The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [479]
When the first concept of oblivion flickered through her mind, she raised her head from her arms. She was shocked and she was frightened. But she was excited also.
She walked unsteadily to the window. Her thought had taken her into a realm of possibility so vast, awe-inspiring, final and noiseless that her knees felt weak and she glanced over her shoulder although she knew herself to be alone in her room with the door locked against the world.
When she reached the window she stared out across the water, but nothing that she saw affected her thought or made any kind of visual impression on her.
All she knew was that she felt weak, that she was not reading about all this in a tragic book but that it was true. It was true that she was standing at a window and that she had thought of killing herself. She clutched her hands together over her heart and a fleeting memory of how a young man had suddenly appeared at another window many years ago and had left a rose behind him on her table, passed through her mind and was gone.
It was all true. It wasn’t any story. But she could still pretend. She would pretend that she was the sort of person who would not only think of killing herself so that the pain in her heart should be gone for ever, but be the kind of person who would know how to do it, and be brave enough.
And as she pondered, she slid moment by moment even deeper into a world of make-believe, as though she were once more the imaginative girl of many years ago, aloft in her secret life. She had become somebody else. She was someone who was young and beautiful and brave as a lioness. What would such a person do? Why, such a person would stand upon the window-sill above this water. And … she … would … and as the child in her was playing the oldest game in the world, her body, following the course of her imagination, had climbed to the sill of the window where it stood with its back to the room.
For how long she would have stood there had she not been jerked back into a sudden consciousness of the world – by the sound of someone knocking upon the door of her room, it is impossible to know, but starting at the sound and finding herself dangerously balanced upon a narrow sill above the deep water, she trembled uncontrollably, and in trying to turn without sufficient thought or care, she slipped and clutching at the face of the wall at her side found nothing to grasp, so that she fell, striking her dark head on the sill as she passed, and was already unconscious before the water received her, and drowned her at its ease.
SEVENTY-SIX
Now that the flood had reached its height it was vital that not a moment should be lost in combing the regions in which Steerpike might be lurking – in surrounding them with cordons of picked men who, converging inwards to the centre of each chosen district, by land and water, should, theoretically, sooner or later, close upon the beast. And now above all was the time to throw in every man. The Countess had circled areas of the Gormenghast map with a thick blue pencil. Captains of Search had been given their instructions. Not a cranny was to be left un-scoured – not a drain unprobed. It would be difficult enough, with the flood at its present level to run to earth so sly a quarry, yet with every day that passed the chances of Steerpike’s capture would recede even further – would recede as the flood receded, for as one floor after another began to open up its labyrinthian ways, so the fugitive in the multiplying warrens, would burrow ever deeper into darkness.
It would of course be slow and gradual this going-down of the flood, but the Countess was fiercely conscious of how time was the salient factor: how never again