Lord of the Hollow Dark Read online

  “So you think he got as far as Coriolan has gone?”

  “And farther. I am inclined to conclude, Sweeney, from the latter portion of the coded notes, that Balgrummo entered in at the strait gate-at that little metal door, I mean; that by a perverse passion he was drawn to whatever lies within; and that he made such a horrid chthonian pilgrimage more than once.” Gerontion blew smoke rings. “Perhaps the adventure gave him motive for continuing to live-if only a life in death.”

  Sweeney gaped. “I can’t believe it. But you said you’ve got more evidence?”

  “I think,” Gerontion murmured, “of the two burglars who came down the walls of the Den on ropes, and were not seen again. The police made thorough search of the Lodging at that time, I understand, finding no trace whatsoever of the missing men. Where might they have gone? Why, below-but as cadavers. They might have been dragged down, those two hoody crows, to the water at the foot of the main drain; but the Weem would have been a more secure hidie-hole for such remains. Were they offerings of a sort, that brace of wretches, do you suppose, Sweeney?” The Archvicar blew two more smoke rings, carefully, as if in memoriam.

  Sweeney held up a hand in silent warning.

  In the south wall of the library, one of those pseudo-bookcases with the false backs of books was swinging inward. Grishkin entered, so elegant, so expressionless. “The Master will be with you in another half-hour,” she said, almost as if announcing a plane arrival. “Mr. Sweeney may return to his work within the hour.”

  “Thanks a lot, baby,” said Sweeney. She went out the way she had come. She must be on kalanzi all the time, Sweeney thought: enough to make her a zombie, not enough to keep her from functioning in more ways than one. Apollinax must like them that way, strictly from Deadsville.

  There wasn’t much time to ask about Apollinax, and the Archvicar might betray him, but Sweeney was desperate. He had to get some idea of what was going to happen in this house, Wednesday night if not sooner. “Gerontion,” he muttered urgently, moving closer to the Archvicar, “what’s Apollinax up to? Is he crazy enough to take everybody down below, and then...?”

  “As for what he means to do down below,” the Archvicar told him, “I can’t inform you. After all, it may be merely some silly, harmless mock liturgy, Gnostic in character. As for what he is, I am not at all certain. As for what he thinks he is, I can hazard a surmise.”

  Sweeney felt frozen with loneliness: this malign old cripple could be of no help to him when the hour came, even if, as he professed, he wasn’t leagued with Apollinax-itself a dubious premise.

  “The first thing to accept,” Archvicar Gerontion was saying, very low, “is that Apollinax believes wholeheartedly in himself, and has some reason to believe. He is not playing. He has tested his talents before now; our present experiment, however, is on a grander scale.

  “Try to imagine this, Sweeney. Put on the mind of the man called Apollinax. Fancy that you, as Apollinax, have come to believe that you are something other than human.”

  “Other than human ?”

  “Quite, my friend. Think of yourself as a Domination or a Power, perhaps an incorporeal being, which for a great while has been imprisoned in darkness and pain-for ages, suppose-a burning consciousness long unable to scratch or do mischief directly, working only through groping agents, frustrated and infuriated by this intolerable limitation. Think of yourself as blinded and bound in the dark, when you are all burning malignant energy. You follow me?”

  “Part way,” said Sweeney. He felt cold all through.

  “Well, then, my Apeneck, next try to imagine that somehow this infuriated Power has contrived to take on sub-stance-within your own flesh, you being Apollinax. True, the substantial form itself is subject to those infirmities fixed to all flesh: a knife or a bullet might end the conjunction of body and spirit. This temporarily incarnate Power must act through the puny despicable five senses of man, for the most part. The very physical brain that governs its envelope of flesh is fallible, an exasperating imperfect tool for this Power’s aspirations. Despite all that, this Power is occupying a human body; for want of a clearer concept, let us say that it is possessing some mortal’s body. To this body, the name Apollinax has been tagged. Whatever its limitations in the form of Apollinax, this Power rejoices in its partial liberation from impotence.”

  “The hell you say!”

