Lord of the Hollow Dark Read online

“Well, then! All memory of recent things blotted out of my awareness, in this vision I found myself sitting in a certain room of the Lodging. None of you has been there yet. On the door-it is high up in the house-a brass plate bears the inscription ‘Lord Balgrummo.’ It was his study, cozier and more private than the vast library on the second story.

  “I was perched on a stool, and my feet did not reach the floor. I wanted something to do, but I didn’t dare to say so. I wore a little velvet jacket and knickerbockers. One of the silver buttons was missing from my jacket. There was music in the study, and I was not alone.

  “A clavichord stood in the room; it is there still. A tall strong man, his back to me, was playing skillfully some delicate eighteenth-century fugue that I have not heard these many years-something from the collection of scores in the Lodging’s library, I suppose. I tried not to sneeze, but failed. The man at the clavichord turned. It was Lord Balgrummo.”

  “The last one?” Madame breathed.

  “None other. He was frowning at the interruption, but forced himself into a better temper on seeing me.

  “‘Manfred!’ he said, and again, ‘Manfred!’ He seemed to collect himself. ‘I did not know you were in the house.’ His voice was unexpectedly gentle.”

  Madame and Fresca, Marina noticed, were even more intent upon this story than she was; the Archvicar must have had no time until now to tell them of his dream, or else had thought it better to keep silent, for some reason. She would have thought he was inventing it out of whole cloth, had it not been for her own dream on the same night. The Archvicar clearly was moved by his own narration.

  “His face—why, it wasn’t so ravaged as you might suppose. Perhaps Farinata, Dante’s Farinata, had such a face, with a high scorn of his circumstances stamped upon it. But the face was almost vacant. I think he had difficulty in drawing himself out of reverie, infernal reverie, to speak to me. Surely he was bemused at my presence. Yet he pulled himself together after a fashion: even at his worst, he retained grace of manner. I dreaded him and was fascinated by him.

  “His words rose to his lips only slowly, as if he had been silent for a thousand years. ‘It was good of them-yes, good of them to let you come to see me, Manfred.’ What a longing in those eyes that had seen everything! I feared he might reach out and pat my small shoulder.

  “‘Sir,’ I asked, ‘please, sir, may I go out into the Den and play?’ After saying it, I could have bitten my tongue through, ten-year-old boy though I was. The terror of sadness that came into his oxlike eyes when he saw the aversion in mine!

  “‘If you wish, Manfred.’ He groped for something more, perhaps a phrase of entreaty, but abandoned the venture. ‘Have a care, then, of the old shafts there; some are beneath shrubs, and the ground can give way under one’s feet.’ He turned back toward the clavichord.

  “I slipped down from the stool. He faced me again.

  “‘I don’t suppose you will stay long, Manfred. When you leave, give my compliments to your mother. She understands why I cannot bring myself to write. The servants treat you well here? No complaints? I find it hard to keep them. Are the meals at all decent? I don’t notice. You’re the only guest who ever sleeps in the Lodging, you know-and it was hard enough to get permission for you to visit occasionally. You manage tolerably at that school? They’ll make a soldier of you? Had you borne my name, I don’t suppose they would have admitted you. So let us be thankful, Manfred, for small blessings like morganatic marriage.’

  “He seemed to sink back within himself, but rallied after a long moment during which I stared anxiously at him. ‘Sometimes,’ he went on, faintly, ‘I suffer from the delusion that this old house is full of people, unpleasant folk. It was good to find you instead, my boy. Watch out for those rascals. Ah, yes, I have been meaning to show you something that might be useful to you one day. Let it be our secret, Manfred, a dead secret between father and son.’

  “I shivered, though perhaps with a frightful joy at such trust from a Penny-Dreadful Monster. Every word he said will be with me forever-verbatim. I wonder if he remembers, too.

  “Then he took a long pin from his desk drawer, went to a certain panel in the wainscoting, thrust that pin under molding at a certain point—making me come up close to observe. He was able to raise the panel some inches, reach in, press some lever, and crook his long arm so that he could grasp objects within the thickness of the wall, below the level of the floor. He drew them out.

  “One was a roll of papers, sewn up in oilskin. ‘These are the plans of what’s down beneath this house, Manfred.’

