by Mervyn Peake
SEVENTY-SIX
It was on a moonless, starless night that they escaped from the Under-River and headed north by east. Within a month they were on foreign soil.
It was under a bald hill that they picked up Crack-Bell as planned. He was, for all his idiocy, the only one of the three who had any money. Not much, as they soon found out, but enough to last them for a month or two. This money was transferred to Crabcalf’s pocket, where, as he said, it would be safer. When it came to money Crabcalf’s vagueness seemed to desert him.
Crack-Bell had no objections. Nothing happened. He had been rich. Now he was poor. What did it matter? His laugh was as shrill, as penetrating as it always was. His smile just as fatuous. His responses just as quick. Compared with his two companions, Crack-Bell was intensely alive, like a monkey.
‘Here we are,’ he cried. ‘Bang in the middle of somewhere. Don’t ask me where, but somewhere. Ha, ha, ha.’ His crockery laughter rattled down the hill in broken pieces.
‘Mr Crabcalf, sir,’ said Slingshott.
‘Yes?’ said Crabcalf, raising an eyebrow. ‘What do you want this time? Another rest, I suppose.’
‘We have covered a lot of heavy ground today,’ said Slingshott, ‘and I am tired. Indeed I am. It reminds me of those …’
‘Years in the salt mines. Yes, yes. We know all about them,’ said Crabcalf. ‘And would you care to be a little more careful with my volumes? You handle that sack as though it were full of potatoes.’
‘If I may get a tiny word in edgeways,’ trilled Crack-Bell. ‘I would put it like this …’
‘Unstrap my volumes,’ said Crabcalf. ‘All of them. Dust them down with a dry cloth. Then count them.’
‘When I was in the mines you know, I had time to think …’ said Slingshott, obeying Crabcalf mechanically.
‘Oh la! And did you then? And what did you think of? Women? Women! Ha, ha, ha. Women. Ha, ha, ha, ha.’
‘Oh no. Oh no indeed. I know nothing of women,’ said Slingshott.
‘Did you hear that, Crabcalf? What an extraordinary statement to have made. It is like saying “I know nothing of the moon”.’
‘Well, what do you know of it?’ said Crabcalf.
‘As much as I know of you, my dear fellow. The moon is arid. And so are you. But what does all this matter? We are alive. We are at large. To hell with the moon. It’s a coward anyway. Only comes out at night! Ha, ha, ha, ha!’
‘The moon figures in my book,’ said Crabcalf. ‘I can’t remember quite where … but it figures quite a lot. I talk, or rather, I dilate you know, on the change that has come over the moon. Ever since Molusk circled it, it has been quite a different thing. It has lost its mystery. Are you listening, Slingshott?’
‘Yes, and no,’ said Slingshott. ‘I was really thinking about our next encampment. It was different in the mines. There was no …’
‘Forget the mines,’ said Crabcalf. ‘And mind your clumsy elbow on my manuscript. Oh my friends, my friends, is it nothing that we have escaped from that pernicious place? That we are all three together as we had planned? That we are here at peace on the lee side of a bald hill?’
‘Yet even here one cannot help remembering that beastly grapple. It quite turns me up,’ said Slingshott.
‘Oh my. It was a scrap indeed! Bones, muscles, tendons, organs, ’n all sorts, scattered this way and that, but what does it matter now? The evening is fine; there are two stars. Life is ahead of us … or some of it is. Ha! ha! ha!’
‘Yes, yes, yes. I know all about that Crack-Bell, but I can’t help wondering …’
‘Wondering?’
‘Yes, about that boy. He sticks in my mind,’ said Slingshott.
‘I didn’t see much of him. I was some way down the hill. But from what I saw, and from what I know of life, I should say he was well reared.’
‘Well reared! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! That’s very spicy.’
‘Spicy! You fool! Do you think I’ve spent my life in the Under-River? I was a valet once.’
Slingshott rose to his feet.
‘The dew is rising,’ he said. ‘I must build the fire. As for the young man, I would give much to see him.’
