no sound. Then she had an idea. She pressed herself against him a little more closely.
‘How delicious!’ she said at last, but her voice was very strained.
The silence that followed was no more than a few seconds, but to Irma it was as long as that ghastly hush that awaits all sinners when, at the judgement seat, they wait the Verdict. Her body trembled, for there was so much at stake. Had she said something so stupid, that no headmaster, worthy of his office, could ever consider accepting her? Had she unwittingly lifted some hatchway of her brain and revealed to this brilliant man how cold, black, humourless and sterile was the region that lay within?
No. Ah no! For his voice, rolling from the gloom, had, if possible, even more tenderness in it than she would have dared to hope for in a man.
‘You are cold, my love. You are chilly. The night is not for delicate skins. By hell, it isn’t. And I? And what of me? Your suitor? Is he cold also, my dear? Your old gallant? He is. He is indeed. And what is more he is becoming sick of darkness. Darkness that shrouds. That clogs the living lineaments of beauty. That swathes you, Irma. By hell it’s maddening and pointless stuff …’ Bellgrove began to rise … ‘it’s damnable, I tell you, my own, this arbour’s damnable.’
He felt the pressure of fingers on his forearm.
‘Ah no … no … I will not have you swear. I will not have strong language in our arbour … our sacred arbour.’
For a moment Bellgrove was tempted to play the gay dog. His moods flitted across the basic excitement of the wooing. It was so delicious to be chided by a woman. He wondered whether to shock her – to shock her out of the surplus of his love, would be worth the candle. To taste again the sweetness of being reprimanded, the never-before-experienced gushes of sham remorse – would this be worth the lowering of his moral status. No! He would stick to his pinnacle.
‘This arbour,’ he said, ‘is forever ours. It is the darkness it holds captive; this pitchy stuff that hides your face from me – it is this darkness that I called damnable – and damnable it is. It is your face, Irma, your proud face that I am thirsting for. Can you not understand? By the great moonlight! my love; by the tremendous moonlight! Is it not natural that a man should wish to brood upon his darling’s brow?’
The word ‘darling’ affected Irma as might a bullet wound. She clasped her hands at her breast and pressing them inwards the tepid water in her false bosom gurgled in the darkness.
For a moment Bellgrove, thinking she was laughing at what he had said, stiffened at her side. But the terrible blush of humiliation that was about to climb his neck was quenched by Irma’s voice. The gurgle must have been a sign of love, of some strange and aqueous love that was beyond his sounding, for ‘O master,’ she said, ‘take me to where the moon can show you me.’
‘Show-you-me?’ for a short while Bellgrove was quite unable to decipher what sounded to him like a foreign language. But he did not stand still, as lesser men would have done while pondering, but answering the first part of her command he escorted her from the arbour. Instantaneously, they were floodlit – and at the same instant Irma’s syntax clarified in the headmaster’s mind.
They moved together, like spectres, like mobile carvings casting their long inky shadows across the little paths, down the slopes of rockeries, up the sides of trellises.
At last they stopped for a little while where a stone cherub squatted upon the rim of a granite bird-bath. To their left they could see the lighted windows of the long reception room. But they could not see that in the midst of a rapt audience the Doctor was raising his silver hammer as though to put all to the test. They could not know that by a supernatural effort of the will, and the martialling of all his deductive faculties, and the freeing of an irrational flair, the Doctor had come to the kind of decision more usually associated with composers than with scientists – and was now on the brink of success or failure.
The ‘body’ had, to aid the physician in his exhaustive search for the cause of the paralysis, been stripped of all clothing save the mortar-board.
What happened next was something which, however much the stories varied afterwards – for it seemed that every professor present was able to note some minor detail hidden from the rest – was yet consistent in the main. The speed at which it happened was phenomenal, and it must be assumed that the microscopic elaborations of the incident which were to be the main subject of conversation for so long a while afterwards, were no more or less than inventions which were supposed to redound to the advantage of the teller, in some way or other – possibly through the reflected glory which they all felt at having been there at all. However this may be, what was agreed upon by all was that the Doctor, his shirt sleeves rolled well back, rose suddenly on his toes, and lifting his silver hammer into the air, where it flashed with candle-light, let it fall, as it were with a kind of controlled, yet effortless downstroke, upon the nether regions of the spinal column. As the hammer struck, the Doctor leapt back and stood with his arms spread out to his sides, his fingers rigid as he saw before him the instantaneous convulsion of the patient. This gentleman writhing like an expiring eel leapt suddenly high into the air, and on landing upon his feet, was seen to streak across the room and out of the bay windows and over the moonlit lawn at a speed that challenged the credulity of all witnesses.
