The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy полностью

When he awoke, he felt hungry. Hauling up the shutters of the window he noticed that the rain had stopped, and as far as he could judge from the position of the sun it was well into the afternoon. Yet nothing had been sent up for him in the miniature lift from the Kitchen, forty fathoms below. This was unheard of. It was so new an idea that his food should not be awaiting him that for the moment he could not be certain that he was awake. Perhaps he was dreaming that he had left his hammock.

He shook the cord that disappeared into the black well. Faintly he could hear the bell jangling far beneath. Remote as was the thin, metal sound, it seemed that it was much clearer today, than he ever remembered it to have been before. It was as though it were the only thing in motion. As though it had no other sound to contend with, not so much as the buzzing of a fly upon a pane – it jangled in so solitary a way, so distinct and so infinitely far. He waited, but nothing happened. He lifted the end of the cord for the second time and let it fall. Once more, as though from a city of forsaken tombs, a bell rang. Again he waited. Again nothing happened.

In deep and agitated thought he returned to the window which was so seldom open, passing beneath the glimmering chandeliers. Accustomed as he was to silence, there was something unique today about the emptiness. Something both close and insistent. And as he pondered he became aware of a sense of instability – a sensation almost of fear – as though some ethic he had never questioned, something on which whatever he believed was founded and through which his every concept filtered was now threatened. As though, somewhere, there was treason. Something unhallowed, menacing, and ruthless in its disregard for the fundamental premises of loyalty itself. What could be thought to count, or have even the meanest kind of value in action or thought if the foundations on which his house of belief was erected was found to be sinking and imperilling the sacrosanct structure it supported.

It could not be. For what could change. He fingered his chin and shot a hard, beady glance out of the window. Behind him the long, adumbrate Hall of the Bright Carvings glimmered beneath the suspended chandeliers. Here and there, a shoulder or a cheekbone or a fin or a hoof burned green or indigo, crimson or lemon in the gloom. His hammock swung a little.

Something had gone wrong. Even had his dinner been sent up the shaft to him in the normal way he must still have felt that there was something wrong. This silence was of another kind. It was portentous.

He turned his thoughts over, tortuously and his eyes, losing for a moment their beady look, wandered over the scene below him. A little to his left and about fifty feet beneath his window was a table-land of drab roof around the margin of which were turrets grey with moss, set about three feet apart from one another. There were many scores of them, and as his eyes meandered over the monotonous outline he jerked his head forwards and his focus was no longer blurred, for he had suddenly realized that every turret was surmounted by a cat, and every cat had its head thrust forwards, and that every cat, as white as a plume, was peering through slit eyes at something moving – something moving far below on the narrow, sand-coloured path which led from the castle’s outhouses to the northern woods.

Mr Rottcodd, gauging by the converging stares of the turreted cats, what area of distant earth to scan, for with such motionless and avid concentration in every snow-lit form and yellow eye, there must surely be a spectacle of peculiar interest below them, he was able within a few moments to discover, moving toy-like, from the woods, a cavalcade of the stone castle’s core.

Toy horses led. Mr Rottcodd, who had long sight but who could hardly tell how many fingers he held up before his own face save by the apprehension of the digits themselves, removed his glasses. The blurred figures, so far below his window, threading their way through sunlight, no longer swam, but, starting into focus, startled him. What had happened? As he asked himself the question, he knew the answer. That no one had thought fit to tell him! No one! It was a bitter pill for him to swallow. He had been forgotten. Yet he had always wished to be forgotten. He could not have it both ways.

He stared: and there was no mistaking. Each figure was tiny but crystal clear in the rain-washed atmosphere. The cradle-saddled horse that led the throng: the child whom he had never glimpsed before, asleep, one arm along the cradle’s rim. Asleep on the day of his ‘Earling’. Rottcodd winced. It was Titus. So Sepulchrave had died and he had never known. They had been to the lake; to the lake; and there below him on a slow grey mare was borne along the path – the Seventy-seventh.