The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [439]
What lay beyond? There was no reason to suppose that there would be any further repetition of this corner-to-corner trailing. Save for the fatigue of the journey and for their constant grip upon the silence, they had as yet encountered neither problem nor peril. But now, as they stared at the hangings, that were yet moving a little in the still air, they knew that they were entering upon a new phase.
Titus gripped the short iron poker in his hand as though to squeeze the life out of it. The Doctor tossed his head, arched his nostrils, and tip-toed to the very point where Steerpike had disappeared. Flay, who insisted on leading, had already drawn back, by no more than half an inch, a fold of the drapery, and was peering to his left. What he saw brought the blood to his head and his hand trembled violently.
He found himself staring along a short passage to where the slanting section of yet another and broader corridor slanted darkly. This further corridor was faced with cold bricks; its floor also, and that was all, but it brought the sweat suddenly to his brow and to the palms of his hands. Yet why, for he was looking at no more than the sort of things he had seen a score of times already on this same morning? But there was this difference. He had seen those bricks before. He had come upon the outskirts of his own domain. Unwittingly as he had moved through the uncharted hinterlands, he had come upon the outskirts of the Hollow Halls – the world he had made his own. He was no longer lost. Steerpike had led them by a trail of his own to a domain which Mr Flay had thought to be impregnable.
What was he doing here? Here, where Mr Flay had stood, his blood running cold, and had heard the grizzly laughter long ago? Here, where night after night and day after day he had sought the screaming nest to no avail? Here, where ever since those days the silence had come down like a deadweight – so that he had not dared to return, for the stillness had become more terrible than the demoniac laughter.
He alone knew of this. He passed the back of his hand across his eyes.
Without waiting to make so much as a sign to the two behind him he paced out grotesquely, on tip-toe to the juncture and, again to his left he saw the young man. Had Steerpike turned to the right he might well have proceeded towards those districts which Mr Flay knew so well. Turning to the left, however, took him into that labyrinth in which he had so often lost himself in his search for the haunted room.
Mr Flay knew only too well that to keep Steerpike in sight would be no easy task. There was the double difficulty of their following him closely enough to keep him in sight, and yet to remain inaudible and unseen themselves.
Nothing would be more embarrassing than for them to be discovered – for Steerpike was committing no crime in moving rapidly through this deserted place. If there were anything nefarious going on, it was upon their side, in shadowing the Master of Ritual.
But there was no need for Flay to warn the Doctor and the boy that the necessity for absolute silence was even more acute. As they slid along the brickwork corridor they felt a closing in of the world.
And now began the threading of a maze so labyrinthine as to suggest that the builders of these sunless walls had been ordered to construct a maze for no other purpose than to torture the mind and freeze the memory. It was no wonder that Flay had never done more in those past days, than stumble blindly through so tortuous a region. And yet, in spite of the confusion, and the necessity for his concentrating upon keeping Steerpike in view, his instincts were working upon their own and they told him that they were returning by devious and contradictory roads to the proximity of the cold brick corridor from which they had started. Steerpike had slowed his pace. His head hung forward on his chest, not dejectedly but with an air of abstraction. His feet moved even slower, until he was virtually loitering. When he came to