by Mervyn Peake
As for the phlegmatic Anchor, he had noted the long line of aeroplanes that glimmered in the half-darkness. There, if nowhere else, was their escape route.
Now he was ready. Now, before the evening closed in, he must strike when the moment came. Strike when? He had not long to wait for an answer.
Cheeta had by now seen not only Titus, but her father also. She had stopped as a bird stops in the middle of a run; for it was with amazement that she found herself so close to the huge stranger, who was even now picking her father up by the nape of his neck as a dog might lift a rat.
ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN
Everything seemed to be happening together. The light shifted like a gauze across the scene, almost as though the moon was making a return journey. Then something shone in the darkness. Something of metal, for there was no other substance that could throw out so strong a glint into the night air.
Titus, his gaze distracted for a moment by these flashes of light, turned his head away from Cheeta and her suspended father, and discovered, at last, what he was looking for. And while he watched, the leaping bonfire sent out a more than usually brilliant tongue, and this tongue, though it was far away, was strong enough to draw out of the darkness an expressionless face, and then another. Now they were gone again, though the light went on flashing above them. Plunged in their caves, their faces were no more, though their crests were alive with light. The helmeted men, even without their helmets they would be tall. But with them, they stood head and shoulder above the crowd.
A shudder passed though Titus’ body. He saw the crowds draw themselves apart so that the ‘helmets’ could pass through. He heard the assembly call out for them to deal with Muzzlehatch.
‘Take him away,’ they cried. ‘Who is he? What does he want? He is frightening the ladies.’
Yet not one of that crowd, save for the ‘helmets’ themselves, and Cheeta, who was trembling in a diabolical rage; not one dared to take a step alone.
As for Muzzlehatch, his arm was outstretched and the scientist was still dangling at the end of it. This was the man whom he intended to slay. But now that he had the bald creature at arm’s length, he could not feel the hatred so strongly.
Titus was appalled at the scene. Appalled at the vileness of it. Appalled that anyone should have thought out such an idea as to mock his family in such a way. Appalled and frightened. He turned his head and saw her, and his blood ran cold.
Revenge filled up her system, and battled with itself in her miniature bosom. Titus had scorned her. And now there was the ragged man as well, for he was holding up her family to scorn. And now Juno, whom she saw out of the tail of her eye. Her hair rose at the nape. There was no forgetting so far as Cheeta was concerned. This was the Juno of his early days. This was she; his one-time mistress.
ONE HUNDRED AND TWELVE
The bonfire of juniper branches had been replenished, and again a yellow tongue of fire had fled up into the sky. Its light lit up the nearest of the trees with a wan illumination. The scent of the juniper filled the air. It was the only pleasant thing about the night. But no one noticed.
The animals and the birds, unable to go to sleep, watched from whatever vantage point they could cling to. There was among them an understanding that they left one another alone, until dawn, so that the birds of prey sat side by side with doves and owls, the foxes with the mice.
From where he stood, Titus could see, as though on a stage, the protagonists. Time seemed to draw to a close. The world had lost interest in itself and its positionings. They stood between the coil and the recoil. It was too much. Yet there was no alternative either of the heart or of the head. He could not leave Muzzlehatch. He loved the man. Yes, even now, though the flecks of red burned in his arrogant eyes. Sensing the widespread derangement all about him, Titus was becoming fearful for his own sanity. Yet there is loyalty in dreams, and beauty in madness, and he could not turn from the shaggy side of his friend. Nor could the scores of guests do anything. They were spellbound.
Now Muzzlehatch’s boulder-like rolling of his own voice was repeated, and then immediately followed by a voice that did not seem his own. Something muted: something more menacing took its place.
‘That was a long time ago,’ said Muzzlehatch, ‘when I lived another kind of life. I wandered through the dawn and back again. I ate the world up like a serpent devouring itself, tail first. Now I am inside out. The lions roared for me. They roared down my bloodstream. But, as they are dead, their roaring comes to nothing, for you, Bladder-head, have stopped their hearts from beating, and now it’s about time for me to stop yours.’
