The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

by Mervyn Peake

  Let him have his surprise. His golden treat. His fantastic party for which no expense was enough. This will be a ‘Farewell’ never to be forgotten.

  Cheeta had whispered … ‘It will burn like a torch in the night. The forest will recoil at the sound of it.’

  At a weak moment, all in the heat of it, when his brain and senses contradicted one another, and a gap appeared in his armour, he had said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes,’ that he would agree to it … the idea of going to an unknown district, blindfolded, for the sake of the secret.

  And now he was aloft in the evening air, sailing he knew not where, to his Farewell party. Had his eyes been free of the silk scarf he would have seen that he was supported in mid-air by a beautiful white balloon like a giant whale, tinted in the light.

  Above the balloon, high up in the sky, were flocks of aircraft of all colours, shapes and sizes.

  Below him, flying in formation, were craft like golden darts, and far, far below these, he would have seen, in the north, a great tract of shimmering marshland reaching away to the horizon.

  To the south in the forest land he would have caught sight of smoke from the bonfire which gave them their direction.

  But he could see nothing of all this – nothing of the play of light upon the silky marshes nor how the shadows of the various aircraft cruised slowly over the tree-tops.

  Nor could he see his companion. She sat there, a few feet out of his reach, very upright, tiny and supremely efficient, her hands on the controls.

  The workmen were gone from the scene. They had toiled like slaves. Rough country had been cleared for the helicopters, and all types of aircraft to land. The heavy carts were filled with weary men.

  The great crater of the Black House that had until recently yawned to the moon was now filled with something other than its mood. Its emptiness gone, it listened as though it had the power of hearing.

  There had, in all conscience, been enough to hear. For the last week or more, the forest had echoed to the sound of hammering, sawing and the shouts of foresters.

  Close enough to observe without being seen, yet far enough in danger’s name, the scores of small forest animals, squirrels, badgers, mice, shrews, weasels, foxes and birds of every feather, their tribal feuds forgotten, sat silent, their eyes following every movement, their ears pricked. Little knowing that between them they were forming a scattered circle of flesh and blood, they drew their breath into their lungs and stared at the shell of the Black House. The shell and the strange things that filled it.

  As the hours passed, this living circumference grew in depth, until the time came when a day of silence settled down upon the district, and in this silence could be heard the breathing of the fauna like the sound of the sea.

  Mystified by the silence (for the day had come for the workmen to leave, and the socialites had not yet arrived), they stared (these scores of eyes) at the Black House, which now presented to the world a face so unlikely that it was a long time before the animals and the birds broke silence.

  NINETY-SEVEN

  Casting their wicked shadows, two wild cats broke free at last from the trance that had descended upon the scores of spellbound creatures, and with almost unbelievable stealth crept forward cheek to cheek.

  Watched by silent miscellaneous hordes, they slid their feline way from the listening forest and came at last to the northern wall of the Black House.

  For a long time they stayed there, sitting upright, hidden by a wealth of ferns, only their heads showing. It seemed they ran on oil, those loveless heads, so fluidly they turned from side to side.

  At last they jumped together as though from a mutual impulse, and found themselves on a broad moss-covered ledge. They had made this jump many times before but not until now had they looked down from their old vantage point upon so unbelievable a metamorphosis.

  Everything was changed and yet nothing had changed. For a moment their eyes met. It was a glance of such exquisite subtlety that a shudder of chill pleasure ran down their spines.

  The change was entire. Nothing was as it was before. There was a throne where once was a mound of green masonry. There were old crusty suits of armour hanging on the walls. There were lanterns and great carpets and tables knee-deep in hemlock. There was no end to the change.

  And yet it was the same in so far as the mood swamped everything. A mood of unutterable desolation that no amount of change could alter.

  The two cats, conscious that they were the focus of all eyes, grew progressively bolder until slipping down an ivy-faced wall, they positively grinned with their entire bodies and sprang into the air with a mixture of excitement and anger. Excitement that there were new worlds to conquer, and anger that their secret paths were gone for ever, and the green abodes and favourite haunts were gone. The overgrown ruin which these two had taken for granted as part of their lives, ever since, like little balls of spleen, they nuzzled and fought for the warmth of their mother’s belly … this ruin was now, suddenly, another thing, a thing to be assimilated and explored. A world of new sensations … a world that had once rung with echoes, but which now gave no response, its emptiness departed.

  Where was the long shelf gone: the long worn dusty shelf, festooned with hart’s tongue? It had disappeared, and what stood in its place had never felt the impress of a wild cat’s body.

  In its place were towering shapes, impossible to understand. As their courage strengthened, the wild cats began to run hither and thither with excitement, yet never losing their poise as they ran, their heads held high in the air in such a sentient and lordly way as to suggest a kind of vibrant wisdom.

  What were these great swags of material? What was this intricate canopy of bone-white branches that hung from the roof and over their heads? Was it the ribs of a great whale?

