The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [380]
Steerpike knew at once that yet another chapter was over in his relationship with Cora and Clarice. They had become clay in his hands, but they were clay no more, unless there is in clay not only something imponderable but something sinister also. Not only this, but something adamantine. From now on he knew that they were no longer ductile – they had changed into another medium – a sister medium – but a harsher one – they were stone.
All this could be seen at a glance. But now, suddenly, there was something which escaped his vigilance. It was this. His reflections were no longer in their eyes. Their ladyships had unwittingly expelled him. Something else had taken place – and as he was unaware that he had ever been reflected so he was equally unaware that he was no longer so – and that in the lenses of their eyes he had exchanged places with the head of an axe.
But what Steerpike could see was that they were no longer staring at him – that their gaze was fixed upon something above his head. They had not tilted their heads back although it would have been the normal thing to do for whatever they were looking at was all but out of their line of vision. Their upturned eyes shone white. Save for this movement of their eyeballs they had not so much as stirred.
Fighting down his fear that were he to move his eyes from them, even for a second, he would fall in a peculiar way into some trap, he swung himself about and in a moment had seen a great axe dangling a dozen feet above him, and the complex network of cords and strings which, like a spider’s web in the darkness of the upper air, held in position the cold and grizzly weight of the steel head.
With a backward leap the young man was through the doorway. Without a pause he slammed the door and before he had turned the key in the lock he had heard the thud as the head of the axe buried itself in that part of the floor where he had been standing.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Steerpike’s return to the castle’s heart was rapid and purposeful. A pale sun like a ball of pollen was hung aloft an empty and faded sky, and as he sped below it his shadow sped with him, rippling over the cobbles of great squares, or cruising alongside, upright, where at his elbow the lit and attenuate walls threw back the pallid light. For all that within its boundaries, this shadow held nothing but the uniform blankness of its tone, yet it seemed every whit as predatory and meaningful as the body that cast it – the body, that with so many aids to expressiveness within the moving outline, from the pallor of the young man and the dark red colour of his eyes, to the indefinable expressions of lip and eye, was drawing nearer at every step to a tryst of his own making.
The sun was blocked away. For a few minutes the shadow disappeared like the evil dream of some sleeper who on waking finds the substance of his nightmare standing beside his bed – for Steerpike was there, turning the corners, threading the mazes, gliding down slopes of stone or flights of rotten wood. And yet it was strange that with all the vibrancy that lay packed within the margins of his frame, yet his shadow when it reappeared reaffirmed its self-sufficiency and richness as a scabbard for malignity. Why should this be – why with certain slender proportions and certain tricks of movement should a sense of darkness be evoked? Shadows more terrible and grotesque than Steerpike’s gave no such feeling. They moved across their walls bloated or spidery with a comparative innocence. It was as though a shadow had a heart – a heart where blood was drawn from the margins of a world of less substance than air. A world of darkness whose very existence depended upon its enemy, the light.
And there it was; there