‘Obviously,’ said Crabcalf. ‘He had an air about him. Yet, why should we want to …?’
‘To see him?’ cried Crack-Bell. ‘Why should we? Oh la! He and his crocodile friend. Oh la! What food for conjecture.’
‘Leave that to me,’ said Crabcalf. ‘I have a head like a compass, and a nose like a bloodhound. For you dear Slingshott, the encampments and the care of the volumes … Crack-Bell, for forage and the wringing of hens’ necks. Oh my dear, how neatly and fleetly you move when the moon gloats on farms and the yards are black and silver. How neatly and fleetly you stalk the livestock. If ever we catch up with the boy we will have wine and turkey.’
‘I don’t drink,’ said Slingshott.
‘Hush!’
‘What is it?’
‘Did you not hear the laughter?’
‘Sh … sh …’
SEVENTY-SEVEN
There was a sound; and their heads turned together to the west flank of the bald hill.
Came slithering through the dusk the entrail gobblers: the belly-brained, agog for carrion. The jackals and the foxes. What are they digging for? The scrabbling of their horn-grey nails proceeds. Their eyes start like jellies. Their ears, the twitching spades of playing-cards. Ahoy! scavengers! The moon’s retching.
As Slingshott, Crack-Bell and Crabcalf crouched trembling (for at first it might have been anything, so curiously repellent was the noise) another kind of sound caused them to turn their heads again, and this time it was towards the sky.
Out of the blind space, sunless and terrible, like coloured gnats emerging from the night, a squadron of lime-green needles, peeling at speed, made for the earth.
The jackals lifted their vile muzzles. Slingshott, Crabcalf, and Crack-Bell lifted theirs.
There was no time for fear or understanding. They were gone no sooner than they appeared. But, fast as they travelled, there was something more than speed for its own sake. It seemed they were looking for someone.
The jackals and the foxes returned to their carcase on the other side of the bald hill, and in doing so they were unable to see the helmeted figures, who now stood against the sky like tall carvings, identical in every particular.
They wore a kind of armour, yet were free to move with absolute ease. When one of them took a step forward, the other took a similar step at the same moment. When one of them shielded his huge hollow eyes from the moon, his companion followed suit.
Had they been guiding those soundless aerial darts? It did not seem so, for their heads were bowed a little.
Around their column-like necks were tiny boxes, suspended from metal threads. What were they? Could it be that they were receiving messages from some remote headquarters? But no! Surely not. They were not the sort of mortals to obey. Their silence in itself was hostile and proud.
Only once did they turn their gaze upon the three vagrants, and in that double gaze was such a world of scorn that Crabcalf and his two trembling pards felt an icy blast against their bodies. It was not for them that the helmeted pair were searching.
Then came a growl as the teeth of one of the jackals met in the centre of some dead brute’s intestines, and at that sound the tall pair turned upon their heels, and moved away with a strange and gliding action that was more terrible than any strut or stride.
Now they were gone the jackals followed suit, for nothing was left on the bones of the poor dead beast. Like a canopy the countless flies hung over the skeleton as though to form a veil or shawl of mourning.
The three from the Under-River climbed at last to the crest of the hill, and saw spread out in the moonlight, on every side, a lunar landscape, infinitely brittle. But they were in no mood for pulchritude.
‘No sleep for us tonight,’ said Crabcalf. ‘I don’t like the place one little bit. My thighs are as wet as turbots.’
The other two agreed that it was no place for sleep, though it fell upon Slingshott, as always, to push the wheeled chair up and down the slopes of this horrible terrain, with not only Crabcalf himself on board, but his ‘remainder’ of sixty-one volumes.
Crack-Bell (who, over and above the blanching effect of the moon on his face was, in his own right, as white as a sheet) walked a little behind the other two, and in an attempt to appear courageous, whistled an air both shrill and out of key.