  The two cats growing bolder began to behave in a very peculiar way, not only leaping from vantage-point to vantage-point in a weird game of follow-my-leader, but wriggling their ductile bodies into every conceivable position. Sometimes they ran alone along an aisle of hoary carpet: sometimes they clung to one another and fought as though in earnest, only to break off suddenly, as though by common assent, so that one or other might scratch its ear with a hind foot.

  And still there was no movement from the ring of watching creatures, until, without warning, a fox suddenly trotted out of the periphery, leapt through a window in one of the walls, and running to the centre of the Black House sat down on an expensive rug, lifted his sharp yellow face, and barked.

  This acted like a tocsin, and hundreds of woodland creatures rose to their feet, and a minute later were down in the arena.

  But they were not there for long, for immediately after the two cats had arched their backs and snarled at the fox and all the other invaders, something else occurred which sent the birds and beasts back into their hiding places.

  The sky above the Black House was, of a sudden, filled with coloured lights. The vanguard of the airborne flotilla was dropping earthwards.

  NINETY-EIGHT

  Delicately stepping from their various machines, the glittering beauties and the glittering horrors, arrayed like humming birds, passed in and out of the shadows with their escorts, their tongues flickering, their eyes dilated with conjecture, for this was something never known before … the flight by night. The overhanging forests; the sense of exquisite fear; the suspense and the thrill of the unknown; the pools of dark; the pools of brilliance; the fluttering breath drawn in and exhaled with a shudder of relief; relief in every breast that it was not alone, though the stars shone down out of the cold and the small snakes lurked among the ruins.

  As each dazzling influx tip-toed through the mouldering doorways of the Black House, their heads involuntarily turned to the central fire; a careful structure composed of juniper branches which when alight, as now, threw up a scented smoke.

  ‘Oh my darling,’ said a voice out of the darkness.

  ‘What is it?’ said a voice out of the light.


  ‘This is the throb of it. Where are you?’

  ‘Here, at your dappled side.’

  ‘O Ursula!’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘To think it is all for that boy!’

  ‘O no! It is for us. It is for our delectation. It is for the green light on your bosom … and the diamonds in my ears. It is bloom. It is brilliance.’

  ‘It is primal, darling. Primal.’

  Another voice broke in …

  ‘It is a place for frogs.’

  ‘Yes, yes, but we’re ahead.’

  ‘Ahead of what?’

  ‘The avant-garde. Look at us. If we are not the soul of chic, who is?’

  Another voice, a man’s; a poor affair. ‘This is double pneumonia,’ it wheezed.

  ‘For heaven’s sake be careful of that carpet. It sucked my shoe off,’ said his friend.

  With every moment that passed, the crowd thickened. For the most part guests made for the juniper fire. Their scores of faces flickered and leapt to the whim of the flames.

  Were it not Cheeta’s party there would undoubtedly have been many more than ready to criticize the lavish display … the heterodoxy of the whole affair would have rankled. As it was, the discomfort of the Black House was more than made up for by the occasion. For that is what it was.

  The babble of voices rose, as the guests multiplied. Yet there were many young adventurers who, tired of staring into the flames almost as much as having to listen to the shrill tongues of their partners, had begun to leave the warmth in order to explore the outer reaches of the ruin. There they came across bizarre formations reaching high into the night.

  Here, as they moved, and there, as they moved, they came upon peculiar structures hard to understand. But there was nothing hard to fathom about the dusky table, dim-lit by candles, where a great ice-cake glimmered, with ‘Titus, Farewell’ sculpted in its flanks. Behind the cake, there arose tier upon tier, the Banquet, in half-light. A hundred goblets twinkled, and the napkins rose as though in flight.

  Six mirrors reflecting one another across the sullen reaches of the Black House focused their light upon something which appeared to contradict itself, for, looked at from one angle, it appeared to resemble a small tower, yet from another it seemed more like a pulpit, or a throne.

  Whatever it might be, there was no doubt that it was of some importance, for posted at its corners were four flunkeys who were almost abnormally zealous in keeping any odd guest who had strayed that far, from coming too close.

  Meanwhile there was something happening, something – if not of the Farewell Party, yet close to it. Something that strode!

  NINETY-NINE

  He was not entirely cut out to pattern, this strider. Barbaric to the eye, his silhouette more like something made of ropes and bones, he was nevertheless instantly recognizable as Muzzlehatch.

  A little behind him, as he approached were the three one-time Under-River characters. Peculiar as they were, they paled into nothingness beside their eccentric leader whose every movement was a kind of stab in the bosom of the orthodox world.

  They had searched for, and found, more by luck than wisdom (though they knew the country well), this Muzzlehatch, and had forced him to rest his long wild bones, and to shut for an hour his haunted eyes.

  What they had hoped to do (Crabcalf and the rest) was to find Muzzlehatch, and warn him of Titus’ danger. For they had come to the conclusion that some black force had been unearthed, and that Titus was in real peril.

  But what they found, when at last they tracked him down, was not the Muzzlehatch they knew, but a man of the wilds. Of the wilds within himself and the wilds without. Not only this, but a man who had but recently been deep into the steel heart of the enemy: a man with a mission half complete. One eye had closed in satisfaction. The other burned like an ember.

