Lord of the Hollow Dark Page 16

  “I can’t make it safe, but anybody who’ll take the risk should be able to walk through by tomorrow afternoon.” Apollinax seemed well enough satisfied, praise be. “Now, Gerontion, does that metal door open directly into the Weem?”

  “Ask me what songs the Sirens sang, Master. Balgrummo’s notations don’t contain anything on that point. There may be a low passage through a mass of living rock-perhaps a natural vent enlarged centuries ago-some yards long, or longer, before one reaches the original cave. A medieval pilgrim’s account obscurely suggests that possibility.”

  “An obstructed passage?”

  “Balgrummo passed through, if we can believe his chart and jottings; and thus far they’ve served us accurately enough. He may have blocked it up again, all the same, as he blocked that wall at the end of the sewer tunnel. How long to clear it, if he did something of the sort? We shan’t know until we open that little door. We must bear pitfalls in mind, by the way: at least one pilgrim fell to his death, you’ll recall.”

  “Sweeney, so far you have done well.” Apollinax favored him with one of those archaic smiles. “You must have the whole way clear by Wednesday noon, and sooner if at all possible. If not... But of course you shall.”

  “If I don’t collapse first,” Sweeney whined. “I can’t take many more hours of this.” He needed a stimulant urgently.

  The Master frowned. “You shall do it.” He turned to the Archvicar. “One thing puzzles me, Gerontion, even though it has made our way easier. I am thinking of how simple it was for us to enter the great drain from the old necessarium—merely a matter of taking up the flags. There must have been attempts to find the way down, since the sixteenth century, what with the Lodging being inhabited all the while. And if you’re correct in your speculation, Balgrummo may have searched in this house for twenty or thirty years before discovering the Third Laird’s entrance through the sewer. Yet Balgrummo was an intelligent man, so how could that be?”

  The Archvicar, leaning upon the table with his left hand, used the stick in his right hand to indicate an area on one of the charts. “Because, Master, the drain was filled with water almost to its brim, for more than three centuries—or so I surmise. It scarcely would have occurred to anyone who lifted those flagstones in the necessarium that a secret way could lie beneath the black sewer water. Who’d relish such a baptism as that? And of course they had no diving equipment.

  “Shall I give you my analysis of this minor mystery? Thank you, Master. Well, then: when the Fourth Laird, the Warlock’s son, attained his majority and came into possession of this property, he was sedulous to efface, so far as possible, recollections and souvenirs of his sinister father’s end. The kirk session remained suspicious of sons of warlocks. The Lodging had lain derelict, half burnt, ever since Morton’s sack; the Fourth Laird commenced its restoration. Probably he found his father’s entrance to the vestibule of the Weem from the monks’ sewer-or rather, the place where that passage had been-totally blocked by fallen rubble from the gunpowder explosion. He had a wall of masonry erected to seal off the rubble-filled passage even more thoroughly, using ashlar blocks from ruined portions of the Priory buildings. The ancient sewer itself could be dispensed with: the seventeenth century cared less about sanitation than had the thirteenth century.

  “Then the Fourth Laird proceeded to drown that fresh wall of masonry by filling up the great drain with water from the burn. This must have been simple enough, for the old monks had flushed out the sewer, occasionally or regularly, by water from their pond above the dam, led underground through a subsurface lade of stone to a point near the beginning of the sewer under Nectan’s Priory. Did you happen to notice the aperture for that lade, Sweeney?”

  “Maybe,” Sweeney answered, rubbing his tired eyes. “There was a hole in the sewer wall, high up, with just a trickle of water coming from it; Coriolan poked a rod into it and said it couldn’t be a passage for a man.”

  “Just what I expected from the charts. Well, to fill the old sewer with water to its top, then, it was necessary merely to choke partially the egress from the drain, lower down, where it entered the Fettinch Moss. It may have been somewhat clogged already with rock fragments from the Third Laird’s mining to the vestibule of the Weem. There was plenty of rubble to hand for the Fourth Laird to obstruct the lower end of the drain. In some days or weeks, the sewer must have filled with water from the pond, accordingly, although some of that water still seeped slowly into the Moss at the foot of the drain. To keep the sewer full, and the Warlock Laird’s passage concealed, it remained only to let some lade water continue to flow from the pond into the sewer-as if the sewer were a reservoir. Intake and outlet were brought substantially into balance. For three hundred years thereafter, no one invaded the old drain-though the stagnant water below must have made this part of the Lodging damp enough. The ancient necessarium became a lumber room of sorts, and the Inchburns, in their handsome new wing of the Lodging, seldom visited these mean offices.

