Lord of the Hollow Dark Read online

  The pseudo-Archvicar paused; contemplated Kronos on the door; resumed.

  “A few moments ago I mentioned that the Inchburns kept one eye on the main chance. But the other eye squinted toward the fey, the eldritch, what is now called the occult. This was a forbidden pleasure: they never forgot what price the Third Laird had paid for this sweet-sour taste, and restrained themselves. Nevertheless, they built up here in the library an almost unequaled collection of what booksellers call ‘occulta.’ I believe that some of the line made desultory attempts to discover an entrance to the legendary Weem-desultory, I say, because they were half ashamed and half afraid of this aberration, and employed no qualified experts to direct operations-rejecting even an offer of assistance from the great Robert Adam-and did not wish to damage their ancestral house, with its explosion-shaken foundations.”

  Here Sweeney glanced most uneasily at the broken and menacing vaulting above their heads. The Archvicar noticed, nodded, and continued, as if he had all the time in the world.

  “Besides, as I remarked, they seldom were in residence: out of sight, out of mind. Since the seventeenth century, the first Inchburn to live here regularly was Alexander Fillan Inchburn, succeeding to the Balgrummo title in 1890.

  “At the time of the death of the ninth Baron Balgrummo, young Inchburn was serving with Lugard in the occupation of Uganda, his passion for things African already well developed. He returned to Scotland for three years, settling here in the Lodging and reading much in its library, particularly in the collections concerned with the wilder shores of spirituality. By 1894, he was back with Lugard, active in the taking of Borku, and was later one of Lugard’s chief lieutenants in what is now Nigeria.

  “Then he struck out on his own. ‘Good at need,’ like nearly all the men in his family, he became a successful mercenary captain after the fashion of his ancestor the Third Laird—resembling the Warlock in much-but in Africa, not Europe, employed by native potentates. He was the right hand of the Sultan of Kalidu in his unsuccessful resistance to French penetration; but his prowess as a strategist enabled the Sultan to make much better peace-terms with the French than he could have sought otherwise. It was a condition of the treaty, insisted upon by the French, that Lord Balgrummo be exiled from Kalidu. That was done, but the Sultan and his descendants long retained admiration and gratitude for their Scots condottiere.”

  Arcane, sham Archvicar, played with his stick as if it were a baton. “This connection, half a century later, raised me to high estate. After the Second World War, I found myself at a loose end in Africa. The then Sultan of Kalidu, Ali the Just, learned of an experienced European officer residing in Morocco and wanting employment; the Sultan was near to losing control of his domains to ideological factions; he sent for me. Upon learning, to his astonishment, that I was the son of his grandfather’s friend Milord Balgrummo, he flung his arms about me and put me at the head of his forces. To a sultan, legitimacy of birth is no grand consideration. His confidence in me was justified by the event, I doing more for him than my father had done for his grandfather; and now I serve his son, Achmet the Pious, with a fixed share of oil royalties for reward.

  “As I am too fond of saying, there are no concidences. I do not think it impossibly strange that I should fall into my good fortune in Kalidu, now a quasi-autonomous province of the Commonwealth of Hamnegri, even though I did not actively seek that connection on the strength of being my father’s son. Some Power moves us puppets about, even if we are permitted a measure of free will in our choices—including the choice of obdurate disobedience. In my life there have been stranger ‘coincidences’—among them in the chain of events which made me into an impostor in this house. But of that, something another time.”

  “From the moment our eyes met in the Den,” Coriolan told him, “I suspected that you were Alec Balgrummo’s son.”

  “And for my part, I thought that you must know it, miraculously, calling me ‘my lord’ as you did then; I almost fancied that you must be uncanny.”

  “Did you, now?” Coriolan smiled.

  “You gave me a turn, Coriolan, for you might have unmasked me. But of course you’re the only one in this house, myself excepted, who ever looked the last Lord Balgrummo in the face. Our pretty Marina did cause me an uneasy moment when she detected my resemblance to the Third Laird in that portrait upstairs. Apollinax hasn’t noticed that ‘coincidence’ yet; but then, he’s too busy with his incantations and chants to study the portraits in the gallery.”

