Mervyn Peake

As soon as she had smiled her face altered again, and the petulant expression peregrine to her features took control. They cast no reflection in the water at their feet – it was too triturated by the pricking of the rain. So she for those first few moments stood incomprehensive and stared with empty eyes. […] the attic, which since the earliest days Fuchsia could remember had been for her a world undesecrate. No flaming flower relieved its black achromatism although that tree had been known long ago to burst open with a three-hour glory. [The cats] took not the slightest notice of either Mr. Flay or of himself save for the sudden cessation of their purring. When they had stood in the darkness, and before Mr. Flay had removed the bunch of keys from his pocket, Steerpike had imagined he had heard a heavy, deep throbbing, a monotonous sea-like drumming of sound, and he now knew that it must have been the pullulation of the tribe. And now that it is so tempersome and cold you are always going out into the nastiness and getting wet or frozen every day. The spacial depths between the glittering threads of the web and the chef seemed abysmic and prodigious. He might have belonged to another realm. Barquentine went into a form of a trance, the well-heads of his eyes appearing to cloud over and become opaque like miniature sargassos, of dull chalky-blue – the cataract veil – for it seemed that he was trying to remember the daedal days of his adolescence. The kitchen staff, man and boy, and the entire servantage in all its forms and both its sexes, were to be ready at half-past eleven to troop down to Gormenghast Lake, where the trees would be in readiness for them. Like a vast spider suspended by a metal chord, a candelabrum presided over the room nine feet above the floor-boards. From its sweeping arms of iron, long stalactites of wax lowered their pale spilths drip by drip, drip by drip. By the time Swelter's monologue was dragging to its crapulous close, Mr. Flay was pacing onwards […] “Fuchsia,” said the Doctor, “come along this evening and I’ll give you a tonic which you must make her take every day. By all that’s amaranthine you really must. […] ” Now she was strong enough to walk and watch them circling in the sky or to sit in the arbour at the end of the long lawn and, with the sunlight smouldering in her dark-red hair and lying wanly over the area of her face and neck, watch the multiform and snow-white convolutions of her malkins. Dr. Prunesquallor had circled around Steerpike with his head drawn back so that his cervical vertebrae rested against the near wall of his high collar, and a plumbless abysm yawned between his Adam’s apple and his pearl stud. Why can’t you stay in when the weather is muddy and blowy? In any event he might have wakened the long scrag by so doing. Swelter, following at high speed, had caught his toe at the raised lip of the opening, and unable to check his momentum, had avalanched himself into warm water. […] what haunts the heart will, when it is found, leap foremost, blinding the eye and leaving the main of Life in darkness. One humid afternoon a visitor did arrive to disturb Rottcodd as he lay deeply hammocked, for his siesta was broken sharply by a rattling of the door handle […]

The two gownsmen lowered the rigid body. It lay straight as a board, supported by no more than its head on the chair-back, and its heels on the ground. When Irma returned to her guests she paused before she opened the doors of the salon, for a loud and confused noise came from within. It was of a kind that she had never heard before, so happy it was, so multitudinous, so abandoned—the sound of voices at play.