  “How well you put the essence of all this, Apeneck! This Power, this Being, is bent upon grand destruction of life and of more than life. In that devastation, our present little ominous gathering at Balgrummo Lodging is only one step toward more splendid satisfactions. All of those present in this house are subjects in a rather petty experiment by this Power. The object of this present ‘retreat’ or ‘seminar’ is to determine just how adept this Power already has become in operating within the bounds imposed by incarnation. If the experiment at Balgrummo Lodging comes off to the Power’s satisfaction—why, a more significant stride will be taken so soon as practicable.”

  The great globe itself seemed to spin round and round in Sweeney’s tired aching head. Had he appealed from one lunatic to another lunatic? Was he really in this bemusing house with its many levels, and was this man before his eyes really the sanctimonious drug peddler of Haggat, and was Apollinax a fell spirit incarnate? Hoo-ha! Oh, you’ve got the hoo-ha’s coming to you, Sweeney boy!

  Yet the gradual change he had seen in Apollinax over the past two years, the Master grown stranger and grander at every successive encounter; his total domination of those disciples, some of whom once had possessed minds and wills of their own; the Master’s absolute enslaving of those acolytes, as if he were the Old Man of the Mountain, beyond what even the madder well-known crazy cults could exact in obedience... Sweeney shook himself. “Where’d you get these way-out ideas, Gerontion?”

  The Archvicar stood up, as if to ease his back. “I offer you no judgment, Apeneck. Can’t you understand that I am trying to tell you what, I suspect, Apollinax believes himself to be? ‘Put on his mind,’ I told you a moment ago. I have been describing the mentality, the personality, the soul with which we have to deal. Our Master has favored me with several privy conversations, these past three days. As for the reality...”

  A few days earlier, Sweeney would have told anybody that Apollinax was not much more than a garden-variety charlatan, talking a pseudo-occult jargon, wheedling large new checks out of little old women. But the Apollinax who had enchained him here at Balgrummo Lodging had grown overwhelming, fearsome, hideously convincing, almost incandescent with power of some sort. The reality...

  “Yeah,” said Sweeney. “What about that? Let me tell you, he’s weird. How much can he actually do that he hints he can do? How do we know that he’s not hearing what we say right here and now, some way or other?”

  Gerontion replied slowly. “I suspect that he can do some astonishing things; certainly he thinks he can. Do you know, I have a kind of awareness of Apollinax’s self-awareness? Is my insight into him transmitted from Apollinax’s mind to my mind, deep crying unto deep, evil unto evil? If so, is the transmitting of this awareness accidental or deliberate, on Apollinax’s part? I can’t say. Or is this awareness of mine some operation of the illative sense—everything suddenly falling into place, all my suspicions and surmises about Apollinax fitting together like parts of a puzzle, some obscure catalyst of the brain ingeniously combining fragmentary perceptions into a whole? I don’t know. Yet somehow I sense what Apollinax fancies himself to be: I apprehend his ‘self-image,’ as the psychologists smugly put it.”

  “How about my question?” Sweeney demanded.

  “Ah, yes: can he read our minds at a distance, so to speak? No, not that. He has some faculty for clairvoyance or thought-transference, some touch of extrasensory perception, but not more developed than such talents have been in certain other people I have known. For that matter, if you and I keep careful guard upon ourselves when face to face with him-why, he learns little more than what we tell him;
I warrant you that. He may not even guess what one really is.”

  Sweeney looked hard at Gerontion: a faint early suspicion of the Archvicar had recurred, with new strength. But for this hour, Apollinax was enough of a conundrum, without asking what might lie behind Gerontion’s mask. “Okay, tell me this: where did this Apollinax come from?”

  “Others than the Master can compile dossiers,” the Archvicar told him, puffing a cloud of smoke about his head. “I have one such concerning Mr. Apollinax, as he styles himself now—although I’m not so imprudent as to carry the papers about with me. You’ve known him longer than I, but you have lacked curiosity until now. Very well: I give you, Apeneck, a succinct candid account of his variegated career.