And those who, standing grouped about the Doctor, had seen the transformation and the remarkable athleticism that followed so swiftly upon it, were not the only ones to be startled by the spectacle.
In the garden, among the livid blotches and the cold wells of shadow a voice was saying …
‘It is not meet, Irma my dearest, that on this night, this first night, we should tire our hearts … no, no, it is not meet, sweet bride.’
‘Bride?’ cried Irma, flashing her teeth and tossing her head. ‘O Master, not yet … surely!’
Bellgrove frowned like God considering the state of the world on the Third Day. A knowing smile played across his old mouth but it appeared to have lost its way among the wrinkles.
‘Quite so, my delicious helm. Once more you keep me on my course, and for that I revere you, Irma … not bride, it is true, but …’
The old man had jerked like a recoiling firearm, and Irma with him, for she was in his gown-swathed arms. Turning her startled eyes from his she followed his gaze and on the instant clung to him in a desperate embrace, for all at once they saw before them, naked in the dazzling rays of the moon, a flying figure which for all the shortness of the legs, was covering the ground with the speed of a hare. The tassel of the inky mortar-board, sole claim to decency, streamed away behind like a donkey’s tail.
No sooner had Irma and the headmaster caught s
ight of the apparition, than it had reached the high orchard wall of the garden. How it ever climbed the wall was never discovered. It simply went up it, its shadow swarming alongside, and the last that was ever seen of Mr Throd, the one-time member of Mr Bellgrove’s staff, was a lunar flash of buttocks where the high wall propped the sky.
THIRTY-SEVEN
There were at least three hours to be burned. It was unusual for Steerpike to have to think in such terms. There was always something afoot. There were always, in the wide and sinister pattern of his scheduled future, those irregular pieces to find and to fit into the great jig-saw puzzle of his predatory life, and of Gormenghast, on whose body he fed.
But on this particular day, when the clocks had all struck two, and the steel of his swordstick which he had been sharpening was as keen as a razor and as pointed as a needle, he wrinkled his high shining forehead as he returned the blade to the stick. At the end of the three hours that lay before him he had something very important to do.
It would be very simple and it would be absorbing, but it would be very important also; so important that for the first time in his life he was at a loss for a few moments as to how to fill in the hours that remained before the business that lay ahead, for he knew that he could not concentrate upon anything very serious. While he pondered, he moved to the window of his room and looked out across the vistas of roofs and broken towers.
It was a breathless day, a frail mist tempering the warmth. The few flags that could be seen above various turrets hung limply from their mastheads.
This prospect never failed to please the pale young man. His eye ran over it with shrewdity.
Then he turned from the scene, for he had had an idea. Pouncing upon the floor, his arms outstretched, he stood upside down upon the palms of his hands and began to perambulate the room, one eyebrow raised. His idea was to pay a quick call upon the Twins. He had not visited them for some while. Away across the roofscape he had seen the outskirts of that deserted tract, in one of whose forgotten corridors an archway led to a grey world of empty rooms, in one of which their ladyships Cora and Clarice sat immured. Their presence and the presence of their few belongings seemed to have no effect upon the sense of emptiness. Rather, their presence seemed to reinforce the vacancy of their solitude.
It would take him the best part of an hour’s sharp walking to reach that forgotten region, but he was in a restless mood, and the idea appealed to him. Flexing his elbows – for he was still moving about the room on his hands – he pressed, of a sudden, away from the floor and, like an acrobat, was all at once on his feet again.
Within a few moments he was on his way, his room carefully locked behind him. He walked rapidly, his shoulders drawn up and forward a little in that characteristic way that gave to his every movement a quality both purposeful and devilish.
The short cuts he took through the labyrinthian network of the castle led him into strange quarters. There were times when walls would tower above him, sheer and windowless. At other times, naked acres, paved in brick or stone would spread themselves out, wastelands vast and dusty where weeds of all kinds forced their way from between the interstices of the paving stones.
As he moved rapidly from domain to domain, from a world of sunless alleys to the panoramic ruins where the rats held undisputed tenure – from the ruins to that peculiar district where the passageways were all but blocked with undergrowth and the carved façades were cold with sea-green ivy – he exulted. He exulted in it all. In the fact that it was only he who had the initiative to explore these wildernesses. He exulted in his restlessness, in his intelligence, in his passion to hold within his own hands the reins, despotic or otherwise, of supreme authority.
Far above him and to the east the sunlight burned upon a long oval window of blue glass. It blazed like lazuli – like a gem hung aloft against the grey walls. Without changing the speed of his walk he drew from his pocket a small smooth beautifully made catapult, into the pouch of which he fitted a bullet, and then, as though with a single action the elastic was stretched and released and Steerpike returned his catapult to his pocket.