  Little by little, they drew out his story. Of how he came upon the factory and knew at once that he was at the door of hell. The door he had been searching for. Of how by bluff and guile, and later by force, he had found and forced his way into a less frequented district of this great place where he began to be sickened by the scent of death.

  They listened carefully, the three followers, but for all their concentration they could barely make out what he was saying. Had their interpretation of his words been pooled and sifted so that it was possible to evoke a summary of all he whispered (for he was too tired to speak) then in the broadest way he told the three who hovered above him, of the identical faces: of how he slid down endless belts of translucent skin; and how, as he slid, a great hand in a glove of shining black rubber reached out for him so that Muzzlehatch was forced to haul at the creature; to haul it aboard upon the moving belt; a vile thing to touch it was and shrouded in white from head to toe; a thing that lashed out, but could not escape from Muzzlehatch’s clench, and fell back at last, dead.

  It seems that Muzzlehatch had ripped away the dead man’s working-shroud before that cipher slid into a glass tunnel, and then, clad in white, had escaped from the belt and the empty hall, and loping away, had soon found himself in another kind of district altogether.

  Strange as it seems (when it is remembered how horrible and multifarious are the ways of modern death), yet it is true that a jack-knife at the ribs can cause as terrible a sensation as any lurking gas or lethal ray. His knife was at the ready, and it was very sharp, but before he had any chance to use it, the light turned from a clear cool grey to a murky crimson and at the same moment the entire floor of the factory, like the floor of a lift began to descend.

  So much could the three vagrants understand, but then began a long period of confused muttering which, try as they would they could not decipher. It was obvious that they were missing much, for the gaunt man’s arms kept beating the ground as he fought to recover from his terrible experience.

  At times the intensity grew less and his words came back again like creatures from their lairs, but almost at once the ‘three’ became aware of how, in spite of the increasing volubility, it spelt no certainty, for their master began more and more to drift away into an almost private language.

  But this much they did discover. He must have waited almost to distraction; waited for the one opportunity when at the supreme moment he could single out a hierophant, and with his jack-knife in that creature’s back, demand to be taken to the centre.

  It came at last. The victim almost sick with fear leading Muzzlehatch down corridor after corridor. And all the time the gaunt man repeated …

  ‘To the centre!’

  ‘Yes,’ said the frightened voice. ‘Yes … yes.’

  ‘To the centre! Is that where you’re taking me?’

  ‘Yes, yes. To the centre of it all.’

  ‘Is that where he hides himself?’

  ‘Yes, yes …’

  As they proceeded, white hordes of faces flowed by like a tide. Then silence and emptiness took over.

  ONE HUNDRED

  Titus, where are you? Are your eyes still bandaged? Are your arms still tied behind you?

  Through a gap in the forest the night looked down upon the roofless shell of the Black House studded with fires and jewels. And above the gap, floating away forever from the branches was a small grass-green balloon, lit faintly on its underside. It must have come adrift from its tree-top mooring. Sitting upright on the upper crown of the truant balloon was a rat. It had climbed a tree to investigate the floating craft; and then, courage mounting, it had climbed to the shadowy top of the globe, never thinking that the mooring cord was about to snap. But snap it did, and away it went, this small balloon, away into the wilds of the mind. And all the while the little rat sat there, helpless in its global sovereignty.

  ONE HUNDRED AND ONE

  Titus was no longer in any mood for collaboration, party or no party. Up to an hour or so ago, he had been willing enough to join in what was supposed to be an elaborate game in his honour; but he was beginning to feel otherwise. Now that his feet were on terra
firma he began to hanker for release. His blindness had gone on for too long.

  ‘Undo my bloody eyes,’ he cried, but there was no reply until a voice whispered …

  ‘Be patient, my lord.’

  Titus, who was now being led forward to the great door of the Black House came to a halt. He turned to where the voice had come from.

  ‘Did you say “my lord”?’

  ‘Naturally, your lordship.’

  ‘Undo these scarves at once. Where are you?’

  ‘Here, my lord.’

  ‘Why are you waiting? Set me free!’

  Then out of the darkness came Cheeta’s voice, dry and crisp as an autumn leaf.

  ‘O Titus dear; has it been very irksome?’

  A group of sophisticates edging up behind Cheeta echoed her …

  ‘Has it been very irksome?’

  ‘It won’t be long now, my love, before …’

  ‘Before what?’ shouted Titus. ‘Why can’t you set me free?’

  ‘It is not in my hands, my darling.’

  Again the echo from the voices, ‘… my hands, my darling.’

  Cheeta watched him with her eyes half closed.

  ‘You promised me, didn’t you,’ she said, ‘that you would make no fuss? That you would walk quietly to the place of your appointment. That you would take three paces up and then turn about. That then, and only then, would the scarf be unknotted, and your eyes be freed. That is the moment of surprise.’

  ‘The best surprise you could give me would be to rip these rags off! O lord of lords! How did I get mixed up in it all? Where are you? Yes, you in your midget body. O God for help! What’s all the shouting for?’