by Mervyn Peake
It was no easy task for them to keep track of him, for Crabcalf’s books weighed heavily.
As they stole through the shadows they were halted by a sound. At first the three vagrants were unable to locate it; they stared all about them. Sometimes the noise came from here, sometimes from there. It was not the kind of noise they understood, although the three of them were quick in the ways of the woods, and could decipher a hundred sounds, from the rubbing together of branches to the voice of a shrew.
And then, all at once, the three heads turned simultaneously in the same direction, the direction of Titus, and they realized that he was muttering to himself.
Crouching down together, they saw him, ringed by leaves. He was wandering listlessly in the half-darkness and, as they watched, they saw him press his head against the hard bole of a tree. As he pressed his head he whispered passionately to himself, and then he raised his voice and cried out to the whole forest …
‘O traitor! Traitor! What is it all about? Where can I find me? Where is the road home? Who are these people? What are these happenings? Who is this Cheeta, this Muzzlehatch? I don’t belong. All I want is the smell of home, and the breath of the castle in my lungs. Give me some proof of me! Give me the death of Steerpike; the nettles; give me the corridors. Give me my mother! Give me my sister’s grave. Give me the nest; give me my secrets back … for this is foreign soil. O give me back the kingdom in my head.’
EIGHTY-SIX
Juno has left her house by the river. She has left the town once haunted by Muzzlehatch. She is driving in a fast car along the rim of a valley. Her quiet companion sits beside her. He looks like a brigand. A hank of dark red hair blows to and fro across his forehead.
‘It is an odd thing,’ says Juno, ‘that I still don’t know your name. And somehow or other I don’t want to. So I must call you something of my own invention.’
‘You do that,’ says Juno’s companion, in a gentle growl of such depth and cultivation that it is hard to believe that it could ever issue from so piratical a head.
‘What shall it be?’
‘Ah, there I can’t help you.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘Then I must help myself. I think I will call you my “Anchor”,’ says Juno. ‘You give me so deep a sense of safety.’
Turning to look at him she takes a corner at unnecessary speed, all but overturning the car.
‘Your driving is unique,’ says Anchor. ‘But I cannot say it gives me confidence. We will change places.’
Juno draws in to the side of the road. The car is like a swordfish. Beyond it the long erratic line of the amethyst-coloured mountains. The sky overhanging everything is cloudless save for a wisp way down in the far south.
‘How glad I am that you waited for me,’ says Juno. ‘All those long years in the cedar grove.’
‘Ah,’ says the Anchor.
‘You saved me from being a sentimental old bore. I can just see myself with my tear-stained face pressed against the window-panes … weeping for the days long gone. Thank you, Mr Anchor, for showing me the way. The past is over. My home is a memory. I will never see it again. For look, I have these sunbeams and these colours. A new life lies ahead.’
‘Do not expect too much,’ says the Anchor. ‘The sun can be snuffed without warning.’
‘I know, I know. Perhaps I am being too simple.’
‘No,’ says the Anchor. ‘That is hardly the word for an uprooting. Shall we go on?’
‘Let us stay a little longer. It is so lovely here. Then drive. Drive like the wind … into another country.’
There is a long silence. They are completely relaxed; their heads thrown back. Around them lies the coloured country. The golden cornfields; the amethyst mountains.
‘Anchor, my friend,’ says Juno in a whisper.
‘Yes, what is it?’
His face is in profile. Juno has never seen a face so completely relaxed, and without strain.
‘I am so happy,’ says Juno, ‘although there is so much to be sad about. It will take its turn, I suppose … the sadness. But now … in this very now. I am floating with love.’
‘Love?’
‘Love. Love for everything. Love for those purple hills; love for your rusty forelock.’
She sinks back against the cushions and closes her eyes, and as she does so the Anchor turns his lolling head in her direction. She is indeed handsome with a handsomeness beyond the scope of her wisdom. Majestic beyond the range of her knowledge.
‘The world goes by,’ says Juno, ‘and we go with it. Yet I feel young today; young in spite of everything. In spite of my mistakes. In spite of my age.’ She turns to the Anchor … ‘I’m over forty,’ she whispers. ‘Oh my dear friend, I’m over forty!’
‘So am I,’ says the Anchor.
‘What shall we do?’ says Juno. She clutches his forearm with her jewelled hands, and squeezes him.
‘There is nothing we can do, except live.’
‘Is that why you thought I should leave my home? My possessions? My memories? Everything? Is that why?’
‘I have told you so.’
‘Yes, yes. Tell me again.’
‘We are beginning. Incongruous as we are. You with your mellow beauty that out-glows a hundred damsels, and me with …’
‘With what?’
‘With a kind of happiness.’
Juno turns to him but she says nothing. The only movement comes from the black silk at her bosom where a great ruby rises and sinks like a buoy on a midnight bay.
At last Juno says, ‘The sunlight’s lovelier than it’s ever been, because we have decided to begin. We will pass the days together as they pass. But … Oh …’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s Titus.’
‘What about him?’
‘He is gone. Gone. I disappointed him.’
The Anchor moving with a kind of slow, lazy deliberation takes his place at the wheel. But before the swordfish whips away he says …
‘I thought it was the future we were after.’
