Lord of the Hollow Dark Page 21

  “On being informed of this scheme, Balgrummo insisted that Gillespie bring the Coal Board’s representatives here to the Lodging. He received them quite civilly, like a man of business. They gave him the details of their plan. ‘You will not do that,’ Lord Balgrummo said.

  “They wanted to know why not; they pointed out, one of them rudely enough, that they were vested with the authority to do precisely what they intended, and had done such things at other old country houses.

  “‘Because, gentlemen, no coal worth extracting remains in the Den or these policies.’ To the surprise of even Gillespie, Balgrummo then produced from his muniments old maps and plans of the estate, from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, showing that his ancestors long ago had worked out the seams for more than a mile in every direction from the Lodging. The Coal Board people departed in humiliation.”

  “If they had commenced open-cast operations just here,” Coriolan remarked, “they might have broken into the Weem, accidentally.”

  “Precisely. Balgrummo had no intention of entering after that fashion; he had his own plans, and by that year must have been down to the Weem himself, more than once, through this little door which temporarily defies us.” The Archvicar tapped Kronos’ muzzle again.

  Sweeney shuddered at the reverberation. “So you mean he was normal, living all alone in this place?”

  “Not at all normal. His was a life in death, or something between death and life, a most peculiar state. Dr. Effie Inchburn has told me, ‘He wasn’t present merely in one room, you know: he filled the house, every room, every hour. Balgrummo Lodging was like a saturated sponge, dripping with the shame and the longing of Alexander Fillan Inchburn.’ The man was a living ghost.”

  “And there were those three or four mysterious deaths, weren’t there?” Coriolan asked.

  “Quite right. The trustees, and even the police, kept the fatalities quiet, so far as they could. One of the deaths wasn’t mysterious, actually: burglars with ladders had contrived to get over a dyke, on the side of the policies toward that derelict linoleum factory, and Jock Jamieson, the night keeper, caught them and used his shotgun on one. Jock told the police that the man had reached for a weapon, and fortunately for Jock a revolver was found in the belt of one burglar. Even without that, I suppose Jock wouldn’t have been gaoled: the police tolerated a certain license in the use of firearms by keepers at Balgrummo Lodging—remembering that it might be necessary to keep Lord Balgrummo in, as well as to keep two-footed predators out. A second burglar had his back broken on that occasion, incidentally: someone had pitched backward the ladder by which he had been climbing to a second-floor window, and there had been no one in the house that night but Balgrummo himself.”

  “What about those other two fellows, earlier, who came down from the Den cliffs and weren’t seen again?” Sweeney demanded.

  “I guarantee nothing, but I’d not be surprised if we should encounter their bones somewhere beyond this door.” The Archvicar tapped Kronos a third time, to Sweeney’s discomfiture. “Was Balgrummo a killer? On provocation, yes: in that limited sense, mad. He prized his pictures, and he had shed a great deal of other people’s blood in Africa—as I have—and perhaps the two miner-burglars resisted him. Besides, it wouldn’t have done for him to report to the police his killing, even if in self-defense, of two intruders: what with his earlier slayings, the second offense probably would have sent him to confinement in a public lunatic asylum. Possibly he stalked them through the shrubbery of the Den; he was expert of old at that sort of exercise. They had challenged the Minotaur, and they ended in his labyrinth.”

  “I’m told that something inexplicable occurred since my time here,” Coriolan said. “On the night Alec Balgrummo was found dead in his bed, another man, a thief, was found dead on the floor of the chapel, without a mark on his body.”

  “You’ve been accurately informed, my dear man. The other corpse was that of an accomplished picture thief, South African, I believe, who passed under the name of Horgan: an old hand at the business, armed, vigorous. Balgrummo, on his last night among the living, must have been unable to stir from his bed; nevertheless, he seems to have protected his pictures—which was more than the keeper at the pend could do, for Horgan had coshed him on his way in.