  “How did the last Lord Balgrummo unriddle this riddle of the concealed passage? Perhaps by cudgeling his brains; or perhaps in some drought year the waters of the pond were much diminished. The level of the pond, indeed, fell below the point at which the hidden medieval lade conveyed water to the sewer; the remaining water in the medieval sewer gradually drained away into the Fettinch Moss, itself much diminished by the drought. One day Balgrummo, in his incessant dreary poking about his own house, happened to lift the flagstones in the necessarium and to find a drain nearly empty.

  “Then, realizing that he might have chanced upon the secret way underground, he had only to discover the head of the sewer lade where it began just below the surface of the pond; to close that opening with blocks of stone which still lay at hand from the monks’ time-and lo, the remaining water in the sewer must have found its way into the Moss, allowing Alec Balgrummo to explore the whole line of the medieval drain and to come upon a rather rude wall which concealed the mouth of the Third Laird’s entry into the vestibule of the Weem. For generations of Inchburns, the Fourth Laird’s clever device had sufficed to keep any adventurous souls out of the Weem to which his father had retreated forever.”

  Apollinax was peering closely at a neat sketch of water channels, with notations in the last Balgrummo’s minuscule hand here and there upon it. “I see, I see! Balgrummo opened enough of the choked tunnel for a man to crawl through, and some time or other sealed the entrance again, doing all the labor himself.” The flush upon Apollinax’s face, ordinarily so pallid, seemed to increase. “Yet if he had finished with the Weem, why didn’t he fill the drain with water again?”

  The Archvicar shrugged. “He may have meant to enter at a later time-it would have been relatively easy to reopen the Third Laird’s tunnel, because he merely thrust back the stones without mortaring them-and after all, he being in occupation of the Lodging, there was small danger of any casual visitor, such as a police constable, happening to stroll down the dry drain. For all we know, he may have let the water fill up the drain again, from time to time, and then have blocked the lade once more; then have gone down into the Weem for another expedition. What else had the poor madman to do, all those years? If he concealed anything down there-the bodies of those miner-burglars, for in-stance-he may have kept the drain filled with water until the hue and cry was over. Toward the end, sickness may have prevented him from filling the drain a final time.”

  “Make sure you have these drawings perfectly in mind, Sweeney,” Apollinax ordered him. He drew the Archvicar aside, toward the chimneypiece, but Sweeney could still make out most of what the two of them were saying, as he pretended to study the charts.

  “The sewer could be filled to its top again?” The Master said this very softly.

  “Easily,” the Archvicar told him. “I had Phlebas, under my direction, poke and spade about the point where the sewer lade begins at the pond. One would have only to adjust the sluice blocks, and gradually the drain would be refilled; if one were to remove
the blocks entirely, the refilling would be rapid. Because the vestibule to the Weem lies higher up than the sewer, there’d be no flooding of the Weem itself.” The Archvicar’s voice was as low as the Master’s.

  “Then no one entered the Weem from Morton’s sack until whatever year the last Balgrummo made his way in?” Apollinax asked this with a sigh of satisfaction.

  “Presumably not, Master. The Fourth Laird was too canny to have brought himself under suspicion by penetrating to the bewitched depths where his father had vanished; his workmen might have talked, and warlocks still were burnt under James VI and I. After he filled the drain, there must have been hollow darkness and desolation in the Weem for three hundred years.”

  “‘Hollow darkness and desolation...’” Apollinax seemed to relish the phrase. “Beyond time, timeless.” The Master collected himself. “And what did Balgrummo find down there?”

  “His notations tell us little, Master, so far as they can be decoded.”

  “On Ash Wednesday night, we shall learn.” The archaic smile reappeared on Apollinax’s thin lips. “One thing more, Gerontion: the occurrence which sent Fraulein von Kulp into her screaming fit. Do you take it that the phenomenon was objective, or that it was the Fraulein’s private hallucination?”

  “What with your keeping the lot of them under mild dosages of kalanzi, Master, who can say for certain?” The Archvicar spread his hands expressively. “Under kalanzi, many delusions are possible. Still, her hysterical description...”

