The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

‘remainder’ of sixty-one volumes.

Crack-Bell (who, over and above the blanching effect of the moon on his face was, in his own right, as white as a sheet) walked a little behind the other two, and in an attempt to appear courageous, whistled an air both shrill and out of key.

SEVENTY-EIGHT

And so they moved in a single file across the white landscape, and encountered no sign of a living creature. Crabcalf was seated in his high-backed chair on wheels; his sack of identical books in his lap. Slingshott, his retainer, pushed his master, laboriously, down narrow defiles, along cold ridges, across deserts of shale. As for Crack-Bell, he had long ago given up whistling, saving his breath for the thankless task of hauling an old cooking stove, some camping gear, and a stolen turkey. Staggering along in the rear of this three-piece cavalcade, with nothing but a cold night ahead, Crack-Bell, by his very nature, could not help the irritating grin that hovered over the lower regions of his face, nor the mad twinkle in his empty eyes. ‘Life is good,’ they seemed to say … ‘Life is very good.’

Had it not been that he took up the rearguard station his facial fatuities must surely have maddened his two companions. As it was, he trudged along unseen.

SEVENTY- NINE

She sat motionlessly at her peerless mirror, gazing not at, but through herself, for her meditation was deep and bitter, and her eyes had lost their sense of sight. Had she been aware of her own reflection and freed her eyes of the veil that lay like a cataract across them, she would have seen, first of all, the unnatural rigidity of her body, and she would have relaxed not only the muscles of her spine, but those of her face.

For there was, in spite of her beauty, something macabre about her head; something she would certainly have attempted to disguise had she known it permeated her features. But she knew nothing of this, and so she sat there, bolt upright, staring, with her eyes out of focus, while the blank reflections of her orbs stared back.

The stillness was horrible, especially when, like something palpable, it coagulated and seemed almost to drown the only authentic sound, that of a dry leaf as it fluttered from time to time against the glass of a distant window.

The very atmosphere of Cheeta’s dressing-room was in itself enough to chill the blood, so austere and loveless it was. And yet, although it sent a vile chill up the spine, it was not, on that account, a place of ugliness. On the contrary, it was majestic in its proportions and superb in its economy.

The floor, to begin with, was spread from corner to distant corner with a tundra of white camel skins, pale as white sand and soft as wool.

The walls were hung with tapestries that glowed with a sullen, prawn-coloured luminosity … a system of concealed lighting that gave the impression that the muted light was not so much falling upon the tapestries, as emerging from them. As though they were themselves effulgent, and burned their lives away.

EIGHTY

Not so many years ago she had cried out, ‘Oh how I hate you all.’ The elders shook their heads. ‘What does she mean?’ they said. ‘Has she not everything that money can buy? Is she not the scientist’s daughter?’

But she was restless, was Cheeta. Would she care for this? Would she care for that? No. Would she accept the Greeziorthspis Tapestries? She would accept them.

They were bought for her, thus denuding a small country of its only treasure.

So here they hung in the great room that was designed to take them, lovelier than ever, burning away in dusty pinks and golds, but with no one to see them, for Cheeta had deserted what was once her joy.

They had gone dead on her; or she on them. The unicorns leapt unseen. The crags that blushed in the sun’s rays, meant nothing now. The perilous combers were now no longer perilous.

The floor of camel-hair; the walls of tapestry; the dressing-table. It was carved from a single hunk of granite. Upon its surface were laid out, as usual, the articles of her toilet.

The surface of the black granite was peerlessly smooth, yet thrillingly uneven to the palm of the hand, appearing to bulge, or sway, and the reflections of the various instruments were as sharp as the instruments themselves, yet wavered. For all the multiplicity of her toilet, the coloured objects took up the merest fraction of the surface. To right and left of them, the granite fanned out in adamantine yet sumptuous undulations.

But Cheeta who sat upright on the camel-hair seat of her chair was today in no frame of mind to run the palms of her hands in silent and sensuous delight. Something had happened to her. Something that had never happened before. She knew now for the first time that she was unnecessary. Titus Groan had found that he could do without her.

Beneath the rigidity of her small, slender, military spine was a writhing serpent. Beyond the blankness of her seemingly dead eyes was a world of febrile horror, for she now knew that she hated him. Hated his self-sufficiency. Hated a quality that he had, which she lacked. She lifted her glazed eyes to the sky beyond the mirror. It swam with little clouds, and her sight cleared at last, and her eyelids fell.

Her thoughts like scales began to shed themselves until there was an absolute nothingness in her head, a nothingness made necessary, for the intensity of her dark thoughts had been horrible and could not be kept up forever, short of madness.

Beyond the mirror, scissoring its way across the sky, was her father’s pride. The latest of all his factories. Even as she watched, a plume of smoke spiralled its way out of one of the chimneys.

Rigid as herself in her agony, her implements were drawn up in battle array. A militant array of eccentrics; instruments of beauty; coloured like the rainbow; shining like steel or wax; the unguent vases carved in alabaster; the Kohl; the nard.

The fragrance from the onyx and the porphyry pots, the elusive aromatic spikenard … olive and almond and the sesame oil. The powdery perfumes, ground for her alone; rose, almond, quince. The rouges, the spices and the gums. The eyebrow pencils, and the coloured eyeline; mascara and the powder brush. The eyebrow tweezers and the eyelash curlers. The tissues, the crepes and several little sponges. Each in its place before the perfect mirror.

Then there was a sound. At first it was so faint it was impossible to make out what was being said, or whether indeed it was her voice at all. Had it not been that there was no one else in the room one would not have guessed the sound to come from such pretty lips as Cheeta’s. But now the sound grew louder and louder until she beat upon her granite dressing-table with her minute fists and called out, ‘Beast, beast, beast! Go back to your filthy den. Go back to your Gormenghast!’ and rising to her feet she swept the granite table with her arm so that everything that had been set out so beautifully was sent hurtling through the air to smash itself and waste itself upon the white camel skins of the carpet and the dusky red of the tapestries.

EIGHTY-ONE

Out of the bitterness that was now a part of her, like an allergy, something had begun to arise to the surface of her conscious mind;