  “I asked a medical examiner about Horgan. ‘Informally,’ he told me, ‘I must say that I think he died of fright; I saw his dead face.’ Thus one thinks of Apollinax’s talk of ‘essences’; and one remembers how the Society for Psychical Research has found that the kind of apparition most frequently encountered is one of a person about to die, or of one just dead. Perhaps Balgrummo strode across the great gulf of Time.

  “Tom Gillespie, though a disciple of Davie Hume, has his own theory about the case: ‘If any man’s or woman’s consciousness should have penetrated to Balgrummo’s consciousness, to his time scheme, to his world beyond the world—or if, through some vortex of mind and soul, anybody had been sucked into that narrow place of torment, Balgrummo’s private internal Hell—why, then the intruder would have been consumed.’ Gillespie, by the way, would not sit for very long in the same room with Balgrummo, even when the last Lord was near his end; he seems to have feared that he might be ‘drawn into Balgrummo’s mind.’ If Tom Gillespie’s brain isn’t addled, Balgrummo in his confinement may have developed certain powers that he had sought in vain between 1910 and 1913.”

  “He’s gone, anyway,” Sweeney sighed.

  “Has he? Apollinax thinks otherwise. Balgrummo is the being he expects Archvicar Gerontion to evoke—to do the Master homage, or something of that sort. I know a little of such attempts, but I’m no séance director, my friends. Could the real Gerontion have accomplished the feat? Conceivably: certainly the real Gerontion once sent me into what seemed to be another and highly unpleasant world, employing kalanzi for that purpose; but I’ll not trouble you just now with that digression. Yet with the last Balgrummo I do have ties of blood and character: I might be as good a necromancer as anyone could be, in this peculiar case.”

  “Do you think that he’s bound to this spot?” Coriolan asked, very seriously.

  The Archvicar took his time about replying; lit another cheroot; then spoke to Coriolan with an uncharacteristic hesitation, looking at the head of Kronos rather than directly at the man he addressed. “Perhaps, Bain, you know more of such possibilities than I do. Well, everything is energy, electrical particles, the scientists tell us nowadays: all matter is in flux. Perhaps, as Apollinax devoutly believes, particles once assembled in a particular arrangement may be reassembled in that form, under propitious circumstances. The ‘essence,’ moved by impulses that we do not understand, may enflesh itself once again in those particles which once made up its physical being. To use oldfangled words, the vagrant soul may constitute a body for itself once more. I put the possibility clumsily: I’m no physicist. After all, the ‘matter’ of which human beings are composed, we are now told, is an arrangement of positive and negative charges, so to speak—insubstantial, really, though appearing so solid. What do you think, Coriolan?”

  Coriolan also hesitated before replying. “We’re made for immortality,” he said presently. “The soul, the ghost in the machine of the body, the animating spirit, goes somewhere. All one knows for certain about such things is one’s own personal private experience. I...” He broke off some chain of thought, was silent a moment, and then resumed, “Well, if you want my opinion—yes, the essence of what was called Alexander Fillan Inchburn is somewhere, though not in what we call ‘material’ form. The circumstances of every soul depend upon the will of God. But, if you’ll pardon me, I didn’t ask for a general theory, Archvicar; I asked whether you think that the essence, the soul, of the last Lord Balgrummo is chained to this place.”

  Sweeney followed these two scarcely at all in their discourse. They seemed to be engaged in a kind of gentle probing duel of words, the Archvicar and Coriolan, neither wishing to strike home.

  Now the Archvicar l
ooked directly at Coriolan: “Confined, dead as living, in his private Hell still, here? Why, if that’s possible for any soul, it would be most possible of all for the last Balgrummo. He never left this house for more than half a century; such a one becomes attached to place, rooted. When I was a boy, people used to talk of‘earth-bound spirits.’ The Lodging and the Weem were Balgrummo’s world, and it hasn’t been long since Balgrummo’s death. I don’t think you need dread very much the Warlock Laird and his men, Sweeney: if ghosts of a sort, those are only shades, echoes, vestiges of past emotion, powerless now to harm or help, dead four centuries. But Balgrummo, who pervaded every room of the Lodging even while he lived—well, Balgrummo is another and graver concern.

