'As in... the... old... days... when... you were ambitious When you... had ideals, Bellgrove We all... had hopes of... you, I... seem to... remember.' (There was a horrible sound of laughter like porridge.)
'Indeed, sir.'
'Does... anyone... still... believe... in... you,... my... poor... poor... friend?'
There was no answer.
'Come... come. It is not for you to resent your destiny. To... cavil... at... the... sere... and... yellow... leaf. Oh... no... my... poor... Bellgrove,... you... have... ripened. Perhaps... you... have... over-ripened. Who knows? We all... go... bad... in... time. Do... you... look about... the same,... my.... friend?'
'I don't know,' said Bellgrove.
'I... am... tired,' said Deadyawn. 'What... am... I... doing... here? Where's... that... virus... Mr... Fly?'
'Sir!' came the musket shot.
'Get... me out of this. Wheel... me... out... of it... into stillness Mr Fly Wheel... me... into... the soft... darkness...' (His voice lifted into a ghastly, treble, which though it was still empty and flat had in it the seeds of life.) 'Wheel... me...' (it cried) 'into... the... golden... void.'
'Right away, sir,' said The Fly.
All at once it seemed as though the professors' Common-room was full of ravenous seagulls, but the screaming came from the unoiled wheels of the high chair, which were slowly turning. The door-handle was located by Flannelcat after a few moments' fumbling and the door was pushed wide. A glow of light could be seen in the passage outside. Against this light the smoke-wreaths coiled, and a little later the high, fantastic silhouette of Deadyawn, like a sack at the apex of the rickety high chair made its creaking departure from the room like some high, black form of scaffolding with a life of its own.
The scream of the wheels grew fainter and fainter.
It was some while before the silence was broken. None present had heard that high note in the Headmaster's voice before. It had chilled them. Nor had they ever heard him at such length, or in so mystical a vein. It was horrible to think that there was more to him than the nullity which they had so long accepted. However, a voice did at last break the pensive silence.
'A very dry 'do' indeed,' said Crust.
'Some kind of light, for grief's sake!' shouted Perch-Prism. 'What 'can' the time be?' whimpered Flannelcat.
Someone had started a fire in the grate, using for tinder a number of Flannelcat's copybooks, which he had been unable to collect from the floor. The globe of the world was put on top, which, being of some light wood, gave within a few minutes an excellent light, great continents peeling off and oceans bubbling. The memorandum that Slypate was to be caned, which had been chalked across the coloured face, was purged away and with it the boy's punishment, for Mulefire never remembered and Slypate never reminded him.
'My, my!' said Cutflower, 'if the Head's sub-conscious ain't self-conscious call me purblind, la!... call me purblind! What goings-on, la!'
'What is the time, gentlemen? What can it be, if you please?' said Flannelcat, groping for his exercise-books on the floor. The scene had unnerved him, and what books he had recovered from the floor kept falling out of his arms.
Mr Shrivell pulled one of them out of the fire and, holding it by a f1ameless corner, waved it for a moment before the clock.
'Forty minutes to go,' he said. 'Hardly worth it... or is it? Personally, I think I'll just...'
'So will I, la!' cried Cutflower. 'If my class isn't either on fire by now or flooded out, call me witless, la!'
The same idea must have been at the back of most of their minds. for there was a general movement towards the door, only Opus Fluke remaining in his decrepit arm-chair, his loaf-like chin directed at the ceiling, his eyes closed and his leathery mouth describing a line as fatuous as it was indolent. A few moments later the husky, whispering sound of a score of flying gowns as they whisked along the walls of corridors presaged the turning of a score of door-handles and the entry into their respective class-rooms of the professors of Gormenghast.
TWELVE
A roof of cloud stretching to every horizon held the air motionless beneath it, as though the earth and sky, pressing towards one another, had squeezed away its breath. Below the cruddled underside of the unbroken cloud-roof, the air, through some peculiar trick of light, which had something of an under-water feeling about it, reflected enough of itself from the gaunt back of Gormenghast to make the herons restive as they stood and shivered on a long-abandoned pavement half in and half out of the clouds.
The stone stairway which led up to this pavement was lost beneath a hundred seasons of obliterating ivy, creepers and strangling weeds. No one alive had ever struck their heels into the great cushions of black moss that pranked the pavement or wandered along its turreted verge, where the herons were and the jackdaws fought, and the sun's rays, and the rain, the frost, the snow and the winds took their despoiling turns.
There had once been a great casement facing upon this terrace. It was gone.
Neither broken glass nor iron nor rotten wood was anywhere to be seen. Beneath the moss and ground creepers it may be that there were other and deeper layers, rotten with antiquity; but where the long window had stood the hollow darkness of a hall remained. It opened its unprotected mouth midway along the pavement's inner verge. On either side of this cavernous opening, widely separated, were the raw holes in the stonework that were once the supporting windows. The hall itself was solemn with herons. It was there they bred and tended their young. Preponderately a heronry, yet there were recesses and niches in which by sacredness of custom the egrets and bitterns congregated.
This hall, where once the lovers of a bygone time paced and paused and turned one about another in forgotten measures to the sound of forgotten music, this hall was carpeted with lime-white sticks. Sometimes the setting sun as it neared the horizon slanted its rays into the hall, and as they skimmed the rough nests the white network of the branches flared on the floor like leprous corals, and here and there (if it were spring) a pale