  “Less than twelve years ago, the person we call Apollinax was a Roman priest, in London. He had been thoroughly, perhaps abstrusely, schooled in theology. There came over him a sea-change, in some ways not unlike the deep alteration of assumptions which affected so many Roman clergy, then and later; he fancied that he had penetrated to the sanctum sanctorum, and had found it empty. Yet, unlike most, he was not then swept into the vortex of modernism and materialism. I do not know the whole background of his particular straying from dogmata, but in his case the change was to something new and strange-or rather, exceedingly strange, but perhaps not so new. It was as if, in the empty Holy of Holies, an invisible voice, the Grand Inquisitor’s, had proclaimed to him, ‘Everything is permitted.’

  “He immersed himself in Gnostic speculations and other perennial heresies. He attracted to himself a little following so eccentric that even a most latitudinarian hierarchy found it necessary to look closely at him. Presently he renounced his vows, became a zealot for radical transformation of society, shouting, marching, demonstrating. About the same time, he took up with women-several of them, it appears, and not undesirable ones. Our Grishkin, then model and actress, has been the most enduring of these.

  “Such cases, of course, have not been infrequent during the past decade.” The Archvicar seated himself again, without ceasing his discourse. Sweeney had noticed that Gerontion had not leaned upon his ebony stick while he had been standing.

  “But there followed more curious modes of belief and conduct. Our Master’s adventure as a political messiah lasted less than one year. Abruptly he dropped all his Leveller connections, buried himself in the British Museum, entered upon intensive Indie studies. He had been a highly intellectual priest; now he applied a keen intellect, already disciplined in languages which few know, to esoteric inquiries. He did not lack for funds-supplied then, as now, by certain little old ladies who were moved by his luminous eyes and his strange immature face. He traveled to India and roamed elsewhere in Asia, taking Grishkin with him. In the course of more philosophical and mystical investigations, concerned in large part with the nature of Time, he acquired extensive information about the properties of sensual drugs. After those years in remote places, he returned to England.”

  “Hurry it up,” said Sweeney. “We may not have much time before he comes.”

  The Archvicar nodded indulgently. “The paths he followed had been trodden by others before; he came upon traces of pioneers in this dark quest, some in Britain, some in Asia and Africa. He learned with excitement, I take it, about a Lord Balgrummo, still alive during the earlier period of Apollinax’s researches, whose experiments in the occult had ruined him decades earlier—experiments closely parallel with Apollinax’s developing obsession. He tried to see this Lord Balgrummo; was refused an interview by the trustees of Balgrummo Estates, by the police, and by Balgrummo himself—the last response a cold holograph note from an exceedingly old peer; presently he learned of Balgrummo’s death under unusual circumstances.

  “About this time, no doubt, our Apollinax made some study of the history of Balgrummo Lodging and the legends of what lay beneath it; and presumably it came into his head that Balgrummo Lodging was the most propitious place for the experiments upon which he was bent, Lord Balgrummo having made startling advances in such research upon this spot.”

  “Where’d you get all this—from police files?”

  “In part, Sweeney, yet only in part; and even that from fragmentary police reports in several countries; no one but your servant possesses all this lively data in consolidated form. Believe me, I enjoy the means... but that’s another narration.

  “Also Apollinax’s Asiatic wanderings had taken him to Madras and the Shan States. In both regions, he had learned something about a person called Omanwallah, styling himself Archvicar in the Church of the Divine Mystery. This person had been charged with necromancy, with poisoning, and with much else. This Omanwallah—or Gerontion, as he would call himself later—was reputed to be, among other things, an accomplished pharmacist, practiced in the manufacture and use of hallucinogens. The Subcontinent having grown too hot for his health, this Omanwallah had withdrawn to the emergent Commonwealth of Hamnegri, in Africa, settling at the old slavers’ port of Haggat, where he flourished under the alias of Gerontion.

