The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

Juno turned round and faced him. ‘I am not ill,’ she whispered, ‘but I will be if you don’t answer my question. You know what I mean.’

‘His castle and his lineage? Is that what worries you?’

‘He’s such a boy! Such a golden boy! He was always sweet with me. How is it he could lie to me, and to everyone? What do you feel at the sound of that strange word?’

‘Gormenghast?’

‘Yes, Gormenghast. Oh, Anchor my dear. I have such a pain in my heart.’

Anchor rose to his feet in one quiet movement and moved with a faintly rolling gait towards her. But he did not touch her.

‘He is not mad,’ he said. ‘Whatever else he is, he is not mad. If he were mad then it would be better for madness to thrive in the world. No. Inventive perhaps. He may be for all we know the last word in the realms of imagery, supposition, hypothesis, conjecture, surmise, and all that is clothed in the wild webs of his imagination. But mad? No.’

Anchor looked at her with a wry smile on his lips.

‘Then you don’t believe him, for all your long words,’ cried Juno. ‘You think he’s a liar! Oh my dear Anchor, what has come over me? I feel so frightened.’

‘It was your dream,’ said Anchor. ‘What was it about?’

‘I saw him,’ whispered Juno at last, ‘staggering with a castle on his back. Tall towers were intertwined with locks of dark red hair. He cried out as he stumbled … “Forgive me! Forgive me!” Behind him floated eyes. Nothing but eyes! Swarms of them. They sang as they floated through the air at his side, their pupils expanding or contracting according to the notes they were singing. It was horrible. They were so intent, you see. Like hounds about to tear a fox apart. Yet they sang all the while, so that it was sometimes difficult to hear the voice of Titus calling out, “Forgive me. For pity’s sake, forgive me”.’

Juno turned to the Anchor.

‘You see, he is in danger. Why else should I dream? We must not rest until we find him.’

She turned her head up to his.

‘It isn’t love any more,’ she said, ‘as it used to be. I have lost my jealousy and my bitterness. Nothing of this is any longer a part of me. I want Titus for another reason … just as I want Muzzlehatch and others I have cared for in the past. The past. Yes, that is it. I need my past again. Without it I am nothing. I bob like a cork on deep water. Perhaps I am not brave enough. Perhaps I am frightened. We thought that we could start our lives again. But all this time I brood upon what’s gone. The haze has settled like a golden dust. O my dear friend. My dear Anchor. Where are they? What shall I do?’

‘We will away and find them. We’ll lay their ghosts, my dear. When shall we start?’

‘Now,’ said Juno.

Anchor got to his feet.

‘Now it is,’ he said.

NINETY-SIX

He only knew he was aloft and airborne: that no one answered him when he spoke: that he appeared to be moving: that there was a soft buzz of machinery: that the night air was gentle and balmy: that there were occasional voices from far below, and that there was someone near him, sharing the same machine, who refused to talk.

His hands were carefully tied behind him, so that he should suffer no pain: yet they were firm enough to prevent his escape. So it was with the silk scarf across his eyes. It had been carefully adjusted so that Titus should feel no inconvenience, save that of being sightless.

That he was in such a predicament at all was something to wonder at. Indeed if it were not that Titus was apt to throw in his lot with any hare-brained scheme, he would by now be yelling for release.

He had no sense of fear, for it had been explained to him that, this being the night of the party, he must expect anything. And he must believe that to make it a night of all nights, one element alone was paramount, and that element was the element of surprise. Without it, all would be stillborn, and die before its first wild breath was drawn.

It was for him, at a future moment, to have the silk scarf plucked from his eyes to behold the light of a great bonfire, a hundred bright inventions.

It was for him to await the quintessential instant and to let it flower. Under the star-flecked sky, under the sighing of the leaves and ferns, there lay the Black House. Here was a setting for a dark splendour, a dripping of the night dew. Here was the forlorn decay of centuries, which, were Titus to set his eyes upon it, could not fail to remind him of the dark clime he had thought to toss off like a cloak from his shoulders, but which he now knew he had no power to divest.

Without surprise, all else was doomed to falter, as Cheeta well knew. It mattered not how brilliant the concept, how marvellous the spectacle, all, all would be lost unless the boy, Titus, suffered the supreme degradation.