SEVENTY-EIGHT
And so they moved in a single file across the white landscape, and encountered no sign of a living creature. Crabcalf was seated in his high-backed chair on wheels; his sack of identical books in his lap. Slingshott, his retainer, pushed his master, laboriously, down narrow defiles, along cold ridges, across deserts of shale. As for Crack-Bell, he had long ago given up whistling, saving his breath for the thankless task of hauling an old cooking stove, some camping gear, and a stolen turkey. Staggering along in the rear of this three-piece cavalcade, with nothing but a cold night ahead, Crack-Bell, by his very nature, could not help the irritating grin that hovered over the lower regions of his face, nor the mad twinkle in his empty eyes. ‘Life is good,’ they seemed to say … ‘Life is very good.’
Had it not been that he took up the rearguard station his facial fatuities must surely have maddened his two companions. As it was, he trudged along unseen.
SEVENTY-NINE
She sat motionlessly at her peerless mirror, gazing not at, but through herself, for her meditation was deep and bitter, and her eyes had lost their sense of sight. Had she been aware of her own reflection and freed her eyes of the veil that lay like a cataract across them, she would have seen, first of all, the unnatural rigidity of her body, and she would have relaxed not only the muscles of her spine, but those of her face.
For there was, in spite of her beauty, something macabre about her head; something she would certainly have attempted to disguise had she known it permeated her features. But she knew nothing of this, and so she sat there, bolt upright, staring, with her eyes out of focus, while the blank reflections of her orbs stared back.
The stillness was horrible, especially when, like something palpable, it coagulated and seemed almost to drown the only authentic sound, that of a dry leaf as it fluttered from time to time against the glass of a distant window.
The very atmosphere of Cheeta’s dressing-room was in itself enough to chill the blood, so austere and loveless it was. And yet, although it sent a vile chill up the spine, it was not, on that account, a place of ugliness. On the contrary, it was majestic in its proportions and superb in its economy.
The floor, to begin with, was spread from corner to distant corner with a tundra of white camel skins, pale as white sand and soft as wool.
The walls were hung with tapestries that glowed with a sullen, prawn-coloured luminosity … a system of concealed lighting that gave the impression that the muted light was not so much falling upon the tapestries, as emerging from them. As though they were themselves effulgent, and burned their lives away.
EIGHTY
Not so many years ago she had cried out, ‘Oh how I hate you all.’ The elders shook their heads. ‘What does she mean?’ they said. ‘Has she not everything that money can buy? Is she not the scientist’s daughter?’
But she was restless, was Cheeta. Would she care for this? Would she care for that? No. Would she accept the Greeziorthspis Tapestries? She would accept them.
They were bought for her, thus denuding a small country of its only treasure.
So here they hung in the great room that was designed to take them, lovelier than ever, burning away in dusty pinks and golds, but with no one to see them, for Cheeta had deserted what was once her joy.
They had gone dead on her; or she on them. The unicorns leapt unseen. The crags that blushed in the sun’s rays, meant nothing now. The perilous combers were now no longer perilous.
The floor of camel-hair; the walls of tapestry; the dressing-table. It was carved from a single hunk of granite. Upon its surface were laid out, as usual, the articles of her toilet.
The surface of the black granite was peerlessly smooth, yet thrillingly uneven to the palm of the hand, appearing to bulge, or sway, and the reflections of the various instruments were as sharp as the instruments themselves, yet wavered. For all the multiplicity of her toilet, the coloured objects took up the merest fraction of the surface. To right and left of them, the granite fanned out in adamantine yet sumptuous undulations.
But Cheeta who sat upright on the camel-hair seat of her chair was today in no frame of mind to run the palms of her hands in silent and sensuous delight. Something had happened to her. Something that had never happened before. She knew now for the first time that she was unnecessary. Titus Groan had found that he could do without her.
Beneath the rigidity of her small, slender, military spine was a writhing serpent. Beyond the blankness of her seemingly dead eyes was a world of febrile horror, for she now knew that she hated him. Hated his self-sufficiency. Hated a quality that he had, which she lacked. She lifted her glazed eyes to the sky beyond the mirror. It swam with little clouds, and her sight cleared at last, and her eyelids fell.
