The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy (174 page)

Why were these men with their heads cocked upon one side so anxious to see the entrance of the hounds? Why were they so intent?

It was always like this in the Under-River, for the days and nights could be so unbearably monotonous: so long: so featureless, that whenever anything really happened, even when it was expected, the darkness appeared to be momentarily pierced, as though by a thought in a dead skull, and the most trivial happening took on prodigious proportions.

But now, as other figures emerged out of the semi-darkness, there appeared out of the shadowy south seven loping hounds.

They were exceptionally lean, their ribs showing, but were by no means ill. Their heads were held high as though to remind the world of a proud lineage, and their teeth were bared as a reminder of something less noble. Their tongues lolled out of the sides of their mouths. Their skulls were chiselled. They panted as they passed: their nostrils dilated; their eyes shone. There were seven of them, and now they were gone, even the sound of them, and the night welled up again.

Where are they now, those hot-breath’d lopers? They have veered away through colonnades a-drip. They have reached a lake four inches deep and a mile across where their feet splash in the shallow, sombre water. The spray surrounds them as they gallop in a pack so tight, that it seems they are one creature.

On the far side of the broad-skirted water-sheen the floor rose a little, and the ground was comparatively dry. Here, pranked across the lamp-lit slope were small communities similar to the group that had for its recumbent centre the bedridden Crabcalf. Similar, but different, for in every head are disparate dreams.

And so, at speed, threading the groups lit here and there with lamps, the dog-pack all of a sudden and seemingly with no warning doubled its speed until it reached a district where there was more light than is common beneath the river. Scores of lamps hung from nails in the great props or stood on ledge or shelf, and it was beneath a circle of these that the hounds drew up and lifted their heads to the dripping ceiling, and gave one single simultaneous howl. At the sound of this a tall spare man with a minute fleshless head, like the head of a bird, came out of the lamp-stained gloom, his white apron stained with blood, for in his arms he held seven hunks of crimson horse-flesh. As he approached them, the hounds quivered.

But he did not give them to the dogs at once. He lifted the dripping things above his head, where they shone with a ghostly, almost luminous red. Then forming his mouth into a perfect circle he hooted, and in the silence the echoes replied, and it was at the sound of the fourth echo that he tossed the crimson steaks high into the air. The hounds, taking their turn, one after the other, leaped at the falling meat, gripped it between their teeth, and then, turning in their tracks, galloped, with their heads held high, across the great sheet of water where they disappeared into the wet darkness.

The man with the bird-like head wiped his hand on his apron’d hips and plunged his long arms up to the elbows in a tub of tepid water. Beyond the tub, twenty feet to the west was a wall, covered with rank ferns, and in this wall was an arched doorway. On the other side of this door was a room lit by six lamps.

Here, in this fern-hung chamber, set about with cracked and broken mirrors to reflect the light of the lamps, are a group of characters. Some lie reclined upon mildewed couches: some sit upright on wickerwork chairs: some are gathered about a central table.

They are talking in a desultory way, but when they hear the bird-headed man begin his hooting, the sound of their conversation subsides. They have heard it a thousand times and are blunted to the strangeness of it, yet they listen as though every time were the first.

At one end of a rotting couch, with his great bearded chin propped up by knuckly fists, sits an ancient man. At the other end sits his equally ancient wife with her feet tucked up beneath her. The three of them (man, wife, and couch) present a picture of venerable decrepitude.

The ancient man sits very still, occasionally lifting his hand and staring at something that is crawling across his wrist.

His wife is busier than this, for here, there and everywhere run endless threads of coloured wool, until it seems she is festooned with it. The old lady, whose eyes are sore and red, has long since given up any idea of knitting but spends her time in trying to disentangle the knots in the wool. There were days, long ago, when she knew what she was making, and yet earlier days, when she was actually known by the clickety-clack of her needles. They had been a part, a tiny part of the Under-River.

But not so, now. Entanglement, for her, is everything. Occasionally she looks up and catches her husband’s eye, and they exchange smiles, pathetically sweet. Her little mouth moves, as though it is forming a word; but it is no word but a movement of her withered lips. For his part, there is no seeing through the long, hairy fog of his beard; no mouth is locatable … but all his love finds outlet through his eyes. He takes no part in the disentangling, knowing that this is her only joy, and that the knots and interweavings must outlive her.

But tonight, at the sound of the hooting she lifts her head from her work.

‘Dear Jonah,’ she says. ‘Are you there?’

‘Of course I am, my love. What is it?’ says the old man.

‘My mind was roving back to a time … a time … almost before I … almost as though … what was it I used to do? I can’t remember … I can’t remember at all …’

‘To be sure, my squirrel; it was a long while ago.’

‘One thing I
do
remember, Jonah, dear, though whether we were together … oh but we
must
have been. For we ran away, didn’t we, and floated like two feathers from our foes? How beautiful we were, Jonah, my own, and you rode with me beside you into the forest … are you listening, dearest?’

‘Of course, of course …’

‘You were my prince.’

‘Yes, my little squirrel, that is so.’

‘I am tired, Jonah … tired.’

‘Lean back, my dear.’ He tries to sit forward so that he can touch her, but is forced to desist, for the movement has brought with it a jab of pain.

One of the four men, who are playing cards on the marble table, turns round at the sound of a little gasp, but cannot make out where the sound comes from. He tuns back to a perusal of his hand. Another to have heard the sound, is an all-but-naked infant who crawls towards the rotting couple dragging its left leg after it, as though it were some kind of dead and worthless attachment.