He kept walking, but as he walked his face was turned up to those high grey walls where the blue window blazed.
He saw the small gap in the glass and the momentary impression of a blue powder falling before he heard the distant sound, as of a far gunshot.
A head had appeared at the gap in that splintered window away in the high east.
It was very pale. The body beneath it was swathed in sacking. On the shoulder sat perched a blood red parrot – but Steerpike knew nothing of this and was entering another district and was for a long while in the shadows, moving beneath a continuous roofscape of lichened slates.
When at last he approached the archway which led to the Twins’ quarters, he paused and gazed back along the grey perspectives. The air was chill and unhealthy; a smell of rotten wood, of dank masonry filled his lungs. He moved in a climate as of decay – of a decay rank with its own evil authority, a richer, more inexorable quality than freshness; it smothered and drained all vibrancy, all hope.
Where another would have shuddered, the young man merely ran his tongue across his lips. ‘This is a place,’ he said to himself. ‘Without any doubt, this is somewhere.’
But the hands of the clock kept moving and he had little time for speculation, and so he turned his back on the cold perspectives where the long walls bulged and sagged, where plaster hung and sweated with cold and inanimate fevers, with sicknesses of umber, and illnesses of olive.
When he reached the door behind which the Twins were incarcerated he took a bunch of keys from his pocket and selecting one, which he had cut himself, he turned the lock.
The door opened to his pressure with a stiff and grating sound.
Stiff as were the hinges, it had not taken Steerpike more than a second to throw it wide open. Had he been forced to fight against the swollen wood for an entrance, to struggle with the lock, or to put his shoulder to the damp panelling – or even had his rapid entrance been heralded by the sound of his footsteps, then the spectacle that awaited him, for all its strangeness, would not have had that uncanny and dreamlike horror that now lay hold of him.
He had made no sound. He had given no warning of his visit – but there before him stood the Twins, hand in hand, their faces white as lard. They were positioned immediately before the door; at which they must have been staring. They were like figures of wax, or alabaster or like motionless animals, upright upon their quarters, their gaze fixed, it would seem, upon the face of their master, their mouths half open as though awaiting some tit-bit – some familiar signal.
No expression at all came into their eyes, nor would there have been room for any, for they were separately filled, each one of them, with a foreign body, for in each of the four glazed pupils the image of the young man was exquisitely reflected. Let those who have tried to pass love letters through the eyes of needles or to have written poems on the heads of pins take heart. Crude and heavy handed as they found themselves, yet they will never appreciate the extent of their clumsiness for they will never know how Steerpike’s head and shoulders leaned forward through circles the size of beads, whose very equidistance from one another (the Twins were cheek to cheek) was as though to prove by ghastly repetition the nightmare of it all. Minute and exquisite in the microcosm of the pupils, these four worlds, identical and terrible, gleamed between the lids. It would seem they had been painted – these images of Steerpike – with a single hair or with the proboscis of a bee – for the very whites of his eyes were crystalline. And when Steerpike at the door drew back his head – drew it back on a sudden impulse, then the four heads, no bigger than seeds, were drawn back at that same instant, and the eight eyes narrowed as they stared back from the four microscopic mirrors – stared back at their origin, the youth, mountain high in the doorway, the youth on whom their quick and pulseless lives depended – the youth with his eyes narrowed, and whose least movement was theirs.
That the eyes of the Twins should be ignorant of that they reflected was natural enough but it was not natural that in carrying the image of Steerpike to their identical brains, there should be, by not so much as the merest shade, a clue to the excitement in their breasts. For it seemed that they felt nothing, that they saw nothing, that they were dead, and stood upon their feet by some miracle.
Steerpike knew at once that yet another chapter was over in his relationship with Cora and Clarice. They had become clay in his hands, but they were clay no more, unless there is in clay not only something imponderable but something sinister also. Not only this, but something adamantine. From now on he knew that they were no longer ductile – they had changed into another medium – a sister medium – but a harsher one – they were stone.
All this could be seen at a glance. But now, suddenly, there was something which escaped his vigilance. It was this. His reflections were no longer in their eyes. Their ladyships had unwittingly expelled him. Something else had taken place – and as he was unaware that he had ever been reflected so he was equally unaware that he was no longer so – and that in the lenses of their eyes he had exchanged places with the head of an axe.
But what Steerpike could see was that they were no longer staring at him – that their gaze was fixed upon something above his head. They had not tilted their heads back although it would have been the normal thing to do for whatever they were looking at was all but out of their line of vision. Their upturned eyes shone white. Save for this movement of their eyeballs they had not so much as stirred.