Muzzlehatch was not looking at the living bundle at the end of his arm. He was looking through it. Then he dropped his hand and trailed the scientist in the dust.
‘So I went for a stroll, and what a stroll it was! It took me to a factory at last. And there I met your friends and your machines, and all that caused the great death of my beasts. O God, my coloured beasts, my burning fauna. And there I lit the blue fuse at the centre. It can’t be long to wait. Boom!’
Muzzlehatch looked about him.
‘Well, well, well,’ he said. ‘What a pretty lot we have here! By heaven, Titus boy, the air is full of damnation. Look at ’em. D’you know ’em? Ha, ha! God’s liver, if it ain’t the “Helmeteers”. How they do tread on our tails.’
‘Sir,’ said Anchor, moving up. ‘Let me relieve you of the scientist. Even an arm like yours must tire at times.’
‘Who are you?’ said Muzzlehatch, leaving his arm where it was, like a signpost, for he had lifted it again.
‘Does that matter?’ said Anchor.
‘Matter! Ha, that’s ripe,’ said Muzzlehatch. ‘Ripe as your copper-coloured mane. How is it you have jumped from the ranks to join us?’
‘We have a lady in common,’ said Anchor.
‘Who would that be?’ said Muzzlehatch. ‘Queen of the mermaids?’
‘Do I look it?’ It was Juno who, against Anchor’s instructions, had crept out of the alcove, and now stood at his side.
‘O Titus, my most dear!’ She ran towards him.
At the sight of Juno, the air became electric and through this atmosphere a figure darted, rapid as a weasel. It was Cheeta.
ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTEEN
So this was Juno; this, the billowy whore. Cheeta bit her underlip until the blood ran over her chin.
She had long ago dismissed from her mind any thought of her own attractions. They had ceased to be of any interest to her, for something a thousand times more important filled her vision as a pit can be filled with fumes. But as the venomous midget slid with a dreadful intensity of purpose towards Juno, her rival, she was brought to an incongruous halt by an explosion.
Not only was Cheeta halted in her progress at the sound of the reverberation, but each in their own way found himself or herself rooted to the floor of the Black House; Juno, Anchor, Titus, and Muzzlehatch himself, the ‘Helmets’, the Three, and a hundred guests. And more than this. The birds and the beasts of the surrounding forests, they also froze along the boughs, until simultaneously taking wing a great volume of birds arose like a fog into the night, thickening the air, and quenching the moon. Where they had perched in their thousands the twigs and boughs lifted themselves a little in the bird-made darkness.
Seeing the others glued to the ground, Cheeta struggled against her own inability to close with them and to fight with the only weapons she possessed; two rows of sharp little teeth and ten fingernails. She had turned from Titus to Juno as the first of her enemies to dispatch, but like them, her head was turned in the direction of the sound, and she could not twist it back.
That her father, the greatest scientist in the world was hanging upside down from the outstretched arm of some kind of brigand did not, in itself, inflame or impress upon her passions, for there was no space left in her tiny tremulous body for such an emotion to find foothold. She could not feel for him. She was consumed already.
The first to speak
was Anchor.
‘What would that be?’ he said. Even as he spoke a light appeared in the sky in the direction of the sound.
‘That would be the death of many men,’ said Muzzlehatch. ‘That would be the last roar of the golden fauna: the red of the world’s blood: doom is one step closer. It was the fuse that did it. The blue fuse. My dear man,’ he said, turning to Anchor, ‘only look at the sky.’
Sure enough it was taking on a life of its own. Unhealthy as a neglected sore, skeins of transparent fabric wavered across the night sky, peeling off, one after another to reveal yet fouler tissues in a fouler empyrean.
Then the crowd raised its voice, and demanded that it be set free from the ghastly charade that was taking place before its eyes.
But when Muzzlehatch approached them they drew back, for there was something incalculable about the smile that turned his face into something to be avoided.
