ONE HUNDRED AND FIVE

What Titus could not see was the interior of the forgotten room where a dozen ill-tempered monstrosities had been incarcerated. But now there was a stir in the dungeon: the entrance had cleared itself of its first huge character, and close behind her, walking like a duck, was a wicked caricature of Titus’ sister. She wore a tattered dress of diabolical crimson. Her dark dishevelled hair reached to her knees, and when she turned her face to the assemblage there were few who did not catch their breath. Her face was blotched with black and sticky tears, and her cheeks were hectic and raw. She slouched behind her huge mother, but came to a halt as they were about to enter the torch-lit circle, for she stared pathetically this way and that, and then stood grotesquely on her toes as though she were looking for someone. After a few moments she flung her head back so that her black tresses all but touched the ground. Now, with her blotched face turned pitifully to the sky she opened her mouth in a round empty ‘O’ and bayed the moon. Here was madness complete. Here was matter for revenge. It took hold of Titus and it shook him, so that he wrenched this way and that against the grip of the helmeted figures.

So strange and terrible was what he saw that he froze within the grip of his captors. Something began to give way in his brain. Something lost faith in itself.

‘Where is my son?’ came the soft gravel throat, and this time his mother turned her face to his, and he saw her.

In contrast to Fuchsia’s raddled, hectic, tear-drenched face was his mother’s. It was a slab of marble over which false locks of carrot-coloured hair cascaded. This monster spoke, though there was little to be seen in the way of a mouth. Her face was like a great, flat boulder that had been washed and worn smooth by a thousand tides.

With the blank slab out-facing him, Titus let out a cry of his own; an inward cry of desolation.

That is my boy,’ came the gravel voice. ‘Did you not hear him? That was the very accent of the Groans. How grievous, yet how rare that he should have died. What is it like to be dead, my wandering child?’

‘Dead?’ whispered Titus. ‘Dead? No! No!’

It was then that Fuchsia made her gawky way across the rough circle, the perimeter of which was thick with faces.

‘Dear brother,’ she said, when she reached the broken throne. ‘Dear brother, you can trust me, surely?’

She turned her face to Titus.

‘It’s no use pretending; and you’re not alone. I drowned myself, you know. We have death in common. Have you forgotten? Forgotten how I sank beneath the frog-spawn waters of the moat? Is it not glorious to be dead together? I, in my way. You in yours?’