"Mervyn Peake - Danse Macabre" - читать интересную книгу автора (Peake Mervyn)

DANSE MACABRE

Mervyn Peake




There are critics who claim that Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy about a crumbling,
far-future world is an even greater work of fantasy than Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Certainly, the
adventures of Titus, 77th Earl of Gormenghast and heir to the House of Groan, told with a
mixture of wit and dazzling imagination, rate among the great works of the genre, and
thoroughly deserve John Clute's accolade in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1995) when he
calls Gormenghast "one of the most richly realised alternate worlds in all the literature of fantasy
or sf." Fans of the trilogy include the musicians Nigel Kennedy, Sting and Phil Collins; chef Keith
Floyd, who claims to have found some kitchens in Spain which instantly reminded him of the
ancestral kitchens in the book; and the writers Michael Moorcock and Anthony Burgess, who
once referred to the work as '"a rich wine of fancy chilled by the intellect to just the right
temperature. '' A stage version of Gormenghast has already been produced, and Walt Disney
studios own the film rights.
Mervyn Laurence Peake (1911-1968) was born in Ruling in southern China, where his father
was a medical missionary, and the memories of those '"rich, alien years'' shaped much of his later
career when he returned to England and began working as an artist and writer. His love of
fantasy was demonstrated in his first book, Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor, published in
1939; and during the subsequent war years while he was serving in the Royal Engineers he started
work on what would ultimately become the Gormenghast trilogy. At the end of the hostilities,
Peake was the first artist to be sent to the Belsen concentration camp, another profoundly
affecting experience. Shortly after completing the three comic masterpieces about Titus Groan, he
was found to be suffering from a form of Parkinson's disease which tragically shortened his life.
'"Danse Macabre," originally published in Science Fantasy in 1963, is one of Mervyn Peake's few
short stories, and a tale as curious as anything he wrote. It is also about the ability to flyтАФnot
human beings, though, but people's clothes . . .

Whether it was the full moon that woke me, I do not know. It may have been.
Or it may be that the melancholy which had settled on my spirit and which
coloured my dreams, had become too strong for me to bear and had broken
through my sleep and left me, of a sudden, aware and trembling.
It is no part of my story to tell you of the unhappy circumstances which had
driven my dear wife away from me. I cannot tell you of that dreadful separation.
It is sufficient to say that in spite of, or it may be because of our ill omen'd
love, we were driven apart, although, as you shall hear, this desperate act
brought nothing but horror in the end.
I had drawn wide the curtains when I had gone to bed, for the night was
close, and now, with my eyes wide open, I found that my bedroom was filled
with the light of the moon.
Facing me, as I lay upon my side was my wardrobe, a tall piece of furniture,
and my gaze wandered across the panels until they came to rest upon one of the
metal door knobs.
Uneasy as I was, I had as yet no concrete cause for alarm; and would have
closed my eyes had it not been that all at once my heart stopped beating. For the
metal knob on which my gaze was fixed had begun, very slowly, very surely, to