Peake, Mervyn - 02 Gormenghast

No expression at all came into their eyes, nor would there have been room for any, for they were separately filled, each one of them, with a foreign body, for in each of the four glazed pupils the image of the young man was exquisitely reflected. Let those who have tried to pass love letters through the eyes of needles or to have written poems on the heads of pins take heart. Crude and heavy handed as they found themselves, yet they will never appreciate the extent of their clumsiness for they will never know how Steerpike's head and shoulders leaned forward through circles the size of beads, whose very equidistance from one another (the Twins were cheek to cheek) was as though to prove by ghastly repetition the nightmare of it all. Minute and exquisite in the microcosm of the pupils, these four worlds, identical and terrible, gleamed between the lids. It would seem they had been painted - these images of Steerpike - with a single hair or with the proboscis of a bee - for the very whites of his eyes were crystalline. And when Steerpike at the door drew back his head - drew it back on a sudden impulse, then the four heads, no bigger than seeds, were drawn back at that same instant, and the eight eyes narrowed as they stared back from the four microscopic mirrors - stared back at their origin, the youth, mountain high in the doorway, the youth on whom their quick and pulseless lives depended - the youth with his eyes narrowed, and whose least movement was theirs.

That the eyes of the Twins should be ignorant of that they reflected was natural enough but it was not natural that in carrying the image of Steerpike to their identical brains, there should be, by not so much as the merest shade, a due to the excitement in their breasts. For it seemed that they felt nothing, that they saw nothing, that they were dead, and stood upon their feet by some miracle.

Steerpike knew at once that yet another chapter was over in his relationship with Cora and Clarice. They had become day in his hands, but they were day no more, unless there is in day 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 it slid, this particular shadow - from wall to wall, from floor to floor, the shoulders a little high, but not unduly, the head cocked, not to one or other side, but forward. In an open space it paled as it moved over dried earth, for the sun weakened - and then it fainted away altogether as the fringe of a cloud half the size of the sky moved over the sun.

Almost at once the rain began to fall, and the air yet further darkened. Nor was this darkening enough, for beneath the expanse of the cloud that moved inexorably to the north, dragging behind it miles and miles of what looked like filthy linen, beneath 'this' expanse, yet another, of similar hugeness, but swifter, began to overtake it from beneath, and when this lower continent of cloud began to pass over that part of the sky where the sun had lately been shining, then something very strange made itself felt at once.

A darkness almost unprecedented had closed down over Gormenghast. Steerpike glancing left and right could see the lights begin to burn in scores of windows. It was too dark to see what was happening above, but judging from a still deepening of the pall, yet further clouds, thick and rain-charged, must have slid across the sky to form the lowest of three viewless and enormous layers.

By now the rain was loud on the roofs, was flooding along the gutterings, gurgling in crannies and brimming the thousand irregular cavities that the centuries had formed among the crumbling stones. The advance of these weltering clouds had been so rapid that Steerpike had not entirely escaped the downpour, but it was not for more than a few moments that the rain beat on his head and shoulders, for, running through the unnatural darkness to the nearest of the lighted windows, he found himself in a part of the castle that he remembered. From here he could make the rest of the journey under cover.

The premature darkness was peculiarly oppressive. As Steerpike made his way through the lighted corridors he noticed how at the main windows there were groups gathered, and how the faces that peered out into the false night wore expressions of perplexity and apprehension. It was a freak of nature, and no more, that the world had been swathed away from the westering sun as though with bandages, layer upon layer, until the air was stifled. Yet it seemed as though the sense of oppression which the darkness had ushered in had more than a material explanation.