‘But O, but O, it is,’ cries Juno. ‘Oh my dear Anchor, it is indeed.’
‘Then let us catch it by its tail and fly!’
Juno, her face radiant, leans forward in the padded swordfish, and away they go, soundless save for the breath of their own speed.
EIGHTY-SEVEN
Shambling his way from the west, came Muzzlehatch. Once upon a time there was no shambling in his gait or in his mind. Now it was different. The arrogance was still there, redolent in every gesture, but added to it was something more bizarre. The rangy body was now a butt for boys to copy. His rangy mind played tricks with him. He moved as though oblivious of the world. And so he was, save for one particular. Just as Titus ached for Gormenghast, ached to embrace its crumbling walls, so Muzzlehatch had set himself the task of discovering the centre of destruction.
Always his brain returned to that mere experiment; the liquidation of his zoo. There was no shape in all that surrounded him, whether branch or boulder, but revived in him the memory of one or other of his beloved creatures. Their death had quickened in him something which he had never felt in early days; the slow-burning, unquenchable lust for revenge.
Somewhere he would find it; the ghastly hive of horror; a hive whose honey was the grey and ultimate slime of the pit. Day after day he slouched from dawn until dusk. Day after day he turned this way and that.
It was as though his obsession had in some strange manner directed his feet. It was as though it followed a path known only to itself.
EIGHTY-EIGHT
Out of the fermentations of her brain; out of the chronic hatred she bore him, Cheeta, the virgin, slick as a needle to the outward eye, foul in the inward, had at last conceived a way to bring young Titus to the dust; a way to hurt him.
That there was some part of her which could not do without him, she refused to believe. What might once upon a time have turned to some sort of love, was now an abhorren
ce. How could a wisp contain such a gall as this? She smarted beneath the humiliation of his obvious boredom … his casual evasion. What did he want from her? The act and nothing else? Her tiny figure trembled with detestation.
Yet her voice was as listless as ever. Her words wandered away. She was all sophistication; desirable, intelligent, remote. Who could have told that joined in deadly grapple beneath her ribs were the powers of fear and evil?
Out of all this, and because of this, she had framed a plan; a terrible and twisted thing, that proved, if it did nothing else, the quality of her inventive brain.
A cold fever of concentration propelled her. It was a state more readily associated with a man’s than with a woman’s mentality. And yet, a sexless thing, it was more dreadful than either.
She had told Titus of the farewell party she was preparing in his honour. She had pleaded with him; she had made her eyes to shine; her lips to pout; her breasts to tremble. Bludgeoned by sex he had said he would be there. Very well, then, her decks were cleared for action. Hers was the flying start; the initiative; the act of surprise; the choice of weapons.
But to put her plan into action necessitated the co-operation of a hundred or more of their guests, besides scores of workmen. The activity was prodigious, yet secret. There was co-operation, yet no one knew they were co-operating; or if they did, who, where, why, or in what way. They only knew their own particular roles.
She had in some magnetic way convinced each particular man and woman that he or she was at the centre of the whole affair. She had flattered them grotesquely, from the lowest to the highest; and such were the varieties of her approach, that no dupe among them but found her orders unique.
At the back of it all was a nebulous, accumulative foreboding; a gathering together in the cumulus sky; a mounting excitement in the heart of secrecy; a thing like a honeycomb which Cheeta alone apprehended in its entirety, for she was no drone, but author and soul of the hive. The insects, though they worked themselves to death, saw nothing but their own particular cells.
Even Cheeta’s enigmatic father, the wisp, with his dreadful skull the colour of lard, knew nothing except that on the fateful night it was for him to take his place in some charade.
It might be thought that with everyone seemingly working at cross purposes it was merely a matter of time before the whole intricate structure irrevocably collapsed. But Cheeta, moving from one end of the domain to the other, so synchronized the activities of the guests and workmen (carpenters, masons, electricians, steeple-jacks, and so on) that, unknown to themselves, they and their work began to coalesce.
What was it all about? Nothing of its kind had ever happened before. Speculation was outlandish. It knew no end. Fabrication grew out of fabrication. To every inquiry there was one reply from Cheeta.
‘If I should tell you, there’d be no surprise.’
To those prickly young men who saw no reason why so much expenditure and attention should be lavished upon Titus Groan, she winked in such a way as to suggest a conspiracy between her critics and herself.
Here, there and everywhere she flitted like a shadow; leaving behind her instructions, now in this room, now in that, now in the great timber-yard; now in the kitchen; now where the seamstresses were huddled like bats; or in the private homes of her friends.
But a great deal of her time was spent elsewhere.
From then on, Titus was shadowed unknowingly, wherever he went.
But those who shadowed him were in their turn shadowed, by Crabcalf, Slingshott and Crack-Bell.
Full of old crimes, they had learned the value of silence, and if a branch stirred or a twig snapped one can be sure that none of these gentlemen was responsible.
EIGHTY-NINE
Cheeta, when she had first conceived her plan, had assumed that her party would take place in the great studio that covered the whole of the top floor of her father’s mansion. It was a studio indeed, lovely in its lighting, bland in its floorboards, vast in its perspectives (the easel no larger than a ninepin when seen from the door, reared up like a tall insect).
