The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

Titus, drowsy in the arms of a village girl, a rosy, golden thing, opened one eye as they lay together on the banks of a loquacious river, for he had heard through the ripples another sound. At first he could see nothing, but lifting his head he was surprised to see a yellow aircraft passing behind the leaves of the overhanging trees. Close as it was, Titus was yet unable to see who was piloting the machine, and as for the village maiden, she neither knew nor cared.

NINETY-TWO

The weather was perfect, and the helicopter floated without the least hindrance over the tree-tops. For a long while there was silence aboard, but at last Cheeta, the pilot, turned to look at her companion. There was something foul in the way his dirtiness was being carried aloft, through the pure air. What made it worse was the way he stared at her.

‘If you keep looking at me,’ she said, ‘we may miss the landmarks. What should we be looking for now?’

‘Your legs,’ said the old man. ‘They’d go down very nice, with onion sauce.’ He leered at her, and then all at once cried out in a hoarse voice, ‘The shallow river! Alter her course to south’d.’

Three long cobalt-blue mountains had hoisted themselves above the horizon and what with the sunlight bathing the foliage below them, and dancing down the river, it was a scene so tranquil that the sudden chill that rose, as though on an updraught from below, was horrible in its unexpectedness. It seemed that the cold in the air was directed against them, and at the same moment, on looking down as though to see the cause of the cold, Cheeta cried out involuntarily …

‘The Black House! Look! Look! There below us.’

Hovering as they descended; descending as they hovered, the ill-matched pair were now no more than weather-cock high above the ruin … for so it was … though known (time out of mind), as the Black House.

Very little of the roof was left, and none of the inner walls, but Cheeta, gazing down, recalled immediately the vast interior of the building.

It had an atmosphere about it that was unutterably mournful; a quality that could not be wholly accounted for by the fact that the place was mouldering horribly; that the floor was soft with moss; or that the walls were lost in ferns. There was something more than this that gave the Black House its air of deadly darkness; a darkness that owed nothing to the night, and seemed to dye the day.

‘I’m bringing her in,’ said Cheeta, and as they came down to make a perfect landing in a grey carpet of nettles, a small fox pricked its ears, and loped away, and as though taking their cue, a murmuration of starlings rose in a dense cloud which coiled its way up, up into the sky.

The old man, finding himself on terra firma, made no immediate effort to get to his feet, but stretched out his withered arms and legs, as though he was a ragged windmill, and then, prising himself to his feet …

‘Hey you!’ he cried. ‘Now that you’re in it, what do you want with it? An armful of bloody nettles?’

Cheeta took no notice, but made her way, quick and light as a bird, to and fro across what might have been the shell of an abbey, for there was a heap of masonry that might or might not have been some kind of altar, sacred or profane.

As Cheeta flickered to and fro over the moss and fallen leaves, with the pale sun above her and the surrounding forest breathing gently to itself, she was taking note of every kind of thing. To her it was second nature to remember anything that might prove to her advantage, and so today it was a case of absorbing into her brain and being, not only the exact lie of the land; not only the orientation and the proportions and the scale of this bizarre setting, but also the exits and entrances that were to fill with figures unforeseen.

Meanwhile, the old man, unabashed, made water in a feeble arc.

‘Hey, you,’ he shouted in that gritty voice of his, ‘where is it then?’

‘Where is what?’ whispered Cheeta. It was obvious from her tone of voice that her mind was elsewhere.

‘The treasure. That’s what we’ve come for, ain’t it? The treasure of the Black House.’

‘Never heard of it,’ said Cheeta.

A flush of anger spread itself over the old man’s face so that the hot hue became reflected in the white of the beard.

‘Never heard of it?’ he cried. ‘Why you …’

‘Any more abuse from you,’ said Cheeta in a voice quite horrible in its listlessness, ‘and I will leave you here. Here, among a thousand rotting things.’

The old man snarled.

‘Get into your seat,’ said Cheeta. ‘If you touch me, I will have you whipped.’

The return journey was a race against darkness, for Cheeta had remained longer than she had meant in the Black House. Now, sailing over the varying landscape that slid below them, she had time to make her calculations.