They all drew back a pace or two, except for the helmeted pair. These two, holding their ground, leaned forward on the air. Now that they were so close it could be seen that their heads were like skulls, beautiful, as though chiselled. What skin they had was stretched tight as silk. There was a sheen over their heads, almost a luminosity. Nor did they speak from those thin mouths of theirs. Nor could they. Only the crowds spoke, while their clothes grew damp as the night fell, despoiling the exquisite gowns, and blackening their hems with dew. So with the medallioned chests of their tongue-tied escorts.
‘I ask you sir, again. What was that noise? Was it thunder?’ said Anchor, knowing full well that it was not. He watched the gaunt man while he spoke but he also watched Titus; and Cheeta. He watched the helmeted men who menaced Muzzlehatch. He watched everything. His eyes, in contrast to the shock of red hair, were grey as pools.
But above all he watched Juno. All eyes had by now been turned away from the direction of the sound and of the sick sky also, and formed between them a pattern in the darkness, and at the same moment the first twinge of sunrise in the forested east.
Juno, her eyes filled with tears, took hold of Titus by the arm at a moment when he longed from the bottom of his soul to get away, to leave for ever. But he did not by an iota tense or withdraw his arm from her, or do anything to hurt her. Yet Juno let go her hand from his arm, and it fell like a weight to her side.
He gazed at her, almost as though she belonged to another world, and his lips, though they formed a smile, had no life in them. Here they stood side by side, these two, with the loveliest section of their past in common. Yet they appeared to have lost their way. All this was in a flash, and the Anchor took it in.
He also took in something of another kind. The impersonal embers in Muzzlehatch’s eyes appeared to have been fanned into life. The small, dull red light had now begun to oscillate to and fro across the pupils.
But in contrast to this grisly phenomenon, was the control he exercised over his own voice. It was perfectly audible though a little more than a whisper. Coming from the great rudder-nosed man it was a double weapon.
‘It was not thunder,’ he said. ‘Thunder is purposeless. But this was the very backbone of purpose. There was no explosion for explosion’s sake.’
Taking advantage of the fact that Muzzlehatch was engaged in his own oratory, Anchor moved around him, unseen, until he stood a little behind Titus, for from this position he was able to command a view of Cheeta and Juno at the same time.
The air was bristling, for they had seen one another. Without her knowing it, the initial advantage lay with Juno, for Cheeta’s ferocity was almost equally divided between her and Titus.
The whole travesty had been planned as something to humiliate Titus. She had been to all lengths to insure its success; yet now it was over, and she stood among the wreckage, her little body vibrating like a bow-string.
‘Dismantle them!’ she screamed, for she saw out-topping the crowd, the battered masks, the hanks of hair; the Countess breaking in half, dusty and ludicrous; the sawdust; and the paint.
ONE HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN
‘Take those things down!’ she screamed, standing on tip-toe, for she saw in the tail of her eye, a great wavering, semi-human bulk, that was even now as she watched it, breaking in half and turning as it collapsed, to show the long filthy hanks of hair, the mask with its dreadful pallor, lit by the flooding of the dawn, sink to the floor. Down came the others, that had so recently been the symbols of mockery and scorn. Some with their grease-paint dripping; the dusty remnants of blotched sawdust.
All at once a woman screamed, and as though this were a signal for release, a general cacophony broke out and a number of ladies grew hysterical, striking out at their husbands or their lovers.
Muzzlehatch, whose peroration had been interrupted, merely cocked an eye at the crowd, and then stared fixedly and for a long time at what was still dangling at the end of his arm. After a while he remembered what it was.