  Sweeney had been listening incredulously. “Gerontion... Mr. Arcane... Archvicar, I mean—you’re saying that this house is yours?”

  “No, Sweeney, it’s the property of the Balgrummo Estates, though my family connection enabled me to lease it for Apollinax from the Estates, through my aunt-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-blanket Dr. Euphemia Inchburn; she knows who and what I am. For the last Lord Balgrummo married early in life; there was only one child of that marriage, a boy, who died ten years ago, well before his father, and lived in America most of his life. Lady Balgrummo was an invalid from the age of twenty-three until her death, and not a cheerful one. I understand: she lived in Carrick, never seeing her husband.

  “So, though not a licentious man. Balgrummo formed an enduring liaison with a delightful Dalmatian gypsy dancer in Vienna, during the course of his European travels: and I resulted. Balgrummo gave me my nose, an English education, considerable funds in Swiss banks through my mother: but, of course, no surname, title, or entailed estate. After his Trouble, he necessarily broke off his connection with my mother, as with everyone else. But I was permitted to visit him here, now and again, when I was a small bow After those boyhood Years. I did not see him until he lay in his coffin, three years ago. Yet there were bonds between us, not all of them virtuous.”

  The Archvicar rested his chin in his hands. “Without willing it. I have obtained what my father desired for himself: military victories, great power in Africa, wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. Did he, buried alive in this house, somehow conjure up those successes and thrust them upon his son’s shoulders? And now I’m forced to dabble in his necromancy, too.”

  “Then why in hell... I mean, why did you pretend to be Gerontion—you really fooled me, you did—and join up with Apollinax?”

  “You tempt me to digress, my dear Sweeney, but I mean to continue my account of the last Lord Balgrummo. Bear with me. I repeat.

  “Expelled from Kalidu, though with honor. Balgrummo returned to Scotland. His restlessness caused him to make expeditions to other African countries during the next decade, but nothing satisfied him. In Africa he had begun serious studies of magic and witchcraft: ‘out of Africa come all things strange.’ The old Inchburn fascination with such things took hold upon him, and he added mightily to the collection of occulta in the library here. Britain was then entering upon one of its periodic quests after strange gods: Madame Blayatsky rose up. Annie Besant, many others: great men were enthralled by Home the medium; absurd corrupt figures like Crowley and Corvo strutted upon the stage; William Butler Yeats plucked the Mystic Rose. Why wonder that Lord Balgrummo, with his ancestry and his African lore, tried to peer into the abyss? Especially when an abyss lay immediately under his own residence? Why, even I am infected still: I know enough of such things to deceive our master Apollinax, for the moment.

  “About 1910, Lord Balgrummo fell under the influence of certain occultists, particularly a married couple, the Hittles, far inferior to himself in both intelligence and knowledge. Balgrummo Lodging became the center of their liturgies and séances and experiments, and Balgrummo’s abundant money their mainstay. Their ceremonies seem to have mingled antique Scots diabolism with Benin witch-rites and other African magic. Have you read how, in Joan of Arc’s time, certain scoundrelly charlatans took advantage of Gilles de Rais, marshal of France, and turned him into Bluebeard? No? Well, that was done to Balgrummo by these infected and infecting human parasites-or saprophytes, rather.

  “This strange circle
encompassed dozens of people, some of them of good birth and breeding, some respectable bourgeoisie, some idlers, some utterly corrupt and malign. They met frequently at this house. Among them was a half-Parsee young dilettante called Omanwallah, a university student—but only on the fringe. In the fullness of time, he would become a bloated spider of a man, the last survivor of ‘Balgrummo’s Trouble.’

  “I was not there: I had been born in Vienna only a few months before the Trouble. What I know, I picked up from my Aunt Euphemia, the Inchburn family solicitor, that Omanwallah-Gerontion, and various others-among them your father, Coriolan. Your father was one of the very few who ventured to call on Balgrummo after the Trouble, and obtained both the permission and the permit.”

  “What was Lord Balgrummo after?” Sweeney wanted to know.