  “The other object, which made me gasp, was a heavy African weapon with jewels in the hilt, a kind of elegant chopper, double-bitted, seemingly coated with grease all down the sharp blade to keep it from rust. I knew at once when he must have used it.

  “‘They never could discover it,’ he told me, with the wan ghost of a smile. ‘This, too, conceivably, you may find worth retrieving one day. They’ve taken all the other weapons in the house. These things are between you and me, Manfred.’

  “I would have run for it then, but my feet might have been nailed to the Turkey carpet. As I looked at him, and he looked at me, astonishment came over his face—he seemed frightened by me! And then I went-but as if whirled up, pummeled, uprooted. The blackness followed, and then the whirligigs of abhorrent color.

  “And next, Fresca my Pomegranate, you found me clutching you and moaning most unmanfully.

  “What am I to believe? This nocturnal experience: was it hallucination, or translation, or memory conjured up from the subconscious, or a Timeless Moment? I recollect well certain uncomfortable half-hours with that fallen man in that very room; even hastily gulped cups of tea or chocolate with him in his dark-walled study. But I have no conscious memory whatsoever of precisely such a conversation with him, in my boyhood, as I have described just now. Were he and I beyond time?

  “I was given opportunity to say some word of comfort, and I failed him. But what words could have availed? Perhaps ‘I love you, Father.’ That sentence would have been a lie, and he would have known it for a lie.”

  Marina spoke without forethought, the words coming from her in a gasp. “Then Lord Balgrummo really was-actually was—your father?”

  The Archvicar nodded slowly. “I might not have come here for this adventurous foolery, if I hadn’t been told—fancy my astonishment—that the Timeless Moment was to occur at Balgrummo Lodging, of all possible places in this world. Apollinax had sent that news to Gerontion by way of Sweeney, and I coaxed or bullied it out of Gerontion before he died, along with much more information. What a twisted skein of circumstance! Is there any such thing as coincidence? I doubt it; we’re moved about like pins drawn by concealed magnets, I suspect. What concitation of the backward devils links together mad Apollinax, a horrid old pseudo-parson in Haggat, the last Lord Balgrummo, this haunted house, and you, Marina?”

  “Then what are you?” Marina implored.

  The protean man stood up, supple and straight, seeming little past the prime of life, raising Fresca along with him. “Why, young lady, your servant; and a brutal and licentious soldier.” He squeezed Fresca’s waist. “I was born on the wrong side of a blanket; Balgrummo’s ‘morganatic marriage,’ if really he said it, was a mere civil pretense to soothe the sensibilities of a lonely little boy. A bastard was I born.

  “But I beg your pardon, Marina: I had forgotten our little friend here”—he nodded toward the blanket-swathed baby on the ground. “So much the better for him! Some fathers it is well not to have known.”

  Marina, panting, could not grasp all this. “Then you aren’t Archvicar Gerontion at all?”

  He shook his white head. “Most people call me Manfred Arcane, and Gerontion’s husk was burned at Haggat, in Africa, and I was in at the death.”

  Fresca broke in impatiently-in English! “Manfredo, if the papers and the ax are in that room now...”

  “For sufficient reasons, Pomegranate, I have not confided
to you that at a certain hour yesterday, when not watched, I stole upstairs to Lord Balgrummo’s study. Somehow I was not afraid to enter-not very afraid, that is-but of course I found no one sitting at that clavichord. I did find the pin in the desk, and I did with it what Balgrummo had done in my vision, and I found those papers. Those drawings and calculations, a few hours later, enabled Sweeney and Coriolan to proceed so far as they have got, far down below. I haven’t yet given them, or Apollinax, every scrap of paper I found.”

  “The ax, the chopper, Manfredo?” Fresca asked that with a sibilant eagerness, and Marina remembered the stiletto strapped to Fresca’s thigh.

  “That I found too, and left it in its cranny: a damned thing, but good at need.”

  There came a chill pause. At Arcane’s gesture, Phlebas pulled aside yew branches for them, and they filed out from under the ancient funereal tree.

  With a quizzical grimace, the Archvicar-Marina somehow could not dissociate the man from his pretended dignity—resumed his goggles. “Once more into the breach, dear friends!” He flourished his heavy stick. “We contend against the Lord of This World.”