  “A drug called kalanzi, it was rumored, could be compounded only by Gerontion, from ingredients some of which were procurable only in the Hamnegrian region of Kalidu. The effects of this rare drug, properly administered, appeared to be quite what Apollinax-we use his present alias, of course, not the name he employed then-had been seeking to advance his occult researches. He contrived to get in touch with this Archvicar Gerontion, although the two of them did not meet face to face. The supplying of kalanzi was arranged, for a good price, and also Gerontion was engaged to make certain rigorous tests of the drug upon human subjects—Haggat being a far more prudent place to conduct these tests than London would have been. Communication between Haggat and London was conducted through couriers, of whom you, my dear Apeneck, have been the latest. Does this hurried account suffice you?”

  “No, but we’re damned lucky he hasn’t come in yet. Tell me one thing more: how in hell do you know so much about Lord Balgrummo and this house, coming from India and Africa?”

  “Why, my friend, this Omanwallah or Gerontion-it is well to speak impersonally in such concerns-was the son of a rich Parsee father and an English mother. His youth was spent in Britain, where he was schooled. In his affluent and clever idleness, the devil making mischief for his hands, he fell into a circle of occultists in Edinburgh, of whom the last Lord Balgrummo was the patron. This young Omanwallah, dilettante and trifler then, amused himself at the fringes of this cult, which dissolved in panic at the disastrous unexpected catastrophe of Balgrummo’s experiments. Omanwallah had frequented Balgrummo Lodging and acquired a smattering of the practices of this occult circle; he left Britain in haste shortly after Lord Balgrummo’s Trouble. Of all the people who had any hand in Lord Balgrummo’s catastrophe here at the Lodging, Omanwallah-Gerontion is the last man still living. Gerontion’s kalanzi powder is devilishly useful to Apollinax, but Gerontion’s knowledge of what went on at Balgrummo Lodging is equally valuable.”

  Sweeney stared in wonder at the old man. Was all this to be believed? “It’s some coincidence that Apollinax tracked you down.”

  “Doesn’t it seem so?” The Archvicar removed his goggles for a moment, to polish them with a silk handkerchief; Sweeney was surprised by the eyes so revealed, very different from the eyes he had expected. “If you knew the whole of the matter, Sweeney, you’d be even more astonished at the coincidence. But we understand little about coincidence, quite as little as we understand about time. Well, I gave Apollinax something besides kalanzi, something besides my knowledge of mysteries at Balgrummo Lodging. For he borrowed the concept of ‘The Church of the Divine Mystery’; and it was the alias ‘Gerontion’ which inspired him to style himself Apollinax and to name the disciples and the acolytes after Eliot’s Figures.

  “I never had seen the person we call Apollinax until we met here at the Lodging a few days ago. But so far as I can gather, his behavior and his personality have been in progressive alteration for some years; no longer is the Master q
uite the person with whom I began to correspond three years ago, nor even precisely your employer of last year. You understand me, I see. His progress has been in a regular train, but new and disturbing features develop. I suppose it was so with the last Lord Balgrummo. Something enters in...”

  “Watch it!” Sweeney whispered in haste. Something literally was entering in: the pseudo-bookcase was moving again. Apollinax came through, his unfinished face with its high forehead flushed by emotion.

  “We’re to look at the plans again, Master?” the Archvicar inquired, deferentially. At an impatient nod, he hobbled to a long table near the center of the library. There lay, carefully arranged, long sheets obviously sketched by Gerontion, and other sheets, somewhat yellowed, by a rather good draftsman. There were also very old papers and two parchment documents. Sweeney had been shown most of these before.

  “That passage is shorter than you calculated, Gerontion,” Apollinax said, studying the drawings.

  “Yes, Master, but worse clogged by rubble than I’d expected.”

  “You had not told me that the inner way to the Weem was closed by a door.”

  “I had no notion it was there. For all I knew, the doorway itself might have been obliterated by the old explosion.” The Archvicar pointed with a pencil to a spot on a rough sketch. “We are fortunate.”

  Apollinax addressed Sweeney. The flush of excitement did not fade from the Master’s face. The man was wildly eager to get into that dead place.

  “Sweeney, how much longer will it take you to make the short tunnel safe to pass through?”