The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

It was now for Cheeta to discover someone who had been there on that faraway day. Someone who could find the place again.

Driving her fastest car, she was soon at the gates of the factory. At once she was surrounded by a dozen men in overalls. Their faces were all the same. One of them opened his mouth. The very act was obscene.

‘Miss Cheeta?’ he said in a curiously thin voice, like a reed.

‘That’s it,’ said Cheeta. ‘Put me through to my father.’

‘Of course … of course,’ said the face.

‘And hurry,’ said Cheeta.

They led her to a reception room. The ceiling was matted with crimson wires. There was a black glass table of unnatural length, and at the far end of the room the wall was monopolized by an opaque screen like a cod’s eye.

Eleven men stood in a row while their leader pressed a button.

‘What’s the peculiar smell?’ said Cheeta.

‘Top secret,’ said the eleven men.

‘Miss Cheeta,’ said the twelfth man. ‘I am putting you through.’

After a moment or two an enormous face appeared on the opaque screen. It filled the wall.

‘Miss Cheeta?’ it said.

‘Shrivel yourself,’ said Cheeta. ‘You’re too big.’

‘Ha, ha, ha!’ said the huge face. ‘I keep forgetting.’

The face contracted, and went on contracting. ‘Is that better?’ it said.

‘More or less,’ said Cheeta. ‘I must see Father.’

‘Your father is at a conference,’ said the image on the screen. It was still over life-size, and a small fly landing on his huge dome of a forehead appeared the size of a grape.

‘Do you know who I am?’ said Cheeta in her faraway voice.

‘But of course … of …’

‘Then stir yourself.’

The face disappeared, and Cheeta was left alone.

After a moment she wandered to the wall that faced the cod’s-eye screen, and played delicately across a long row of coloured levers that were as pretty as toys. So innocent they looked that she pressed one forward, and at once there was a scream.

‘No, no, no!’ came the voice. ‘I want to live.’

‘But you are very poor and very ill,’ said another voice, with the consistency of porridge. ‘You’re unhappy. You told me so.’

‘No, no, no! I want to live. I want to live. Give me a little longer.’

Cheeta switched the lever and sat down at the black table.

As she sat there, very upright, her eyes closed, she did not know that she was being watched. When at last she raised her head she was annoyed to see her mother.

‘You!’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘It’s absorbing, you know,’ said Cheeta’s mother. ‘Daddy lets me watch.’

‘I wondered where you got to every day,’ muttered her daughter. ‘What on earth do you do here?’

‘Fascinating,’ said the scientist’s wife, who never seemed to answer anything.

A big arm came across the screen and thrust her aside. It was followed by a shoulder and a head. The father’s face suddenly swam towards Cheeta. His eyes flickered to and fro to see if anything had been altered. Then they rested on his daughter.

‘What do you want, my dear?’

‘Tell me first,’ said Cheeta, ‘where are you? Are we near each other?’

‘O dear no,’ said the scientist. ‘We’re a long way apart.’

‘How long would it take me to …’

‘You can’t come here,’ said the scientist, with a note almost of alarm in his voice. ‘No one comes here.’

‘But I want to talk to you. It’s urgent.’

‘I will be home for dinner. Can’t you wait until then?’

‘No,’ said Cheeta, ‘I can’t. Now listen. Are you listening?’

‘Yes.’

‘Twenty years ago, when I was six, an expedition set out to plot out territory in the south-west. We found ourselves bogged down and had to give up. On our return journey we came unexpectedly upon a ruin. Do you