The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [401]
Mr Flay could hear his sweat splashing on the stones at his feet. His mouth was leather-dry. His heart was thumping like a drum. And he had nothing to see. Only the candlelight shining steadily at the base of the opposite wall.
And then it came again, with a kind of double note – almost as though, whatever throat it was that was giving vent to this ghastly laughter, was curiously formed – as though it were able to throw out two voices at once.
There was no question of an echo for there was no repetition and no overlapping – but a kind of duplex horror.
This time, the high pealing note tailed off into a thin whine, but even in this ghostly termination there was the two-fold quality, the terrible, petrifying sense of double madness.
For some while after silence had returned, Mr Flay could not move. He had been struck. His sense of privacy had been shattered; his inability to rationalize and make sense out of the small hours was like an insult, an insult hurled against his narrow but proud mind. And his fear, his naked fear of something he could not see, but something which was within a few yards of him – it was this that froze his limbs.
But the silence continued and there was no repetition, and at last he picked the candle from the floor, and with more than one glance behind him, he moved rapidly back the way he had come, following the chalk marks until at last he arrived at the fateful parting of the ways. Thereafter he was on his own ground and he strode it without hesitation until he arrived at his room.
It was, of course, impossible to let the matter rest. The enigmatic horror of that laughter was with him all the time, and no sooner had the sun risen on the following day than the grim place drew him. It was not that he wished to indulge himself with the vile thrill of a repetition, but rather that the mystery should be brought forward into the rational daylight, and that whatever it was, beast or human, it must stand revealed, for his deepest interests were those of the onetime first servant of Gormenghast – of a loyalist who could not bear to think that in the ancient castle there were forces or elements at work, happenings that were apart from the ceremonial life, secrets and practices that, for all he knew, were deadly poison in the castle’s body.
It was his intention to explore further along the terrifying passage and if possible to double back down some parallel artery when opportunity offered, and so discover if he could, some clue to what lay on the other side of the wall.
And this is what he did but with no success. Day after day he threaded his way through the cold brick lanes crossing and recrossing his own tracks, losing himself a score of times a day – returning over and over again to the original corridor for reference – unable to comprehend the tortuous character of the architecture. Every now and again, on returning to the place where he had heard the wild laughter he listened, but there was never any sound but the beating of his own heart.
There seemed no other way for him but to come again to that dread place, not in the daylight, but at the selfsame time as before, when the small hours of the morning sucked the courage from heart and limb. If he should hear it again, that crazed laughter, and if it was repeated and repeated, then with that sound to guide him it was possible that he could run to earth, in the darkness, what had foiled him by day.
And so, fighting down his terror, he set out in the icy blackness of the early hours. He came eventually to the brick corridor; and when he was still some distance away he heard a sound of crying and shouting. And when he was nearer still, a loud calling to and fro, as if something was calling to itself for it seemed to be the same voice that was answering.
But there was fear in the voice, or voices, and what struck Mr Flay most, as he listened with his ear to the wall, was that the cries were weaker than before. Whatever it was that cried had lost a lot of strength. But it was in vain that he tried to trace the sounds