  “Within a few hours, we’ll follow in his footsteps,” the Archvicar continued, after scrutinizing Kronos again. “He’s as much the demon-god of the Weem as is that bronze beast there. I have reason to suppose that Balgrummo passed through that low doorway many times, over the years. Why? Could he not have found everything there was to find upon two or three expeditions, at the most? Or did he worship something there? I fancy not: his ruinous experience that ended in his Trouble probably cured him of infatuation with false gods. Even though mad thereafter, in some degree, he had been cured of little superstitious follies and poses. So far as I can remember him from my boyhood, on my occasional unhappy visits here, he seemed disillusioned of much.

  “So why did he explore the Weem repeatedly, spending whole nights in that haunted place, perhaps? I judge from his coded notes that he did so. He contrived an enduring clue to the labyrinth behind that door—his own Ariadne’s thread. What was Balgrummo after? What could he hope for, pledged by his word of honor never to set foot outside the Lodging and its policies? Why did he seek the hollow dark?”

  “All right, why?” said Sweeney. “You tell us.”

  “I have a theory,” the Archvicar answered, though as if he were talking to himself, “but it can’t be substantiated yet. I think that on many nights Balgrummo came down from his suite in the tower—that’s where he slept all his years after the Trouble, perhaps for the view those rooms command—and entered the Weem for some conscious purpose. He came down that little hidden stair, unsuspected by anyone—the stair by which our Marina frustrated your folly of last night, Sweeney. He went to his work in the Weem. I am beginning to suspect what that work was—if it accomplished nothing else, it kept him fit even when he was more than ninety years old—but I sha’n’t tell you yet.”

  “Thanks,” said Sweeney. It couldn’t much matter, anyway. “But what I really want to know is, how are we going to get out of this hellhole before Apollinax gets crazier?”

  “Balgrummo went beyond that bronze door,” the Archvicar continued, as if uninterrupted, “and labored away in that ghastly labyrinth. Oh, he must have had steel nerves. Did he hear the footfalls of the dead file of the Third Laird and his men, every time he went down? Did he hear the tapping of their ghostly picks—knock, knock, knock?”

  “By God, that’s what I dreamed, but I hadn’t told anyone,” Sweeney exclaimed. “Do you read minds better than Apollinax does?”

  “Others before you have dreamed that dream of the lost men,” the Archvicar told him, unsurprised. “I dreamed it myself, more than once, when I slept here as a boy. At first the vision repels you; then it draws you down.... I suspect that Balgrummo dreamed it often, and heard it while awake, too, that sound and others, while he was down here below.”

  “I think you two really believe in those damned ghosts,” Sweeney said, uncertainly. As he spoke, he looked all round the narrow space in which they three were confined.

  “Can you give me your definition of ‘ghosts,’ Sweeney? No? Do I talk nonsense? Let me turn conjuror.”

  The Archvicar rapped hard, three times, on the bronze door; then stood unmoving. From somewhere far within, it seemed, there came back a series of sounds of a different sort, not wood on metal, but metal on stone. Knock. Knock. Knock.

  “For God’s sake, don’t!” Sweeney stammered, leaping up. “Aha! Have I converted an unbeliever? Well, my friends,” the Archvicar said, slipping back into his old decrepit posture and leaning on his stick, “the time has come for me to hobble above stairs and fetch down that great ominous key to our demon-god’s lair.”

  “Right away?”

  “Not immediately, no: I shall have to talk with Apollinax first. Yet I think we may count upon an expedition tonight; indeed, Apollinax probably will insist upon it, whether or not he comes along.”

  “But you haven’t told us what we’re going to do tomorrow night, Ash Wednesday night, or before then,” Sweeney protested passionately. “You said you’d try to get us all out of this.”

  The Archvicar turned to Coriolan, courteously. “Have you any suggestions?”

  “I don’t make decisions,” Coriolan said, “not now. I drift.”

  “As the spirit moves you?”

  Coriolan looked into the Archvicar’s eyes: “As the spirit moves me.”

  The Archvicar bowed his head slightly, and looked at Sweeney. “And you, my friend, perhaps you have a scheme?”