When the infant reaches the couch where the old couple sit silent again, it stares at them in turn with a concentration that would have been embarrassing in a grown-up. There it heaves itself up and keeps its balance by grasping the edge of the couch. In the eyes of the ragged infant there seems to be an innocence quite moving to behold. A final innocence that has survived in spite of a world of evil.

Or was it, as some might think, mere emptiness? A sky-blue vacancy? Would it be too cynical to believe that the little child was without a thought in its head and without a flicker of light in its soul? For otherwise why should the infant turn on, at the most sentimental moment, his tiny waterworks, and flick an arc of gold across the gloom?

Having piddled with an incongruous mixture of nonchalance and solemnity the infant catches sight of a spoon shining in the shadows beneath the couch and dropping to his little naked haunches he rights himself and crawls in search of treasure. He is the essence of purpose. His minute appendage is forgotten: it dangles like a slug. He has lost interest in it. The spoon is
all
.

But the dangler’s done its worst … in all innocence, and in all ignorance, for it has saturated a phalanx of warrior ants who, little guessing that a cloudburst was imminent, were making their way across difficult country.

The child, and now the father and mother, refugees from the Iron Coast, sit opposite one another at the table. The father plays his cards with a mere fraction of his brain. The rest of it, a scythe-like instrument, is far away in realms of white equations.

His wife, a heavy-jaw’d woman, scowls at him out of habit. As usual he has won enough token money to correspond to a dozen fortunes. But there is no money down here in the Under-River, nor anywhere else for them, as far as she can see. Everything has gone wrong. Her uncle had been a general long ago; and her brother had been presented to a duke. But what was that to them now? They were real men. But her husband was only a brain. They should never have tried to escape from the Iron Coast. They should never have married, and as for their son … he would have been better unborn. She turns her heavy-jaw-boned head to her husband. How aloof he seems: how sexless!

She rises to her feet. ‘Are you a man?’ she shouts.

‘Delicious query!’ cries a voice, like a cracked bell. ‘“Are you a man?” she says. What fun! What roguery! Well, Mr Zed? Are you?’

The brilliant, articulate, white-eyelashed Mr Zed turns his eyes to his wife and sees nothing but Tx¼ p¾ = ½–prx¼ (inverted). Then he turns them on the willowy man with the cracked voice, and he realizes all in an instant that his last three years of constructive thought have been wasted. His premises have failed him. He had been assuming that Space was intrinsically modelled.

Realizing that this gentleman is way over the horizon, Crack-Bell tosses his hair from his forehead, laughs like a carillon, gesticulates freely to his partners across the table, in such a way as to say ‘O, isn’t it marvellous?’

But his partner, the sober Carter sees nothing marvellous about it, and leans back in his chair with his eyes half-closed. He is a massive, thoughtful man, not given to extravagance either in thought or deed. He keeps his partner under observation, for Crack-Bell is apt to become too much of a good thing.

Yes, Crack-Bell is happy. Life to him is a case of ‘now’ and nothing but ‘now’. He forgets the past as soon as it has happened and he ignores the whole concept of a future. But he is full of the sliding moment. He has a habit of shaking his head, not because he disagrees with anything, but through the sheer spice of living. He tosses it to and fro, and sends the locks cavorting.

‘He’s a card he is, that husband of yours,’ cries Crack-Bell leaning across the table and tapping Mrs Zed on her freckle-mottled wrist. ‘He’s an undeniable one, eh? Eh? Eh? But oh so
dark
… Why don’t he laugh and play?’

‘I hate men,’ says Mrs Zed. ‘You included.’

‘Jonah dear, are you all right?’ said the old, old lady.

‘Of course I am. What is it squirrel?’ The old man smoothed his beard.

‘I must have dropped off to sleep.’

‘I wondered … I wondered …’

‘I dreamed a dream,’ said the old lady.

‘What was it about?’

‘I don’t remember … something about the sun.’

‘The sun?’

‘The great round sun that warmed us long ago.’

‘Yes, I remember it.’

‘And the rays of it? The long, sweet rays …’

‘Where were we then …?’

‘Somewhere in the south of the world.’

The old lady pursed her lips. Her eyes were very tired. Her hands went on and on with their disentangling of the wool, and the old man watched her as though she were of all things the most lovely.

‘Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!’ cried Crack-Bell, throwing his head back and laughing like crockery.

‘Steady on,’ said Sober-Carter, the heavy man. ‘You would do well to keep quiet. Life may be hilarious to you, but They are on your trail.’

‘But I haven’t got a trail,’ said Crack-Bell. ‘It petered out long ago. Don’t let’s think about it. I am happy in half-light. I have always loved the damp. I can’t help it. It suits me. Ha, ha!’

‘That laugh of yours,’ said Carter, ‘will be the death of you, one day.’

‘Not it,’ said Crack-Bell. ‘I’m as safe down here as a fig in a fog. To hell with the fourth dimension. It’s
now
that matters!’ He tossed a mop of hair out of his eyes and, turning on a gay heel he pointed to a figure in the shades. ‘Look at her,’ he cried, ‘why don’t she move? Why don’t she laugh and sing?’

The shadow was a girl. She stood motionless. Her huge black eyes suggested illness. A man came through the door. Looking to neither right nor left he made for the dark girl where she stood.