The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

‘Gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Silence if you please. I thank you.’

He dropped his head so that with his face in deep shadow he could relax his features in a smile of delight at finding himself obeyed. When he raised his face it was as solemn and as noble as before.

‘Are all who are here gathered present?’

‘What the hell does that mean?’ said a coarse voice, out of the red gloom of the gowns, and immediately on top of Mulefire’s voice, the staccato of Cutflower’s laughter broke out in little clanks of sound – ‘Oh La! la! la! if that isn’t ripeness, la! “Are all who are here gathered present?” La! … What a tease the old man is, lord help my lungs!’

‘Quite so! Quite so!’ broke out a crisper voice. ‘What he was trying to ask, presumably’ (it was Shrivell speaking) ‘was whether everyone here was really here, or whether it was only those who thought themselves here when they weren’t really here at all who were here? You see it’s quite simple, really, once you have mastered the syntax.’

Somewhere close behind the headmaster there was a sense of strangled body-laughter, a horrible inaudible affair and then the sound of a deep bucketful of breath being drawn out of a well – and then Opus Fluke’s mid- stomach voice. ‘Poor old Bellgrove,’ it said. ‘Poor old bloody Bellgrove!’ and then the rumbling again, and a chorus of dark and stupid laughter.

Bellgrove was in no mood for this. His old face was flushed and his legs trembled. Fluke’s voice had sounded very close. Just behind his left shoulder. Bellgrove took a step to the rear and then turning suddenly with a whirl of his white gown he swung his long arm and at once he was startled at what he at first imagined was a complete triumph. His gnarled old fist had struck a human jaw. A quick, wild, and bitter sense of mastery possessed him and the intoxicating notion that he had been under-rating himself for seventy odd years and that all unwittingly he had discovered in himself the ‘man of action’. But his exhilaration was short lived for the figure who lay moaning at his feet was not Opus Fluke at all, but the weedy and dyspeptic Flannelcat, the only member of his staff who held him in any kind of respect.

But Bellgrove’s prompt action had a sobering effect.

‘Flannelcat!’ he said. ‘Let that be a warning to them. Get up, my man. You have done nobly. Nobly.’ At that moment something whisked through the air and struck an obscure member of the staff on the wrist. At his cry, for he was in real pain, Flannelcat was at once forgotten. A small round stone was found at the feet of the obscure member, and every head was turned at once to the dusky quadrangle, but nothing could be seen.

High up on a northern wall, where the windows appeared no larger than keyholes, Steerpike, sitting with his legs dangling over one of the window-sills, raised his eyebrows at the sound of the cry so far below him, and piously closing his eyes he kissed his catapult.

‘Whatever the hell that was, or wherever it came from, it does at least remind us that we are late, my friend,’ said Shrivell.

‘True enough,’ muttered Shred, who almost always trod heavily on the tail of his friend’s remarks. ‘True enough.’

‘Bellgrove,’ said Perch-Prism, ‘wake your ideas up, old friend, and lead the way in. I see that every light is blazing in the homestead of the Prunes. Lord, what a lot we are!’ he moved his small pig-like eyes across the faces of his colleagues – ‘what a hideous lot we are – but there it is – there it is.’

‘You’re not much of a silk-purse yourself,’ said a voice.

‘In we go, la! In we go!’ cried Cutflower. ‘Terribly gay now! Terribly gay! We must all be terribly gay!’

Perch-Prism slid up under Bellgrove’s shoulder. ‘My old friend,’ he said. ‘You haven’t forgotten what I said about Irma, have you? It may be difficult for you. I have even more recent information. She’s dead nuts on you, old man. Dead nuts. Watch your steps, chief. Watch ’em carefully.’

‘I – will – watch – my – steps, Perch-Prism, have no fear,’ said Bellgrove with a leer that his colleagues could in no way interpret.

Spiregrain, Throd and Splint stood hand in hand. Their spiritual master was dead. They were enormously glad of it. They winked at each other and dug one another in the ribs and then joined hands again in the darkness.

A mass movement towards the gate of the Prunesquallors began. Within this gate there was nothing that could be called a front garden, merely an area of dark red gravel which had been raked by the gardener. The parallel lines formed by his rake were quite visible in the moonlight. He might have saved himself the trouble for within a few moments the neat striated effect was a thing of the past. Not a square red inch escaped the shuffling and stamping of the Professors’ feet. Hundreds of footprints of all shapes and sizes, crossing and recrossing, toes and heels superimposed with such freaks of placing that it seemed as though among the professors there were some who boasted feet as long as an arm, and others who must have found it difficult to balance upon shoes that a monkey might have found too tight.

After the bottleneck of the garden gate had been negotiated and the wine-red horde, with Bellgrove at its van, like an oriflamme, were before the front door, the headmaster turned with his hand hovering at the height of the bell pull, and raising his lion-like head, was about to remind his staff that as the guests of Irma Prunesquallor he hoped to find in their deportment and general behaviour that sense of decorum which he had so far had no reason to suppose they possessed or could even simulate, when a butler, dressed up like a Christmas cracker, flung the front door open with a flourish which was obviously the result of many years’ experience. The speed of the door as it swung on its hinges was extraordinary, but what was just as dramatic was the silence – a silence so complete that Bellgrove, with his head turned towards his staff and his hand still groping in the air for the bell-pull, could not grasp the reason for the peculiar behaviour of his colleagues. When a man is about to make a speech, however modest, he is glad to have the attention of his audience. To see on every face that stared in his direction an expression of intense interest, but an interest that obviously had nothing to do with him, was more than disturbing. What had happened to them? Why were all those eyes so out of focus – or if they were in focus why should they skim his own as though there were something absorbing about the woodwork of the high green door behind him? And why was Throd standing on tip-toe in order to look through him?

Bellgrove was about to turn – not because he thought there could be anything to see but because he was experiencing that sensation that causes men to turn their heads on deserted roads in order to make sure they are alone. But before he could turn of his own free will he received two sharp yet deferential knuckle-taps on his left shoulder-blade – and leaping about as though at the touch of a ghost he found himself face to face with the tall Christmas-cracker of a butler.