  “Your girl has a long knife, and Coriolan here has a short one. We could all go down to the pend...”

  “Though I’m a man of blood,” the pseudo-Archvicar told him, “I came to this place unarmed, guessing that we would contend more against dominations and powers than against flesh and blood. I still do not believe that I erred in my calculations. Besides, your design wouldn’t save us: all of those devil-boys have guns. And then, what would we have to say to the police, afterward, if it should turn out that Apollinax’s ‘liturgy’ was to be a mere piece of superstitious foolery, no physical harm worked, after all? No, we shall have to wait the event. Well, I am preparing a plan for us—risky, and it may not please you, and it’s incomplete as yet. But I shall give you the details in time, perhaps tonight. Do you ever pray, Sweeney? Do try it, now or never.”

  13

  The Prince of This World

  High up the Den, not far from the sheer wall over which burst the torrent of the Fettinch Water, Marina came upon a walled garden. In its ogival-arched gateway were hung gates of iron elaborately wrought in a mazelike pattern, now rusting away. Peering through those gates, she saw a larger-than-life statue standing on an artificial islet, with the divided burn flowing furiously on either side.

  This was a marble effigy of Father Time, scythe and all, baroque sculpture more than two centuries old. The roaring Fettinch Water entered this garden through another broad low arch at the opposite end of the enclosure; she was staring in from a gateway in the south wall. From either side of the burn, humpbacked bridges of stone led to Father Time’s tiny domain.

  Although wildly grown up to weeds, this forgotten walled garden, so Scottish, was the most lovely spot in the policies of Balgrummo Lodging. Marina could see that it had been a rose garden, for the leafless stems of climbing rosebushes still clung to the inner sides of the stone dykes. Could she enter?

  She tugged hard at one side of the heavy gate; its hinges groaned. She put Michael in his blanket upon the ground by an outcrop of limestone, and tugged still harder, until she persuaded the gate to yield sufficiently for her to squeeze through with Michael in her arms. She seated herself, panting, upon the crumbling balustrade of one of those humpbacked bridges-rather a scary spot, with the burn rushing beaneath her, but she needed some minutes’ rest.

  She was quite alone with her baby. It had been a hard climb up the Den’s overgrown paths, Michael being a fat baby now, but she had rested along the way. She had not wanted that old lady and the Sicilian girl-whatever their real names were-for company; she didn’t know how far to trust them, and she must think in solitude, as far from the Lodging as she might get.

  The chanting had driven her out of the house. Mr. Apollinax had taken all the disciples and most of the acolytes into the chapel, but she had not been invited to participate; obviously she hadn’t been accepted as a disciple, af
ter all, for the Master had ignored her except for their one brief unsatisfactory interview yesterday. Perhaps that was as well, considering the character of the other disciples. Then what was she to be, tomorrow night? And where was she to turn when they all should leave here?

  Sitting in her room with these worries in her head, she had heard the disciples’ chant drift upward to her, despite the thick interior walls and the contrived corridors of Balgrummo Lodging. They must have been shouting at the top of their lungs. She could not make out the words.

  Where had she heard it before? Was it plainsong, and did she recall it from some church before the electric guitars came in? No, not that. Now she knew! It seemed to be the very chant which those naked people wearing beast-masks had sung in her nightmare of the underground hall! Of course that couldn’t be: sometimes you think you are recalling things from your dreams, when actually the events of real life are only vaguely similar to some earlier dream sequence.

  No, that couldn’t be. Yet she had preferred not to listen to that chant, and so had gone out a rear door of the Lodging, unchallenged by anyone, and up the Den. For one thing, she needed to think hard about Mr. Apollinax.

  The walls of this rose garden kept off the wind, and it was a clear day: she was glad she had come here. She scrutinized the Figure of Father Time, with his hourglass at his belt, his terrible scythe brandished high. How skeletal he seemed in his flowing stone drapery! Was he the same as Death, the grim reaper? Immobile though he was here, and looking away from her toward the Lodging, still Father Time made Marina uneasy in this stillness.