  10

  Sweeney Agonistes

  Unshaven and bone-weary, Sweeney was in the storeroom above the monks’ drain, sawing timbers into pit props, when someone poked him. Nervous as a stray cat, Sweeney swung round in alarm. It was only Sam, one of those devil-boys.

  “The Master wants you in five minutes, in the library,” Sam told him. This was said with a sneer, as a command. Everybody knew he was a slave now, Sweeney thought. He wasn’t even permitted to go upstairs, except on command. Cots had been brought down for Coriolan and himself, and they were to sleep-precious little of that they got-in the storeroom at the entrance to the sewer. That slop from the kitchen was sent down to them, too; and they were kept toiling practically round the clock, helped incompetently by relays of devil-boys, trying to clear the rubble-choked tunnel or passage which led from the sewer in the direction of the Weem.

  That unpleasant nut Apollinax, their Master, must be served. Sweeney dashed into a pantry, washed hands and face hurriedly, and then made his way upstairs. Gradually he was getting the layout of this crazy-built funhouse called Balgrummo Lodging; he had even managed to calculate just where Marina’s bedroom lay, for future reference. The library was on the second floor, taking up most of the front of the seventeenth-century block of the house on that story. He came to it, knocked. There was no response; he entered.

  It was the valley of the shadow of books. The heavy interior shutters of the tall windows had been drawn back, and afternoon sunlight had penetrated, but the immense room remained gloomy. It was so high that a pillared narrow gallery ran round three sides, giving access to the upper tiers of books. Opposite the windows, a colossal marble mantelpiece with life-size allegorical figures, carved almost in the round, commemorated the part played by some heavy-handed Inchburn at the battle of Inverkeithing. Books, books, books, splendidly bound, from elephant folios to tiny pamphlets, tier upon tier, concerning every abstraction that ever had entered the fancy of man, loomed oppressive on every side, even between the great windows. Down the center of the room ran a row of glass cases, veiled in baize, probably containing rare manuscripts and the decorations and medals of long-dead Inchburns of Balgrummo. A fire smoldered insignificantly on the hearth beneath that overweening arrogant chimneypiece.

  Sweeny felt imprisoned: no exit, no doors. He glanced behind him, as if to secure his retreat: not even a door where he had entered! For on their inner sides, the several doors to this room were concealed by cunningly-designed simulated bookshelves, to which were fixed the backs of antique books, glued there to look like the real thing. Only inconspicuous bronze doorpulls betrayed the situation of the disguised doors. It was as if once within this library, the unwary intruder were trapped until the end of time, condemned to wear out his eyes with promiscuous pathless study, decade upon decade, generation upon generation, while the sensual world passed him by.

  Sweeney had thought himself alone in this tomb-library. But from a high-backed chair near the chimneypiece, a voice sounded softly, making Sweeney jump: “Come over here, Apeneck, and be enlightened. I shall speak for your instruction.”

  It was the Archvicar, hidden by the chair back. Sweeney seated himself uneasily upon a Queen Anne stool beside the hearth. Huddled there in the huge chair, Gerontion looked more decrepit than ever. “Apollinax has been delayed,” the Archvicar informed him. “I believe that he’s endeavoring to soothe the shattered nerves of that von Kulp trollop, still all aquiver from the encounter with her spectral visitant. Keep your voice low, for all that. I want your news. How far have you penetrated, down below?”

  Sweeney felt all scratches and bruises and grime, and he had been granted no more than three hours’ sleep out of the past twenty-four. He heard himself speaking, in a blurred way, as if it were someone else’s voice.

  “Coriolan’s still at it down there. How he keeps it up, I don’t know. The sketch plan you gave us is pretty close to right. We got out those stones blocking up that sort of doorway at the back of the side drain. Then we shored up the lintel with timbers we found in the old carpenter’s shop-risky, that, because once or twice we thought everything overhead was coming down-and what do you know, back of that doorway was a kind of crawl space, up high! There’d been a rough passage or tunnel beyond that doorway-hasty sixteenth-century mining, Coriolan thinks-but it had been blown up a long time ago, and it was choked with rubble almost to the top, except for that tight crawl space under the roof of it. Even the crawl space couldn’t be got through until Coriolan had pulled more fallen stone from it. I left the clearing-out to him: the whole tunnel is splintered and cracked from the old explosion, and might collapse any second and crush you to pulp like a worm. But Coriolan was crazy enough to try it. We got a barrow down into the sewer, and carted the rubble from the tunnel down the main drain and dumped into the water where the sewer ends. And when we did that, we found a pile of older rubble just under the surface of that bog water, as if somebody had been operating the way we are, but long ago.”

