Who else is there alive in this echoing world? And yet, for all the collapse and the decay, the castle seemed to have no ending. There were still the endless shapes and shadows, echoing the rides of stone.
While the Countess Gertrude moved about her home, it might be thought that she was in some kind of trance, so silent she was. The only sound coming from her coiled hair was the twitter of small birds.
As for the cats, they swarmed about her like froth.
One day the massive Countess standing before the little window of her bedroom lifted her matriarchal head and brought her eyes into focus. The birds fell silent and the cats froze into an arabesque.
As she approached from the west, so Prunesquallor, his head in the air, approached from the east, and as he minced he sang in a falsetto, unutterably bizarre.
‘Is that you, Prunesquallor?’ said the Countess, her voice travelling gruffly over the flagstones.
‘Why, yes,’ trilled the Doctor, breaking off in his own peculiar improvisation. ‘It most assuredly is.’
‘Is that you, Prunesquallor,’ said the Countess.
‘Who else?’
‘Who else,’ said her voice, travelling over the flagstones.
‘Who else,’ cried the Doctor. ‘It assuredly is! At least I hope so,’ and Prunesquallor patted himself here and there, and pinched himself to make sure of his own existence.
The Descent from Gormenghast Mountain
With every pace he drew away from Gormenghast Mountain, and from everything that belonged to his home.
That night, while Titus lay asleep in the tall barn, a nightmare held him. Sometimes as he turned in his sleep he muttered, sometimes he spoke out loud and with extraordinary strange emphasis. His dreams thronged him. They would not let him go.
It was early. The sun had not yet risen. Outside the barn the hills and the forests were hoary with cold dew, and blotched with pools of ice.
What is he doing here, the young man, 77th Earl and Lord of Gormenghast? This surely is a far cry from his home and his friends. Friends? What was left of them. As for his home, that world of fractured towers, what truth is there in its existence? What proof had he of its reality?
Sleep brought it forth in all its guises and, as he turned again, he hoisted himself on his elbow and whispered, ‘Muzzlehatch, my friend, are you gone then for ever?’
The owl made no movement at the sound of his voice. Its yellow eyes stared unblinking at the sleeping intruder.
Titus fell back against the straw and immediately three creatures sidled into his brain.
The first, so nimble on his feet, was Swelter, that mountain of flesh, his belly trembling at every movement with an exquisite vibration. Sweat poured down his face and bulbous neck in runnels. Drowned in his moisture, his eyes swam no larger than pips.
In his hand he carried, as though a toy, a double-handed cleaver.
At his shoulder stood something that was hard to define. It was taller than Swelter, and gave forth a sense of timber and of jagged power. But it was not this that caught the senses, but the sound of knee-joints cracking.
For a moment they beamed at one another, this dire couple in a mixture of sweat and leather – and then their mutual hatred settled in again, like a foul plant or fungus. Yet they held hands, and as they moved across the arena of Titus’s brain they sang to one another. Swelter in a thin fluted voice, and Flay reminiscent of a rusty key turning in a lock.
They sang of joy, with murder in their eyes. They sang of love, with bile upon their tongues.
Those tongues. Of Swelter’s it is enough to say that it protruded like a carrot. Of Flay’s that it was a thing of corroded metal.
What of the third character? The lurker in the shade of Swelter’s belly? Its tongue was green and fiery. A shape not easily found. It was for the main part hidden by a bush of mottled hair.
This third apparition, a newcomer to Titus’s brain, remained in the shadow, a diminutive character who reached no higher than Swelter’s knee-joint.
While the other two danced, their hands joined, the tiny creature was content to watch them in their foul perambulations, until loosening their grip upon one another Swelter and Flay rose to full height upon their toes and struck one another simultaneously, and Titus in his dream twisted away from them.
Mervyn Peake, July 1960
2
Titus Among the Snows
TITUS AWOKE FROM a haunted sleep. The uncanny light of whiteness began to permeate his brain. Snow fell silently. Its gentle falling was cruel, condemning him to continue in his solitude, and his hunger. The door of the barn could not be moved. The owl had frozen to death. It seemed to Titus that he was the only creature in the world left alive, and as the brilliant whiteness hit the barn, he saw around him the small corpses of birds and mice, food for what he knew would be his own incarceration.
Despite his hunger and the aching cold in his limbs, a warmth of love glowed in his memory: the withdrawn magnitude of his mother whom he could not love, but whose mental elegance chastened him – his dead sister Fuchsia, passionate, ugly and beautiful all at the same time, loving him to the point of pain, for herself and for him. Nannie Slagg, so petulant and so pathetic to all but herself. Dr Prunesquallor, whose wit did not hurt. Bellgrove, his schoolmaster, trying to muster a dignity he did not possess, and then, because physical love bears with it the power to deny all other love the ‘Thing’ – callous, cruel, mocking and alone, done to death by a flash of lightning before fruition, but leaving Titus so vulnerable that he carried the scar for the rest of his life.
He thought back to Muzzlehatch, a man whose hurt when his animals were destroyed by science rendered a brilliant mind oblique and nulled by shock. The pain of his mental collapse and death was more than Titus could withstand. Juno he had not loved, but with what heart he had left, he wished that he had been able to. Everything she offered Titus was generous and without intent. She gave. He received, but could not return. He was a blind man who could not hear – a deaf man who could not see. A stump of a man who did not know how to use what little he had left of his human frame. And so, with the cruelty of youth, the cruelty of a man who knew that he was loved, he left her, and never gave her another thought.
Cheetah he hated, but with less virulence than the hatred he felt for Steerpike.
Titus was engulfed by loneliness. Despite his past, and the emptiness the future promised, he did not want to die, alone, in an unknown barn, surrounded by rodents which lay, almost beautiful in the translucent light, with their claws drawn up to their frozen faces so pitifully.
He searched the barn for the smallest shred of comfort; his eyes were as sharp as had been those of the dead owl, which still clung frozen to its rafter.
The wind howled and the tears of self-pity froze like intemperate glaciers on his cheeks. As he stretched, knowing that the thrushes, starlings and woodland creatures that had entered the barn before his incarceration crept closer to him, he heard a sound that was not animal. At this strange, unexpected screeching of the barn door being feebly pushed, his frozen body gave a leap and what was left of his heart pumped chilled blood through his whole being.
He was unable to lift himself, to call out, to come to the aid of whatever it was that trespassed on that silent atmosphere. He opened his mouth to whistle his presence, but nothing came from the pursed lips. He watched, mesmerised, as the barn door slowly – gratingly – with the shriek of pain and the difficulty of a cripple, slowly opened and let in the freezing snow.
The grating of the door was an echo of the chalk on the blackboard, so long ago when he was a boy at school. Another screech, and another and another, until the hideous sound was no longer bearable. Like the breaking of the waters, it was pushed with the imperative need of a baby to escape from its mother’s womb, and the dark birth lay prostrate.