Her thoughts like scales began to shed themselves until there was an absolute nothingness in her head, a nothingness made necessary, for the intensity of her dark thoughts had been horrible and could not be kept up forever, short of madness.
Beyond the mirror, scissoring its way across the sky, was her father’s pride. The latest of all his factories. Even as she watched, a plume of smoke spiralled its way out of one of the chimneys.
Rigid as herself in her agony, her implements were drawn up in battle array. A militant array of eccentrics; instruments of beauty; coloured like the rainbow; shining like steel or wax; the unguent vases carved in alabaster; the Kohl; the nard.
The fragrance from the onyx and the porphyry pots, the elusive aromatic spikenard … olive and almond and the sesame oil. The powdery perfumes, ground for her alone; rose, almond, quince. The rouges, the spices and the gums. The eyebrow pencils, and the coloured eyeline; mascara and the powder brush. The eyebrow tweezers and the eyelash curlers. The tissues, the crêpes and several little sponges. Each in its place before the perfect mirror.
Then there was a sound. At first it was so faint it was impossible to make out what was being said, or whether indeed it was her voice at all. Had it not been that there was no one else in the room one would not have guessed the sound to come from such pretty lips as Cheeta’s. But now the sound grew louder and louder until she beat upon her granite dressing-table with her minute fists and called out, ‘Beast, beast, beast! Go back to your filthy den. Go back to your Gormenghast!’ and rising to her feet she swept the granite table with her arm so that everything that had been set out so beautifully was sent hurtling through the air to smash itself and waste itself upon the white camel skins of the carpet and the dusky red of the tapestries.
EIGHTY-ONE
Out of the bitterness that was now a part of her, like an allergy, something had begun to arise to the surface of her conscious mind; something that might be likened to a sea monster rising from the depths of the ocean; scaled and repulsive. At first she did not know or feel any kind of contraction, but gradually as the days went by, the nebulous ponderings began to find focus. Something harsher took their place until she realized that what she craved was the knowledge not just of how to hurt but when. So that at last, a fortnight after her argument with Titus she realized that she was actively plotting the downfall of the boy, and that her whole being was diverted to that end.
In sweeping her make-up to the floor she had swept away all that was blurred in her mind and passion. This left her not only more venomous but icy-headed, so that when she next saw Titus her behaviour was the very heart of poise.
EIGHTY-TWO
‘Is that the boy?’ asked Cheeta’s father, the merest wisp of a man.
‘Yes father, that is he.’
His voice had been utterly empty. His presence was a kind of subtraction. He was nondescript to the point of embarrassment. Only his cranium was positive – a lard-coloured hummock.
His features, if described piecemeal, would amount to nothing, and it was hard to believe that the same blood ran through Cheeta’s body. Yet there was something – an emanation that linked the father and daughter. A kind of atmosphere that was entirely their own; although their features had no part in it. For he was nothing: a creature of solitary intellect, unaware of the fact that, humanly speaking, he was a kind of vacuum for all that there was genius in his skull. He thought of nothing but his factory.
Cheeta, following his gaze, could see Titus quite clearly.
‘Pull up,’ she said, in a voice as laconic as a gull’s.
Her father touched a button, and at once the car sighed to a halt.
At the far end of an overhung carriage-way was Titus, apparently talking to himself, but just as Cheeta and her father were about to suppose that he had lost his senses, three beggars emerged out of the distant tangle of leaves, at Titus’ side.
This group of four had apparently not heard or seen the approach of the car.
The long drive was dappled with soft autumnal light.
‘We have been following you,’ said Crack-Bell. ‘Ha, ha, ha! In and out of your footsteps as you might say.’
‘Following me? What for? I don’t even know you,’ said Titus.
‘Don’t you remember, young man?’ said Crabcalf. ‘In the Under-River? When Muzzlehatch saved you?’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Titus, ‘but I don’t remember you. There were thousands of you … and besides … have you seen him?’
‘Muzzlehatch?’
‘Muzzlehatch.’
‘Not so,’ said Slingshott.
There was a pause.
‘My dear boy,’ said Crack-Bell –