  The Archvicar nodded. “That will have been the last Lord Balgrummo, and perhaps the Fourth Laird long before.”

  “That’s what Coriolan says. How in hell does he know? Well, once he had pretty well cleared the crawl space, Coriolan snaked on through. He must have crawled twenty or thirty feet up that black hole-yeah, it slants up, not down. With the luck of fools, he made it. You’ve got to give it to that Bain, or Coriolan, the tramp: he’s tough, really tough. Well, he made it, though nobody else will go through till we finish clearing the tunnel and prop it as much as we can with the timbers I’ve been sawing. We had to drag Coriolan back out by his feet, but he’d crawled to the far end, and he’d got his head and an arm out the hole at the other end of the passage, and with his electric torch he’d taken a look at the room beyond.”

  The Archvicar leaned foward toward Sweeney, all eagerness. “You mean that he had a glimpse into the Weem, the Purgatory?”

  “Not exactly. Coriolan says that he was looking into a kind of ruined antechamber, the floor of it thick with fallen stones. On his left hand, he made out the foot of a stone staircase, more than ten feet broad, carved out of the living rock. Just the foot, the bottom two or three steps, of the stair: everything above that seems to be fallen rubble, blown to smithereens, the roof caved in. Coriolan says that this must be the foot of the medieval pilgrims’ grand stair into the Purgatory, and that nobody’s gone down it since the fifteenth century, maybe.”

  “What else?” The Archvicar gripped his stick.

  “Well, on his right hand, Coriolan could see mostly solid rock, but some masonry about the middle of it, ancient work. And recessed into the masonry was a little low doorway with a closed door. Coriolan thinks the door is brass or bronze—anyway, worked metal, with ornamental reliefs on it. That’s all he could make out. This vestibule, or anteroom, or whatever it may be, is a narrow dangerous wreck
of a place, understand: it’s only an accident, Coriolan thinks, that it wasn’t totally blown apart and blotted out and filled up when the Pope ordered the Weem destroyed, and later when the Third Laird sealed himself inside the Weem. If the Laird’s men had had more time to lay their gunpowder, Coriolan says, the north tower of the Lodging might have collapsed and settled right down into the remaining scrap of the vestibule, probably. As it is, when we clear that little tunnel leading up from the sewer, we may be able to get at that metal door. But Coriolan tells me that anyway the Warlock Laird may have laid more powder on the other side of that little door and have blocked the Weem forever, or even collapsed the whole cave on the other side of the door.”

  “I think not,” said the Archvicar.

  To Sweeney, this was an unwelcome opinion. He did not at all desire to pass through that little door: definitely not. There might be horror within, something told him-dead horror, living horror. That Weem wasn’t his dish. “What in hell makes you think there’s anything left behind that door?” The Archvicar had lighted another of those stinking cheroots. “Various evidences, my dear Apeneck. For one thing, in Balgrummo’s study I have come upon an interesting notebook, in a code of sorts, cryptic even when decoded. But from it I gather that the last Lord Balgrummo, in his halfcentury of enforced leisure here, performed Herculean labors. It appears from the notebook, if I understand the jottings aright, that he contrived to open that sealed doorway-then well mortared-in the side channel of the sewers. He was incredibly strong, even in advanced years, they say. I fancy that Balgrummo himself, at great physical peril, excavated the crawl passage through the rubble of the tunnel which his ancestor the Third Laird had constructed as a new access to the vestible of the Weem.”

  “Yeah, that’s Coriolan’s theory, too. But would the police have let Balgrummo dig like a mole?”

  “How could they have guessed? He was alone in the Lodging, all night, every night, the servants having gone home at nightfall, canny folk they; and the keepers were distant down in the gate lodge at the pend. For that matter, I suspect that he may have had help from one of the keepers, a former police constable called Jock, who used to behave more like a retainer of Lord Balgrummo than a warden at a private asylum. And, after all, it was his own house he was exploring: so long as he didn’t leave the policies of the Lodging, the police were satisfied, I suppose.”