  “In the beginning, I suppose, knowledge-even if forbidden knowledge, that of the Tree in the Garden. But he seems to have descended steadily into appetite for power, like Faust. What he had been denied in Kalidu, he might obtain in Saint Nectan’s Weem. The path to such power grew more murky and more foul. Effie described his seeming state of mind and emotion to me once, rather well. ‘Toward the end,’ she said. Balgrummo may have forgotten about knowledge and have leaped into passion and power. One didn’t learn what one had sought to apprehend; one became the mystery, possessing it and possessed by it.’

  “And, after all, whatever he may have gained in knowledge of the occult, he gained nothing then in power. The Hittles, who had seduced him from his old lofty virtue, were not charlatans altogether: they could accomplish some surprising feats, not yet explained. But chiefly they were smirking dabblers in the obscene, of Crowley’s stamp; they could teach Balgrummo nothing true. By and large, the members of Balgrummo’s circle were the sort of folk who will have any god but God, shallow followers of fad and foible. In this group, Balgrummo himself was the only man of imagination, reason, extraordinary perception; and yet he was duped. That has happened to greater men than Balgrummo.

  “The rituals and experiments were failures. In the course of them, over three years, he spent vast sums of money to no purpose; he did not gain access to the Weem; he called spirits from the vasty deep, but they did not come at his summons; rather than rising to the transcendent, he sank toward the bestial. In effect, he made the old bargain with that cheat Satan; and on reckoning day, his fancied treasure turned out to be withered leaves.

  “People have said that Balgrummo was trying to raise the Devil. That was not his purpose, he being no vulgar fool. He sought, instead, such perceptions as only mystical saints have attained, and then imperfectly, such waters of strength as flow from supernatural fountains, but harder to Find than Ponce de Leon’s fountain of youth. He pursued the illimitable, but captured only the perverse.

  “Yet paradoxically, his one triumph was something he had neither sought nor desired, and just what he was falsely accused of essaying. For, after a fashion, he did raise the Devil-through himself and in himself. This came at the very end of those three years of fruitless delusion.

  “By 1913, the corrupt Hittles who had obtained an ascendancy over him were thoroughly enjoying their degradation of this strong man. They would drag him down farther, into the extremes of obscenity and sacrilege.

  “He had placed at their disposal any amount of money, for the Balgrummo Pits then still sent up their hundreds of thousands of tons of coal. With some of this money, Balgrummo’s corrupters bought a huge cartoon attributed to Fuseli—that picture in the chapel I mentioned. Fuseli, that strange painter of nightmares, did produce certain obscene drawings: but nothing so foul as this cartoon; probably it was the work of an unknown imitator. With Balgrummo’s permission, he not having seen it, they installed the cartoon back of the altar in the chapel, concealed by special curtains, to be exhibited to the occult circle on Ash Wednesday, 1913, at a ‘sacred’ ceremony.

  “The Hittles cast Balgrummo in the role of a high priest at this liturgy. Among the trappings for the occasion was a curious sword, really a kind of double-bitted ax, an African executioner’s weapon, which Balgrummo had brought back from Kalidu. This was styled by the charlatan couple a labrys, the sacred double-bladed ax of the ancient Cretans, which gave its name to the Cretan labyrinth. No doubt they played upon Balgrummo’s frustrated passion for entering into the labyrinth of the Weem beneath his own house; this Kalidu weapon was converted into a symbol of that quest. This labrys was laid upon the chapel’s altar.

  “The ceremony began at the appointed time, an hour before midnight, I prefer not to describe it in detail; besides, I am not sure that the accounts given to me are accurate; I hope not. At the climax of the ritual, the Hittles drew aside the curtains which had covered the enormous cartoon behind the altar. Turning, Balgrummo saw the monstrous thing for the first time.

  “Did he go mad then? That was the defense his lawyers were to make, and I suppose it was true enough. There must have flooded upon him, in that instant of shock, an overwhelming apprehension of how high he had aspired, and of how low he had descended. His corrupters stood on either side of him, ‘priest’ and ‘priestess.’

