The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

What did he see among the overhead shadows? Some, in his place, must surely have seen battle or the great jaws of carnivores or landscapes of infinite mystery and invention complete with bridges and deep chasms, forests and craters. But Crabcalf saw none of these. He saw nothing in the shadows but great profiles of himself, one after the other.

He lay quietly, his arms outside the thick red blanket that covered him. To his left sat Slingshott on the edge of a crate, his knees drawn up to his chin, his long jaw resting on his kneecap. He wore a woollen cap, and like Mr Crabcalf had lapsed for the while into silence.

At the foot of the bed, crouched like a condor over its young, was Carrow cooking a meal over a stove, and stirring what looked like a mass of horrible green fibre in a wide-necked pot. As he stirred he whistled between his teeth. The sound of this meditative occupation could be heard for a minute or two, echoing faintly in far quarters before a hundred other sounds slid back to hush it.

Mr Crabcalf was propped up, not against pillows or a bolster of straw, but by books; and every book was the same book with its dark grey spine. There at his back, banked up like a wall of bricks, were the so-called ‘remainders’ of an epic, long ago written, long ago forgotten, except by its author, for his lifework lay at his shoulder blades.

Out of the five hundred copies printed thirty years ago by a publisher long since bankrupt, only twelve copies had been sold.

Around his bed, three hundred identical volumes were erected … like walls or ramparts, protecting him from – what? There was also a cache beneath the bed that gathered dust and silver-fish.

He lay with his past beside him, beneath him, and at his head: his past, five hundred times repeated, covered with dust and silver-fish. His head, like Jacob’s on the famous stone, rested against the volumes of lost breath. The ladder from his miserable bed reached up to heaven. But there were no angels.

FIFTY

‘What on earth are you doing?’ said Crabcalf in a deep voice (a voice so very much more impressive than anything it ever had to say). ‘I have seen some pretty revolting things in my time, but the meal that you are preparing, Mr Carrow, is the most nauseating affair that I ever remember.’

Mr Carrow hardly troubled to look up. It was all part of the day. There would have been something missing if Crabcalf had forgotten to insult his crouching and angular friend, who went on stirring the contents of a copper bowl.

‘How many of us have you killed in your time, I wonder?’ muttered Crabcalf, allowing his head to fall back on the pillow of books, so that a little whiff of dust rose into the lamplight, new heavens being formed, new constellations, as the motes wavered.

‘Eh? Eh? How many have you sent to their deathbeds through hapless poisoning?’

Even Crabcalf was apt to become tired of his own heavy banter, and he shut his eyes. Carrow as usual made no answer. But Crabcalf was content. Even more than most he felt a great need for companionship, and he spoke only to prove to himself that his friendships were real.

Carrow knew all about this, and from time to time he turned his hawk-like features towards the one-time poet and lifted the dry corner of his lipless mouth in a dry smile. This arid salutation meant much to Crabcalf. It was part of the day.

‘O, Carrow,’ murmured the recumbent Crabcalf, ‘your desiccation is like juice to me. I love you better than a ship’s biscuit. You have no green emotions. You are dry, my dear Carrow: so dry, you pucker me. Never desert me, old friend.’

Carrow turned his eyes to the bed, but never ceased in his stirring of the grey broth.

‘You are talkative today,’ he said. ‘Don’t overdo it.’

The third of the trio, Slingshott, rose to his feet.

‘I don’t know about you,’ he said, addressing the space halfway between Carrow and Crabcalf, ‘but speaking for myself I’m hand in hand with grief.’

‘You always are,’ said Crabcalf. ‘At this time of day. And so am I. It is the eternal problem. Is one to be hungry, or is one to eat old Carrow’s gruel?’

‘No, no, I’m not talking about food,’ said Slingshott. ‘It’s worse than that. You see, I lost my wife. I left her behind. Was I wrong?’ He lifted his face to the dripping ceiling. No one answered.

‘When I escaped from the merciless mines,’ he said, folding his arms. ‘When the days and the nights were salt, and my lips were cracked and split with it, and the taste of that vile chemical was like knives in my mouth and a white death more terrible than any darkness of the spirit … when … I escaped I swore …’

‘That whatever happened you would never again complain of anything whatever, for nothing could be as terrible as the mines,’ said Crabcalf.

‘Why, how do you know all this? Who has been …?’

‘We have all heard it many times before. You tell us too often,’ said Carrow.

‘It is always in my head, and I forget.’

‘But you escaped. Why fret about your deliverance?’

‘I am so happy that they cannot take me. O never let them take me to the salt mines. There was a time when I collected eggs: and butterflies … and moths …’

‘I am growing hungry,’ said Crabcalf.

‘I used to dread the nights I spent alone: but after a while, when for various reasons I was forced to quit the house, and had to spend my evenings with the others, I looked back upon those solitary evenings as times of excitement. It has always been my longing to be alone again and drink the silence.’

‘I wouldn’t care to live alone in this place,’ said Crabcalf.

‘It’s not a nice place, that is very true,’ said Slingshott, ‘but I have been living here for twelve years and it is my only home.’