  “Quite.” Apollinax nodded slowly. “I think that he is rising, by painful stages; his essence takes form with difficulty. You continue, of course, to do everything in your power to evoke him?”

  “I exercise all my art, Master, particularly after smokefall. Let us devoutly pray for this consummation.”

  Apollinax shot a sharp glance at him, was silent for a moment, then said, “Just so. See to it, Gerontion. I want Balgrummo, and I shall not accept failure.”

  What a pair of kooks! Sweeney thought. Why was he permitted to eavesdrop? Apollinax was well aware that his courier-slave Sweeney would have bolted already, had he not been caught at the pend. At any investigation, later, Sweeney might be called as a witness, and he did not love the Master, and the Master knew that. Did Apollinax have plans for potential givers of testimony? Hoo-ha! Down in the Weem, hollow darkness and desolation... Knock knock knock.

  “Now, Sweeney, you shall show me what you’ve accomplished.” Sweeney looked at the Master with a poker face. Apollinax, until now, had not descended into the drain: he had a care for his skin, he did. There flashed into Sweeney’s mind the Archvicar’s picturesque phrase of half an hour earlier: “... the substantial form itself is subject to those infirmities fixed to all flesh.”

  Leaving the Archvicar with the charts in the library, Sweeney followed Apollinax through the Lodging toward that storeroom which had been the necessarium. The devil-boy Sam, who had been waiting outside the library for the Master, accompanied them to the ladder that led down into the drain. As they were about to descend, Sweeney said, “Master, would you...”

  Apollinax looked at him mercilessly; Sweeney hoped that the Archvicar had been right about the limits cribbing the Master’s mind-reading.

  “Master”-how Sweeney hated that acknowledgment of servile condition, and his own whining tone!—“Master, could you let me have a little kalanzi? Just enough to turn me on a bit? I get the shakes, working down there; I don’t know how I can keep on without the stuff.” Sam was smirking at Sweeney’s humiliation.

  He was behaving like a broken bum, Sweeney knew, worse than Coriolan. The Master hesitated. Then he drew from an inner pocket a tiny neat parcel and put it into Sweeney’s outstretched mendicant hand. “This must last you until Wednesday night, Sweeney.”

  That gained, the three of them descended the ladder. Apollinax went down second, planting his feet carefully upon the rungs; oh, the Master had a care for his own skin, he did, if for nobody else’s. Sweeney had the tiny packet tucked carefully away. It could make you feel ten or twelve feet tall, kalanzi could: dangerous stuff, but it could nerve a man. Marina would learn that tonight.

  11

  Marina’s Flight

  Michael, fretful this night, had roused Marina a little past one o’clock, wanting to be fed and then cuddled. Marina sat on an old oaken chair, her dressing gown wrapped tightly round her against a chill little diminished by the dying coals on the hearth.

  As best she could, she had buttressed the door to the corridor: a heavy chest pushed against it, and the head of her bed thrust at right angles to the chest. There was no one at all in this house whom she could rely upon.

  What was she to make of the Archvicar, or Manfred Arcane, or whatever his name really was—and of those two women and the African with him? If this bewildering man Arcane wasn’t Gerontion, then he had killed Gerontion, by his own account. Could she believe anything he said? He was fertile in lies and disguises, convicted out of his own mouth. “A brutal and licentious soldier,” he had called himself! The way he complimented and patted Fresca, or Melchiora, or whatever her name really was, that Sicilian girl, he certainly was justifying the latter epithet—and in the presence of his own wife, too, if Madame Sesostris, or Grizel, or whoever the old lady might be, actually was his wife. Marina had come to distrust Mr. Apollinax, but he seemed gentle by the side of these fierce people, with their talk of knives and choppers, and of having burned Gerontion’s body somewhere in Africa. Where might she turn?

  There had been no time for fuller explanations: the Archvicar—he had told her to call him that still, without fail—had gone off for a conversation with the Master, as soon as their picnic party had left the shelter of that yew tree. Madame Sesostris, or Grizel, had not been very communicative in the Archvicar’s absence. The old woman had said only that the pretended Archvicar, or Mr. Manfred Arcane, was a commander of mercenary troops and almost a grand vizier in an African country called Hamnegri; he was the prop of a Muslim ruler with billions of pounds in revenues from petroleum. Was this Gerontion, or Arcane, really the illegitimate son of the last Lord Balgrummo? Madame Sesostris had replied that she didn’t know the details.