  “Balgrummo snatched up the ax from the altar. His physical strength was famous, and he was skilled with edged weapons. He did to those two beside him what Samuel had done to Agag. Did Samuel the ghostly judge, looking down from the baroque circular painting in the chapel ceiling, nod his approval of this act of lex talionis? The corrupters’ blood spattered all over the loathsome cartoon.

  “At the murder, all those trifling occultists in the chapel ran screaming through the halls of Balgrummo Lodging, out through the great central doorway, out through the pend into the road. The draperies of the chapel caught fire from upset candelabra. Balgrummo walked alone through a corridor, the ax still in his hand, and those who glimpsed him screamed louder and ran faster. The weapon was not found again. When the police arrived, Balgrummo seemed perfectly calm, but would say nothing at all.

  “Had he been tried for the slaughter, it could have been only by the Lords, and the only sentence that they could have passed would have been death. The alternative was to have doctors find him insane-and to have his trustees agree to his perpetual house arrest, without sentence being passed by anyone. This latter course was taken.

  “The Trouble, the catastrophe, occurred on Ash Wednesday night, 1913. Now Ash Wednesday swings round again, and we are to gather in that same chapel, we happy few, before we move in procession into the Weem.

  “The two people whom Balgrummo hewed in pieces had promised him that he should transcend Time. Now old Kronos, there in bronze before our eyes, mocks such ambition: he devours. Balgrummo looked upon the face of this demon-god Kronos only after he had become a perpetual prisoner in his own private Hell of Balgrummo Lodging. Time indeed had a stop for Lord Balgrummo.”

  Sweeney released a long breath. “So he had been crazy all the time?”

  “Not at all.” The Archvicar rose from the foot of the Pilgrims’ Stair, strolled the few steps to the bronze door, tapped Kronos’ muzzle with his ebony stick; there came a hollow sound, chilling, from behind that barrier. “Balgrummo, until the Trouble of Ash Wednesday night, had been no madder than thousands of other folk, in his time and ours, who seek to draw the veil from the face of Mystery. He had been beguiled into folly and foulness, that was all. Would you cast the first stone, Sweeney?

  “He was mad thereafter, perhaps. I don’t mean that he was a raving lunatic. But thereafter he was a prisoner, not in this house merely, but in a single instant of Time: the time of his atrocity. Effie Inchburn says that thereafter her uncle was one-tenth alive, nine-tenths dead, though walking about and hale as ever, until his last three or four years. He withdrew into his interior Hell.

  “T. M. Gillespie, the Inchburn solicitor, says that Balgrummo, for the half-century after his Trouble-or what part of those decades Gillespie knew him-was ‘quite rational, in the sense that he could transact the ordinary business of life when pressed.’ He refused to se
ll any of the pictures in the Lodging, despite the recommendation of his trustees: after all, only fine books and fine pictures remained to him. And in other ways he behaved with shrewdness and prudence.

  “One of the more lively instances of his relative rationality occurred after the Attlee government had nationalized the coal industry. By that time, the Balgrummo Pits had been worked out, the vastly increased cost of miners’ wages taken into account. Gillespie, incidentally, had succeeded in obtaining quite tolerable compensation for Balgrummo Estates at the time of nationalization; then it had turned out that the National Coal Board had acquired little more than a maze of derelict shafts and levels. Well, four years later, representatives of the Coal Board came to Gillespie, and eventually to Balgrummo himself, to announce their new scheme for extraction.

  “They proposed to mine, open-cast, the Den and the whole policies of Balgrummo Lodging. The Lodging being an historic building, inhabited, they would not demolish the house itself; but they would leave it standing in a treeless desolation of abandoned open-cast pits, the Den denuded and eroded. The Coal Board, you understand, had authority in law to do that sort of mischief, provided that they should pay compensation—their assessment—to the proprietors of surface-rights for the damage the Board may have wreaked upon agricultural and forested land. The officials had with them geologists’ charts which indicated that broad and thick strata of coal, now exhausted in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century pits up the brae, must extend beneath the policies of Balgrummo Lodging.