The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

the delicacies were passed round, and when Swelter approached him with a salver of toasted larks, Flay motioned him away peremptorily, and noticing as he did so the evil expression in the chef’s pig-like eyes, he drew his bony shoulders up to his ears.

As the time moved on Sourdust began to grow more and more conscious of his responsibilities as the master of ritual, and eventually, having registered the time by the sun, which was split in half by the slim branch of a maple, he clapped his hands and shambled towards the door.

It was then for the assembled company to gather in the centre of the room and for one after another to pass Sourdust and Mrs Slagg, who, with Titus on her lap, was to be stationed at his side.

These positions were duly taken up, and the first to walk forward to the door was Lord Sepulchrave, who lifted his melancholy head in the air, and, as he passed his son spoke the one word ‘Titus’ in a solemn, abstracted voice. The Countess shambled after him voluminously and bellowed ‘TITUS’ at the wrinkled infant.

Each in turn followed: the twins confusing each other in their efforts to get the first word in, the doctor brandishing his teeth at the word ‘Titus’ as though it were the signal for some romantic advance of sabred cavalry. Fuchsia felt embarrassed and stared at the prongs of her little brother’s crown.

At last they had all passed by, delivering with their own peculiar intonations the final word ‘Titus’ as they reared their heads up, and Mrs Slagg was left alone, for even Sourdust had left her and followed in the wake of Mr Flay.

Now that she was left by herself in the Cool Room Mrs Slagg stared about her nervously at the emptiness and at the sunlight pouring through the great bay window.

Suddenly she began to cry with fatigue and excitement and from the shock she had received when the Countess had bellowed at his little lordship and herself. A shrunken, pathetic creature she looked in the high chair with the crowned doll in her arms. Her green satin gleamed mockingly in the afternoon light. ‘Oh, my weak heart,’ she sobbed, the tears crawling down the dry, pear-skin wrinkles of her miniature face – ‘my poor, poor heart – as though it were a crime to love him.’ She pressed the baby’s face against her wet cheek. Her eyes were clenched and the moisture clung to her lashes, and as her lips quivered; Fuchsia stole back and knelt down, putting her strong arms around her old nurse and her brother.

Mrs Slagg opened her bloodshot eyes and leaned forward, the three of them coming together into a compact volume of sympathy.

‘I love you –,’ whispered Fuchsia, lifting her sullen eyes. ‘I love you, I love you’, then turning her head to the door – ‘you’ve made her cry’, she shouted, as though addressing the string of figures who had so recently passed through – ‘you’ve made her cry, you beasts!’

MEANS OF ESCAPE

Mr Flay was possessed by two major vexations. The first of these lay in the feud which had arisen between himself and the mountain of pale meat; the feud that had flared up and fructified in his assault upon the chef. He avoided even more scrupulously than before any corridor, quadrangle or cloister where the unmistakable proportions of his enemy might have loomed in sight. As he performed his duties, Mr Flay was perpetually aware that his enemy was in the castle and was haunted by the realization that some devilish plot was being devised, momently, in that dropsical head – some infernal hatching, in a word – revenge. What opportunities the chef would find or make, Flay could not imagine, but he was constantly on the alert and was for ever turning over in his dark skull any possibilities that occurred to him. If Flay was not actually frightened he was at least apprehensive to a point this side of fear.

The second of his two anxieties hinged upon the disappearance of Steerpike. Fourteen days ago he had locked the urchin up and had returned twelve hours later with a jug of water and a dish of potatoes only to find the room empty. Since then there had been no sign of him, and Mr Flay, although uninterested in the boy for his own sake, was nevertheless disturbed by so phenomenal a disappearance and also by the fact that he had been one of Swelter’s kitchen hands and might, were he to return to the foetid regions from which he had strayed, disclose the fact they had met, and probably, in a garbled version of the affair, put it to the chef that he had been lured away from his province and incarcerated for some sinister reason of his own invention. Not only this, for Mr Flay remembered how the boy had overheard the remarks which Lord Groan had made about his son, remarks which would be detrimental to the dignity of Gormenghast if they were to be noised abroad to the riff-raff of the castle. It would not do if at the very beginning of the new Lord Groan’s career it were common knowledge that the child was ugly, and that Lord Sepulchrave was distressed about it. What could be done to ensure the boy’s silence Flay had not yet determined, but it was obvious that to find him was the prime necessity. He had, during his off moments, searched room after room, balcony after balcony, and had found no clue as to his whereabouts.

At night as he lay before his master’s door he would twitch and awake and then sit bolt upright on the cold floorboards. At first the face of Swelter would appear before his eyes, huge and indistinct, with those beady eyes in their folds of flesh, cold and remorseless. He would shoot his hard, cropped head forward, and wipe the sweat from his palms upon his clothes. Then, as the foul phantom dissolved in the darkness, his mind would lure him into the empty room where he had last seen Steerpike and in his imagination he would make a circuit of the walls, feeling the panels with his hands and come at last to the window, where he would stare down the hundreds of feet of sheer wall to the yard below.

Straightening out his legs again his knee joints would crack in the darkness as he stretched himself out, the iron-tasting key between his teeth.

What had actually happened in the Octagonal Room and the subsequent events that befell Steerpike are as follows:

When the boy heard the key turn in the lock he half ran to the door and glued his eye to the keyhole and watched the seat of Mr Flay’s trousers receding down the passage. He had heard him turn a corner, and then a door was shut in the distance with a far bang, and thereafter there had been silence. Most people would have tried the handle of the door. The instinct, however irrational, would have been too strong; the first impulse of one who wishes to escape. Steerpike looked at the knob of the door for a moment. He had heard the key turn. He did not disobey the simple logic of his mind. He turned from the only door in the room and, leaning out of the window, glanced at the drop below.

His body gave the appearance of being malformed, but it would be difficult to say exactly what gave it this gibbous quality. Limb by limb it appeared that he was sound enough, but the sum of these several members accrued to an unexpectedly twisted total. His face was pale like clay and save for his eyes, masklike. These eyes were set very close together, and were small, dark red, and of startling concentration.

The striped kitchen tunic which he wore fitted him tightly. On the back of his head was pushed a small white skull cap.

As he gazed downward quietly at the precipitous drop he pursed his mouth and his eyes roved quickly over the quadrangle below him. Then suddenly he left the window and with his peculiar half-run, half-walk, he hurried around the room, as though it were necessary for him to have his limbs moving concurrently with his brain. Then he returned to the window. Everywhere was stillness. The afternoon light was beginning to wane in the sky although the picture of turrets and roof-tops enclosed by the window frame was still warmly tinted. He took one last