‘I was going to kill you,’ said Muzzlehatch, ‘in the way you kill a rabbit. A sharp stroke at the nape of the neck, delivered with the edge of the hand. I was even going to throttle you, but that seemed too good for you. Then there was the idea of drowning you in a bucket, but all these things were too good for you. You would not appreciate them. But I’ll have to do something about you, won’t I? Do you think your daughter wants you? Has she a birthday coming? No? Then I’ll take a chance, my little cockroach. Only look at her. Dishevelled and wicked. Look how she pines for him. Why, you’d take his nut for an onion. I must be rude after all, my sweet dangler, for you killed my animals. Ah, how they slid in their hey-day. How they meandered; how they skidded or leapt in their abandon. Lord, how they cocked their heads. Dear heaven! How they cocked their heads!
‘Once there were islands all a-sprout with palms: and coral reefs and sands as white as milk. What is there now but a vast shambles of the heart? Filth, squalor, and a world of little men.’
At the same moment that Muzzlehatch drew breath, Cheeta was seen to speed across the last few steps that divided her from Titus, like an evil thing borne on an evil draught.
Had it not been that with an unexpected agility, Juno leapt in front of Titus, he might well have had his face cut over and over by Cheeta’s long green nails.
Thwarted in her passion to leave her marks on Titus’ face, she howled in an access of evil as tears churned down her cheeks in channels of make-up.
For, no longer than it takes to tell it, Anchor had dragged both Titus and Juno out of reach of the malignant dart. Trembling, she stood and waited the next move, rising and falling on her tiny feet.
The dawn was now beginning to pick out the leaves from the trees of the surrounding forests and glowed softly on the helmets of the agents.
But Titus did not want to be hidden away behind the stalwart Anchor. He was grateful but angry that he should have been plucked backwards. As for Juno who had disobeyed Anchor – she was doing it again. For she also had no wish to remain in the shadow of her friend. They were too restless, too on edge to stand still. Seeing what was happening, Anchor merely shrugged his shoulders.
‘The time has come,’ said Muzzlehatch, ‘to do whatever it was we set out to do. This is the time for flight. This is the time for bastards like myself to put an end to it all. What if my eyes are sore and red? What if they burn my sockets up? I’ve bathed in the straits of Actapon with phosphorus in the water, and my limbs like fish. Who cares about that now? Do you?’ he said, tossing the bundle who was Cheeta’s father, from one huge hand to another. ‘Do you? Tell me honestly.’
Muzzlehatch bent down and put his ear to the bundle. ‘It’s beastly,’ he said, ‘and it’s alive.’ Muzzlehatch tossed the little scientist to his daughter, who had no option but to catch him.
He whimpered a little as Cheeta then let him fall to the floor. Getting to his feet, his face was a map of terror.
‘I must go back to my work,’ he said in that thin voice that sent a chill down the spines of all his workmen.
‘It’s no good goi
ng there,’ said Muzzlehatch. ‘It has exploded. Can you not hear the reverberations? Can you not see how ghastly is the dawn? There’s a lot of ash in the air.’
‘Exploded? No! … No! … It was all I had; my science, all that I had.’
‘And she was a lovely girl, I’m told,’ said Muzzlehatch.
Cheeta’s father, too frightened to answer, now began to turn in the direction of the foul light that was still angry in the sky. ‘Let me go,’ he cried, though no one was touching him. ‘O God! My formula!’ he cried. ‘My formula.’ He began to run.
On and on he ran, over the walls and into the dawn shadows. Immediately upon his words came a thick and curious laughter. It was Muzzlehatch. His eyes were like two red-hot pennies. While the echoes of Muzzlehatch rang out, Cheeta had manoeuvred herself so that she was again within striking distance of Titus, who, now that he was some way from Anchor, had turned for a moment to stare about him at the gaping throng.
It was at that moment, with his head averted, that Cheeta struck, breaking her nails as one might crunch sea-shells. The warm blood ran profusely down his neck. At once Juno was upon her.
How she could have moved with such speed it was impossible to say. But when she leapt forward and lifted her arm to strike, Juno recoiled from touching the febrile thing, for there was something horrible in the discrepancy in their sizes, and something pitiful about Cheeta’s small bedraggled face spotted with blood, however evil.