But it was wrong, fatally wrong, for it had an air about it … almost of that kind of innocence that nothing can eradicate. Innocence was no part of Cheeta’s plan.
Yet there was no other room in the building, large though it was, that suited her purpose. She had flirted with the idea of knocking down a long wall in the southern wing which would have opened up a long and ponderous hall; but there again, the ‘feel’ would have been wrong; as was the longest of the twelve high barns, those rotting structures on the northern boundaries.
As the days went by, the situation became more and more peculiar. It was not that there was any slackening of vitality among the friends and labourers; rather that the sight of scores upon scores of seemingly incongruous objects under construction inflamed the general speculation to an almost unbearable degree.
And then, one overcast morning as Cheeta was about to make a tour of the workshops, she stopped suddenly dead, as though she had been struck. Something she had seen or heard had wakened a memory. All in a flash came the answer.
It had been a long time ago, when Cheeta was a mere child, that an expedition had been mounted, the main purpose of which had been to establish the exact boundaries of that great tract of land, as yet but vaguely charted, that lay, a shadowy enigma, to the south-west.
This excursion proved to be abortive, for the area covered was treacherous marshland, along whose sluggish flanks great trees knelt down to drink.
Young as she had been, yet Cheeta, by a superb imitation of hysteria, eventually forced her parents to allow her to join the expedition. The extra responsibility involved in having to take a child on such a mission was maddening, to put it at its mildest, and there were those on the return journey who were openly against the intractable child, and fully believed their failure to be due to her presence.
But this was long ago, and had been all but forgotten: all save for one thing, and this itself had been smothered away in her unconscious mind until now. Like something long subdued, it had broken free and leapt out of the shadows of her mind in devastating clarity.
It was hard for Cheeta, all at once, to be sure whether it was a valid memory of something that was really there, a hundred miles from her home, or whether it was a startling dream, for she had no recollection of the finding of the place, nor of leaving it. But she was not long in doubt. Image after image returned to her as she stood, the pupils of her eyes dilated. There could be no doubt about it. She saw it with a mounting vividness. The Black House.
There in that setting of immemorial oaks, threaded by that broad, fast, knee-deep river … there, surely, where the masonry was crusty with age, was the setting above all settings for the Party.
It was now for Cheeta to discover someone who had been there on that faraway day. Someone who could find the place again.
Driving her fastest car, she was soon at the gates of the factory. At once she was surrounded by a dozen men in overalls. Their faces were all the same. One of them opened his mouth. The very act was obscene.
‘Miss Cheeta?’ he said in a curiously thin voice, like a reed.
‘That’s it,’ said Cheeta. ‘Put me through to my father.’
‘Of course … of course,’ said the face.
‘And hurry,’ said Cheeta.
They led her to a reception room. The ceiling was matted with crimson wires. There was a black glass table of unnatural length, and at the far end of the room the wall was monopolized by an opaque screen like a cod’s eye.
Eleven men stood in a row while their leader pressed a button.
‘What’s the peculiar smell?’ said Cheeta.
‘Top secret,’ said the eleven men.
‘Miss Cheeta,’ said the twelfth man. ‘I am putting you through.’
After a moment or two an enormous face appeared on the opaque screen. It filled the wall.
‘Miss Cheeta?’ it said.
‘Shrivel yourself
,’ said Cheeta. ‘You’re too big.’
‘Ha, ha, ha!’ said the huge face. ‘I keep forgetting.’
The face contracted, and went on contracting. ‘Is that better?’ it said.
‘More or less,’ said Cheeta. ‘I must see Father.’
‘Your father is at a conference,’ said the image on the screen. It was still over life-size, and a small fly landing on his huge dome of a forehead appeared the size of a grape.
‘Do you know who I am?’ said Cheeta in her faraway voice.
‘But of course … of …’
‘Then stir yourself.’
The face disappeared, and Cheeta was left alone.
After a moment she wandered to the wall that faced the cod’s-eye screen, and played delicately across a long row of coloured levers that were as pretty as toys. So innocent they looked that she pressed one forward, and at once there was a scream.
‘No, no, no!’ came the voice. ‘I want to live.’
‘But you are very poor and very ill,’ said another voice, with the consistency of porridge. ‘You’re unhappy. You told me so.’
‘No, no, no! I want to live. I want to live. Give me a little longer.’
Cheeta switched the lever and sat down at the black table.
As she sat there, very upright, her eyes closed, she did not know that she was being watched. When at last she raised her head she was annoyed to see her mother.
‘You!’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘It’s absorbing, you know,’ said Cheeta’s mother. ‘Daddy lets me watch.’
‘I wondered where you got to every day,’ muttered her daughter. ‘What on earth do you do here?’
‘Fascinating,’ said the scientist’s wife, who never seemed to answer anything.
A big arm came across the screen and thrust her aside. It was followed by a shoulder and a head. The father’s face suddenly swam towards Cheeta. His eyes flickered to and fro to see if anything had been altered. Then they rested on his daughter.