  But there had popped into Marina’s memory the portrait of the Third Laird, the Warlock, in the gallery; and how she had noticed that astounding resemblance between the Third Laird’s face and Gerontion’s face. Did those masterful features run in the Inchburn family? That frightened her still more, for it was cold comfort being protected by the spit and image of a long-dead warlock. Then, too, she speculated, this Archvicar might be an Inchburn, and nevertheless still might be the real Gerontion of Apollinax’s dossier. He might have invented out of whole cloth a new pseudo-identity as Arcane, a master of mercenaries, just to deceive her into thinking that he wasn’t so evil as Apollinax’s dossier had showed Gerontion to be.

  Why did she even hesitate between Apollinax and Arcane? Hadn’t she come here at Apollinax’s generous invitation, and hadn’t he taken her into his confidence, letting her see Gerontion’s file? Had he done anything to injure her? Nothing at all: his only faults were of omission, and after all one couldn’t justly blame the Master for having been rather short with her: he must be desperately busy with ministering to the spiritual needs of those twelve dismaying disciples and those twelve brutish acolytes, not to mention the mysterious preparations for the Ceremony of Innocence on Wednesday night.

  Why, then, did she distrust Mr. Apollinax? She knew why: because he had refused to bless tiny Michael, and had looked at him as if Michael were a nasty piglet. Madame Sesostris and Fresca, on the contrary, had dandled and played with Michael; even the Arch vicar had been pleasant with Michael, seeming interested in the baby. In erring reason’s spite, Marina knew that there was something wrong with Mr. Apollinax because he rejected Michael, and something right about the Archvicar’s people because they rejoiced in Michael.

  But she trusted neither camp. Where might she turn? Surely not to those disciples! S
he had scrutinized them at dinner tonight, and had come to suspect that the Archvicar’s biting remarks about each of them, last night, had contained more than a grain of truth.

  Perforce, Marina had left her baby with Fresca again, during dinner; at least the fierce Sicilian girl was deft with Michael, and she couldn’t be sure that one of those acolyte-girls would take proper care of him-they didn’t look as if they would. But she had avoided Madame Sesostris in the dining room, and had taken a vacant chair between Mrs. Channing-Cheetah and Mr. Silvero. The Archvicar had been absent tonight, perhaps conferring with Sweeney and Coriolan about the underground excavations, and Fraulein von Kulp still was confined to her bed; otherwise, the people at the dining table had been the same as the night before.

  As for the food, it had been a greasy soup and then sausage and chips, tonight; and the same brownish drink in the wineglasses, which Marina had refrained from tasting. Might she obtain some help, or at least reassurance, from her dinner companions? Marina had tried to find out what they were like, and had learned too much.

  “How long have you known the Master?’ she had commenced with Mr. Silvero.

  He had ignored her question, suavely enough. He had run a hand along her arm, avuncularly, as if stroking a Grecian urn. Mr. Silvero’s eyes had been like dusty tunnels, despite the gentleness of his manner, and his eyebrows had twitched frequently. Marina had suspected that Mr. Silvero did indeed walk all night long in his room; and she was glad his room wasn’t next to hers.

  “Do you ever pose?” Mr. Silvero had inquired. “For painters and photographers, I mean. If I do say it myself, my dear, I am a true artist with the camera. Sad to relate, my model is indisposed for the present: Fraulein von Kulp, you know. So graciously uninhibited, so unabashed, so amenable to every whim of the artist, Fraulein von Kulp! But she is hors de combat, and I am desolated. Now your downy innocence, your pristine freshness, those blue eyes of yours with outraged virtue, Marina, when a suggestive phrase is employed—utterly delicious! I keep a roaring fire in my grate, and you’d not be the least uncomfortable, quite warm, I assure you. Of course I have a good supply of flashbulbs, and all the right lenses. Shall we commence our sessions with my camera tonight, just after leaving this room? Ah, you blush so beautifully! A piquant plan, isn’t it, amusing, tantalizing? The photographs, you quite understand, will be merely for my private collection: no commercial distribution, unless perhaps you might be enticed by a handsome royalty...”